Winter and the Fragrance of Georgie Pie

I've just realised that it is technically winter now. Time to wrap up warm, time to get out my blue coat and gloves and hat, time to-

Hang on, it's not actually that cold.

I thought I'd re-acclimatised to Auckland weather, but I still can't quite believe this is supposed to be winter. Sure, it's still early (and we did have a few cold days last week, and they had SNOW last year), but the sky is blue and I only need two layers. I remember it being faaaar colder in Sydney.

I guess I should go and see some snow at the end of the month.

In other news, the beloved Georgie Pie has returned at last. It was NZ's own fast food restaurant (with BALL PITS, as my bro keeps reminding me) until it was taken over by McDonalds and closed down in the mid-nineties. After a lengthy Bring Back Georgie Pie movement and Facebook group, McDonalds are testing bringing back the pies in selected restaurants, starting with the steak mince and cheese flavour (yes, MEAT pies).

Bro suggested a mission to obtain one of these long-lost pies on the opening day, so we sat in afternoon traffic, found a park and joined the line (which had been much longer when they first opened that morning, apparently). As soon as I smelled that special pie smell, I was taken back to eight years old, giving my order for a small mince pie and a latticed apple and blackberry.

It's funny how easily smells can trigger memories and the feel of a place or time. What if you could capture those scents in bottles and have a library of them, labelled according to time and date, and you could transport yourself back just by smelling one? Transport metaphorically, of course, within memories.

Hmm. Or literally. I can see that turning into a very strange story.

The pie was good, in any case.

Lincoln and Burns Night

Why is it, whenever I try to catch a train, the buses and tubes unite against me and deliver me to the train station with breathless seconds to spare? I have not yet missed a train (touch wood), but pretty much all of them I've almost missed.

Today I am off to Lincoln. I've only got a few more weeks in the UK (I will return in September, if all goes well) and I've been squeezing as much as I can into them. This morning I was trying to make my room presentable for potential new flatmates, but I still left in good-ish time.

If only the bus had come when it said it was going to, not ten minutes later (they're supposed to come every five to eight minutes). If only I hadn't just missed the Jubilee train and had to wait four minutes for the next one (I've got used to tube trains every 1-2 minutes). If only the train hadn't been held at Canary Wharf to 'regulate the service'. If only I hadn't chosen the wrong door, adding precious seconds to my change at London Bridge. If only I hadn't missed the Northern Line train by five seconds, and had to wait five minutes for the next one. If only the driver of the Northern Line train hadn't decided to wait stupidly long at every station. By the time I got to Angel, I was convinced I was going to miss the train, so much so that I was a bit relieved I wouldn't have to run through the warren of King's Cross at high speed in my coat and backpack. There were four minutes until the train left, and I still had Euston to go before we got to King's Cross.

Or... not.

I'd mixed up King's Cross and Euston. King's Cross comes first. I sprinted off the train, trying not to collide with too many people, up the escalators, and the next escalators, and the next escalators. As I was reaching the top, the lady on the loudspeaker said that the next train to leave from platform 3 would be the 10.08 East Coast Service to Newark North Gate. My train! At least now I knew which platform, which is one of the things that takes up time to figure out.

I still only had about a minute left, and hadn't collected my tickets. I ran for a ticket machine, stabbed in my code and almost ran off with half my tickets before I remembered there were more to come. I followed the signs to platform 3, ran through the barriers (they were open, no need to figure out which ticket I had to stick in them! Hallelujah!) and skidded down the platform to the first open door (first class). I was on the train!

I was only 30s late, but the train was later. If it had been on time, I wouldn't have been able to catch it. Now we're speeding through snowy countryside with fields blanketed in white. In central London the snow has disappeared, but out here it's still a way from melting. Very pretty. And there are bunnies in the snowy white fields!

I stayed with my lovely hosts in a village a little outside Lincoln, beside a Roman archaeological dig. The smaller roads were very icy and we slid a bit at one point. Someone had tried to build an igloo using an umbrella as scaffolding, though it was only half-done.

