Letter from Warwick: 27 of 2008

My dear family & friends

We’re in Portugal. Right now the sky is mostly overcast and I detected a few drops of rain on the window a short while ago – but the temperature is still up in the mid-20s (that’s centigrade, not Fahrenheit for the Brits.) That said, the weather has been mostly of the type with cloudless skies and bright sunshine – just the right antidote for the British “summer”.

But we nearly didn’t make our flight thanks to Edgar after he managed to pull out some of the stitches in his neck last Thursday night, leaving a gaping wound. He had to be restitched on Friday morning – remembering that you have to give animals general anaesthetic to stitch them up. Then on Saturday morning, the day we had to take the dogs to the boarding kennels, Lucia noticed that Edgar developed some fluid under the wound. So we had to take him back to the vet to drain the wound with a syringe. While I was at the vet, Lucia was at home cutting up and sewing an old scarf to button up around Edgar’s neck to make sure that he couldn’t scratch the wound. Unfortunately, that was no guarantee that the fluid wouldn’t develop again and we had to decide whether or not to postpone our departure for Portugal. The vet, whose parents live in Napier in the Cape, assured us that it wouldn’t be a problem to attend to Edgar at the kennels. That was like tempting fate. On Monday I got a call from the vet to say the kennel owner had brought Edgar back because there was more fluid sloshing about under the wound and he had had to put a drain in. He also kept Edgar in the infirmary on Monday and Tuesday night. He went back to the kennel on Wednesday, but was brought back into the vet on Thursday because he had been scratching at the wound. I’ve just had a call from one of the other vets at the practice to say that everything seems to have healed, that they’ve removed the drain and the stitches, and that he’ll be going back to the kennel later today. I really hope this is the last of it. I shudder to think what the vet’s bill is going to be when we get home.

Apart from Edgar’s dramas, we’ve been having a wonderful holiday. I don’t intend to give you a detailed account of everything that we’ve done, but you can find pictures of our adventures in the usual spot at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/llewellynijones.

The flight from Coventry to Faro on Sunday was uneventful even if I am convinced that many of our fellow passengers proved Darwin’s theory of evolution. As I said to Lucia, “I think we’ve found the missing link?” When we landed, the skies were blue and the air was filled with the rich, fragrant aroma of the Algarve and that is all that mattered. We retrieved our hire car from Auto Algarve and headed for hills and Barbara and Terry’s (my sister and brother-in-law) home in the village of Espargal (which is in the freguesia [parish] of Benafim in the conselho [council] of Loule.)

Since then, we’ve been taking our days very slowly. Lucia always joins Barbara and Terry as they begin each day walking the dogs; I join them when I can motivate myself out of bed. The walks have to be early to avoid the heat of the day – even so, it is still a warm exercise. Back at home, we mull over what to do for the rest of the day after showering or freshening up. My favoured breakfast is to go to a village cafe for cheese and ham sandwiches, espresso coffee and a small glass of medronho, a local fire water that is distilled from the fruit of the arbutus tree, wild strawberries.

The advantage of having visited here many times is that we don’t feel we have to rush around and see everything because we’ve seen most of it already. So far, our excursions have mostly been to the beach and the shops. We’ve learned that the best time to go to the beach is at high tide because the water is much warmer having had a few hours to bake in the sun. I found a good website that shows the tide tables in an easy to understand graphic format to help us achieve that target, and a weather forecasting website that predicts the weather by the hour.

My one misadventure so far is to have been stung by a bee. I was paddling happily along in the pool belonging to Barbara's and Terry's neighbours – David and Sarah – when the little bugger zapped me right in the soft tissue between thumb and forefinger. I’m mildly allergic to bee stings and it still hurts like blazes although the swelling has started to go down.

As for the evenings, we have either had a barbecue or gone out for dinner to one of the local restaurants or cafes that Barbara and Terry know so well. More to the point, the evenings are warm allowing me to stroll around in shorts and a T-shirt, my favoured form of dress. Lucia and I broke the mould yesterday evening when we went to the feira (fair) at Fatacil, one of the biggest feira’s on the Algarve summer calendar. We spent a very pleasant few hours strolling around the stalls offering everything from local handicrafts, to property developments and agricultural implements. For dinner we shared the most delicious plate of cured meats and cheese over a couple of beers while we watched the passing parade.

Let me leave it there

Love, light & peace
Llewellyn

Letter from Warwick: 26 of 2008

My dear family & friends, 18 August

It’s just six days to go until we’re off to Portugal for two glorious weeks. We’re checking the Algarve weather everyday on the Internet and we are greatly heartened by the little sun icons day after day with temperatures in the high 20s. I think I might be quite miffed if we were to find overcast skies when we land in Faro on Sunday. Here in Warwick, it’s raining again as I sit here and write this. Summer seems to be the sunny spells between showers. It’s quite an adjustment.

