I'm Clive, Fly Me

I love Air New Zealand. 'Good evening Mr. Rushton, welcome back.' That's got to put you in a good mood hasn't it?

Esther at Flight Centre hadn't put my frquent flyer number in the booking system so I started scheduled for seat 60D which is somewhere aft of the tailfin on a 777. The lovely Wellington check-in girl with amazing Sideshow Bob hair couldn't access another seat so when I got to the lounge in Auckland they found seat 30D which was row one of cattle class; much better than trying to sit in the slipstream.

We boarded and I settled mnyself in. Then the Chief Steward came over and said,

'Good evening Mr. Rushton, welcome back. Could you come and chat please?'
'Are you going to throw me off?'
'No, no. We have a lady we need to move, would you mind moving forward to seat 4D?'
'Not at all, that would be very nice.'

So off I went into ultra-super-dooper class with those diagon-ally facing fully reclining bed things. Added to that another stewardess came and said,

'Welcome back Mr. Rushton. We'd like to give you a bottle of wine as a present. Do you prepare pinot or saugnon blanc?'

'Pinot please.'

No one else got a wine present so i have no idea why I did but, hey, Gibbston Valley Pinot Noir 2006 is great and retails around the $45 mark.

The flight was good and, very unusual for me, I slept! Fourteen hours of flying over water later, coming into Canadian airspace the Captain came over the intercom and said,

'There's been a further dump of snow in the Vancouver area and they're trying to clear the runway so we can land. We have to go into a holding pattern for some time.'

No problem until a little later when he announced,

'Due to the fuel situation we have about four minutes to get the all clear to land otherwise we will have to divert to San Fransisco.'

That's about two and a half hours due south and past around a dozen airports which can take a 777 so a huge collective groan from everyone on board. Anyway we got the all clear and down we went. All the markings on the runways were snowed out so we took forever to get near the terminal. Then the airbridge was frozen so it couldn't be manouvered onto the plane. Now Air New Zealand are terrific but Air Canada and Vancouver ground crews are pretty useless. If we'd been in Montreal the snow and ice would have been a mere trifle of a problem but the high-tech solution here was two slow guys with one shovel. They took 75 minutes to get it moving and off we went.

Then the bags took an hour and, insert a conspiracy theory here, the very last bags to come off were ALL for the first class cabin.

Merry Christmas :)

David Billington

Who? David Billington was the fastest mile swimmer in the world in the early 1900's. He hailed from Bacup which is just up the road from Rochdale, in fact he lived on Rochdale Road. His mile record was broken in a weird manner by Syd Battersby (although Wiki names him Thomas Battersby). The 1908 Olympics were held in London and, surprisingly for those days, the events were metric so the 'mile' was, in fact, 1,500m. The pool was 100m long in the middle of the track and field stadium which was surrounded by the velodrome! I'll post pictures of it sometime. The spectators for the swimming events were in the order of 70,000+ which is still the world record for a pool event.

Henry Taylor (GBR), who hailed from Chadderton, just down the road from Rochdale stopped at the 1,500m finish, but Battersby swam an extra 100 metres after the finish to complete the mile. His time over the mile was 24:33.0, beating the standing record of 24:42.6 minutes set by David Billington in 1905. Now, 1,600m is actually the metric equivalent of an imperial 1749.8 yards which is a tad short of an actual mile of 1,760 yards (not a USA NCAA 1,650 yard 'mile') so how it was ratified as a world record is anyone's guess.

There are also some rather strange results when googling him.

AND!! Good grief! I just read one of the linked pages in this blog and found this:

1891....1a, Rushtons St Houses

Which I think is where he was born. Whoo-whoo-whoo .........

The Things They Say

Overheard in the local Post Office from man on crutches:

'I was doing the Elvis Presley thing at the end of the show and it just popped out.'

Overheard at the local KwikiMart:

Mother: 'No I won't let you share my drink.'
Daughter: 'Why not?'
Mother: 'Because you kiss boys. They have worms. You should kiss girls more often.'

Come Fly With Me

In my little card wallet I have credit cards, cards for wine-clubs, FlyBuys, BurgerFuel VIP discounts, ASCA membership etc. etc. and two airline frequent-flyer cards; Air New Zealand and Qantas.That's fine because they are each part of 'conglomerate' airline rewards groups with Qantas covering British Airways, American, Cathay Pacific etc. and Air NZ being part of the Star Alliance including Singapore Airlines, Thai Airlines, Air Canada, United, Lufthansa and a bunch of others so I can pretty much go anywhere with anyone and one of the two cards will hungrily gobble up points.