Friday was Burns Night, when much of Scotland celebrates the life of Rabbie Burns and eats haggis. Though Lincoln is in England, my hosts have Scottish connections and were celebrating too. I had a great night, with Scottish smoked salmon, proper sheep's stomach haggis, neeps and tatties (turnips and potatoes). Though we didn't have a bagpiper, we had an iPod to pipe the haggis in, and the Ode to a Haggis (great chieftan o' the Puddin-race). To finish, there was cranachan and clootie pudding, and whisky, of course.

On Saturday we went for a turn around Lincoln. Lincoln Cathedral is one of the largest (if not the largest?) Norman cathedrals, and is set high on a hill looking over everything. It's fantastic coming across the low hills towards it in a car, and it must have been incredible to be a pilgrim in the medieval times, approaching this colossal building on foot. The inside of the cathedral has beautiful vaulted ceilings and high windows. Footsteps echo and you can hear the stillness.

Right outside the cathedral is the castle, which was once used as a prison, and is in fact where the court house still is. It's having renovations at the moment, but when it's not you can walk all the way around the tops of the walls. Instead we walked some of the way down Steep Hill, an old medieval street with original buildings stepping down the hill. The shops along here are wonderful little boutiquey things with crafty jewellery and clothes and knickknacks that you could spend hours and hours in. We peered in a few, then went down into the main town for coffee in a half-timbered café on a bridge that has been open for business for about five hundred years. The beamed ceilings were low, the casement windows glinting in the light, and if you squinted a bit and imagined folk in doublets and hose you could almost believe you were in the sixteenth century.

There was a lovely winter barbeque for dinner, and soon it was time to get the train back to London. The rain had come in the night, and the fields were a patchwork of greens and browns, very different from the white landscape of Friday.

 

Snow and the Tower of London

It's cold here, though not quite cold enough for proper snow blankets. We were promised snow falling ALL WEEKEND, but I looked out the window this morning and the snow in the back garden is sinking sadly into the grass in patches.

Yesterday I walked along the Thames in the snow (retracing Bond's London car chase in Skyfall), past MI6 and along to Westminster. There was a team playing football on the green outside Westminster, snow floating around them. I was very glad of my thermal top, my knitted tunic, my half-mohair jersey, my blue coat, my sheepskin ugg boots, and my hat, scarf and gloves. Not sure how they were doing in their shorts and t-shirts.

From Westminster I got a Circle line train to Tower Hill, and wrapped up In preparation for the Tower. You enter via a drawbridge over the snow-white expanse of the grass moat, and walk along Water Lane, which is built on wooden pilings over the Thames. We had a short talk from one of the Yeomen Warders (aka Beefeaters) in the Chapel rather than around the grounds, because it was pretty cold outside. He told stories about the history of the Tower, and the executions that had taken place through the centuries, before informing us that the bodies had originally been buried exactly where we were sitting, with so many thrown in under the stones that the floor was higgledy-piggledy uneven. Most of them were exhumed and reburied in Queen Victoria's time, but some, including Anne Boleyn, were still under the altar.

I've become a great fan of audio-guides in my time in Europe - you can listen and look at the same time. Much of the audio-guide at the Tower takes place outside, so I was determined to stick it out through the snow with frozen fingers. I would get the full experience! I would hear and see all the Tower had to offer!

I went through the Medieval Palace above the Traitor's Gate, and saw a recreation of a King's chambers. Through a staircase and over a bridge was a beautiful octagonal room with vaulted ceilings, and up another spiral staircase I found the battlements of the inner wall. About this time, I realised I only had forty minutes left until the Tower closed, so I stopped looking at everything and made a shortlist (They tell you three hours is a 'long' time to see the Tower. In future, I think I should take all the maximum times for things and double them. I like to take my time...). So... around the battlements, and on to the Crown Jewels!

