Halloween’s over and we didn’t have a single trick-or-treater. 

It’s November again.

I’ve decided not to attempt NaNoWriMo this year.  Hopefully sometime in the future, I will be able to complete the ultimate goal of writing a 50,000 word novel in one month.  But, right now, the hours I’m spending at work and the fact that my November weekends are already filling up makes that amount of novel impossible. 

Instead, this post should be counted as my first entry for NaBloPoMo: National Blog Posting Month.  While  November’s going to be a busy month, we’re not going away at this stage, so I should be able to find an internet connection and the time to post a daily blog entry till the 30th. 

Or that’s what I say now at least…

Tash

Battle is a strange and slightly amusing name for a town.  It’s even more amusing, for us at least, when it’s placed next to the word ‘Station’.

However, I was less amused, when upon arriving at the town at 4.00pm, ready to take in some of it’s 1066 history, on a rare sunny day in October, we found that the Abbey and Battlefield had just closed.

Okay, it’s our fault for not noting the closing times.  But it’s just that we were there, and wanting to see the battlefield, and with so many other places that we still want to visit in the UK, who knows when or if we’ll go back.

Tash

We hired a car yesterday and Matt drove us down to Dover.  We’ve been through Dover several times, leaving on the ferry to France, arriving back in the UK.  From a distance, we’d seen the white cliffs and the castle on the hill.

That was our first stop yesterday: Dover Castle.  And with English Heritage Membership, we managed to avoid the £10.30 entry fee.  The Dover Castle complex is vast.  It’s the site of a Roman lighthouse, a 1216 seige, a visit by Henry VIII, and – more recently, home to a set of underground tunnels, where they coordinated the evacuation of Allied troops from Dunkirk in World War II.

We could’ve spent a whole day, maybe more, at Dover Castle.  Since we only had a fraction of that time, we decided to focus on it’s wartime history.  There’s three layers of tunnels under the complex.  We joined a guided tour of the first two – one operating as a hospital; the other as a strategic headquarters for the military.  Apparently the one below was to be used in the 1960s in the event of a nuclear attack.  That level remains closed to the public, remains more of a secret.

England does it’s history well, I think.  It comes with audio guides and placards giving the important facts.  Or videos with old footage.  Or tours with the sights, sounds and smells of a World War II hospital.  A chance to stand inside a lookout and scan the horizon with binoculars, as others used to do, when the sight of an unknown ship had far more serious consequences. 

Being here has given me a whole new appreciation of what the past is. 

Tash

So, football’s kind of big here.  Not quite as big as the other kind of football, the one that takes up at least seven pages in Melbourne newspapers during it’s season.  But the game that I grew up calling soccer and now call football definitely has it’s followers.  Such as my darling husband, who ranked 64th in the world in last year’s fantasy league. 

He chose our team almost two years ago, before we actually arrived in London.  I agreed because the name matched my favourite bookish activity: Reading.  Two years ago, Reading had just been promoted to the Premiere League, expectations were high.  This season, they’ve been demoted again.  A perfect time then, to try out our Reading membership cards, to wear our Reading shirt and scarf, and go see a match.

The match was in Ipswich, at Portland Road stadium and Reading was playing Ipswich town.  We were assigned to the very small ‘away supporters’ section of the ground.  Well, when I say ‘assigned’, I mean we had tickets.  Matt’d booked them over the phone, and we’d picked them up when we arrived.  It was just too bad that there were two men already sitting in our seats, who had exactly the same tickets as us.  Same date, same block, same seats, totally identical.  Luckily the section wasn’t sold out, so we didn’t have to move into one of the home team areas.

Going to the footy is memorable for the chanting.  I can’t say I understood much of it, and perhaps I didn’t want to.  The turnstile gates are tiny, and the seat rows are crammed in.  People yell abuse at the referee.  When there’s a goal, all that team’s supporters stand up to cheer.  We didn’t get to stand up.  Reading lost, two-nil.

When Ipswich Town scored that second goal, Reading supporters started to file out, while the Ipswich fans turned to the section and waved goodbye (in a less than friendly manner).  Matt and I stayed to the end, but we didn’t change the result by doing so.

