Letter from London: 2 of 2014 --- A Daytrip to France

You can find the pictures in the usual place here,
If you prefer Google+, you can find them here.


I went on a day-trip to France with my friend Julian Curtin. I met Julian many years ago in the army when I was working as a waiter/chef at the Castle in Cape Town. Julian and I went to the same school in Johannesburg, KES, although he only joined the school after I left for Cape Town and Rondebosch Boys High School - so I never met him at school.

This was my second such trip to France in as many weeks. The first was on my birthday a couple of weeks ago. I had been wanting to do this for a long time. So, as my birthday approached, I searched the Internet for the best ferry deals from Dover to Calais. I discovered that you really can get a return from Dover to Calais for as little as £19 on MyferryLink.com (the remains of SeaFrance.) This compares to about £70 or £80 on the channel tunnel from Ashford in Kent. The journey is 90 minutes by ferry, and about 25 minutes on the channel tunnel, according to Julian.

The first trip, on my birthday, was more of an exploratory experience – just to check things out, so to speak. But, it gave me the desire to do it again soon - and Julian was free and up for it.

I chose a Wednesday, because Wednesday is Market Day in Boulogne-sur-mer – some 35km from Calais. My idea was to buy lots of cheese and charcuterie from small independent sellers at the market. This is what it's like at Portuguese town markets - but it wasn't really like that.The French markets are far more focused on fresh produce. The market had the most dizzying array of colourful fruits and vegetables - five different types of plum, the most fragrant lemons, and more variations of peppers and tomatoes than I care to count.

It was fun. The first stop was at a restaurant on Place Dalton coincidentally called “Chez Jules” for a reviving coffee on the market square. As for shopping at the market, we only bought some melons and plums – we did the real shopping much later at the huge Carrefour hypermarket in Calais.

You can mostly follow the rest of our day in pictures.

First, we strolled around the old city and the ramparts of the ancient walls, followed by lunch in the Old Town Square.

Then we drove back towards Calais along the Coast Road, stopping at anything that grabbed our attention.

Our first stop was at the immaculately manicured Terlincthun British War Cemetery just outside Boulogne-sur-mer. Too many of the graves were dedicated to soldiers only “Known Unto God”.

Next was a fortified artillery position that formed part of the “Atlantic Wall” built by the Germans during WW2 to defend against the anticipated invasion from England. Now it's covered in graffiti and used for raves and musical concerts. That really appeals to my sense of cosmic justice.

Next stop was Cap Gris Nez – or, in English, Cape Grey Nose. It's the closest point to England on the French coast and is littered with old machine gun bunkers, now tipping forward under their own weight in the soft sand.

Our final destination was the huge shopping centre next to the channel tunnel terminal at Sangatte, just outside Calais. The Carrefour Hypermarket there has a dizzying array of goods and produce. Without a written shopping, list it was difficult to decide what to buy and what not to buy. We ended up buying plenty of chacuterie and  cheese …. and lots, and lots, and lots of beer and spirits. Alcohol is a vastly cheaper in France. Let me put it this way – Gordon’s Gin, Lucia's favourite tipple, costs about £20 per litre in England. But, in France it's more like £14 per litre. By four of those and you’ve just paid for your ferry fare.. It's even cheaper in Belgium.

Anyway, shopping done, we headed back to the ferry port at Calais for our journey home. We joined the ferry as the sun was setting on the most beautifully calm and peaceful evening. We didn't have any asylum seekers riding in the boot of my car, so far as I know.

This link link is a short visual story of Lucia’s and my day-trip to France and Belgium on my birthday.

The link directs you to something that Google does without specifically being asked to. Specifically, I use Google auto backup for my pictures - which are also all geo-tagged. But, I also use Google location tracking on my mobile phone – a great idea if your phone is ever stolen. Google then somehow uses your pictures and your location history to create a visual story. I suppose it is quite freaky, but I do find the technology absolutely mind blowing. Besides, my mobile service provider, my credit card supplier, my bank, GCHQ, the NSA and, probably, the KGB, know where I am anyway – at least Google offers me some real value in return.

It's been over six months since I put any pictures up on the web. They are there – I just haven't shared them yet. I wanted to share the link with some commentary of our life in London which I haven't done for so long. I will get around to it.

I hope you enjoy these links to my pictures.

Love, light & peace
Llewellyn


Link to photo albums
Link to albums on Google+

Letter from London: 1 of 2014

My dear family & friends

We went to Portugal - again - for 10 days. As usual we stayed with my sister and brother-in-law, Barbara & Terry, at their home in the tiny village of Espargal in the hills above the Algarvean flood plain.

We could not have asked for better weather or a more relaxing vacation. Every day we were greeted with blue skies and temperatures in the upper 20s and low 30s. If from my pictures it appears that we did nothing but go to the beach, lounge next to the Algibre River, and go to coffee shops - - - you would not be far wrong.

We relished the warm dry heat of the Algarve that is so similar to that which we are used to from South Africa.

You can find the pictures in the usual place here.
If you prefer Google+ (which I just can't get used to), you can find them here.

Unfortunately, after a wonderful break, our return home was not as happy.

We arrived home from Portugal at 23h30 on Tuesday to find CharlieBrown - our black & white cat - in a very poor way. It appears that the problem of crystals in his urethra had recurred, and he had gone downhill very, very fast. I took him to the emergency vet at 01h00 and, after a short discussion with the vet, had him put down while I stroked him and told him that we loved him. I brought him home and laid him on the kitchen floor so that Tigger, Edgar & Hazel would know that he was gone. We buried him at the bottom of the garden next to the river the next morning and planted some bulbs and seeds on his grave. Needless to say, we are so very sad at this turn of events, and we miss him.

Love, light & peace
Llewellyn


Link to photo albums.

Link to albums on Google+

Tigger & CharlieBrown

Letter from London: 1 of 2012

My dear family & friends

You can see the pictures in the usual spot at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/llewellynijones

My sojourn in Prague began with a bang in the middle of the night. I left my suitcase next to the automatic teller machine in Prague airport and walked off. I got on the bus and, after about two stops, realised I was travelling a bit light. By the time I got back to the airport, after retracing my steps, the suitcase was surrounded by police, bomb squad and airport officials who were all very fucking unhappy with me, but I really didn’t care – I was just too overjoyed to be reunited with my luggage. I wanted to hug my suitcase, but the policemen wouldn’t let me do so until I had produced my passport, given them my address, proof of my address, and (I suspect) generally given them a look of contrition. They never did get the look of contrition.

All the while I was sending Lucia – who had caught a morning flight to Prague for work – panicked text messages. By the time I had all my luggage and was allowed to leave, it was approaching midnight and Lucia insisted that I catch a taxi to the apartment we were staying in. The taxi ride cost £20 against the £1 it would have cost me using public transport.

The apartment, which Lucia found for us on the Wimdu website, was right in the heart of the old city. We had the “suite” which was more like a loft apartment. It had a big open room downstairs and a mezzanine level for beds. Well, when I say mezzanine level, I mean a sort of roof space no more than five feett high at the apex of the roof and then slanting fairly sharply down. My head and the ceiling became quite well acquainted over our stay. Despite this drawback, it was a lovely apartment and I would recommend the apartment block to anyone considering going to Prague.

We were up early the next morning because this was a working trip for Lucia and she had to get to the office which was a few streets away. We listened to the sound of bells wafting in the open window over a breakfast of cheese, ham and bread rolls.

It took me quite a while that Tuesday morning to shake off the events of the night before – I have never done anything quite so stupid.

My first task for the morning was to get a local prepaid simcard for my mobile phone with a big data allowance. I’ve become a heavy data user while travelling. You can never get lost with Google Maps because it uses GPS to pinpoint your exact location. If there’s an interesting sight or building, Google Earth will once again use GPS to pinpoint your exact location and, nine times out of ten, will tell you what you’re looking at with a link to Wikipedia. And, if you want to know more about what you’re looking at, you can just Google it. Google Translate is an absolute gem of an app which enables you to get by without speaking a word of the local language. You just type in what you want to say and show the shop assistant (or a member of the bomb squad getting ready to blow up your suitcase for that matter) the resulting translation.  I also have a clever little application called JellySMS which uses the Internet to send text messages anywhere in the world at the local rates of the country to which you’re sending the SMS. And the Skype app allows you to call anyone anywhere in the world at vastly reduced rates.

