Category Archives: England

The year that was

Everywhere I look the last 12 months are being reviewed – news, sports, politics – the best of, the worst of – clearly this is the time of year for reflection. Never being one to miss a trend, here’s our year in review.

It started in a cold UK and ended in a warm and sunny New Zealand. Along the way there has been travel, adventure, triumphs and sadness. Going back through the photo album, a few images leapt out.

In defence of photo albums
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In defence of photo albums

An early casualty of the digital photo revolution was the traditional photo album. During our stay in the UK and Italy last year I took 4,626 photos. Of that vast number exactly none have been printed out.

They are all stored on my iMac, and on two back up drives that sit humming away next to it. If we want to show people the photos we gather around  the television and run a slide show with commentary provided by Jean and I as our guest’s eyes slowly glaze over.

We have lost the tactile fun that is a photo album – and we were reminded of this when my brother and his wife visited last weekend. They had just returned from a trip to Texas and the East Coast of the USA. Upon returning, brother Geoff had taken the memory card from his camera to the local photo printing place and returned with 6×4 glossies. All of which are now in photo albums.

Going through them was a pleasure. All of us huddled around the albums as they were passed around. Fingers pointing at certain shots and describing the situation that went before or after. Turning pages to connect one shot with another. We spent an hour going through them and didn’t realise where the time went.

So here’s the thing. If you’ve got all your photographs sitting on hard drives or CDs of DVDs, go non-digital and print off an album or two. I intend to.

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The book of the blog

I started writing this post as an endorsement of a fantastic service for turning your blog posts into a book – Feedfabrik.com. But I’ve just learnt that, due to problems between the partners, they have stopped taking orders, their website is offline, and it is unlikely to return anytime soon.

I first used Feedfabrik last year to produce a simple black and white book of the first 100 toscanakiwi posts which we had delivered to our cottage in Tuscany. We carefully carried it around Europe on our travels and it’s sitting, slightly battered and beaten up, in the bookcase next to me.

A month ago I ordered two volumes of blog posts (about 200 posts in all) hard bound on high quality paper and in full colour because they produce the pictures that go with blog posts as well as the writing. The books arrived last week and they look absolutely stunning.

It is a real shame that others won’t be able to make use of this excellent service in the foreseeable future.

Our thanks to the team at Feedfabrik.com. We love your work and hope that you’ll be back soon.

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Farewell Tony Scott

Today film director Tony Scott – brother of Ridley Scott - died after jumping from a Los Angeles bridge. Among his films that I would classify as “ripping yarns” were Top Gun, Crimson Tide, Days of Thunder and his final movie Unstoppable . His passing is a great loss.

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Heading home

After the best part of 11 months living la dolce vita, the Mowday family are moving on. That meant a tough decision between opportunities that have come up to spend another summer in Italy or a return to New Zealand. And, ultimately, the decision was made by the health of our girl Daisy.

At 15 years old and with her heart condition, we felt she only had one big trip left in her and after some soul searching we felt that trip should be home.

That’s meant fixing flights for Jean and I (the easy part) and booking the girls in for a return journey and a battery of tests and treatments to ensure they aren’t carrying anything nasty back into New Zealand.

We also had to find someone to freight back the bits and pieces we have collected on our travels including Jean’s famous Italian vacuum cleaner.

The big question-mark over any planning was Daisy’s health and her ability to make the trip. That came down to a health check a day or two before we flew. If the vet decided she wasn’t well enough to fly, we were staying in the UK. Like the trooper she is, Daisy passed the health check and the girls departed on the same flight as us from London via Los Angeles to Auckland.

Thankfully they arrived in New Zealand none the worse for wear after their 36 hour flight and are now in quarantine in Levin. For my non New Zealand readers that’s a small rural town about a one hour drive north of our home city of Wellington. We’ve moved into a nearby motel so we can make sure Daisy gets her twice daily medication and to be able to spend some time with the girls as we countdown to freedom in 10 days time.

Walking in the country

This afternoon we took the dogs for a walk in the country. For dogs as small as ours that means a quick circuit around the park at the end of the road. They both loved it. We loved it when we got home and had to clean two sets of muddy paws. Right now both girls are sound asleep, exhausted.

London is a dangerous place

We spent Tuesday in London. We’ve been there a few times over the last two months for various reasons but the reason for this trip was simple – act like tourists.

For us that meant a visit to Harrods and a wander around Knightsbridge which included a trip to the Louis Vuitton store on Sloane Street.

Those of you who know Harrods, know that a day can easily be spent just wandering through the various departments and marveling at the choice of products available. We wanted a new toy for Poppie but didn’t realise we would have a choice of hundreds. In the end we picked one that seemed appropriate – a designer handbag. Which designer? ‘Chewy Vuitton’ of course.

Lunch was at a cafe opposite Harrods called “The Gran Cafe – Londra” which served a superb late breakfast and which was, for Knightsbridge, great value. We walked off lunch with a stroll to Sloane Street and a visit to the Louis Vuitton shop. With Jean’s birthday coming up in a week, any guesses what her present will be?