Edgar was the source of some drama last week when he developed a lump in his neck. Rhodesian Ridgebacks are susceptible to problems related to the dermoid sinus tract which can get blocked and form a cyst in the neck. This is the second time Edgar has had to have an operation to have such a cyst removed. What caught us off guard this time was how fast the lump developed. We first felt a bit of a bump last weekend which then grew to the size of a golf ball by Wednesday evening. I took him to the vet on Thursday morning, and he had the cyst removed on Friday. The vet’s bill of £601 stunned me into momentary silence, but I just handed my credit card over and smiled. What else can you do? Professional services here in the UK are exorbitantly expensive. I have a theory about this which involves class expectations and bitter envy but is dressed up as fairness which just results in inflation and insurmountable debt.

I had my own wars with some little insects which seemed to fly up out of the grass in the park and bite me while I was walking the dogs. The little buggers keep on getting me whenever I wear shorts. They look like midges (or a miggie as we call them in SA), but their bites caused angry, itchy and painful welts to swell up on my legs, and which took days to go away. It was even painful to walk at one point.

It was just as well then that I had a job which kept me at home for a whole day. The partner of one of Lucia’s colleagues is a publisher who is always looking for proof readers. Lucia told her I was a journalist in SA which then raised the possibility that I could do some proof reading. The first book, which I had to read last week, was a test – a book that has already been published this year. It was a crime thriller called “The Blood Detective” by Dan Waddell. I found lots of typing and type-setting errors, but I still don’t know whether I passed the test or not. Proof readers get paid £75 per book.

Edgar’s operation meant that we couldn’t really do much this weekend. He stayed wobbly all the way through to Saturday night after the anaesthetic. We did, however, go to dinner on Friday evening at the Portuguese restaurant with one of Lucia’s colleagues, Rebecca, and her partner, David. We had a really pleasant evening. Although Rebecca is Australian born, she spent all her school life here in the UK. I think she’s more Australian though despite her English accent.

On Saturday morning, we left Edgar at home and sought out a village fair at Leek Wootton which I had seen advertised on the side of the road. Leek Wootton lies between Warwick and Kenilworth. When we got there we discovered that the fair, which was to be held on the on the village green, only started after lunch so we went to Kenilworth to kill some time. There isn’t really that much to see or do in Kenilworth. We strolled up the high street giving Lucia the opportunity to visit all the charity shops looking for interesting clothes which might fit her. I waited outside with Hazel who just loved having all Lucia’s and my attention to herself. Later we left her in the car while Lucia and I perused the goods on offer in the new Waitrose store and Lucia cast her researcher’s eye over the customers. I wonder how suspicious we looked to the store detectives.

The new soccer season also got under way this weekend – not that I got to see much of it. It is, in fact, rather ironic, that South Africans with DsTV see more English soccer than the Brits do. DsTV’s advertising slogan for its coverage of English soccer was “Every second of every game” – and one was, indeed, able to watch every single game in the Premier league if one was so inclined. Coverage in the UK, however, is far more limited by the need to get fans into the stadiums to watch the games. Fair trading and business competition rules also mean that all television services which want to show soccer must get their fair share so long as they can pay for it. (It is regarded as grossly unfair and a breach of monopoly regulations that any one television service should be allowed to buy up all the television rights even if they have the money to do so.) Sky did show two games on Sunday afternoon, but I forgot and watched a movie that I downloaded instead so I missed Chelsea thrashing Portsmouth 4-1. Bugger.

That’s it for another week.

Love, light & peace
Llewellyn

Letter from Warwick: 25 of 2008

My dear family & friends

Have you heard of Darren Whackhead Simpson? I hadn’t until our neighbour, who is a military policeman in the British Army, brought a CD called “Serial Prankster” around to us this weekend. I think his daughter’s boyfriend brought it back from South Africa – something like that anyway. Darren Simpson is a morning presenter on Radio Highveld (94.7 Highveld Stereo in modern parlance) in Johannesburg. His speciality is telephone pranks, and many of them are hysterically funny if somewhat un-PC. You can pick up a lot of them on Youtube. (http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=darren+whackhead+simpson.) The Zimbabwean border post gag had me struggling to breathe, as did the Indian trying to join the AWB.