My second task was to find the Brazilian restaurant which was recommended to us as a possibility for watching the Portuguese matches in the Euro 2012 football championship. I found it relatively easily, but all of the staff were Czech apart from one lone Brazilian chef who didn’t know of any bars or restaurants where the Portuguese of Prague gathered. He suggested I try the Brazilian Embassy around the corner.

I had more luck at the Embassy from a very helpful consular assistant who called a pal to find out the name and address of a new Portuguese cafe which had only recently opened its doors for business. I traipsed across the city to the Cafe Oliveira which was on Mánesova, a bourgeois (according to my Rough Guide) boulevard of beautiful art deco apartment blocks. The cafe was a small hole-in-the-wall type place but, having ascertained that they would indeed be showing the football, I strolled off back in the direction of the city centre to go and look at Prague.

My trusty Rough Guide was both good and poor. It was excellent at informing me about where to go and what I was looking at, but poor in that it only gave the Czech names of the sights and areas. Let me ask you: What would you rather read about - Náměstí Republiky or Republic Square?

I spent the rest of the day just walking, taking arbitrary turns when I saw something interesting. The city is like a giant art gallery in and of itself. Down in Wenceslas Square (which is more a wide boulevard than a square really) I had lunch at a cafe which comprised two old trams and rows of outside tables. Rather unsurprisingly it’s called “The Tram”. The square is lined with the most stunning Hapsberg era art deco architecture and a few dull buildings from the communist era. It appealed to my sense of humour that the big communist department store is now a branch of Debenhams, and another has been converted into Marks & Spencer. Around the corner, the Museum of Communism is right above McDonald’s and next door to a casino. Nice.

The top of Wenceslas Square is crowned by the imposing National Museum which was the focus of the 1989 demonstrations which brought down the communist regime. In November 1989 750 000 people – nearly three-quarters of the population of Prague – crowded in to the square demanding change. On the day I was there, a few protestors with big flags and banners and a loud sound system were trying to gain support and sympathy from passersby not very successfully. I’m guessing that they were protesting the economic situation given that there were several “Occupy” sites dotted around the capital also trying to rouse some sympathy and action from the populace.

At the bottom of the square stands a five-storey Bata shoe store. Much to my fascination, my Rough Guide reliably informs me that Tomáš Baťa was Czech. I didn’t know that. All I ever knew about Bata was that they made my school shoes. For my South African friends – anyone remember Bata Toughees? I still remember the jingle and tag line from the radio ads in the 1970s: “(B)ring Bata your feet and we’ll wrap them in comfort, comfort for the whole year round.” The shop proved quite handy a couple of days later when my sandals broke.

Walking around Prague that afternoon I learned a few rules. First, Czech’s don’t have the same regard for pedestrian crossings than they do, say, in the UK. Getting across the road is more a question of who has the bigger balls – you or the driver? Second, trams have absolute right of way. Given that they are fairly large and heavy vehicles made of iron and steel, this is understandable. Third, the Czech’s don’t like it when you cross against the light even when there is nary a car in sight.

Perhaps the biggest soundtrack of Prague for me is the ticking of the pedestrian traffic lights. It’s a slow tick when the light is red, and a triple time tick when the light is green.

Aside from the traffic lights, I was most surprised at how full of music Prague is. There are buskers everywhere, open air concerts in the courtyards of many state and city buildings, concerts in many churches nearly every night (although the ensembles seem to play much the same pieces of music), and often the sounds of students or children practising the piano, or violin, or guitar, or clarinet wafting down from open windows. I suppose that shouldn’t have been surprising in the city that gave us composers like Dvorak and Smetana, where Mozart tickled the ivories of the city’s organs, and the hometown of the Princes Lobkowicz, one of whose ancestors was Ludwig van Beetohoven’s principal patron, and to whom Beethoven dedicated his third and fifth symphonies.

That first afternoon, my walk took me from Wenceslas Square down to the Vlatava River (Moldau in German) at the Legii Most (The Bridge of Legions), past the Karlův most (Charles Bridge) – perhaps the single most recognised icon of Prague, the Mánesův most (Manes Bridge), and the Čechův most (Czech Bridge) where I stopped for a beer and to watch life go by on the river to a soundtrack of trams running over the bridge.

One of the few things that I find disappointing about London (and the UK in general) is the lack of riverside cafés – more like complete non-existence. All over Europe you’ll find cafe after cafe lining the banks of its rivers as they wind through whichever city, frequented by tourists and locals alike. The atmosphere is always relaxed and laid back with patrons sipping a coffee, a beer or a glass of wine, and perhaps tucking in to a pastry or a sandwich. All the UK seems to have is the odd, usually dull (although there are some exceptions), expensive pub.

After a beer (or two) I wandered through the old Jewish quarter(Josefov)  towards the MillwardBrown office in Klimentske. Right next door I passed the Bulgarian Institute which was preparing for a concert by a fourteen-year-old violinist, accompanied by a pianist. It was free and there were free drinks afterwards, so I went to the concert which turned out to be most pleasant. Lining the walls of the storefront concert room were pastels by Bulgarian artist Georgi Jelezerov. No, I hadn’t heard of him either, but if I had some spare cash burning a hole in my pocket I wouldn’t mind hanging a few on the wall in my home. Lucia still wasn’t finished work by the end of the concert, so I strolled back to the apartment via Republic Square and the grand art deco concert hall that is known as the Municipal House. Outside, I stood listening to a group of eight French buskers who played everything from The Kinks, to the Beatles, to French and Spanish folk songs. I don’t easily give money to beggars and buskers, but I gave them a bunch they were that good.

Diagonally opposite the Municipal house is the Palladium Shopping Centre which is easily the best shopping centre I have visited – ever. You would hardly know that it’s a shopping centre from its facade – it just looks like one of the art deco buildings. But step inside the doors and it leads into the best layed out, the best dressed shopping centre, with just the right blend of shops that I have ever visited. To my mind it completely blends into its surroundings, unlike the brutalist architecture of most shopping centres.

For dinner Lucia and I had pizza at a Bohemian, Italian hole-in-the-wall jazz cafe right next to a medieval cathedral.  The keyboard and double bass jazz combo were really good. Lucia expressed some surprise that I liked jazz. The problem with jazz is that it actually represents so many different genres (which usually sound like discordant squawks to my ears) that it’s impossible to say whether you like it or not. This fell into the category of good jazz by my definition.

Interestingly, Prague has one of the biggest Italian expatriate communities in Europe, and it has the Italian restaurants to prove it – they’re everywhere. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the outnumbered “traditional” Czech restaurants. The only more numerous type of shop in the city centre is probably the hundreds of tourist traps selling Czech crystal tat to tourists. We passed one on the way home pumping out Michael Jackson’s “They Don’t Care About Us” (the only decent song he ever wrote) at 11 o’clock at night.

On Wednesday morning, I awoke sneezing and  spent the rest of the day trying to combat the effects of sever hayfever. First, I returned to the bookshop I had spied out the previous day on Wenceslas Square to replace the Marco Polo map of Prague I had lost the day before. The Neo Luxor bookshop – over five floors – is easily the biggest bookshop I have ever visited. I wondered if the Kindle hadn’t made it to Prague yet. The size of the shop would certainly seem to indicate a significant thirst for knowledge among the Czechs.

 With my new map in hand, I strolled back across the city and then across the Vlatava River at the Bridge of Legions to Kampa Island and Malá Strana (Lesser Town) which sits below Prague Castle. It’s an incredibly picturesque area set on a slope up to the Castle. It’s narrow streets are a melange of churches, museums, galleries, concert halls, adverts for musical events, restaurants, cafes, trams, buses, a few beggars and thousands of tourists. The Czech parliament and senate are housed in two of the old grand palács. I felt a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of attractions. It would take many weeks, possibly months to see everything.

