My dear family & friends
Right. The vermin digging up my grass in the dead of night – formerly known (to Lucia) as the foxy-woxies – are banned. They came in and had a party on Monday night. In the morning, there were feathers everywhere from their bring-and-eat buffet, they had dug up newly laid lawn, (mostly) destroyed Lucia’s favourite shrub, and there was fox shit everywhere. The only thing missing was the empty bottles of Strongbow cider favoured by England’s binge-drinking louts. One of the buggers was still searching for tidbits when we woke up at six. He cleared the fence in a single leap when he realised he was being watched. We thought it was cute until we surveyed the damage.
Now, there are many slights and annoyances in life that I will ignore. But fucking with my lawn is not one of them. I decided that that the dogs were going to sleep in the conservatory with the door open for the next couple of nights. So, on Tuesday evening, we kissed them goodnight and went to bed. Well, Edgar patrolled the fence incessantly and barked at every sound. Lucia gave up and let him in at about half-past one in the morning. We certainly couldn’t find any of the telltale signs of a fox party when we woke up at sunrise. But, absence of proof is not proof of absence. I shall be monitoring the lawn closely. Lucia suggested that we make a couple of “No Foxes” signs and hang them on the other side of the fence. They would do well to heed the signs; I will defend my lawn to the hilt.
It’s been a while since I wrote. Let me note a few of the more memorable events. You can see a few more pictures in the usual spot at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/llewellynijones. (And talking of pictures, can I ask you to send us some pictures of your lives, or at least encourage you to start your own Picasa page for the delight of your scattered friends and family.)
At the top of the list was my birthday at the end of August. It was a bank holiday weekend. The weather was shit. I really wanted to go the beach, but one needs to be sure of good weather to invest in a two-and-a-half hour drive to the seaside. We went to the Pastelaria Portuguesa for dinner. They open for dinner once a week on a Saturday night offering some traditional Portuguese dishes for a set price. We rolled home afterwards. I’m still waiting for my birthday post though; there’s been a strike at Royal Mail that (according to a news report this morning) has delayed 20 million pieces of mail. So it’s not just SA.
Out of the blue we were contacted by another South African here in Leamington Spa a couple of weeks ago. Laurie Hall went to university with our vet in Cape Town (George Koury, Citivet Gardens) and also knew one of Lucia’s colleagues in Johannesburg who gave him Lucia’s email address. We invited him and his family around for drinks one Friday evening, but then it turned out that another friend of his (an ophthalmologist from Cape Town) was going to be in town as well, so we ended up going around to their house out in the country for drinks instead. It was a pleasure to meet them and we’ll have them back soon.
Another weekend I drove Lucia an hour down the road to Great Malvern to go walking in the Malvern Hills. We walked up to the beacon that I’d investigated a couple of weeks before. But, being a Saturday, it was a bit like Oxford Street – very crowded. It rather reminded me of Signal Hill in Cape Town. I used to love climbing the Hill with a couple of friends at full moon with a bottle of wine and some cheese and biscuits in my backpack. But as the years wore on, this became a more and more popular past time for fit and active Cape Townians. The last time I climbed the peak I counted more than 150 people edging around the summit trying to find a comfortable place to sit. I thought: “Screw this, I’m not doing this again” – and I never did. But in the Malvern Hills Lucia and I were only too pleased to get out into the great wide open. There wasn’t a breath of wind as we climbed the leeward side of the hill, and it was absolutely silent. You don’t find that many places like that here in the UK. Up at the top, we also noted that there were areas in the hills that had relatively few walkers about. We plan to go back there sometime with the aid of the survey map we bought at the Tourist Information centre and have a picnic in one of the quiet spots we spied.
After lunch in Great Malvern we went in search of the Tiltridge Vineyard near Upton-upon-Severn that I had discovered on the Internet. (There are now more than 400 wine producing vineyards in the UK.) But they were closed for the weekend. Somebody please explain to me what good that is – to close on the two days that you’re most likely to get visitors. As if to prove my point, Clive’s Fruit Farm and Farm Shop (“come pick your own”) a few hundred metres down the road was doing a roaring trade – there was a queue of cars waiting to get into the parking area. We did find a few bottles Tiltridge’s Elgar Wine at the farm shop, but I passed it by at £9.99. Although some English wine is developing a good a good reputation, it is to my mind vastly overpriced. We bought a bottle of English sparkling wine (champagne) at the Leamington Spa Food and Wine Festival a couple of weeks ago for £12.50. You can get vastly better sparkling wines from Spain, South Africa, Australia or Chile for the same price or less.
