Family Gatherings And Friends Galore

Our route north  to Hertford took us via Seaford, Polegate, Horsham, Leighton Buzzard and Dunstable; each stop off being a visit to family or friends.  When we arrived in Hertford, late on Sunday 28 July, we did a quick calculation; in the four days since arriving in England we had managed to catch up with 45 family and friends.  It was lovely to see everyone and also to be able to chatter away in English; no struggling to find the words for “where do I buy a ticket”, or  “is there a petrol station nearby” in a foreign language.    Thank you so much to Sylvia and Taffy for holding another garden gathering on the Sunday afternoon for 32 Blakes.  Yet again, it was a lovely way to spend so much time with the family.

Andy and Carole provided their spare room for our annual English residence yet again and Andy got us up and running after major computer problems prevented us from accessing any of our emails, photos, or documents.  Socialising instead of food shopping became our major priority.  Rodney is thoroughly enjoying the endless cricket on the TV and radio, but in between play we’ve managed to catch up on lots of paperwork and necessary ‘stuff’.  The camera has had a bit of a rest, though I did wish we’d had it to hand in Hertford one Friday, when a perfectly coiffured, white haired, old lady, wearing cardigan, pearls and sensible shoes, handbag in the crook of her arm in Queen Elizabeth style, was filling up her BMW.  She didn’t look big enough, or strong enough to hold the pump nozzle, but gosh, she did it in style.

 

 

Later that morning we went for a muddy walk; ten of us set out from the village of Standon to follow the old, extinct, Buntingford railway line.  We walked past countless fields of almost ripe barley and wheat and by the time we reached The Old Bull Pub at Much Hadham our boots were caked in very sticky mud.  So we all had a bit of childish fun engaging in a lot of puddle-paddling and shuffling about on grassy verges, to try and clean our boots a bit, before entering the pub for lunch.

 

 

We walked back via a slightly different route and it turned out to be quite a long walk, longer than expected, and we got back to Hertford with only just enough time for a quick shower before heading out to dinner at the Plume of Feathers in Tewin with Stuart, Jez and Whaley.

 

 

Unfortunately, while eating a squeaky haloumi cheese salad, a filling fell out of my month and when we got back to Hertford, Carole managed to find me a dentist that was open on Saturday morning in Hitchin. So the alarm was set for ‘early’ and at 9am I was on the phone begging for an emergency appointment.  They squeezed me in at lunchtime and then, while the dentist was drilling to refill the hole, more of the tooth fell away.  The appointment turned into a forty-five minute session with two injections and a very aching jaw.  Fortunately, by the time we met my niece and nephew for dinner, the numbness had worn off and we ate a lovely meal at a restaurant in Harpenden, ‘Graffiti’, owned and run by Rodney’s second cousin Charlotte and her husband Neil.

 

 

Sunday involved more socialising with my brother Neil and his wife, Debs at lunchtime followed by the cricket crowd at Watton-At-Stone in the evening.  On Monday morning I really could have enjoyed a lie-in , but we had to pack our bags and catch a train up to London for four nights at Fred & Christine’s apartment in Westminster.  Sadly Christine was away, but Fred came out with us in the evenings when we caught up with Kevin Wall, Robin Sellers and the Surridges.

 

 

Our days were spent roaming more of London on Boris’s bikes and one day spent hopping on and off the underground (not as much fun).  We spent a few hours in the London Transport Museum and I factored in three hours shopping in Oxford Street one morning, while Rodney visited the Churchill War Rooms.

 

 

We both visited the John Soane’s house, library and museum at Lincoln’s Inn Fields.   John Soane was a Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy who demolished and then rebuilt numbers 12, 13 and 14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields.  He lived at no.13 and filled the other two buildings with art and architecture.  There is a basement full of 6,000 books and some Canaletto paintings of Venice which brought back lovely memories of our time there in June.  There’s a crypt stuffed full of bits of buildings from Italy and Greece and in one room, hanging on some folding walls is  ‘A Rake’s Progress’ by Hogarth, upon which a ballet was created in 1935 and Stravinsky wrote an opera in 1953.

 

 

We then crossed to the opposite side of the park to the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons.  This is a bizarre museum containing 15,000 items collected by the surgeon and anatomist John Hunter.  The beautiful three-storey room is filled with glass cabinets bursting with curiosities such as Winston Churchill’s dentures, a stuffed kangaroo, deformed skulls, a rooster with a human tooth growing out of its head, bits of human skin, the 231cm skeleton of an Irish man and trays and trays of surgical instruments. It’s a freaky place and definitely not for the squeamish, but it has us still talking about it.

We also spent a lovely morning strolling across Chelsea Bridge and then all around Battersea Park, an area that neither of us had been to before.

 

 

Back in Hertford for the weekend we continued catching up with friends and spending more time watching cricket with the Johnsons, in between getting Eileen ready for her trip to Norfolk and Suffolk.