Around one corner I came across a workman high up a ten meter ladder painting the wall and cleaning the gutters of a hotel sans any sort of harness or safety equipment. His head was protected by a baseball cap. English “’Elf & Safety” would have had a collective heart attack.

I stamped up the hill to the castle district, which is more a series of palaces than a castle per se. It didn’t quite have the bustle of the district below with no trams and few cars, but it was still buzzing with hordes of tourists.

First port of call for me was a cafe in the Schwarzenberský palace for a cappuccino and something to try and calm my hayfever. My sister’s solution is always to gargle with Bagaçeira (the Portuguese version of grappa) – she swears by it. The only other patron at the cafe recommended that I try Becherovka, a Czech firewater made from grain alcohol and steeped in spices. I forgot the gargling bit (which is possibly why it had no effect on my hayfever), but I felt good.

The exterior walls of the Schwarzberg Palace are an excellent example of sgraffito decoration – I had to look it up on wiki. Essentially you plaster a wall with several layers of different colour plaster and then carefully scrape away the layers in a geometric pattern (or trace a picture) to create a multi-coloured wall. There’s a lot of this around Prague.

Outside the gates to the “castle” I watched the changing of the guard with soldiers trooping around in their sky-blue uniforms designed by film maker Milos Forman. As a counterpoint to the “friendly” uniforms, the event was watched over by Ignaz Platzer’s Blood-curdling “Battling Titans”, two gargantuan stone figures wielding club and dagger about to inflict fatal blows on their victims.

After that, I joined the midday throngs in the palace compound, elbowing my way around the sights and into St Vitus Cathedral. I quickly (and easily) tired of that and paid the equivalent of £5 to climb the cathedral bell tower which afforded panoramic views up and down the Vlatava River and all around Prague with its red roofs, big green parks and communist style apartment blocks in the distance. Below, the square outside the cathedral was littered with tour guides holding up identifying flags, umbrellas or giant plastic flowers for their followers. (The identifying flags rather reminded me of my days in the army and the drills for fire and movement: every time I see one of the flags, I want to give firing instructions the light machine gun crew.)

After descending the tower, I took myself for lunch at the Poet Cafe in a much quieter, green corner of the castle where I decided to head back to the apartment – I’d had enough hayfever for one day and my head was pounding despite several doses of ibuprofen. I crossed the river at the Manes Bridge and strolled along the riverside under a row of linden trees where young lovers clogged the park benches.

In the evening, two of Lucia’s colleagues, Grace from Italy and Tomas from Germany, joined us for dinner and football at Cafe Oliveira. (The match was Portugal against Spain which Portugal lost on penalties much to the dismay of the Portuguese customers.) The four of us made our way to the cafe on the Prague Metro. It feels like it was designed by the KGB – it’s almost devoid of advertising and has very little signage to tell you where to go. (If you don’t know where you’re going, you shouldn’t be there in the first place.) Unlike London transport, however, it is spotlessly clean – and that goes for the trams and buses as well.

The big screen was in a crammed little room and the air soon became thick with cigarette smoke, but it had an amazing atmosphere. (That’s one thing the Czechs can do: ban all smoking in enclosed public places – we’ve got quite used smoke free restaurants and pubs.) Dinner comprised petiscos: olives, cheese, bread, chouriço, lupins, toasted sandwiches, two bottles of wine and a couple of beers – all for the grand total of £30.

The cafe had such an amiable crowd as well, with everyone enquiring from everyone else where they were from and why they were there. We met a young fellow studying international relations in Prague (probably headed for the diplomatic corps), an oil trader from Angola, a middle-aged pharmacist, a slim and svelte blonde American who spoke perfect Brazilian Portuguese (but with an over-riding American accent), a gay Brazilian girl and her partner (the partner didn’t like me, I suspect because I was yelling loudly at the television), and sundry others who gave us the warmest welcome. It was such a pity Portugal lost.

The next day, Thursday, I spent most of the day riding trams. I like to do this, to get to know the city and get the feel of the city, if I can. I bought my day ticket at Republic Square and got on the very first tram that came by – the number 14. I rode it out to the terminus, and then got on a different one and rode that one until I got to a major tram intersection, and then got on another one again.

The first thing that becomes clear is that Prague has gone up rather than spread out like London or Johannesburg or most cities in the “new world”. One passes apartment block after apartment block right out to the periphery. As you move further out, the apartments become more plain – none of the art deco, baroque, or rococo of the centre – just plain blank walls of the 20th century. At the extreme you get to the communist built apartments which are not really bad looking at all, but something that could simply have been built anywhere.

Alongside the river on one journey I came across a large outdoor market, the Penny Market, so I hopped off the tram to investigate – but it was mostly the Eastern made tat you can find anywhere in the world, although it was in lovely surroundings. Right next door was a warehouse complex with a huge advertising hoarding announcing this was “Showpark”. I thought it would be some sort of cinema or other entertainment complex, but on closer inspection I discovered that it fell more into the “other” category. I looked it up on my mobile phone and was guaranteed that this was the “the largest adult entertainment complex in all of Europe.” I disagree – Amsterdam (where the wares are on public display) wins that one hands down, although I am reliably informed that the Reeperbahn in Hamburg is a close contender.

At around lunchtime, I caught a number of trams which took me to the base of Petrin, one of Prague’s larger green spaces set on a hill to the side of Malá Strana. I took the funicular, built for the 1891 Prague Exhibition, to the top of the hill, and thence ambled to the one-fifth replica of the Eiffel Tower (built for the same Expo) where I lunched on Klobasa (Czech sausage) and a beer. The park is lovely – although it is surrounded by the bustle of the city, it is quiet, green and shady. The stillness is broken only by the sounds of birdsong and church bells. It’s a wonderfully calm space.

Back on the trams in the afternoon, I continued to explore the city – this time with a little more activity on the trams themselves.

First, I was sitting on a tram in a daydream, and suddenly this very big bloke in jeans, with muscles bulging out his floral t-shirt, was at my side shoving some sort of badge in my face and making some demand of me in Czech. My first thought was that the police were still pissed off about my suitcase at the airport. But no, they were ticket inspectors, and I happily showed them my day pass. They continued their inspection of the rest of the passengers, and then just sat down for about four stops, then jumped up again to badge the new arrivals. This time they found some fresh bait in a group of rather older Swedish or German tourists who scattered off the tram in all directions at the next stop with the ticket inspectors in hot pursuit. The last thing I saw as the tram pulled away and around the corner was some old dear walking a lot faster than her prescription walking stick would suggest.

And then, later, out near the more upmarket suburb of Bílá Hora, I had a minor altercation with another passenger. I was sitting happily in my seat with my legs crossed looking out the window at the passing sights, when another older man got on the tram. If I can try to paint a picture in words: he looked like a mean mouse. His clothes were dowdy, more reminiscent of the communist era, he had on very big glasses that seemed to cover half his face, his hair was greasy and his shoulders were slumped. He looked like some minor communist party official who was bitterly disappointed that he no longer got the respect that he thought he deserved was his right – almost glaring at everyone in defiance as he walk down the coach. He walked with a walking stick that he didn’t need other than to bash people as he did to me. I couldn’t believe it – he walked past me and whacked my foot as if it was in his way (which it wasn’t) and took the seat in from of me. I was completely stunned for a moment, at the same time noticing a group of teenagers sort of hiding their eyes and sniggering, and then reacted – I thumped the back of his seat as he sat and told him to fuck off and show some manners. Unfortunately I don’t think he spoke English. And then we just sat there.

In the early evening, I went to a concert by the Old Prague Music Ensemble at St Georges Basilica in Prague Castle. The programme included works by the likes Smetana, Dvorak, Vivaldi and Mozart. The ensemble was adequate, but not brilliant. The £20 ticket for the 70 minute programme seemed expensive, but the venue was fantastic. My sandals broke as I walked there, and then I still had to flop all the way back to the apartment afterwards to change for a work do with Lucia’s company at a cocktail bar around the corner. At some point during the evening I looked at my phone to get the score in the match between Germany and Italy in the other Euro 2012 semi-final. I couldn’t believe my eyes to see German was losing. One of Lucia’s new hires in Prague, Martin, quickly took the opportunity to invite me to another bar around the corner so that we could watch the second half.