However, as I continue unpacking boxes I keep finding surprising and illuminating items, one of which yesterday was another little card wallet from ages ago. In it were membership cards for Herz, Hilton Hotels, Sheraton Hotels, Marriott Hotels, Delta Hotels, Fraser Valley Regional library, Vancouver Public libraries and the following airlines, admittedly some of them temporary; United, KLM, Virgin, Delta, Continental, American, Northwest, SAS, British Airways, and three for Canadian Airlines (remember them!). How insane is that? The three were an ordinary membership card, a 'President's Club' membership card and, get this, a V.I.P. pass to the Empress Lounge worldwide.The V.I.P. pass was because I used to be important when I was at Swim BC!

I wonder how many miles I've flown?

Lemon Squeezy

I contacted the Great War Archive at Oxford University about the autograph book and the Military Historian, Everett Sharp said this:

Thank you for letting us see the autograph book.

There are several like books in our archive and can be viewed by inserting autograph book and clicking The Great War Archive button.

We have no way of knowing just how many exist and each contain a wealth of detail of great interest to historians both military and social.

For example if I just take two of the illustrations you have put on your blog:
1) The image of Britannia between two soldiers dated Dec 1914.
Britain struggled to arm it's new volunteers and resorted to training them with weapons associated with an earlier period, hence both are carrying the Lee-Metford of Boer War vintage. However at this period uniforms were still available and the soldier is wearing the 'bus conductors' hat. If this had been drawn in 1915 even earlier weapons and uniforms were issued to those in training. See here and my comments.

2) The cartoon showing the 'weeding out' of hospital staff dated December 1916 not only shows the jaundiced attitude of the front line soldier personified by the smart handsome looking young man making the comment to those behind the lines personified in this drawing as the rather unfit and shambling ("a real bloody shambles"?) but their uniform detail. More importantly it is also a 'Tommy's view of the problems Britain was having keeping its army up to strength. This is dated a month after the Somme had been 'closed' by Haig with it's enormous loss of manpower but also 11 months after the introduction of Conscription in January 1916.

I could go on. Each is a treasure trove and please, treat yours as such. If you have any more questions please contact us again.

Then today he sent this:

Something bothered me about the cartoon..the hat worn by the chap to the right of the speaker....have another look.

Upon reflection this is an early drawing of a New Zealander in his 'Lemon Squeezer' distinctive hat shape. NZ infantry first went into battle on the Somme in September 1916.

Fascinating, forensic delving; love it.

Jet-lag, Jets, Birds, Nests

Last Thursday I was up and about at 4.30 am (just because its nice here at that time) and the Blonde Maori was making cocktails at her place at 2 am on the Friday morning so I was somewhat jet-lagged by Saturday.

I sorted out my flights around Christmas which turned out to be very head-shaking. How do airlines sort their prices? Originally I was looking to go Auckland-Vancouver-Auckland and the cost was $3,342 plus I still had to get to/from Auckland; horrendous. Then, when the Singapore job was confirmed, I realised I couldn't go NZ-Canada-NZ and then go into Singapore because there aren't that many days in 2008 so I started to research convoluted options. It was all in the too-hard basket so I took the opportunity while in Wellington of going to the Flight Centre and asked Esther to sort it all out. She came up with this:

• Wellington-Auckland
  
• Auckland-Vancouver
  
• Vancouver-Frankfurt (yes, you're correct, that's in the diametrically opposite direction to Singapore)
  
• Frankfurt-Singapore
  
• Singapore-Auckland
  
• Auckland-Wellington

The dates of the last two legs are totally flexible so I can plug them in whenever I sort out the Singapore swimming season.

Cost? $3,239! How do they do that?

Going through Frankfurt adds time but takes $1,500 off the price!

Next thing; the birds. They are becoming more friendly by the day. Whether its because someone is living here and it makes them feel secure or, more likely, its the cooking smells soaking into the wood and attracting them, but there are more of them, more varieties and they come nearer the house and onto the deck more often.

