Vacation so far

[ellarien]

On Monday we made the canonical stroll through the woods to Whirlow Park, where the rose garden was out of order but there were plenty of other flowers to see, and moorhen chicks picking their way over the silted-up beds of the ponds. The woods were full of wild honeysuckle, creamy white and pale yellow, and the bridge that was destroyed in last year's floods has been replaced by a sturdier model. After we got home, I spent most of the rest of the day scanning some of my father's old slides. I'm quite pleased with the results so far, considering the earliest ones are not far short of fifty years old, but it will be a huge project to do them all! The first box starts with my parents' wedding and their honeymoon in North Wales; they both look very young. I was amused to spot, in one photo of my mother in the kitchen, the frying pan that I still use as second-best.


On Tuesday morning I caught the train to London. Where I arrived at a St Pancras station that has finally emerged from its chrysalis of hoardings to a new and glorious existence as St Pancras International, with sky-blue beams under a gleaming glass roof and a pleasant mall of little glass-fronted shops and restaurants in the undercroft. After the neglect and decline of the station in the 90s and the years of construction work, it was nice to see the place rejuvenated. When I finished marveling at that I made my way to Oxford Street to get my visa photograph, and then spent a couple of hours shopping. I was disconcerted to find that the sizes seem to have shifted, so that whereas I've been a UK size 12 all my adult life, now I seem to be somewhere between an 8 and a 10, depending on how precariously I want a skirt to perch on my hips. (And no, I haven't lost a lot of weight recently!)

London seemed much the same as ever in the bright sunshine, crowded and grubby and smelling of ash, with colourful advertizing contending with the grey of walls and pavements. Some of the escalators on the Underground now have little monitor screens replacing the old placards. Eventually I repaired to my hotel in Bayswater and settled in for the evening in a rather claustrophobic little twin-bedded room. I was alarmed to learn from the evening news that there had been a problem with the railway power lines north of London, resulting in severe disruption to trains to Sheffield.


In the morning I left my main bag at the hotel and betook myself to the US Embassy, where the outside queueing procedures seem to be better organized than they used to be but what happens inside was much the same and rather oversubscribed; I'm surprised they don't get into trouble for the closeness with which the rows of chairs are crammed in, but maybe as foreign territory they're exempt from UK safey regulations and it's a bit far for an American fire marshal to come! I waited an hour for my first 'interview' and fingerprinting, and a bit over three for the second interview, after which I had to wait another quarter of an hour in the line to pay to have the passport couriered back to me with the visa in it. The main thing is that the visa was approved. I emerged hungry and frazzled at about 2.30 pm, into a slight drizzle, and wandered down Oxford Street again to grab a sandwich and try on a skirt I'd spotted the day before. Unfortunately the smallest available size was a 10, which wasn't satisfactory. Then I caught the tube back to the hotel, retrieved my bag, took the tube back to St Pancras to see what was happening with the trains and found everything normal there, and then made my way to the South Bank, where I had a pleasant early supper with fjm and chilperic, by the river in what had turned into a pleasant evening. Refreshed, I returned to St Pancras, wandered around for a while and found the Betjeman statue, which is only a little larger than life and rather more charming than the colossal bronze embracing couple at the far end of the station, and then caught my train.


Today was enlivened by a burst water main in the street outside, which was pouring copious amounts of water down the hill; about lunchtime a van and a small excavator arrived from the water company and the workers barricaded off a patch in the middle of the intersection and started digging. It was a very neat process; a gadget like circular saw cut a couple of triangular slices in the tarmac, which the excavator then lifted out. It was still scooping out sand and water when we left for the Botanical Gardens; when we came back, the workers were gone and there was a mended pipe at the bottom of the dry hole. (It isn't a terribly busy street.)

The Botanical Gardens were pleasant, though we had to detour to the Winter Gardens in town first to wait out a heavy shower. We were surprised to see a couple of hedgehogs; I wonder if they've been specially imported, as they aren't very common around here these days, and certainly not in the middle of the afternoon in a public place! One of them was nibbling at a Bakewell tart a couple of young ladies had offered or dropped, after which it sat sipping at a puddle of water and let me take close-ups; the other, with an obviously damaged hind leg, was gimping briskly across a flowerbed.