We awoke late on Friday morning after a long, hot, sticky night. I took the morning slowly, filling in time until Lucia could join me at lunchtime for the rest of the weekend. I went to the giant Bata store on Wenceslas Square and bought a lovely pair of replacement sandals for around £40.

Just before lunch, I met Lucia at the apartment and we caught a combination of the metro and trams to the funicular at Petrin. We had a lunch of Klobasa, Czech pork steaks, bread and beers at the copy of the Eiffel Tower. Lucia relished the quiet calmness of the park after a hectic week of work – we put our feet up, sat back and took things slowly. After lunch we wandered through the extensive rose gardens and then along the “Hunger Wall” down towards Prague Castle. We wandered a short way down the hill in the park so that Lucia could lie against a tree in a yoga pose to try and cool her feet.

In the castle district we first wandered into the Strahovs Monastery. Although it houses one of the largest ancient theological libraries in Europe (£10 entry please), we headed straight for the terrace cafe to enjoy what is probably one of the best views of Prague. The cool drinks were expensive, but we viewed the price more as rent.

Afterwards we sauntered down the hill to the castle precinct itself. What a difference it makes to go later in the day – it was so much more pleasant without the crowds. We almost had St Vitus Cathedral to ourselves, and then bought tickets to see the Old Royal Palace, St Georges Basilica and “Golden Lane” – a narrow alley of tiny houses built into the walls of the castle. Apparently Franz Kafka wrote one of his early books as a resident in this alley. (There’s a lot of emphasis on Kafka around Prague.)

Having taken our fill, we wandered back to our apartment via the castle vineyard set into the hill down from the palaces, across the river at Manes Bridge where we sipped a few beers at the cafe and watched people and boats go by.

For dinner we went to the Cuban restaurant/cafe/bar (more precisely “La Bodeguita del Medio”, which is apparently quite famous) where we supped on a dinner of Mojito’s and Chicken Paella. The food was okay, nothing wrong with it at all – but I hate paying for something I can do so much better.

If anything, Friday night was even hotter than Thursday night with the thermometer staying up in the high 20s.

Saturday was our first full day together and Lucia let me be her guide. First stop was shoe shopping at the Bata store. I left Lucia to peruse the wares while I went down to the coffee shop I’d been at the previous day for cappuccino. The waitress recognised me immediately and told me that I hadn’t paid for my cappuccino previously. I could have sworn that I’d paid her colleague, but given my recent track record for forgetting and losing things, I wasn’t going to argue. Then when it came to pay and leave, the same colleague told me “not to worry” and that “it had been sorted out”. Having worked in a bar/restaurant for five years of my life, and having seen every skulduggerous and nefarious thieving trick in the book, I am prepared to lay money on the fact that he was ripping his colleague off.

As we headed off to begin our day of sightseeing, we past an American family walking the other way – the mother declared loudly that: “It sure ain’t Copenhagen.” My immediate, silent response was: “No you twat, it’s Prague,” but I’ve spent a long time trying to think about what she could possibly have meant. Did she think Prague was shit, or that Copenhagen was shit, or was she just making an innocuous general comment? And, if she thought any of them were shit, why did she get on an aeroplane in the first place?

Our first stop was the Riding School of the Wallenstein Palace where the Prague National Gallery was hosting the works of Jakub Schikaneder. No, I hadn’t heard of him either, once again, but I was really taken the giant posters dotted about the city advertising the exhibition. It showed what looks like an old man standing on the Charles Bridge through the haze of the setting sun on a cold winter’s day that really appealed to me. That, and the fact that various websites described him has the most important Czech painter of all time, was enough for me to make a date with Lucia at the gallery.

Let me qualifying my comments by stating that Lucia said it was the highlight of her trip. Much of the paintings were quite dark. Certainly they showed a robust social feeling often depicting women in hardship, old age and poverty. They show the hard life of the peasantry under the old European monarchies. There was a whole series of contemplative paintings showing priests in prayer and reflection. But there were also very bright pictures, usually views out a window or door. His grasp of painting light and shadow was superb. His speciality seemed to be nocturnes – paintings made in the half light of the setting sun: a couple walking arm in arm, a crowd on a quay, a carriage waiting in front of a grand house. If I ever win the Euromillions, and should some Schikaneders come available on the auction market, I would definitely be a buyer.

I even recognised one of the paintings – Lucia said it looked like something from a chocolate box, and she may well be right. But just because some capitalist fucks stole his picture to sell their chocolates doesn’t mean it isn’t any good.

After the exhibition, we headed down the road towards the centre of Malá Strana looking for somewhere to have lunch and chanced a beautiful tree-lined courtyard set with cafe tables. I have no idea what the trees were, but their flowers filled the courtyard with the most divine scent – so we plonked ourselves down for a sandwich and a beer.

Afterwards, we wormed our way through the narrow, cobbled, twisting streets looking for the museum of musical instruments – which we didn’t find because I was distracted by the Rough Guide’s mention of the John Lennon Wall. It’s simply a wall that the youth of Prague started tagging after John Lennon was assassinated in 1980. Call it what you will – rebellion against the Communist regime, or simply the rebellion of youth against adult authority – it has become a shrine. It looks like a complete mess to my eye (there is nothing Banksy-like on this wall), but it seems to have kept the graffiti artists mostly away from the rest of Prague – and that’s a good thing.

Around the corner is the Museum Kampa (on Kampa Island), a gallery of surrealist and “spiritual” art that is highly rated on TripAdvisor. Among its more famous exhibits are works by Goya and the sculptor František Kupka. We were keen to go, and went to the ticket desk – BUT, that was where things turned sour. Adult admission is about £9 each, but family admission (two adults, three children) is around £11 – and you’re not allowed to buy a family admission without children. I’m never one to take such discrimination lightly – it’s either gross discrimination on families without children, or simply a tax on tourists. They say it’s to encourage children to go to galleries, which may well be true, but the Museum Kampa was the only gallery or museum we came across in Prague that charged a discount on the adult price for a family entry. So, after arguing strongly for several minutes while I let the queue behind me grow, we departed, but it left a bitter feeling (probably the only negative of our entire stay in Prague.) So, if you ever go to Prague, don’t go to the Museum Kampa – in fact, write to them and tell them why you’re not going.

We dithered about what to do after that. It was extremely hot – apparently the hottest day in 65 years – and we were feeling a bit washed out. We eventually took a tram to the top of the palace gardens of Prague Castle and meandered through the coolness of the tree-lined paths. In the middle of the gardens is a house which was built for the President of Czechoslovakia during the communist era. It’s just a shit (big) modern house really, and looks entirely out of place. Leaving the gardens we wandered back down through the castle precincts (popped in at a photo exhibition of pictures by Jan Reich) and the castle vineyard to the Villa Richter, a restaurant where we shared some more beers and a cheese platter gazing over the city. Afterwards we dragged ourselves back to the apartment in the still searing heat. For dinner we went to a Lebanese restaurant in the Palladium Shopping Centre, although I’m not sure I should actually admit that we went to a shopping centre for dinner.

Back at the apartment we tried to find sleep with all the windows wide open. In the morning (Sunday), I found Lucia on the sofa under the window complaining that she hadn’t slept at all. We both took cold showers and dressed for another day of exploring. We had breakfast at a cafe next door to the “Spanish” Synagogue which was our first port of call. The synagogue doesn’t look like much on the outside, but the interior is breath-taking – the gilded Moorish interior deliberately imitating the Alhambra. My Rough guide says: “Every available surface is smothered with a profusion of floral motifs and geometric patterns  in vibrant reds, reds, greens and blues, which are repeated in the synagogue’s huge stained-glass windows.” I concur.

The synagogue now houses a graphic history of Prague’s Jews from the 1781 Edict of Tolerance right through to the Holocaust. Most of the Jews in Prague died in Auschwitz after being moved to the ghetto in Theriesenstadt.