Next, next thing; the Department of Labour (DoL) issues work visas here. I started on a two-year one matching my first contract then switched to a work-to-residency visa for my next one which was three years. So, at the end of my fifth year I should have had automatic residency but the DoL screwed up and had given me a normal work visa. Also, as an aside, I totally forgot I was on a work visa and let it run out, only remembering a few days before I was due to visit Canada which meant I wouldn't have been allowed back in!! Anyway, the nice man who I've dealt with all along simply waived the fact that I was an alien and the other fact that I should have been out of the country before the visa ran out and stuck another one in my passport to keep sport in Godzone on the straight and narrow. So far so good. However, the DoL admitted they'd screwed up with the work-to-residency visa and, as I was now over the allowable age to apply for one, said they would write to the Government Minister in charge and suggest he over-ride the law of the land and grant an exemption.

You following this so far?

Well, nothing happened. Then more of nothing happened. And then the more of nothing continued to happen so I wrote to my friendly DoL man but got an automatic response that he was away for ages and ages and if it was an emergency etc... He has all my files and is very helpful so I waited for him to return. When he was due to return he didn't respond so I was a bit up in the air (just following the metaphor of today's blog title). Then SNZ had a brainfart and decided to disestablish me and, as my work visa is tied to a particular position in SNZ that meant I wouldn't be able to enter NZ without a flight ticket to leave! Rancho Relaxo, what would happen to you?

By the way, Princeton University, where Albert Einstein's brain is kept, defines 'disestablish' as deprive (an established church) of its status . If the NZ coaches had been on the ball when the disestablishment proposal was made they could have formed a group to push antidisestablishmentarianism which has 28 letters and 12 syllables :)

So, I wrote to my friendly man and explained the situation. No reply. So I wrote again. No reply. This morning I spent an age web-surfing trying to find his direct dial number as the DoL general number won't accept calls from mobile phones, but I couldn't find it. Put it on the back-burner and think of another way.

So, I'm driving to Greytown and the phone rings; its my friendly DoL man.

'Got your latest email. What's Swimming New Zealand thinking? Are they mad?'
'Yes'
'I think that strange woman from the North Shore has a lot to answer for; every time I see her utter something I cringe and think we're in big trouble.'
'You are absolutely correct.'
'There's been a cock-up; I sent the request to the Ministry ages ago but they are saying they didn't receive it. Your current situation won't affect it as the request is based on what should have happened two years ago, not what is happening now. I'll chase up and sort it out.'
'OK'

At least something was happening.

Then, as I was driving back from Greytown he called back,

'Ha, ha! The Minister approved the request in October but no one told us.'

So I can now live freely, without let or hindrance, in the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Probably also the Cook Islands, Niue and Tokelau and possibly Scott Base in Antarctica!

And, shortly to be added to that list, Singapore!

Drizzle gently

It's raining at Rancho Relaxo; not real rain but vertical drizzle which lends a gentle texture to the world but obscures the horizon so I can see maybe 10k and not the usual 150k.

Because of the angle of the rainfall I'm sitting under the canopy on the deck eating my first meal of the day in total dryness and it's really warm. It can't be breakfast because it's one in the afternoon.

And ... because I'm celebrating, the wine is going down quite well :)

Country life is different; I didn't put my wristwatch on at all yesterday. That must be the first time in 30 or 40 years and I had to email a friend to ask what day it was! Very relaxed and peaceful :)

An Important Find

During the 'Great' War of 1914-18 your great grandmother, Eda, was engaged to a soldier called Wilfred Lovelady. While he was at the front at Christmastime 1914 he started an autograph book for her which he and his army colleagues filled with comments, poems, drawings and cartoons. When he was home on leave around Haslingden in Lancashire where they lived, a lot of friends also completed their individual pages of which there are around 100. Unfortunately Wilf was killed in action so they didn't marry. After the War she met your great Granddad, John, known as Jack, and married him; G'ma, me and you three are the subsequent and consecutive result. The words on the opening page must have been a great comfort to Eda when Wilf was killed:

To Miss Eda Parkinson.
Christmas 1914

I hope fair owner of this book
When in your darkest hour;
Should you inside its pages look,
Find sunshine follows shower.

G'ma gave me the book some years ago for safe keeping and, now I can 'fess up, I thought I'd lost it; I couldn't find it anywhere. I was pretty sure I'd put it somewhere really, really safe but when I couldn't find it I convinced myself I'd left it in the Bentley when I traded it in three years ago. I even went and checked the glove compartment, boot (trunk!) and under the seats as its still sitting patiently in the showroom waiting to be claimed.