Ipswich itself was another English town, with the same shops on the highstreet.  Beyond that, the lanes got narrower and the buildings older.  We even saw a house with a sign commemorating the fact that it was near the house where Thomas Wolsey was born.  The Bailey’s infused creme brulee from Tonic Bar and Lounge on Falcon Street was amazing.

Tash

I don’t know where to start writing about Italy.  I’ll probably end up doing a few entries over the next couple of weeks; I probably won’t do them in any sort of order.  It was my second trip to the country.  I was spending pounds and not New Zealand dollars, which was why on one morning in Rome, I ended up at the Ara Pacis Augustae.

This time round, €10 didn’t seem too much to pay for an audio-guide and entry to the glass museum near the banks of the Tiber River (€10? That’s only three and a half single scoop gelati for example).  It didn’t seem too much to get away from the crowds and the heat of the morning, into the quiet and cool of inner sanctuary.  To be able to take photos of the reliefs on the outside of the altar, to walk into it, to touch the stones which were first carved in memory of Augustus’ achievements in the years BC.

On the short sides of the altar, there are reliefs showing a procession of priests and members of Augustus’ family.  I stood for a while, even after the audio-guide had stopped explaining who they were – and thought about how their likenesses had stayed in stone for so many years.

I studied the Ara Pacis at high school.  I studied Latin.  I studied classics.  The Ara Pacis was there in my text books, maybe even my exams.  But it wasn’t real until almost 10 years later, when I stood there and touched the stones.

This morning, my parents are on a flight back to New Zealand, and I wish I could be everywhere in the world all at once.

Tash (naTacitus)

After having a Cornish Pasty in Cornwall, the next logical step was to have a Devonshire Cream Tea in Devon.

The only thing standing in our way was time. We’d already driven all the way from St Ives, I needed to be at Exeter Central train station by 4pm, and we still had all of the Dartmoor National Park to cross.

We stopped at Tavistock for some local advice on which roads a caravan shouldn’t attempt (having learnt through recent experience not just to rely on our TomTom). There wasn’t time for a cream tea there. In fact, it was the tourist information officer himself telling us to hurry or we wouldn’t make the train.

So we drove on through Dartmoor National Park. It’s a rather bleak place, kind of like Desert Road in New Zealand, but without the mountains. Just openness and scrub, and sheep with spray-painted markings who sometimes choose to lie in the middle of the road.

In Princetown, there was a prison but no obvious sign of cream teas on the the road through town. In Postbridge, we stopped and parked, but we could only find a place which sold ‘takeaway cream teas’, which we thought might detract from the experience somewhat.

We continued driving, and as we did, I saw a small sign advertising a castle where you could have cream tea on the ‘south-facing terrace’. Of course, by the time I told Dad, we’d already driven past. So he pulled into a small lane, turned around, and back we went. The path to the castle was through a golf course. Through stone gates, and we arrived at a large manor house. The carpark obviously wasn’t intended for caravans, and we were all feeling a bit scruffy after two days of travel – so it was back through the golf course, and back on the road.

We finally found our cream teas in the little village of Moretonhampstead. The epic struggle over many miles faded from our memories as we were presented with individual pots of tea, strawberry and raspberry jam and clotted cream. Yum.

Tash

As I was heading to St Ives, I was trying to remember that nursery rhyme I learnt at primary school: something about a man and his wives and cats and sacks and kits. And I was wondering if the St Ives that I was heading to was the St Ives from the nursery rhyme because when I had typed the destination into our hired TomTom, it gave me a whole list of St Ives’, spread around the country.

As I was heading to St Ives, I discovered that it’s not such a great place to take a campervan. Especially if you haven’t booked a campsite in advance. And particularly if you are following the directions of the TomTom, down some very narrow English lanes with stone walls on either side.