What else?
I forgot to tell you about the tramp in Vauxhall in my last letter. It was after I had taken my sister Barbara to Luton airport and I carried on into London. I had gone to find a Portuguese restaurant I had read about, and was walking up South Lambeth Road. Sitting on the pavement, leaning up against the railings of Vauxhall Park was a tramp (sorry, indigent person) and his dog (there’s no euphemism for dog, is there) begging for money. The tramp did have a bit of a wild-eyed, scary look of the emotionally disturbed about him. He asked for money. I said, No. He said: Fuck you, fuck off, get the fuck away from me, get the fuck off my sidewalk, go on, fuck you, fuck off, who the fuck do you think you are fucker, go on, fuck off ...” It stopped momentarily when he asked another passerby for money, and then it started all over again. When I thought I was nearly out of sight, I turned around to see what was happening, but he saw me and it started again, except much, much louder to make sure that I would hear all the way up the road.
The point is that he rather reminded me of a corporal I met in the army at 7 South African Infantry Battalion at Phalaborwa many years ago. He managed to use the word “fuck” in one sentence as a noun, adjective and verb. It came about as he was inspecting our rifles for “cleanliness”. The bloke next to me had clearly not made even the most rudimentary effort to clean his gun. The corporal stared down the barrel, leapt back as if he had been given an electric shock, and then yelled: “This fucking fucker is fucked.” Oh man, I nearly wet myself laughing. The corporal waited – apparently calmly – until I had brought myself under control. Then he yelled me to run around the “fucking” parade ground until he said that I could “fucking” stop.
And talking of beggars, there was another story in the media this week about how much money “professional” beggars are making in the UK. Police said some beggars were making “hundreds and hundreds” of pounds a week and then still claiming benefits. It immediately struck me as true because I have often come across beggars with dogs where the dogs look in perfect condition; they look as though they could enter a dog show compared to the emaciated, flea-bitten curs with big doe eyes I would expect to find as a begging accoutrement in South Africa, or any third world country.
What else? Oh, I was so annoyed the other day. Lucia and I decided to walk across the fields to the Saxon Mill. Just as you get to the public footpath across farmland some tosser had dumped two old big-screen televisions. The thing that got to me about this is that the televisions were too big and heavy to have been carried there; they had to have been taken there by car. But the dump – with a special section for television sets – is LESS than a mile away. Now, you see, that’s why I think whipping should be brought back – because it doesn’t matter how much you try to “re-educate” this tosser, he’s so dumb that only violence works.
Finally, let me end on an upbeat note. Barbara sent me a text message a couple of weeks ago to ask if I had listened to the Ukulele Prom on BBC3 the night before. The short answer was no, I hadn’t, but that I would try to catch it on the BBC website’s “play again” feature. It was absolutely brilliant. The Proms are mostly about classical music, but they also always have some “interesting” stuff. The Prom in question featured The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain and they played a wonderful mix of classical and pop music on ukuleles. Lucia and I snuggled closely on the sofa listening to the Prom on the Net the next evening. I was so impressed that I decided that I had to get a recording of the Prom. While that sounds fairly simple, it takes a bit of effort to grab the recording from the Internet. First of all, the BBC and rights holders don’t really want you to do it. (But the law says you are allowed to record something from the radio and even distribute it so long as you do it for free.) So what they do is hide the address of the audio stream in the web page and you need a special programme (I use URL Snooper) to find the address. Then you need another programme (I use Replay AV) to grab/record the radio show from the Internet. I hadn’t done any of this since we’ve been in the UK, so I had to find the programmes and learn to use them again. This is a long way of saying that I’ve got a recording of the Ukulele Prom both as an MP3 (73MB) and as an audio CD that I have listened to many times since. If you would like a copy, the price is pictures. Just let me know.
Love, light & peace
Llewellyn