There are lots of very expensive things in the Crown Jewels, as you may think. The number of gold plates and sceptres and goblets was truly incredible, and then we came to the crowns. I hadn't quite realised that they don't generally reuse crowns - there's a new one (or two or three) for each monarch. And they all have lots of very sparkly jewels in them that glint in the light as you move slowly past on the tourist conveyor belt. There weren't that many people - I guess it's a good time to go to the Tower when it's snowing - so I was out quite quickly and heading for the White Tower, which is the big square one that you probably think of when you think of the Tower of London. It was built by William the Conqueror, and at the time was the tallest building in Europe.

The entrance to the White Tower is on the first floor and has wooden steps leading up to it - this meant that, in a siege, you could destroy the wooden steps and no one could get in. An opening in the stone wall halfway up the stairs shows where the bodies of the two Princes in the Tower were apparently found, which was quite creepy. It's strange to come across places where famous things you've learned about actually happened.

Inside is an exhibition of armoury, including a few sets of Henry VIII's. He was tall and pretty imposing, judging from his armour. There are also swords and horse armour and guns and the 'Line of Kings', which is a set of life-size models of kings and horses made in the seventeenth century. One of the sets of armour holds the world record for tallest armour, and another displayed right beside it is one of the smallest and looks like it was made for a three-year-old.

The warders began to usher us out, so I took a last few listens of my audio-guide and reluctantly gave it back. I hadn't had time for the Bloody Tower or the Queen's residence, but I didn't think the Yeomen Warders would appreciate me hiding in a tower room and exploring the rest in darkness.

It had stopped snowing, and everything was glowing in the dusk and lights. I took the DLR to Canary Wharf and admired the fairy lights and glowing paper boats floating in the water, and then was off home.

 

Travelling to Ireland after the End of the World

We're still alive! Hooray!

And I'm on a train in the Lake District, coming into the same station as last time where I did not see any lakes. This time I've seen quite a lot of lakes, but they tend to be lakes in the middle of fields that aren't really supposed to be lakes (there's been a lot of rain and some train lines are down because of it. Fingers crossed, the trains I am taking today will not be affected).

I am somewhat worried, however, that my train will not make it into Glasgow in time for me to connect with my next train to Ayr, from where I will take a bus to Cairnryan and then a ferry to Belfast. By the time you read this post, all will have been revealed, and you shall see whether I needed to use my travel insurance...

I got to the train station in London in reasonable time and stood with the hordes of other people with suitcases, staring up at the boards where they tell you what platform your train is on, approximately eight minutes before it's due to leave (is this done for some reason other than stressing people out? Why can they organise platforms nicely in Germany and Austria and tell you weeks in advance, whereas in London we get eight minutes?). The train to Glasgow was late. Other trains kept leaving. It got to our departure time, and they still hadn't told us, though the announcements did advise that the train would be delayed.

Finally the platform came up. Number 3! It turned out that pretty much every person standing in the packed station hall was going to Glasgow, and there was a mad rush for Platform 3, suitcases sliding and banging behind. I must admit that, once on the platform, I ran - my ticket doesn't have reserved seats, which meant that if I didn't get in first I'd be obliged to stand.

I found a likely-looking carriage and got in, staring at all the reservation screens and trying to find one that was available. Unfortunately I was not in one of the two separate carriages set aside for the unreserved passengers (and they were being pretty unreserved, too, what with a five hour journey with no seat at stake).

I got out and ran for the right car, but by the time I got there there was barely standing room. One lady had to get off the train because of claustrophobia and I was one of the last to squeeze on. Then we stood for a while before a conductor asked if anyone would mind taking a later train, because they couldn't really have so many people on board (safety and that sort of thing. Not good when you can't move for suitcases and scrunched-up people).

I set myself up with my four bags (suitcase, backpack, food bag, other food bag), finding that there are actually far more places to stuff things when you're sitting in the aisle on your suitcase. I had one food bag to my left, my backpack to my right, and my other food bag above. Two and a bit hours later, enough people left the train that I got myself a seat, all to myself, and celebrated with lunch.