I’ve had quite an eventful week. On Thursday I drove to Peterborough to visit Andreas, Michelle and their daughter (my goddaughter) Natasha. The journey was made necessary by a new addition to their family – a 12-week-old Tibetan Terrier called Oscar. (You can see the pictures at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/llewellynijones as usual.) The journey there was an experience in itself when I was caught in a deluge on the A14. I think most people would find it difficult to see a change in the rain ahead when it’s already raining. So it was that I drove into a cloudburst at 80mph that reduced visibility to zero and turned the motorway into a river. I just took my foot off the accelerator and tried best to steer the car based on the dim glow of the few tail lights ahead of me that I could see. Even more frightening were the few cars that continued to whizz past at speed – real death wish artists. And then, just as suddenly, it stopped raining altogether, and a couple of miles further on the sun was shining.

I took the dogs with me to help socialise Oscar. Well, certainly Hazel helped. Edgar’s been a bit iffy with smaller dogs ever since a Cocker Spaniel bit a hole clean through his ear at the Deer Park Cafe in Cape Town when he was a teenager. He slunk away with a low growl every time the new bundle of joy came close. Hazel, on the other hand, played with Oscar more-or-less non-stop. Andreas, an anaesthetist, worked an early shift, so he was home by midday and we walked to the village pub for lunch. Back at their home, we spent a lazy afternoon gathered around the patio table passing the time of day. Oh, and I mustn’t forget the delicious chocolate cake that Michelle baked.

Lucia and I had a busy weekend – that’s why I’m only writing this letter today. We had thought of spending the day at Ironbridge on Saturday, but the weather forecast didn’t look good and we weren’t sure how busy the town would be on a Saturday in the middle of school summer holidays. Instead we drove down to Chipping Camden, an ancient market town, which is about a half an hour away just on the edge of the Cotswolds. We covered the town on foot amid a fairly persistent drizzle. We stopped for cappuccino and cake in a cafe at an arts and crafts warehouse which welcomed dogs. A sign on the door said: Dogs and children welcome, and sometimes adults too. The cafe roasted its own beans filling the air with a rich aroma of coffee. Lucia and I took it in turns to go upstairs to the silversmith’s workshop where the proprietor plies his trade using traditional techniques.

Afterwards we just drove around to become more acquainted with the area. Our first stop was Hidcote Manor where we signed for membership of the National Trust. This gives us free entry to any of the hundreds of properties owned by the trust for a year. Hidcote has beautiful gardens spanning several hectares; the house and garden where donated to the Trust in the 1940s by Lawrence Johnston who designed and developed the gardens. From Hidcote we drove to Ebrington (pronounced Yubberton by the locals), then to Paxford and Brockely and back to Chipping Camden and then home.

On Sunday morning we decided to take advantage of our new membership of the National Trust and drove to Baddesley Clinton, a moated manor house which is several hundred years old. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baddesley_Clinton). As usual, I tried to imagine what it was like to be born into such privilege and then how the peasants might have felt about it. Probably not too happy. The house was only bought by the National Trust in the late 1970s when it appeared Richard Branson was interested in buying the estate. Afterwards we drove to Solihull, which is only a few more miles up the road, so that Lucia could browse for work clothes at the local mall. The mall was good enough as malls go, but the town centre is a bit drab – not the ideal place for a Sunday afternoon.

Let me leave it there.

Love, light & peace
Llewellyn

Letter from Warwick: 24 of 2008

My dear family & friends, 3 August

It’s just three weeks today until we go to Portugal on vacation and we are counting the days. Lucia is particularly looking forward to the break after a hard year. In fact, it’s been just over a year since we made the decision to leave SA, and the intervening period has been full of stresses and strains from find a job, to selling the house, packing up, moving and resettling in a foreign environment. I’m just looking forward to two weeks of sunshine and deep blue skies. Our weather up in Warwickshire tends to be a lot greyer than in London and south-east England. The city of London itself generates so much heat that it creates its own micro climate that tends to make the weather a lot milder.

Having said that, we had a lot of sunshine last weekend with the temperatures rising as high as 30C according to my car thermometer. We wilted. It proved to us how quickly we had become accustomed to the cooler temperatures of England. We felt sorry for the street performers during the Warwick Folk Festival which took place over the whole of last weekend. (You can see pictures at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/llewellynijones as usual.) We walked into Warwick on Saturday morning with the dogs to take in the sights and sounds. Edgar, poor soul, didn’t like being too close to the drums. He objected even more to one of the dance troupes which dressed up all in black (with a bit of yellow trimming) and with black-painted faces. He bared his teeth and shrank away with hackles raised when one of their number came too close. I had to keep him on a very short leash after that. I think I’ve mentioned that he’s a very sensitive fellow.