As I was looking at an exhibit on the revival of the Jewish community in Prague, I heard a bearded kantor next to me say to a Jewish tourist: “I’ll say a prayer for you.” He then sang the most beautiful and haunting prayer. The synagogue fell silent and you could have heard a pin drop apart from his voice. Me – a confirmed atheist – put my hat on as a mark of respect. But then he went and spoiled it all, when he was finished, by holding his hat out to all and sundry saying: “What, this is a free concert?” I shouldn’t have bothered with the hat.

Outside we passed Švejk Restaurant named for the main character in the book “The Good Soldier Švejk” by Jaroslav Hašek. It was a book I bought when I was still a teenager (because I like the cover), and is one of the few books in my (extensive) collection which I’ve never read. I started a few times, but just got bogged down in the philosophy. But it’s one of the books which define Czech nationhood and you find cartoon motifs to The Good Soldier Švejk all around Prague.

We only had one other tourist item on our list for the day – the Lobkowicz Palace in the castle district, not particularly because I knew its history, but rather because it was something that you should do in Prague. It was only in the gallery/museum that I learned the history of the Lobkowicz family. Most notable is the fact that one of the Lobkowicz princes was Ludwig van Beethoven’s principal patron, paying him a stipend to continue composing. In one of the rooms, surrounded by ancient musical instruments, they have the actual, ORIGINAL score of Beethoven’s third symphony, the Eroica.

The rest of the palace is filled with the most stunning art, paintings, decorative arts, musical instruments, original musical scores and weaponry. I was amazed to discover that the Lobkowicz’s actually own the Canaletto painting of the “Lord Mayor’s Parade” on the River Thames which was the blueprint for the recent Diamond Jubilee Parade for the Queen.

Recent family history is just as interesting. Everything was confiscated by the Nazi’s when they invade Czechoslovakia in 1938 and then given back after the war, only to be nationalised by the Communist regime in 1948. The family then escaped to America and finally claimed it all back under the Restitution Act after the Velvet Revolution in 1989. That said, I have a bit of a problem with restitution: 1) it perpetuates the inequities of feudal Europe as so emotively illustrated by Schikaneder, and, 2) the communist government of 1948 was a legally constituted government supported by at least half the populace thus representing the will of the people at the time.

But let than not detract from the palace – TripAdvisor rates the palace a rare 5 out of 5, and we agree.

In the museum shop afterwards Lucia and I had the opportunity for a good laugh at the expense of some more Americans. Among their wares they had large posters, postcards and key rings depicting “The Lord Mayor’s Parade” by Canaletto . In a very broad American accent a tourist asked the shop assistant: “Is that the Vlatava?” to which the assistant truthfully answered: “No, it’s the Thames in London.” Says the American: “Oh, what a pity.” It makes me think of the well-worn proverb: You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

Before dinner that evening, we switched our apartment for a hotel as Lucia would be staying on in Prague (for work) once I took my leave on Tuesday morning. Dinner was a hurried affair (at a rather good Czech restaurant) so that we could find a bar with big screens showing the Euro 2012 final between Italy and Spain. We found a nice-looking Italian bar/restaurant around the corner from the hotel which was packed with Italians. As it turned out, it was quite awkward really as Spain dished out a 4 – 0 drubbing to Italy. But we certainly enjoyed the match.

 Monday was my last day in Prague. I walked to the Prague Fortress (Vyšehrad – literally High Castle) about four kilometres away, bordering the southern tip of the “New City”. I wound my way through the streets and boulevards simply marvelling at the architecture, once again. The fortress has more legends and myths attached to it than any other place in Bohemia, and it has emerged into a symbol of Czech nationhood. There is little left of the palaces that once adorned its ramparts, and it is now simply a large green open space sitting high above its surroundings and affording an awesome view up and down the Vlatava.

Part of the symbolism of the Vyšehrad arises from its cemetery which shields the remains of Czech art intelligentsia. Only the great and good lie here – there are no soldiers or politicians, and not even the Communists managed to muscle their way in except on artistic grounds. I took my photograph in front of the mausoleum to Antonín Dvořák and then the simpler grave of Bedřich Smetana.

I tried to get in to the neo-Gothic church of Saint Petr and Pavel next door which hides Art Nouveau murals on every surface inside, but the Rottweiler on the door kept slamming the door in everybody’s face without explanation. This somehow deemed it beneath her to converse with the paying (tourist) public. Luckily a nun came along and I more-or-less stood directly in front of her to enquire what was going on and when we might get in to the church. She made the queries of the Rottweiler in Czech who glared at me menacingly while begrudgingly answering the nun. My smile of thanks didn’t quite echo with my thoughts.

I didn’t feel like hanging around until two or three o’clock and so went to a cafe in the corner of the castle for a coffee and slivovitz under the trees while I decided what to do next. I could have gone back across town to the Žižkov Television Tower – the highest structure in Prague – which was allegedly built to jam West German television signals in the 1980s. It has the distinction of being voted one of the ugliest structures in Europe.  Apparently the Praguers call it The Rocket because it looks like a rocket standing next to its launch gantry. Look, it’s not art deco or baroque, but it has its own charm to my eye. I’ve seen many more shit buildings that I would pull down first – the Birmingham Central Library would be number one.

But I’d already got my bird’s eye view of Prague from the bell tower of St Vitus Cathedral, so I scratched that idea. Then I remembered the posters I’d seen for the KGB Museum in Malá Strana, looked it up on my phone (a four out of five rating from TripAdvisor), and decided to go there. I walked along the River until I got to Zofin Island which houses a concert hall and various operations renting out pedal boats, rowing boats and the like. I hadn’t had lunch yet, so I thought it may be a place for a sandwich and a beer. Some “pleasure island” this – it was littered with drunks and drug addicts, one lot doing lines of cocaine right in front of me right out in the open. I moved on.

The KGB Museum (essentially two rooms high in Malá Strana a couple of doors away from the American Embassy) could have been good – but the owner kept dashing between guests trying to give the same story to everyone instead of doing a tour every fifteen minutes. He kept on saying “one minute, one minute” and then dash off for five minutes to lay his patter on somebody else. Eventually, I’d had enough and just left – but it was a real pity really because he had a good story to tell and some truly fascinating objects to illustrate it along the way.

As I walked down the hill I stood for a while watching the police road block that searched every single car that simply wanted to drive past the American Embassy.

Back at the hotel, I packed my bags for an early morning departure. In the evening, Lucia and I went back to the terrace of the Villa Richter for dinner with one of Lucia’s Dutch colleagues. Over our meal we watched the lights of Prague switch on as the night set in. Afterwards we walked back to the hotel and got soaked in the most terrific thunderstorm.

At the airport I wondered why the why the word “Bohemian” had come to mean some sort of artist or writer living an unconventional lifestyle because there is nothing particularly unconventional about Prague. So I looked up the etymology and derivation of the word – and discovered that it derives from a French misunderstanding of where gypsies came from. So, actually it started out as a bit of an insult, but today is worn as a badge of distinction by those whom we refer to as “Bohemian”.


Love, light & peace
Llewellyn

Letter from Royal Leamington Spa: 1 of 2010

My dear family & friends

We made it to Portugal in the end, but only just. We might have figured that there was going to be a problem given the severe weather warnings for England, but we crossed our fingers and started out for Luton Airport at 3AM one morning a week before Christmas. We drove into a blizzard on the M1 just past Northampton which turned the roads to slush and made driving conditions hazardous. We were glad to be in the CRV. The car was showered with bucket loads of water every time we passed an eighteen-wheeler truck, reducing visibility to near zero. We passed dozens of abandoned cars as we approached Luton Airport – their owners having decided to trust their feet rather than their cars. I found a space to park the car in a three foot snowdrift right at the entrance to the medium term parking lot where I had prepaid our parking for two weeks. I thought it was very lucky that we should get a parking so close to the entrance. It was only when we got back that I discovered that I had parked my car diagonally across several disabled parking bays. But so did a bunch of other people.

