A Works Trip to Mid Wales

Wednesday 22 June 2005. Another trip for work and this time the car hire firm have dropped off a Nissan X-Trail. Not that work were so extravagant with their travel funding, but I was using hire cars such a lot that if the firm had customers for all of their smaller cars they would pick their regular customers to upgrade at no extra cost.

I was heading to Newtown in mid Wales and my route took me through Oswestry, so I stopped for a look at the old hill fort.

Whilst it had the usual rings of earthworks there were a few surprises for any would-be assailants in the form of pits and banks perpendicular to the circumference. They would have been much deeper 1500 years ago than they appear now and I reckon the authorities have probably made the owners of the site remove any rusty sword blades and sharpened stakes that might await anyone luckless enough to fall down the side of one of these pits!

Old Oswestry (Hen Ddinas in Welsh) was built around 800 BCE and occupied, according to most sources including English Heritage under whose care it is and Wikipedia, up until 43 CE. 43 CE is a curiously precise date, so I'm not sure how it was derived.

There is a legend that King Arthur's Guinevere was born here and that would have been some 360-400 years later if, indeed, he ever actually existed. So either that's just a legend also or we have to believe that her mother, on the brink of giving birth, decided to climb up the steep slopes of the hillfort, that rises almost 27 metres (90 ft), whilst avoiding falling into the pits in order to give birth...

I was meeting a colleague, Alan, and we were staying here at a country hotel called the Maesmawr Hotel just south of Newtown. Alan had further to travel than myself, living just outside Edinburgh and I picked him up at Newtown Station before going to book in at the hotel.

We found the hotel fairly easily. The Maesmawr was a wonderful black and white timbered building, dating from 1565 a mile from a place called Caersws - as impossible to guess at the pronunciation as Maesmawr was...

Over a period of several months I worked closely with a team at the University of Glamorgan and my main contact there told me once that if you want to learn Welsh you should start by ignoring from an English viewpoint how words are spelt... After a dozen years of regularly visiting Wales, my grasp of the Welsh language is limited to simple phrases like "Good morning" and (because road traffic signs are written in both languages) words like "Stop", "Slow", "Welcome to...", and the one I used the most: "humpback bridge"...

This was the view from my bedroom window.

The hotel was very close to the River Severn. Most surviving buildings of this age are close to rivers come to think of it. They would have provided water for drinking, washing, and cleaning and also perhaps (hopefully a little downstream) for getting rid of waste.

The menu for our evening meal included Welsh lamb. "Ah well..." said Alan, whose slender frame belied his capacity for food, "I think we deserve it!"

The hotel entrance. A strong woody smell came from the orchids in the entrance hall. On the wall... no... it can't be... It was. Bambi's mum!

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Final Evening at the Harfenwirt

Friday 15 August 2003. It's our final night at the Harfenwirt Hotel in Niederau, Austria.

All ready for our last meal. It was taken by one of our waiters, who had taken to us after one night when I went to the bar to find him almost beside himself at a French lady who had bought a bottle of red wine and was demanding "Glass! Glass!" She was already holding four glasses and behind the bar the bemused waiter was shouting "You've got glasses!" "Non! Glass!" was the response. It twigged with me. "Glace?" (ice?) I said, "...pour la froid?" (for cold?) She turned with a dramatic gesture "Oui!" she said, drawing the word out to at least a dozen letters longer than it should have been. "Avec la vin rouge?" (with red wine?) I asked doubtfully. "Oui!"

Almost every night we had played a few games of rummy on the hotel veranda. After the event described above, the female members of the French party had taken to waving and cooing at me every time they passed. Very disconcerting... "Ah oui! Bon soir!" [nervous laugh]. Fran thought this hilarious...

Another of the British couples had thought playing cards a good idea to fill the night and bought a pack in Austria only to find there wasn't a single card with a value under seven... "Did the pack not feel thin?" I asked. "No," came the reply, "I just thought what a bargain they must be at the price!"

The waiters all made a fuss of Mum, possibly for the simple reason that her loud cackling laugh annoyed the French...

Night falls on Niederau and the Harfenwirt. It was a shame that there weren't more lights on in the bedrooms, it would have brightened the picture up a bit. Mum, Dad and Fran are standing near one of the lights but you can't see them. They are peering into the dark saying things like "Where's he gone???"

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Deja Vu Part Two - It Rhymes...

So you already know where I've been this week so why am I writing? Well, having not updated this blog for a week it's nice to be able to sit down and connect and lovingly compose a message to the faithful followers - er...you are still there, yes?

And it gives me an opportunity to put a couple of old sketches up here from 1992. This was drawn whilst on one of Wales' great little trains and shows Llanberis lake and Snowdon. It was done in a rush because the train wasn't hanging about...

The trip down to Bridgend was uneventful - actually all the trips this week were uneventful thank Goodness. Travelling the mileage I do, you do tend to see a number of accidents but the only one I saw being recovered this week was a minor shunt on the motorway during a slow stop-start patch in the Birmingham area.