Awwwww! The driver just came on and told us they are organising ahead! I am doing a sail-rail ticket and I wasn't sure how officially connected-up it was, but it turns out that they have organised for us to take a later train (yes, I will miss the train I'm supposed to get) and then THE BUS WILL WAIT FOR US. Awww. Thanks Virgin Trains.

I have apple pie and mandarins for dinner. I'm looking forward to it, and trying to convince myself that 2.10 pm is in no way dinner time when you've just had lunch.

2.24: I have scored myself a window seat! Ha! And eaten most of my mange tout. We will get into Glasgow in a little over an hour, ten minutes before sunset.

3.07: Going past Scottish lowland mountains with black vegetation across their smooth, rounded sides and a spattering of snow in patches on top. Low clouds drift fingers along their ridges. I have the theme from Skyfall stuck in my head (if you've seen the movie, you should know why).

6.40: I am checked in at the ferry! All gone well so far, with train and bus and ferry matching up nicely.

7.28: leaving port! I like ferries. They're like huge coffee shops that move. Well, this one is. I have myself a high-backed chair with a view into the black out the port hole. About to start my apple pie :)

 

Austria Take Two: Ice Skating and Flying Home

Friday was our last full day in Austria. I wanted to go and find the elusive ice rink, so we ventured out after lunch (when it had warmed up from minus sixteen) armed with a map. We'd almost found it our first day in St Johann, when we went to look at the chair lift, but we hadn't walked quite far enough around the bend in the road.

One solitary boy was skating around the rink holding onto a large plastic penguin for balance. There was a little cottage beside the ice rink, but it looked like a normal house and the hut where I thought you might get skates was all shut up. I tried to ask a man when the rink might open, but he was extremely busy with some kind of flashing-light panel, and refused to talk to me. Luckily a woman with two kids turned up a few minutes later, and when I asked about skates she said 'in der haus'. It turned out the cottage wasn't a private house after all, and when you opened the door you walked through the little foyer and into a changing room, complete with a man at a window ready to exchange skates for 5€. I got some grey skates the wrong size first of all, and had to say 'kleine' and get some bigger, much prettier ones in white and purple. If I ever get any of my own, I think they will look like these.

The rink is outside, with mountains all around. The sun was on the ice and very bright. I hadn't skated in a few years, and was a bit wobbly at first and glad there was only one other person on the ice. I managed to stay upright, though, and The One Who Speaks Russian took some good photos and sat in the sun with her book. It wasn't long before the after-school crowd came onto the ice, but by then I was reasonably confident and even skating backwards some of the time.

There were some very good skaters, and some beginners. There was one boy dressed all in orange who fell over, at speed, almost every time I saw him. I wondered if his parents had dressed him in orange as a warning to other skaters.

At indoor ice rinks I've been to, they have a large lumbering vehicle called a Zamboni that sweeps the ice and makes it smooth again. At this smaller outdoor rink, they had a live Zamboni instead, a boy who looked to be about eight and pushed a scraper broom thing around. I think the broom changed hands a few times, and the kids looked like they were having fun.

The sun began to sink behind the mountains so I surrendered my beautiful skates and walked back through the town to the hotel, passing through the little Christmas market on the way.

There was one goal I had not yet reached for the week: building a snowman. I found lots of good untouched snow in the park next to the hotel, so I storked to a good spot and started.

Only I didn't really want to build a traditional snowman. I didn't have a carrot, for one, and snowmen always look a bit gauche. So I made a snow maiden instead. Unfortunately snow upon snow doesn't tend to make a good picture, but here are my best photoshopped efforts anyway.

She didn't come out exactly as I'd imagined her (and when I had the bright idea of taking off my gloves to get more definition and intricacy and such things as hands, it didn't turn out to be such a bright idea. More a very cold idea) but I was still pleased with her.

We got up early the next morning and prepared for minus sixteen on our way to the train station, but it didn't actually turn out to be that cold. I drunk in the mountains for the last time on our way into Salzburg, found the trolley bus to the airport and were on our way home.