The festival is probably the biggest event on Warwick’s calendar and the town closed off part of the high street and a few of the side streets for the festivities. We searched in vain for a spot shade at a pub or one of the local bistros where we could sit down for lunch and which permitted dogs. We eventually gave up on the idea as an impossible task and slowly made our way home in the humid midday heat. The dogs were glad to hurtle into the river just next to the footbridge over the Avon in St Nicholas Park. An attending swan, however, was most displeased at the intrusion on what he/she believed was rightfully his/her domain. I tried to explain to him/her that he/she would pay in blood if he/she so much as harmed a hair on the head of our darling children. Swans are vicious vermin.

In the evening we were invited to a braai with some fellow South Africans, Keith and Gail Helfett. Gail’s brother, Jeremy, went to school with Lucia’s brother, Justin. Their father was the SA comedian Pip Freedman. Keith is a former chief designer at Jaguar. One of the projects he is involved in now is an electric car prototype which is being built in Cape Town. Even though I’m an eager user of modern technology, I still marvel at how it enables people to work anywhere in the world as if they were just down the road from each other. (Skype, of which I was an early acolyte, reduces telephone costs to zero.) Be that as it may, Keith and Gail went to much effort to entertain us and we had a wonderful evening at their home in Kenilworth (which lies between Warwick and Coventry.) We only got to meet one of their daughters, Charlie, because the other, Nicky, was working as waitress at the Saxon Mill nearby on the River Avon. We know the Saxon Mill fairly well – it’s a so-called gastro-pub which essentially makes it a smart restaurant.

I was really interested what Gail said about how tips are dealt with at the Saxon Mill which really put much of the service I have experienced in the UK into perspective. Let me add here that there has been a big brouhaha about tips in the UK recently because it came to the attention on of newspaper editors (and others who can smell a good headline) that some restaurants were using tips as part of the minimum wage paid to employees. The Hard Rock Café in London, for instance, pays its staff around £2,50/hour against the minimum wage of £5,50-something and robs the tips to make up the rest. This is legal but now but some union and other lobbyists are trying to have the loophole which makes it legal closed.

But here’s my issue: all tips at the Saxon Mill are pooled and then shared amongst ALL staff. Many restaurants do this because it’s FAIR. One hears a lot about fairness in the UK. Now, talking as someone who put himself through university working variously as a waiter, maitre d and barman at Ferrymans Tavern in the Cape Town Waterfront for five years, a tip is about INCENTIVE: fairness doesn’t come into it. I fail to see why anyone would give any better service than was required if they weren’t going to derive a direct benefit from their superior service. And that’s what we’ve seen: the service has been average to adequate at even the better establishments – and I’ve really been trying to understand why. And that is probably it. Where you do get superior service, it’s most often from a foreigner whose incentive is merely having the job.

I made out like a bandit at Ferrymans. Nobody else ever made more money in tips or sales turnover than I did. We had a brilliant manager who taught me the meaning of service and so many tricks to make a customer feel special. I was driven; it was simply a matter of survival. As kitchen closing time approached, when all the other waiters and waitresses were trying not to take any more tables, I would take them all. Then I’d run myself ragged until sometime between midnight and 1AM, but walk away with several hundred rand. I would pick up any and all shifts. I just cannot imagine doing that if I’d had to share the benefit of my sweat. We were expected to give at least 10% of our tips to the runners and barmen, and another 10% to the kitchen staff. But I gave it gladly and frequently gave more for the simple reason that I knew I would get better service from them in the long run. It’s called a tip. I just don’t see the same motivation here.

Another highlight of the week, was our braai on Monday evening. Like the weekend and most of the preceding week, Monday started out bright and hot. At lunch time I decided that we would have a braai for dinner. Admittedly the skies had begun to look ominously dark by late afternoon, but I hadn’t prepared anything else. A few drops of rain started coming down shortly after I lit the fire so I put up the garden umbrella to defend my fire. (See pictures in the usual place.) Within five minutes the few drops had turned into thunderstorm with lightening streaking across the sky and thunder sending Hazel scurrying for cover. (Strangely thunder has never seemed to bother Edgar much.) But the umbrella is a decent size and kept the fire and me dry. I had Lucia join me under the umbrella when she got home. We stayed there and then moved the umbrella to the garden table where we ate our dinner when the chicken was cooked. The evening was warm enough and it was fun. I’m not sure what the neighbours thought though.

This weekend has been a bit more limited. There’s been the Hungarian Grand Prix and Lucia’s had work to do. We did walk the dogs to the Saxon Mill which is on the outskirts of Warwick. It’s a very pretty excursion. One follows the canal (which is a few yards from our house) until you get to the aqueduct over the Avon, and then follow public footpaths along the Avon that take you through a housing estate and across the wheat fields that border Warwick.

That’s it for another week

Love, light & peace
Llewellyn