I pulled in at the hotel only to find I'd been booked in one further away this week. I suspect the travel agents had been told to find the cheapest accomodation for the standard required and got one Premier Inn branch to knock off a quid or so. I had to get back in the car, feeling foolish and quietly berating myself for not having checked the hotel address closely and then cheerfully spent the quid (or more) on petrol driving the extra distance...

The following day I ran a Change Management workshop to a mixed audience from universities, colleges and private training providers and then settled down to drive up from Bridgend to Colwyn Bay. From the south coast of Wales to the north coast. I'm not sure how far it is as the crow flies, but crows have it easy in Wales and I had to go west to join the M5 then up the M6 to the M56 towards and past Chester. 250 miles almost, with a meal snatched on the motorway services.

My hotel was a family run one this time and they were busy enough to have given me the Honeymoon room!!! Imagine my disappointment... I slept in a four poster bed with all the regulation draperies. You know, whenever I watch The Tudors on the telly this type of bed is always dripping with nubile young maidens, eager for the mature manly presence. But nothing! Not a one! Over-rated, honeymoon suites...

So I went downstairs and joined mine host for a drink in his bar and watched Birmingham and West Ham whilst the rest of his family wanted me to side with them for a channel change to Gold...

Yesterday I was at Coleg Llandrillo to deliver a workshop on Managing Multiple Projects in a Complex Environment. Almost as hard to say as "Coleg Llandrillo", though I had had practice for both. The last time I was at Llandrillo must have been around 15 years ago and I was doing a session at a conference for college people managing computerised Student Records systems. A colleague started his session by saying "Bore da" ("Good Morning" in Welsh) and got a murmer of surprise and a round of applause. I've never quite replicated the effect...

The day went well and the drive home this week was fog-free I'm glad to say and it was nice to get home last night and be welcomed by Miss Franny's loving words, "We're up early in the morning, I'm in work at seven..."

This sketch, also from 1992 was drawn at Beddgelert. This was fairly early on in my sketching days and my tree technique was perhaps a little short of something but not to worry! Someday I might even get it right!

A Trip Back to 1981

Sheesh, me old kebab! There's a few memories going through the scanner at the moment from 1981. I was still taking mostly black and white photos at the time, which I processed and developed myself, blacking out the bathroom with thick plastic over the windows and getting giddy on the heady aroma of chemicals in which I sloshed prints about with gay abandon.

First offering today is this one of the then new market stalls in Rochdale. We came from Rochdale originally and whilst Fran's parents were still alive made fairly regular trips back to see them.

The market had recently moved from the bottom of Yorkshire Street to a new spot near the brand new indoor market and the council had provided these new stalls with rather garish plastic canopies in a choice of bright red or bright yellow. The locals hated them and quickly dubbed the new market Toytown!

Meanwhile in Blackpool, this is a shot of the Hounds Hill shopping mall. It felt very futuristic at the time. Mothercare is the large shop on the left and had a front both in the mall and on Adelaide Street West (Adelaide Street having been cut into two portions by the development).

This was my first set of stereo headphones, in ivory plastic with brown foam pads. They were identical to the pair owned by a lad called Paul Fitton, who went to the same school as me and a mutual friend had introduced us way back in 1969. He played me several Moody Blues albums through the headphones and I was knocked out by the clarity of the sound and the stereo effect.

At the time Dad had a stereo set-up, but with a huge cinema speaker at one side whilst for the right hand channel the stereo valve amplifier was plugged into the large 1950s radio set. Not a good match... I bought the headphones and would spend many a night in my own world of Moody Blues, The Supremes and other stuff which would embarrass me greatly to reveal it now... My God, how could I...

Finally a couple of shots from a trip to London at the very end of January 1981. This was the first time I had ever gone away for work, the first time after 5 years of married life that I'd spent a night separated from Fran and the first time I'd ever stayed in a large hotel.

Holidays were spent in the UK at that time and we always stayed in guest houses rather than hotels. This was an eye-opener and I remember feeling ridiculously impressed with the lavish richness of my surroundings! Even the experience of walking up to a Reception Desk was something I'd ever only seen in James Bond movies...

There was a telephone!!! In the room!!! Look at that natty 1970 wall-phone design too! Push buttons were still a definite luxury - and it wasn't that posh a hotel! I can't remember which hotel it was I'm afraid...

It did have a mini-bar though, although of course I had been warned not to use it as they were unbelievably expensive! Can you make out the prices in the photo? Wish you could find one in a hotel priced like that now?

Bristol and Ship Shaped

I'm in Bristol today and tomorrow and am currently studying the rain outside the hotel window. It's much like the rain anywhere else and I suspect it will wet me just as much as anywhere else when I nip out in a bit for something to eat.

I'm starving too - I had a bowl of Cornflakes first thing this morning; went off to the station and caught a train only to be held up outside Manchester just long enough to miss the connection. So a 6 hour journey down here and I missed out on lunch...

I'm at a meeting to discuss a number of related projects, one of which I'm managing and apart from a brief foray out tonight for food, the only bit of Bristol I'll actually see is from the taxi to and from the station. Such is life.

We have visited Bristol before though and I remember one work trip to a conference over ten years ago where we all had a boat trip around the waterways and harbours and docks which was both interesting and at times hilarious. (I was on the boat with a bar...)