One thing I really liked about Salzburg airport was passport control. Salzburg airport has only 9 gates, and passport control consisted of a smiley man at a little window sitting right next to the woman taking our boarding passes at the gate before we walked out onto the runway (into the first rain we'd seen - it really was warming up). Passport control at the UK border was not nearly so nice, but then it's generally not the most enjoyable of experiences.

One more week of work, and then Christmas!

Where did the year go?

 

Austria Take Two: Salzburg

Today was our Salzburg day. Our town is about an hour from Salzburg on the train, so we dragged ourselves away from our books and down to the train station in the freezing air. The sky was an incredible blue, the sun touching the mountains as we caught a nice regional train and began to wend our way out of the mountains.

This is an impressive journey, and worth doing by train I think. The road weaves back and forth and goes through tunnels, but the train spends most of the time right by the river with mountains towering on both sides, white peaks with slashes of black cliff face and dark snow-dusted forests hugging the slopes. We went past a castle on an outcropping of rock, and lots of little villages with colourful wooden houses covered in snow. Everything looks so clean and bright and untouched, with white expanses that I guess are fields in summer.

Salzburg itself is still pretty much surrounded by mountains, though there's more valley space. We took a tour of the old town with a nice guide who showed us the squares and the statues and took us inside the Dom cathedral, through a graveyard with beautiful wrought iron grave markers and past a very old bakery that is still baking bread.

He explained that one side of town is known as the Old Town, and the other the New Town because it was only settled in 15 AD. That's not a typo. The Dom has five organs (Salzburg has a proud history of music, of course), but before there were organs, singers and instrumentalists performed from balconies near the ceiling. The sound would have floated down from above and all around, which would have been an amazing experience.

The buildings are tall and close together, because there isn't much room to build, the streets narrow, and wherever you are in the city you can look up to the castle on the rock with the town surrounding it. We ended at Mozart's birthplace, then decided it was time for lunch and made for NordSee, which you see everywhere in Austria and apparently Germany. I had a very nice meal of fish, potatoes and buttered vegetables and, suitably warmed, we ventured back out to inspect the chocolate shops and the Christmas market.

Mozart ducks. Obviously.

This was my first proper Christmas market this year - in Vienna there were too many people to really see much of it. I got a glüwein (I think that's how you spell it - mulled wine) and wandered around warming my hands and looking at the stalls of decorations and jewellery and food. The market spills over into multiple squares and around the boarded-up fountains (protected from frost) beside the Dom.

Many of the buildings are inspired by Italian architecture, because Salzburg was a main trading point for people from Italy and Germany, especially when the salt mine was still open (Salzburg = Salt Mountain).

By four o'clock we were getting tired and cold, so we caught a train back to St Johann im Pongau and curled up with our books.

 

St Johann im Pongau: Days 3 and 4

We've been having a nice relaxing week in our little Alpine town, the One Who Speaks Russian and I. The hotel has a spa and a swimming pool, and there is a supermarket across the road with a good supply of chocolate. We have books (lots of books) and a few movies, and a beautiful view of snowy mountains out the sliding door. Also, have I mentioned,

IT IS COLD?

It's not a wet cold like you get in London. This is a crisp cold, hovering around minus ten Celsius and diving to minus eighteen at dawn, before the sun has had a chance to warm everything up again. On Tuesday we went out to find the McDonalds (wifi), and had a bit of an adventure trying to find a way across town and the river that was open to pedestrians. They only clear some of the footpaths of snow, and I'm sure in some places the roads are supposed to be higher speed so don't actually have footpaths, but eventually we saw the sign and slogged towards it through pristine white snow or grey mush, depending on whether we were following an actual path or not. The snow in some places is as deep as my knee.

Our internet at the hotel came with a five hour limit on it, so it was nice to be able to sit and check emails and things without worrying about the time. As we were walking back up the hill, a little old lady called us back and insisted on giving us lollies, which was very nice of her. When we got back to the hotel we sat in the spa for a while, and then retreated to our room for dinner.

Our little bar fridge doesn't have quite enough room for my sparkly red bowl of salad, but I've found a better solution: leave it just outside the sliding door in the day time, and it's perfectly crisp in the evening - not actually frozen. So I've been calling the balcony the fridge.