There was chaos in the departures hall with all the early flights already having been cancelled. We felt smug that our flight hadn’t been cancelled. Easyjet checked us in, and we passed security into the departure lounge. First we browsed around the shops and then we waited and waited. I took some pictures of aeroplanes covered in snow. (See pictures in the usual spot at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/llewellynijones/.) I suppose I should have guessed there was a problem because there was absolutely no activity on the airport apron. But I didn’t. Eventually some snow ploughs and tractors came out to clear the apron and runways, and flights were called over the public address system. What I didn’t know was that the flights were being called so that people could go and fetch their luggage on the way to being told to fuck off. All the luggage was unloaded in the arrivals hall, flight by flight. I asked one Easyjet official why our flight had been bumped off the Departures Board, and the bastard lied to me. He said that our flight would be called shortly and that there was no problem. When I realised that there were no planes leaving, I persuaded Lucia to ask the same official what was going on. He told her that our flight had been cancelled. (So, why did the ineffable pratt lie to me and tell Lucia the truth?)

I sent a text message to Barbara & Terry in Portugal with the bad news, and we went to fetch our luggage in the arrivals hall and go back through passport control. Terry searched the Internet for alternative flights while we reclaimed our luggage. And this is where we got fucked. All Easyjet flights up to xmas were full because of the threatened strike by British Airways staff (which never materialised after BA had successfully applied for an injunction against the strike.) Easyjet simply ditched those customers whose flights had been cancelled. You could get a refund (with difficulty), but you were certainly not going to get to your destination on Easyjet before xmas. The best flights Terry could find were on Monarch Airlines from Birmingham to Faro the next morning. Lucia and I sat at Costa Coffee in the arrivals hall while I connected my computer to the Internet via my cellphone and booked the tickets from Birmingham (at great cost.)

We left my car at Luton (on the [correct] assumption that we would be able to drive home on our return) and caught the bus to Coventry, and then a train to Leamington Spa. We took a taxi home and arranged with the driver to pick us up at 4AM to take us to Birmingham Airport. And that’s how we eventually got to Portugal. It wasn’t cheap. I still don’t understand why Luton Airport got snowed in when Gatwick, Stansted and Heathrow managed to keep their runways open. I can tell you what I saw – and that is simply that the “workers” (fuckers) were doing nothing long after the snow had stopped. I wish a pox on them all.

While we cooled my our heels in Leamington Spa overnight, I tried to get a discount on the apartment we had booked in Lisbon given that we would only be spending two nights in the apartment rather than three. The agency, travellingtolisbon, wasn’t interested in my appeal. They didn’t seem to realise that we actually had a choice of whether to honour our reservation or not. I don’t understand why someone would risk losing a reservation and guaranteed payment because the rules say you can’t give a discount once the booking is made. They would rather have lost €200 than have kept a client. How do people get to be so dumb? We eventually decided that we would go to Lisbon for two of the nights we had booked because we really wanted to see the xmas lights. As for travellingtolisbon, they gave us a complimentary bottle of port and promised a 10% discount on our next reservation, but I won’t go back to them. Their efforts to lose a repeat customer were successful.

We landed in Faro a day late in bright sunshine with the temperature touching 20C. We shed layers of clothing on the bus between the aeroplane and the terminal while listening in to the chatter of our fellow travellers. One person wanted to know if she needed her passport to enter Portugal. She was completely serious. I suggested to Lucia (in Afrikaans) that such people should not be allowed to own a passport. In the queue for passport control another genius (who should never have been given a passport) told his family they had to join the “Other Passports” queue because the six “EU” queues were only for American citizens. I heard someone else suggest that the Portuguese must be Welsh because they were also Celts. I could only shake my head in horror.

When we emerged from baggage claim, Barbara and Terry whipped us off to Faro beach for coffee and medronho (meh-dron-yo), Algarvian firewater, and then to Loulé railway station for our journey to Lisbon. The apartment was well appointed with fantastic views (see pictures) over the old business district down to the Tagus and the great bridge of 25April. It used to be called the Salazar Bridge after the fascist dictator who ruled Portugal with an iron fist for nearly 50 years. We strolled around the old business district in the early evening gazing at the xmas lights. We decided that they were much better in 2006, the last time we were in Lisbon for xmas. But they were still good, much better than anything on offer in the UK. We ended the evening at a small family restaurant in the Bairro Alto (High District) sharing a bottle of red wine and some classic Portuguese dishes.

On Sunday morning we went to meet my sister, Barbara, whom we had persuaded to join us for a night in Lisbon, at Entrecampos railway station. We were nearly late because it was Sunday and all the ticket offices were closed and we had to use the Lisbon transport ticket machines. The machines had an English button, but it didn’t really help. I chose to use the Portuguese which I understood well enough. We chose our tickets and put €20 in the machine. The machine gave us our €20 back. Then I tried my credit card, but that wouldn’t work either. On closer inspection I eventually realised that the machines would only accept €10 notes and less. We didn’t have any €10 notes so we emptied our pockets and purses to harvest all the coins we had and only just made the fare with a few 10cent coins to spare.

We took Barbara back to the apartment (with which she was duly impressed) via a famous pastry shop, the Confeitaria Nacional. We absorbed the view from the apartment over pastries and coffee before heading out again in the late morning. We wound our way down to the riverfront and caught a tram to the old docks under the great bridge of 25April where we sipped at beers in the bright sunshine. We followed the riverside walk to Belém for more pastries and coffee, and then to famous Mosteiro dos Jerónimos for a xmas concert by Os Violinhos, The Little Violinists. The orchestra is made up of students from the Lisbon Academy of Music from around five to fourteen years old. You can be certain that many of them will be playing in the great orchestras of the world in a couple of years’ time. Like most concerts in Portugal, we had to put up with people walking around and making a noise, but it was fun anyway. Outside the monastery the bright sunshine had turned into a heavy downpour of rain and we had to run for cover at the tram stop. Back in the old business district we hugged the walls to avoid the pelting rain and made our way to dinner in the Bairro Alto again via a few tram journeys. After dinner we chose a taxi to take us back to the apartment rather than brave the rain again.

In the morning we checked out of the apartment and left our luggage with travellingtolisbon while we went exploring again. We visited Mae d'Agua first, the giant reservoir in the middle of Lisbon which sits at the end of the Águas Livres Aqueduct. The aqueduct was built in the mid-1700s to bring the city its first clean drinking water and, quite amazingly, survived the giant earthquake of 1755. From there we wondered through the Rato (rat) district to the park in Principe Real (for more coffee and firewater), before cutting through the Bairro Alto to an art and handicraft shop that Barbara had found in one of the local newspapers. I satisfied myself taking pictures of the Bairro Alto while Lucia and Barbara pored over the wares in the shop. With our shopping done we retrieved our luggage and caught the bus to the Park of Nations (Parque das Nações) where we caught a train back to Loulé in the early evening. On the promenade next to the Tagus I tried to explain the difference between a suspension bridge and a cable-stayed bridge to Barbara as we marvelled at the Ponte Vasco da Gama, the longest bridge in Europe. Well, that’s what Wikipedia says. I think I lost Barbara.

On the train back to Loulé I was completely absorbed by a young woman (let’s say university age) who wiggled and dipped and jived in her seat for the FULL three-hour journey as she listened to music on her computer. I absolutely drew the line when she started singing out loud and HORRIBLY off key. I clapped my hands and glared at her. England would have been proud of me.

We were nowhere near as adventurous at Barbara’s and Terry’s home at Espargal in the Algarve hills. We tried to get to the beach at Praia do Garrão every day (see pictures), no matter the weather. Lucia and I are beach people in our souls and the hardest part of living in Leamington Spa is that we are about as far from the sea as you can get in the UK. Edgar and Hazel would have loved to have been with us, but they have a couple of months to go before they can travel around Europe with us at will on their Pet Passports. Barbara and Terry have more than enough animals to keep us busy. I was particularly exercised by Bobby their latest addition who is a semi-feral dog and very nervous. I used and tried many of the Dog Whisperer’s techniques (National Geographic channel) on him with some success. Terry might argue differently.

I loved walking barefoot on the beach again, no matter the weather. My long-term goal in life is to live by the sea. We envied the owners of the million pound mansions at Vale de Lobo (Wolf Valley) which had an uninterrupted view of the beach and the coastline. At the end of a long walk it was our habit to retire to one of the beach restaurants for a coffee or a beer, and to gaze out to sea and reflect on life.