A clue – it’s very similar to Poppies toy but the real deal. London really is a dangerous place.

The little freeze in pictures

As expected, we awoke to a white world. Although the snow covering was less than a week ago it was still enough to keep the kiwi contingent in Bromham happy.

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Daisy asleep in a small girls room

Yesterday I was putting together a storage unit for wee Jordan. It was from Ikea (what a fantastic retail operation that is) so was flat-packed and required assembly. Daisy clearly got bored with watching me exercise my limited carpentry skills and decided that Jordan’s beanbag chair was an ideal place for a snooze. So in amongst the chaos that follows a house move Daisy became an oasis of peace and tranquility.

Also an excuse for another cute dog photo.

The big freeze – a kiwi perspective

We were warned for the best part of a week, it was from Russia and it was going to hit Saturday night. Road gritters started gritting the roads mid week and Heathrow cancelled one third of their flights in advance. It was the arrival of ‘the big freeze’.

In the last couple of years the UK has developed a habit of grinding to a halt when the first decent snowfall of winter arrives. Airports close, roads are impassable and trains never leave the station. The country essentially stalls until the snow melts.

This year was a repeat of the past with snow falling all night Saturday. As a result, Sunday was all about warnings to ‘not leave home’ and to ‘reduce your speed’ if, indeed, you had to go out at all. Having said that, by Monday everything was largely back to normal with an inch or so of snow hanging around on the ground. For those up early in the morning, ice was the main hazard.

From a kiwi viewpoint the “big freeze” was actually quite fun. The neighbourhood was pure white when we woke up on Sunday and we’ve had two days of winter wonderland since. It was also a great two days to take some photographs.

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On the move

The last week has seen the team from Aspley Guise pack up and move to Bromham. That’s a distance of about 30 kilometres but the move involved serious logistics and planning as well as a decent dollop of muscle over the weekend just past.

Adding interest to the move was the impending “big freeze” that was due to hit the UK on Saturday. Thankfully it held off until the move was finished – just. The lads were enjoying a couple of beers just as the first snow started to drift down.

Next morning our new neighbourhood was under 3 inches of snow – what a lovely welcome to Bromham.

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Farewell Renault, hello Fiat

On Saturday we returned our trusty Renault Megane Estate. Its 6 month lease was over and we couldn’t extend the term any further. It has been a fantastic car – reliable, spacious, comfortable, fast, economical, everything you could want. We returned it almost intact to the Renault Depot at Heathrow, just a couple of scrapes on one side resulting from trying to squeeze into a narrow driveway in Firenze.

We will miss its luggage capacity, its start/stop button (just like an Aston Martin) and the way its side mirrors folded in when parked. We won’t miss its cable gear shift which meant that second and fourth seemed to be in the same place, or the cacophony of beeping that greeted any parking manoeuvre thanks to the front and rear parking sensors.

So what car would you get as a replacement for a capacious, comfortable estate car? A Fiat 500 of course.

The irony that all through Italy we drove French cars and now in the UK we drive the quintessential Italian car is not lost on Jean and I. The irony that we have an estate cars worth of luggage and the 500 is about the size of a roller-skate is also not lost on us.

But it’s a Fiat and a really good one at that. It handles like a go-cart, it looks cute and it just makes you, well, smile.

It’s ours for the next two weeks or until Mr Avis wants it back again.

Note: The photo of our Fiat 500 was taken at Woburn Estate just before sunset. I quite like this shot.

Welcome to Woburn

There are two villages close to Aspley Guise. One is Woburn Sands which boasts a population of around 2,000 people. The other is the much smaller village of Woburn which has, as its close neigbour, the Duke of Bedford’s estate and home, Woburn Abbey.

Of the two villages Woburn seems the more historically significant. According to our friends at Wikipedia:

“Woburn was first recorded as a hamlet in 969 and is found in the Domesday Book of 1086. It is best known as the location of Woburn Abbey (a stately home), founded by Cistercian monks in 1145 and bequeathed to the first Earl of Bedford in 1538 after the dissolution of the monasteries, and Woburn Safari Park.

Woburn has been burned down and rebuilt three times. A mediaeval chimney fire spread due to the prevalence of thatched roofs and closely built houses. Then, during the English Civil War, the Cavaliers burned down much of the village and in 1724 a third fire destroyed much of the town, which was re-built in the Georgian style that remains today.”

I posted photos of Woburn Abbey in April last year soon after we arrived in the UK. But I have never spent much time in the village of Woburn itself.

Today I set out to remedy that and in sunny (but freezing) conditions I spent an hour or so wandering around the village photographing the buildings, the features and the little things that appealed to me. After an hour, the cold meant I had lost feeling in my hands and operating the camera became impossible. This was remedied by a visit to the warm and friendly “Longs Inn” for a quick pint.

Woburn and the nearby Abbey are major tourist attractions, particularly during the summer – funny that. For us, Woburn’s main attraction is the aforementioned Longs Inn – a traditional old pub established in 1649 which has become our favourite local watering hole. With its inviting fire, low ceiling and endless supply of Adnam’s ale, spending time within its cosy confines is easy.