On Wednesday I spent most of the day determined to finish a book, and went out to see the local church just after the sun had dropped behind the mountains. The slopes were luminous, and the Christmas lights strung all around town were sparkling in the dusk. I didn't actually get in to see the church, but I had a nice walk anyway, taking pictures and watching the chairlift take people up the mountain. TOWSR and I had considered skiing, but neither of us has had much practice, and thought the expense and likelihood of broken bones probably wasn't worth it. Especially as my foot has only just healed. I'm keen to try skating on Friday, though, if the rink is open...

 

Austria Take 2 - Days 2 & 3: St Johann im Pongau

When we woke up on Sunday morning, the sky was a brilliant blue. I opened the curtains and caught my breath at the vista above and all around. St Johann im Pongau is in a valley between mountains, and from our window you can see across the valley to the white expanses of mountainside, the firs with their dusting of snow and the sloping roofed Austrian houses dotted across the mountain. It looks exactly like a postcard.

There was a bit of excitement when we realised we couldn't find the room key or my hat and gloves, but eventually they reappeared and we stopped with the conspiracy theories about people breaking into our room while we were sleeping. We weren't exactly sure how cold it was, but we ventured out into the crisp air with lots of layers and scarves and had a wander around the deserted town. It was Sunday, and nothing is open on Sunday, so we hardly met anyone on our exploration of the Hauptstrasse (High Street), a little snowy garden over a cliff edge, the bottom of the chair lift and around the Dom church.

When we got too cold we went back to the hotel and noticed the weather for the day had a temperature of -10. Which we'd just been walking around in.

A soak in the hot tub warmed us up, and then we went for dinner at one of the hotel restaurants where TOWSR got a special gluten free pizza and I got one with spinach, bacon and ewe's cheese (big enough for breakfast and lunch the next day). With sorbet, icecream and fruit with chocolate sauce to follow, we thought overall it was a pretty good dinner.

Monday morning we woke up to snow that TOWSR called semi-blizzard snow. We could not see the mountains. We could not see the buildings across the road. We could almost see the edge of our deck. So we spent the morning with books, and ventured out into the knee-deep snow around lunchtime to see how far we could get.

The snow ploughs had been around clearing the roads and footpaths, and we went down into the valley to see all the buildings with their blankets of snow, wandered around and retreated to the bookstore and supermarket. There really were a lot more people around than on Sunday, and it didn't feel so much like we were two of the last vestiges of humanity clinging to life in a dead world. The snow had stopped falling, and when we got back to our room I began to make a snowman on our deck, but stopped when I couldn't feel my hands anymore. A few hours later the snow began again, and we huddled happily inside as it rose higher and higher and covered up the sad beginnings of my snowman.

 

Austria Take Two - Day One: Snow (Action)

Hello all! I am once again jet-setting around Europe, and back in Austria, this time among the Alps. It was snowing when I arrived, and we had to walk across the runway to the terminal as snowflakes spun down and clung to our coats.

Thankfully I didn't have to leave the house this morning at a quarter to seven to get to the airport, as I originally thought - it turns out that Stansted Airport is much closer to my house than my brain was telling me, and I didn't have to go all the way into Victoria and back out again. There are 5/6 London airports, depending on who you talk to, and though I know Heathrow and City and where they are (City is, strangely, near the City) I always get confused about which other airports are which. I pulled up outside Stansted this morning and thought 'Oh! This one!', because I have actually been here multiple times. For future reference, Stansted is the one closest to Stratford, and is big and square and white and tent-like in construction.

I'll probably forget that.

Non-EU citizens have to get their passports checked at the bag drop (just because non-EU people can't be trusted. Well, I guess they check our visas?) so I did that, had some very early lunch and stood staring at the display boards until they put up my gate number. Then, I joined everyone else in a brisk walk towards our gate, none of us actually running, but everyone sliding looks at each other to make sure no one else was breaking into a trot. First person to the gate is first person on the plane, and the person who gets the pick of the seats.