One huge office building for a nationally known company was built over a catacomb containing lots of centuries old graves, I remember the guide saying. The joke was that the publicly owned company was still employing most of them...

Quite apt being in a city with a strong seafaring history as I'm currently re-reading the Bolitho books of Alexander Kent.

I have over a dozen of this series and they are not that big so I can get through one in a couple of days - particularly if there are long train journeys involved.

With a job like mine that involves lots of staying in hotels I get though an enormous amount of books in a year and can quite enjoy going back to read through a series I last read five or more years ago. Now where did I put those Enid Blytons...?

The Dream Castle Hotel

28 January 2008. So here we are, just arrived at the Dream Castle Hotel near Disneyland Paris.

This is a little further from the actual parks than the Disney hotels, just over the main surrounding road that circles the Disney complex and Marne la Vallée railway station. It was walking distance, but at this time of year it wasn't perhaps a good idea especially after dark as the total absence of street lighting and the sneaky presence of some steep wide ditches would have made it a precarious adventure - but at less cost than paying to go in the park and ride Space Mountain of course.

There are shuttle buses to the parks laid on free and they are excellent, coming every 12 minutes or so during the main part of the day and only down to 20-25 minutes before 8:30am or after 9:30pm. They carried on until just before midnight when (of course) they turn back into pumpkins.

The hotel was themed on a romantic idea of a European castle of the medieval period, although the rooms were thankfully not as basic as the theme might have provided!

There were wall hangings and loads of suits of armour (the swords were chained down...) and a full size mannekin of the King facing the doorway to scare you witless as you walk in! Also a couple of thrones are placed so you can play at being royal, but sadly there's no-one going to start lopping heads off at your say-so.

The public areas such as lounge, restaurants and bar had lots of paintings showing scenes that could well have come from children's story books around the theme of castles and medieval royalty and knights.

The restaurant was good, we ate breakfast every day and had one evening meal there too. In the morning there is bacon and egg, though the bacon was too thin and crispy for our taste. But little matter as there was plenty of other stuff that we did enjoy. Fran was impressed at the soaps provided which were l'Occitane liquid soap, milk shower cream and milk shampoo. Yep guys, means nothing to me either but I'm assured the ladies will understand! As far as I'm concerned it lathered when mixed with water and didn't smell repugnant - so it earned a casual "yup!"

The shuttle from the airport was a VEA shuttle bus and cost 17 Euros for each person. They run 4 times a day heading back to the airport. But as yet we're not ready to go back so let's unpack and then go for a look at the Disney Village!

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Rain? In Manchester???

Well it goes without saying doesn't it?

This was the view from my hotel window, first thing on Thursday as we prepared to introduce another set of delegates to the delights of Risk Management. The drive from London had been a tad prolongued the night before - it took us three hours to get from around Euston to the M1 motorway and we didn't reach our hotel until a quarter to midnight.

It was nice therefore to be staying in the same hotel that was the venue for the workshop as it meant we didn't have to be up at the very crack of dawn and we could have a leisurely breakfast. The conference centre was in the basement and the lift had a strange habit of immediately answering the call of a pressed button - which meant when you reached the basement the voice announced where you were but the doors didn't open and you went back up again to pick up the next set of passengers...

Funny the first time...

Anyway the day went well and it was a thankfully shorter journey back to Blackpool and home to my own bed!

Two Days in Sutton Coldfield

Sounds dramatic doesn't it?

Well it wasn't all that dramatic - I've spent the last two days at a conference. Some interesting sessions, some painful ones, some where I sat quiet (not that many!) and some where I was one of the noisiest!

Gala dinner, pork, heavy on the stomach, wakeful night in roasting room.

I wonder why some hotels seem to cater for visitors from the equator and have no heating controls in the room. There were no opening windows in my room either - there was a door to a small balcony but it may have gone the opposite way if I'd left that open.

There was also a non-switchable heated towel rail so close to the toilet that to avoid burning your leg you had to sit sideways which is not that comfortable...

Am home again now until tomorrow when I trog off to Letchworth...

Tamed by the Shrew

I'm in Shrewsbury on a 57k connection so no photo on this until I get home I think! [Coo-ee! I'm home!]

Clive and I are ensconced in the Lion Hotel, an establishment enjoyed in the past by Charles Dickens who wrote something here - perhaps a note saying his radiator was cold, Paganini who sang in the Minstrels Gallery in the ballroom - I haven't seen that, as it is in use for some sort of event; and Prince William Henry - I'm sure there must have been more than one of those. Anyway the one who was here danced in the same ballroom that Paganini had sung in. Probably because Paganini had shut up and gone back to wherever he came from?

Those damn foreigners - they just turn up and start singing all over the place...! (I do the same when I'm abroad!) They still are - the legendary Julie Felix is here on Friday on a "Forever Young" tour. She's only kidding herself I fear, but a shame I'll miss her all the same.

After last night the conversation over a pint or two has been Disney and Florida and (because it's me and Clive and it's what we do) about the differences in culture between Americans and the UK both in business and in personal life.

Thankfully, sense has prevailed back at the Burke household and Florida is "off" for next year at least...