We stayed overnight at Balnoon Camping Site, at took advantage of the 20p per four minute showers. In the morning, we relocated to the car pack above the village, and walked down towards the sea. We didn’t see the Tate St Ives. We didn’t hire a boat or take a trip to view the seals. But we did watch bakers make Cornish Pasties in a window of Cornish town.

We walked along the narrow streets, and took photos of the hanging baskets and heard the seagulls. When around just one more bay, and then just one more. Mum checked the water temperature. Unusually for the British beaches I’ve seen so far, there was sand and people with body boards.

As I was leaving St Ives, I saw a postcard which had the nursery rhyme on it along with a signpost showing St Ives and Lands End. And I thought I had been to the famous St Ives, and the thought sustained me as we walked back up the hill. But then, tonight, I’ve Googled “as I was going to Saint Ives”, and it seems that several towns claim it. Wikipedia, source of all knowledge says: “There are a number of places called St Ives in England and elsewhere.”

So really, I’m none the wiser.

I’ve been to St Ives though – or at least, one of them.

Tash

My parents last visited the UK in the 1970s. They lived here for a year, got married, travelled around the country in a campervan. I grew up with their stories. And now, 32 years later, they’re back. The Tower of London is still where they left it, so’s St Paul’s. Mum could still drink in the pub where she once worked. We could still travel south to the fishing village of Clovelly in Devon, one of their must-visits from the past.

Only these days, it costs £5.50 to get in.

Don’t let that put you off though. Once you get past the car park and ticket office, the huge giftshop with endless boxes of fudge and pictures of soccer stars, once you get past the huge glass windows and the audio visual presentation, the actual village of Clovelly manages to retain a certain historic charm.

There are no cars in Clovelly. The steep, narrow stone streets are prohibitive of that. Instead, deliveries are made on wooden sleds that are dragged across the stones. This definitely isn’t a place for high heels – even in sneakers, my toes were squashed against the front of my shoes as we descended towards the harbour. We bought postcards from the village post office – once that may soon become a casualty of the government’s closures.

We visited the Methodist Chapel and the Chapel of St. Peters, and a fisherman’s cottage which was set up with it’s 1930s furnishing. I read about the village fisherman lost at sea, the ones who Charles Kingsley wrote about in his poem, The Three Fishers, then walked down to the sea myself, across the quay, across the pebbles. There was a sign there which said NO STONE THROWING.

Clovelly’s been a bit of a tourist town for over a century. The narrow streets and the sea will guarantee that. We left at 10 on a rainy morning, and even then, it was starting to fill up. I guess, in the scheme of things, those £5.50s make sense. If they weren’t charged up front, I’m sure the actual village would be a lot more commercialised. Though I’m still not sure they need the sport star portraits in the gift shop.

Tash

I was experimenting with Facebook advertising at work the other day.  In the past, I’ve been able to create ads targeted just at people in high school or ‘college’, but I wanted to see if I could target people who were employed as well. 

Since there wasn’t a check box which said ‘employed’, I decided to try typing ‘working’ into the keyword category.

No luck.

The way facebook phrased the results made me laugh though.

Tash

Well, I did it.  I survived Race for Life 2008.  And I ran the whole 5km, despite forgetting to wear sunglasses and my iPod dying around the 2km mark.  And despite how desperately emotional I felt at the start line, reading the back plates of the other runners which described who they were running for – people who had fought against cancer, many who were still fighting.

Afterwards, as we looked at a map of Regent’s Park, Matt asked me to point out the route that we ran, and I couldn’t.  I remember a lake and some green elephant statues, but apart from that, it was just a case of putting one foot in front of another and hoping the finish line appeared soon.

Eventually it did, and when it did, I was suprised to see that the clock read something like 28:59.  5km in under 30 minutes – I was pretty pleased with that, as it’s better than I’d done in any of my training sessions.  Matt and Cautney had barely had a chance to get through the food queues between the start and the end of the race.  For me it seemed much longer, and a week later I’ve still got the blisters on the soles of my feet.

All in all, I still don’t think I’m a candidate to run the London Marathon.  But another 5km in a year or so?  When sufficient time has passed so I can forget that last km of suffering? 

I’d consider it.

Tash