I ended up about twentieth in the queue, and bagged myself a nice window seat behind the wing (I can never remember - which part of the plane is most likely to end in your fiery death in a crash?). There appeared to be no seat pockets in which to put my iPad and book, so I laid them on my lap and stuffed my coat, jacket and jersey under the seat in front, and we took off.

As we were flying over the Channel and coming in over the low countries, I saw a huge area that was sort of a hazy chalky colour. I was horrified. What kind of industrial waste was this? What had they done to their city?

It was a while before I saw others patches just like it, and realised it was snow.

As we flew eastwards, the snow patches got larger until they all joined together into a great white snow plain, and then the clouds came in and you couldn't see anything.

It was -4 Celsius and snowing when we landed in Salzburg. We had to walk across the runway to get to the terminal, so I bundled up in all my clothes and braved the snowy cold with my ugg boots. From there it was a matter of getting the trolley bus to the main station where I met The One Who Speaks Russian, and we caught a train that we really hoped would take us to the little Alpine village (look! Literally alpine!) where we would spend the next week.

The conductor didn't tell us we were on the wrong train when he checked our tickets, so we assumed we were on the right one, but we didn't know how long we had until we had to get off. At last the speaker informed us the next station was St Johann im Pongau, so we grabbed our bags and got off into the snow.

We didn't get too lost on the way to the hotel, though we did wander through a small Christmas market twice, and very soon we were in our nice hotel room with our snowy balcony and beautifully painted Austrian TV cabinet.

It was dark, so we couldn't see out the windows very well, but we had a nice evening of books and movies and cake for dinner.

 

The view out my window. And also, SQUIRRELS

So I was going to do this post about an hour ago while it was still light, but now it's mostly dark and I will have to rely on memory.

I have quite a nice view out my window. I live in a terraced house about six metres (six yards?) wide and twelve metres long, with the garden extending to the back about the same length as the house. When you look at the street on Google Maps, all the sections look very long and skinny, and when I look out my window into the back garden I can see the back gardens of the house next door, and the one next to that, and the one next to that. At the end of our garden is a park with lots of trees and brambles (so you can't really get into it from our garden, unless you wear heavy spike-resistant clothing), and lots of green.

There's a NZ native cabbage tree in the next garden over, poking its spiky leaves in all directions, and behind that the skeletal branches of some English natives. The skeletal branches mean you can see where birds have set their nests, and sometimes movement catches my eye and I stare to see what's moving in the trees. (Today I stared for over two minutes trying to see if the small grey thing was a squirrel or not. It was a pigeon.) As the sun goes down, the scene takes on the qualities of a silhouette against the sky.

London has five airports, and one of them is quite near me so there are always planes going overhead and making tracks in the sky (as I write I've counted five in the past thirty seconds, though most of those are quite high and only sparkling lights). Birds sing in the mornings and I go past a small 'farm' with a rooster on the way to the bus. Invariably it's crowing mightily. I wouldn't like to live next door to it in summer, when the sun rises at a quarter to five.

I've got a nice sun crystal hanging in my window, which is a bit futile because the window is north-facing and the sun is unlikely to shine through the crystal and make pretty rainbows on my walls. The window itself is an old-style two-panel-with-panes where the bottom panel is on ropes and slides up. Of the twelve panes of glass in the windows, two are original or at least quite old (I can see because the glass is all squiggly) and it makes me wonder what happened to the other ten panes of glass that they had to be replaced.

I happened to look out my window yesterday and see a squirrel attempting a daring raid on next-door's bird feeder. It ran along the fence line and then spent quite a while climbing all around the bird feeder and inspecting it from every possible angle (twitch, freeze and stare, twitch, move, twitch, move, freeze and stare), trying to find chinks in the mesh armour. Another squirrel took exception, however, and entered from stage left with determined ferocity. The first squirrel gave up on the bird feeder and disappeared from my view.

The episode inspired a dream with two rival squirrels. One of the squirrels was luridly red and had a punk fur-cut.