If it wasn’t the beach, we were probably out walking the dogs with Barbara and Terry in the hills that surround their house in between bursts of rain. The Algibre River was rushing fiercely towards the sea at the bottom of the valley. It’s a dry river bed for most of the year and this was the first time we had seen it in flood. Our walks invariably ended at the Café Coral for coffee and pastries in the village of Benafim on the other side of the valley.

We stayed in most nights next to the fire rather than venture out to a restaurant in one of the surrounding villages. Café Coral cooked a special veal dish (blanquette de veau) for Barbara on the night we arrived in Espargal. I managed to send a glass of red wine flying off the table and into Lucia’s lap as I tried to mime swimming across a snooker table. Oh, don’t ask.

The day before xmas I cooked two batches of Coq Au Vin for an expatriate xmas dinner in Espargal held at Barbara and Terry’s house. The theory was that it would be easy to warm the dish when the guests arrived. Unfortunately we weren’t helped by the electrics, which decided to play silly buggers with our preparations on xmas day, dimming the lights, paralysing the microwave and sending the oven into a hissy fit. We made do. I prepared way too much Coq Au Vin which we were still eating for the next two nights. In fact, Barbara only finished the last of it long after we had left.

Another 20 kilometres into the hills of the Algarve is the village Monte Ruivo (Red Mountain) where our favourite medronho distillery is located. Medronho (meh-dron-yo) is made from the distilled fruit of the strawberry tree (arbutus unedo) (which is entirely different from the more common garden strawberry.) We ventured to the village through a storm which left tree branches lying in the roads and flattened road signs. At the distillery medronho man was hard at work stoking the fire of his copper still. A steady flow of clear liquid poured out the other end into a bucket. I bought four bottles which we wrapped in bubblewrap for the journey home in our suitcases.

The time to leave came all too soon. After checking our luggage in we sat on a bench outside Faro airport breathing in the warm fragrant air and feeling the sun tingling on out skin. Back at Luton airport outside London the temperature was 1C and the weak sun made no difference whatsoever. There was a joyous reunion with Edgar and Hazel when we went to fetch them and the cats at the kennel the next day. Edgar smothered us in kisses and Hazel ran round and round in small circles.

And that more-or-less brings us to where we are now. We visited Julian, Sandra and Chloe in Tonbridge (south-east of London) on Saturday, and on Sunday we went to Anne and Richard for Anne’s birthday do over lunch.

Here in Leamington Spa, it’s been snowing the whole afternoon and the ground is covered in a layer of white.

That’s it for now
Love, light & peace
Llewellyn

Letter from Royal Leamington Spa: 21 of 2009

My dear family & friends

Lucia has her new spouse visa to remain in the UK, and a Schengen visa so that we can go to Portugal this xmas. But what a tale of woe – of a lack of understanding and missed opportunity.

In November 2007 we engaged a migration agent, by the name of Wessel Ludewig from Global Migrations SA in Cape Town, to help us with Lucia’s application. Lucia was duly granted her spouse visa with the following endorsement in her passport: “SETTLEMENT SPOUSE/CP(KOL REQ) L.I.Jones 29/08/66”

We asked Wessel what “KOL REQ” meant. He said it meant “Collection Required” which, in turn, meant that I would either have to be with Lucia, or at least be in the country whenever she entered the UK. Some of you may even remember us telling you this. We thought: “Wow, that’s harsh, they really are trying to keep people out of this country.” But what we have now found out was that Wessel Ludewig was talking shit. He didn’t know the answer and simply bullshitted us to make it look like he knew what he was doing, and to get a cheque out of us.

“KOL REQ” actually means “Knowledge Of Language and Life Required.” This is the test that all foreigners who want to settle in the UK permanently must pass. But you see Lucia was granted this type of visa because we had been married for longer than five years when we applied for the settlement visa. This essentially gives her the immediate right to permanent residence so long as she passed her “Knowledge of Life” when she arrived in the country. That’s was KOL REQ means and that’s what we didn’t know because some bastard lied to us. We didn’t even think of investigating it further because Ludewig’s bullshit sounded sort of reasonable and he was the alleged expert. Right? Why do people do that? What skin would it have been off his nose to say, “I don’t know.” Then I would have gone and found out.

But we only found this out when we went to the Border Agency office in Solihull last week when we applied for Lucia’s “Further Leave to Remain – Marriage”, FLR(M).

This wasn’t the first failure in Global Migration SA’s woeful service to us. Lucia was nearly refused entry when we first entered on the spouse visa because she didn’t have a recent chest Xray with her. Those are the rules: people from certain areas have to present Xrays to show that they are free of TB when they first enter on residence visa. Wessel Ludewig didn’t tell us this because he didn’t know as he admitted when I made an angry telephone call to him from Heathrow.

I wrote to Wessel and every other email address at Global Migration SA to demand reimbursement for the extra £665 we had to shell out for the extension to Lucia’s visa: “We contracted with you to provide a service of expert knowledge. You didn’t, and I want my money back. Please send me a cheque for the £665 we are out of pocket.”

The managing director of the company, Leon Isaacson, wrote back to say that Ludewig no longer worked for the company and, essentially, refusing to pay out. He said he would check my file and get back to me, but he hasn’t. I’ll write to him once more, but after that I’m sending my complaint to every journalist I ever worked with in SA along with a couple of other concerns I think should be addressed.

So to my South African friends: if you hear of someone looking for professional assistance with migration to the UK, or Australia, or the States, please advise them very strongly to stay away from Global Migration SA, Wessel Ludewig and Leon Isaacson. Spread the word: they don’t have a clue.

That’s not the only grief I’ve had over the past couple of weeks. I had to fight to get the correct version of Windows7 sent to me which I bought for the entertainment computer attached to our TV in the living room. I eventually emailed the CEO of Hewlett-Packard as well as the MD of HP’s call centre in Cape Town. I got what I ordered and installed Windows7. I don’t like it. So I essentially wiped my hard drive clean and reinstalled Vista from the factory image. But, for the life of me, I just couldn’t get the computer back to the original state. For some reason the nVidia graphics drivers aren’t behaving the way they did before. So I installed Windows7 again, and then back to Vista, and back to Windows7 again over a couple of days. No joy. I’m going to be emailing those CEO’s expressing my disappointment again.

You may also remember from my last letter that I bought some really cheap printer ink cartridges over the internet. Well, wasn’t that a bad idea. I think the ink was possibly a bit too cheap, because it screwed up my printer in a day. It took me ages to get the printer working properly again.

On the home front, you may also remember that Edgar had caught a stomach bug. He eventually got better after a trip to the vet, but as soon as he was better Hazel caught kennel cough (tracheobronchitis), which is a highly contagious canine illness. Then as soon as she got better, he got the tummy thing again. They appear to be well and healthy now, which is just as well because they are off to the kennels for our holiday tomorrow.

It’s been getting much colder as one might expect in December in the UK. We’ve had our first frosts which means we have to de-ice the cars in the morning. What I still don’t quite understand is how we get a thick layer of ice on the inside of the windscreen. I usually go outside after breakfast (in my pyjamas) and turn both cars on with the demisters going full blast, and then dash back inside and watch them from the warmth of the lounge. Tigger, our Burmese cat, has taken to sleeping on top of computers – which isn’t really good for the computers as they soon start to overheat. I think I have finally persuaded him that it’s not a good idea. Strange looking “flowers” are also appearing down our road as neighbours begin to wrap their sensitive plants a polythene coat to protect them from the frost.

In terms of adventures, we went to Bourton-on-the-water in the Cotswolds a couple of weekends ago because it looked cute on a television programme I saw. And it is, but after a while Cotswolds towns become more-or-less indistinguishable from one another. See the pictures in the usual place at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/llewellynijones. We drove home via Burford and Banbury as night set in (four o’clock in the afternoon) and it began to rain. Somewhere between Burford and Banbury we were following a driver whom I would label as a “slow coach” when up braked sharply as a deer appeared in his headlights. Just as I was thinking that it was a fluke that he hadn’t hit the deer, the deer’s mate came charging across the road in front of me. I now know that my ABS braking works.