At some point in the 94 years of its existence someone (I suspect Eda) has pasted a polythene sheet between each page to help preserve them. It has worked because the pages are in very good condition but it was an extreme solution.

Jack was insanely jealous of Eda's relationship with Wilf and went through the autograph book systematically deleting the Lovelady part of Wilf's signature from drawings and poems but has left the 'W' or 'Wilf' intact; read into that whatever psychological diagnosis you wish.



There are some superb cartoons and drawings demonstrating amazing pen- and brushmanship and giving an insightful glimpse into the minds and sense of humour during a bad time. This one is by Colin Atkin (not Tommy Atkins :) who gets his numbers mixed and dates it as 3/1/31

The pages were completed in random order; this one is a pencil portrait of Eda done by Jack on August 28 1919.








This poem by a corporal in the ASC from Glasgow appears to be original as Google doesn't recognise it and, as well you know, 'Nothing beats the G!' In the bottom, left-hand corner is the answer to a question from the previous page, 'What does a billiard ball do when it stops rolling.' Answer; 'Looks round.'

Many of the poems and messages are directed at Eda or at both Eda and Wilf as a couple. Many of the entries refer to Eda's beauty (she was) and some of them are deliberately ambiguous, such as this from 'W.R.P.' of Letchworth and dated 25/XI/XVI;

A fee simple and a simple fee
And all the fees in tail
Are nothing when compared with thee
Thou best of fees - Female.

... and there are a lot of quotations from the Classics; not something you would read nowadays I think.

This is one of my favourites, drawn by Geo. N. Preston (Sheffield) of the A.S.C. Band in December 1916 and showing beautiful writing style.



This was done in coloured pencil on Dec 30/14 and is of Brungerley Bridge Clitheroe. When you think of the conditions these pictures were produced in - under fire in the trenches in deep winter - they are remarkable.
























E Bracewell of Accrington wrote on New Year's Day 1917:

Prisoners of War
They fought for us, till they could fight no more
And overwhelmed, were captured by the foe
There they must stay, poor prisoners of war
Untill the power that claimed them is laid low.


These two are fascinating. The drawing on the right, titled When Love is Blind, is by Wilf on Christmas Day 1914 and shows him phoning Eda long distance - that's the 'blind' bit. However, Wilf is dressed in a white shirt and dress jacket so he wasn't depicting himself at the front. Maybe he hadn't actually left Blighty at that stage or maybe he was just fantasizing, who knows? The poem on the left is by Jack and done in January 1920 and he's also scratched out the Lovelady signature on the right-hand drawing but in what looks like ballpen so it must have been much, much later than even the poem.

This is by Jack (Jan 6/19) titled THE.ETERNAL.QUESTION and shows him in his Postman's uniform with his arm round Eda starting on the long walk of life so maybe that's the day he proposed.





This is a beaut! Its asking Eda to Forget-him-not and is by Evan Jones who was an Inspector of Nuisances, Explosives, Petroleum and Omnibuses with the Llandaff and Dinas Powis Rural District Council; awesome.














Eda's brother George was killed on 17 September 1916; this is a memorial drawing by someone who's name I don't recognise.







I've looked these pages oe'r and o'er,
To see what other's, have wrote before,
And in this lonely, spot.
I simply write, For-get-me-not.

That is by A. Bond on 11/1/20; it's Auntie Alice from Blackpool - Jack's sister.

-----------------
All in all, a very valuable find. I'll find an expert in these things and have it assessed for importance as a historical document.

Food for Thought

A A Gill is my fave ever restaurant critic. Hannah thinks it strange that anyone should have a fave restaurant critic but, hey, strange is OK.

Check out this in a review from Budapest:

What it did have was gypsy violinists. Ah, now I remember what Hungary’s famous for. The most stressful thing in the entire world is to be shut in a room with a questing gypsy violinist. In terms of naked anxiety, it’s way beyond your phone going off during Hamlet’s soliloquy, swimming with jellyfish, or getting dressed up in a Formula One bondage costume in the back of a cab between traffic lights. I watched the great white violinist and the midget accordionist saw their way through the tables of tourists. He circled a hapless Korean couple. They shrank in terror and numb incomprehension as his fat, malevolently bland face, with its slick black pate and golden grin, loomed over them. He winked a terrifyingly dull eye that rolled back in his head and with one fluid movement, too fast to decipher, he was among them with Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody. It was horrible. Shrieking notes of psychotic dexterity, wringing screaming tremolos and pitiful vibratos from every riff. The air was filled with sentimental death. There is no known defence against an adult male gypsy violinist in an enclosed space: in a Hungarian restaurant, no one can hear you scream.