My brain works in strange ways.

Have a good week!

It's cold, but there is ballet.

Hello all.

This morning we had a hoar frost that lasted the entire day in the back (north facing) garden, and beautiful blue skies (side note: why can blue skies be plural?). Here is a picture of a rose in our garden at 11am. The sky, though it seems white, is actually blue.

So it is getting colder, and I am sitting with my blanket and my beanie and waiting until the radiator comes on at 10pm, at which time I will sit against it.

I love my radiator.

On Wednesday night I was riding a tube escalator and saw a sign for Strictly Gershwin, put on by the English National Ballet and finishing soon. As soon as I was home I checked for seats and got one of the last ones up in the balcony for £10 on Thursday night, and went along.

It was amazing.

I was a bit disappointed at first because the seats were only half-depth (well, I did only pay £10) and the orchestra pit was empty. In NZ ballets they sometimes won't have an orchestra, and I thought this might be the same, but when the curtain went up the orchestra was there on the stage! The conductor was conducting and doing Charlie Chaplin impressions at the same time! The dancers came on in beautiful dresses and suits and danced beautifully, and then there were singers, alone and in harmony, and sometimes ballet to go with it and sometimes only the singing. One particular piece began with a woman singing in the corner of the stage, and a dancer appeared beside her to tell the story of the song with dance. I loved the way the story was passed from the singer to the dancer and back again.

All the music was Gershwin: twenties and thirties jazz (check Youtube for 'Rhapsody in Blue' and 'Summertime' if you don't know it).

And then the dancing drew near to ballroom! My favourite dresses of the night were white sparkly dresses with heavy hems that swirled and draped to perfection, and had twenties-style black decorative belts that seemed somehow art nouveau.

And then there were tap dancers! Two men, very good, who were later joined by half the rest of the company with walking sticks and awesomeness.

And then there was tango!

And then there were can-can dancers!

And then they all got together on stage at the same time, dressed as nuns and sailors and soldiers and flower girls and nannies and someone rode a bicycle around the stage and tringed their bell and I wondered if it was all over. If it is all over, I thought, I have done well out of my £10.

But there was more to come. In the second half, there was more dancing, more singing, more ballet, more Charlie Chaplin impressions and... rollerskating.

I couldn't stop grinning. It's incredible the vitality and talent you see on stage, and when there's so much of it, and it's all so different, and they put it all together, the effect is incredible.

My favourite bits in musicals are the songs where they have a few (or most) of the main characters singing different parts and gazing off into their own middle distance as the tension builds - I'm thinking One Day More from Les Miserables and El Tango de Roxanne from Moulin Rouge. The final scene of Strictly Gershwin was the dancing equivalent of this - all the different dancers on stage at the same time, all dancing their own style but coming together as a cohesive whole.

Despite the uncomfortable seat, I would gladly go again. If only the season weren't finishing...

Walking in a Winter Wonderland

It's cold. Not cold enough for snow, but cold enough for me. My coat and my hat are two of my favourite items of clothing, and when I get my gloves (the pair that is winging its way towards me) the set will be complete.

Christmas lights make much more sense in the Northern Hemisphere. It gets dark at about 4pm at the moment, which seems really strange to me, but it means that all the Christmas lights are twinkling away when I walk home from work. What will happen after Christmas and New Year, though, when it's colder and there's no Christmas to look forward to? The lights will come down, we'll go back to work in the dark depths of January and there will be nothing sparkly until the sun comes out in July. Sigh. I'll just have to make a quick trip to Turkey or somewhere.

People keep telling me that, this time last year, there was snow everywhere and the tubes and the airports were closed (I heard some theory about why, in many other countries, snow does not stop the subway trains, but in London it does. Something about privatisation of some sort). I'd quite like some snow, I think - it would validate winter, and be a good chance to strut my ugg boots. I think I'll enjoy the snow for about two days and then wish I was back in New Zealand at the beach, where I feel one should be in January.

There might not be snow at all, of course. I might have to go to Scotland or Sweden or Latvia.

I might go anyway.