Now isn't that just sublimely, violently, incisively cruel? Beautiful.

... and then, when he eventually gets round to writing about the restaurant under review (the above one was an aside!):

I’m going to get the food out of the way as quickly as possible, because that was the only way to eat it, and I really don’t want to dwell on the liver tart, an offal brick. The artichoke and smoked salmon salad was plainly the result of a shoplifting sprint to an all-night supermarket; the lamb was a soggy brown muscle. Hopefully the monkfish will have kept its vow of celibacy and not produced any more like it. There was something with lavender ice cream on the top, the colour of melted Barbies, that tasted like a pensioner’s knicker drawer.

That is good writing indeed.

The top photo was taken at 10 am yesterday and the second one at 11 am yesterday!

The gate now has a sign so I guess that's final capitulation and Tom, Elliot and Hannah win the naming rights 'discussion.'

This handsome guy must have been looking for Billy the goat :)

Sunday.
Here's the opening scene from Macbeth:

ACT I
SCENE I. A desert place.

Thunder and lightning. Enter three Witches

First Witch
When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

Second Witch
When the hurlyburly's done,
When the battle's lost and won.

Third Witch
That will be ere the set of sun.

.... Exeunt. Which they did after drinking wine. Admittedly they brought their own and some lovely, smelly cheese and French bread.

Monday.
First day of freedom and an unexpected, uninvited and remarkably well-hung visitor. No idea where he wandered in from. I'm pretty sure the next door neighbours haven't any livestock but I'll ask them later. I guess he could have just wandered down off the hills, in which case he's very welcome to return. Rather cute but maybe that's a reflection that I've been out of contact with humans for too long.

Here's a random set of shots taken over the past few days. The very last one is taken from the north end of the lake. The house is right in the very centre. It was a little overcast and very windy so there's some camera shake and, even though the shutter speed was fast, the distance of the shot means the house is not absolutely sharp. I'll do another one on a really clear blue and still day.

Truckin' along

I just got told off again! Sandra read the blog and complained we'd taken no pictures last weekend when I moved and I had not acknowledged how hard she worked.

For the record; Sandra was incredible and Ally was amazing. Both deserve the title of Red Star of the Universe.

Sandra loaded and unloaded the truck from the container. If I'd done it I would have made three journeys but she made it all go into one load. My blood sugar definitely zero'd and I had to administer medicinal coke as I drove back to RR.

When we got there Ally had put a pork roast in the oven (first meal cooked in the new oven) and her two menaces (well one menace and one Red Star) were having fun in the 'garden'.

Pork roast, fine Merlot and a bonfire of cardboard and paper is not a bad way to end a hard Sunday.

Ebony and Ivory

Today has been a day of extremes and contradictions; the blonde Maori being not the least of the contradictions. Take this photo, taken with a hand-held camera at some ridiculously slow shutter speed. Two sun-orbiting planets, Jupiter and Saturn, looking bright in the western sky.

Week the first

Well, it's a week and a lot can happen in a week. Move into a new house. Have no job. Interesting.

The flies are a pain! Houseflies, bluebottles, whatever; they are horrible and they're everywhere. You can't not have the windows open because the weather is so hot so in they come in droves. They're stupid and can be hoovered up while still alive and kicking but you can't lie in wait for them all day.

More pictures are up and long-lost ornaments are sprouting all over the place. The cherrywood table is in place in the entrance so the Rodin has a home along with the 300 million year old fossil and some mineral eggs.





One of the lumps of malachite is on the curly-legged table and various other traesures are above the windows; pink pigs, green dinosaurs, yellow sheep, silver beavers, totem poles, Nigerian wood carvings, Californian redwood, the list goes on.









I also have mirrors! The ones in the bathrooms are off-the-shelf from the builders but all the others are from Fernside. The huge one from over the fireplace in the library is waiting to be hung in the gallery but I don't have anything strong enough to hold it yet.

The office is coming together with the 'ego wall' starting to take shape; lots of photos and certificates and a few still to be mounted.

The deck table and chairs as well as the barbeque and outdoor heater are also ex-Fernside and, hopefully, have found a good home and the sunrises continue to be excellent.