It reminded of the first or second time that Lucia and I drove from Cape Town to George together. I was driving Lucia’s Mercedes at around 150/160 km/h at night just outside Caledon when a really large buck sprang into the road in front of us. I hit the brakes, went down through the gears and eased gently over the road. We missed it. Lucia was really impressed with my skill, but I must confess, it was probably blind luck.

What else?

I was walking the dogs in Northumberland Road a few evenings ago when a little Corsa with three “heavy dudes” pulled up to the sidewalk and hooted. A young lass, who had been leaning up against a wall nearby, walked to the passenger window and gave the occupant some money. He, in turn, gave her a small plastic bag with some white powder in it. I was absolutely aghast that they could be so open about it. I mean, this might be regarded as normal on a sink estate, but this was on Northumberland Road, possibly the poshest address in Leamington Spa.

In another vein, I’ve been to McDonald’s and KFC a few times recently and have noted that nearly all the staff are foreigners – mostly Indians and East Europeans. Given the unemployment rate in the UK, this tends to indicate how many British people prefer the dole to a low-paid job. And then they complain that foreigners are taking their jobs. Hmm?

Which reminds of a line from comedian Al Murray’s latest DVD referring to the children of the lower classes: “Children!” he says, “Those aren’t children. They’re a Benefits based pyramid scheme.”

He also describes the establishment of the modern Olympic Games thus: “After the War, the First War, the English and the French got together, and the English said to the French: You know the way you lot like to run away from the sound of gunfire? Well, this is what we’ll do: We’ll fire a gun and then you lot run towards that white flag. And that’s how the Olympics started.”

Another one: “There’s no German word for sorry, but fourteen words for attack.”

I have created new Hotmail and Yahoo! email addresses for myself. The spam on my Gmail account is getting annoying. Googlemail is really good in how it isolates spam and junk mail and stores it somewhere else. But it still clutters up your inbox “allowance” and you have to go and physically delete it. I just don’t want it. It offends my sense of order and sets me off dreaming of medieval punishments for the perpetrators of this blight on the Internet order. The easiest thing to do seems to be to start again somewhere else with a clean account and abandon the Gmail account. Most of the spam I get is for dodgy internet pharmacies offering fake medicines and a few others some porn. The usual rule is never to use the UNSUBSCRIBE link on these emails because that just confirms your email address. But this site http://www.wikihow.com/Unsubscribe-from-Spam makes an interesting point: Look for the patterns; then choose five or ten emails that clearly come from the same sponsor and UNSUBSCRIBE. You’ve got nothing to lose if you were going to abandon the account anyway. So, I’m going to try it; I’ll let you know how I get on.

That’s it for now; we’re off to Portugal at the crack of dawn on Friday.
Love, light & peace
Llewellyn

Letter from Royal Leamington Spa: 20 of 2009

My dear family & friends

I’ve been watching Edgar closely today for signs that I should take him to the vet. He must have eaten something – probably while we were out walking – that didn’t agree with him. I hadn’t realised there was a problem until I walked into the living room downstairs late yesterday afternoon to discover that he had been sick and poohed everywhere. I didn’t hear what was happening because I’d been listening to Portuguese radio while doodling around on my computer. Unfortunately I’m also not very good at noticing the signs of distress, unlike Lucia who seems to know what the animals want before they themselves know they want it. If Lucia had been home I would have left it to her to clean everything up – that’s the agreement we struck before we even got the dogs. If I had wanted to clean up sick and pooh from the living room floor, I would have had children. But Lucia wasn’t home, so I had bite back my gag reflexes and do it myself. You have got to know that I wasn’t happy. We left him in the conservatory with an extra heater overnight to minimise the effect of any accidents. Lucia woke up at 2AM to check that he was alright. I didn’t.

But it reminded me of a line I recently heard from some comedian on late-night television – it was probably Russell Howard. I forget what the skit was about, but he said: “After twenty minutes you couldn’t tell what was pooh and what was chocolate.” Did that gross you out? Yeah, me too. I laughed anyway.

And before you get the wrong idea about my television viewing habits, I don’t actually stay up all hours to watch this stuff. We’ve got one of these clever Sky satellite receivers that allow one to record hours and hours of television at the touch of a button. We then watch it at a more sociable hour (usually when I’m ironing.) I’ve recently been recording all the stand-up comedy shows on the Comedy Central channel. My conclusion is that there are a lot of not-very-funny people out there – although just enough to keep me watching.

There haven’t been many adventures since I last wrote. We did go to the Birmingham Botanical Gardens two weeks ago, but it started pissing with rain when we got there. We carefully viewed everything in the glasshouses in the hope that the rain would soon stop. It didn’t. We eventually ventured out into the wind and rain to see what was there. We were the only people who did. I think it would be a lot nicer in spring or summer. Afterwards I took Lucia to the South African shop in Harborne – a western suburb of Birmingham. She loaded up on Provita and I bought the last of the store’s Lunch Bars.

Last weekend we went into Birmingham again to do some xmas shopping and to see Birmingham’s Frankfurt Christmas Market. It rained again. We spent two hours wondering around the Bullring Shopping Centre looking for things that we never found. Then we ventured up New Street in the rain towards the Town Hall viewing the wares at the market and dodging puddles. Lucia didn’t have the right shoes on for the rain and her feet were soon sodden. There was a lot of repetition – stalls selling exactly the same tat as each other. There were few genuine independent craft stalls where one could pore over their goods. We shared some bratwurst at one stall and some beer at another as well as a plate of German fried potatoes and mushrooms. But we were getting cold and wet so we caught the train home.

And talking of disappointing markets, Leamington Spa has its own xmas market every Sunday down The Parade. But it’s mostly just tat that you can find at any market and a few rides from Barker’s funfair. It seems a waste to close the road for that.

On the technology front, I received my free disks (it was one of the benefits when I bought my new computer) for the new Windows7 operating system the other day. It might have been fun if they had sent me the right version. It took me two hours to figure that out that I had been sent the wrong thing, and then another two hours on the phone trying to make sure that I would get the right version. I ended up talking to call centres in South Africa, Estonia and Poland. Oh well, the post marks will be interesting.

Another interesting experiment revolved around my printer which was running out of ink. A set of the Canon ink cartridges costs nearly £60. But when I bought the printer (several years ago) I was told that generic ink cartridges would be available in a year or two. So I searched around on the Internet for the generic cartridges and bought four sets for £20. So the difference here is £5 for a set of generic cartridges or £60 for a set from Canon. No, I don’t know what the catch is either. Perhaps somebody can enlighten me. The generic cartridges seem to work fine although they are a bit messier when you change them.

What else?

I’ve been getting friendlier with Helder at the Pastelaria Portuguesa in Warwick. I usually time my morning walk with the dogs to get there just after he opens. We each have a coffee (a bica cheia for my Portuguese correspondents) and tell stories. He recently told me the story of how he became a baker because I asked him about his hand-written recipe book which looked well-used and quite old .

When he was 13 years old his family was so poor that he had to go out and get a job. His school had night classes for all the other children like him who also had to work during the day. His first job was in a foundry with his stepfather. After the first shift he says you couldn’t tell what was a bruise and what was blood on his shoulder. He stayed for a month to get the pay cheque and then asked his stepfather to tell the boss that he wasn’t coming back.

After getting that first pay cheque he went out for a drink with some friends after school. (Remember he was going to school at night.) They each had these very small beers (200ml) which you can buy in Portugal, and it was the 1970s so nobody really minded if a 13-year-old was buying beer. They ended up in conversation (as one does) with an older person who bought them some much bigger beers. They got pissed.

At some point the older person said: “Goodbye, I’ve got to go to work.”
Helder said to him: “It’s midnight, where do you work?”
“In a bakery,” said the older dude.
Helder asked: “Is it nice work?” and he said: “Yes” so Helder said: “Are they looking for people?”
And Helder went to work with him.
At the end of the shift the bakery owner offered him a full-time job.
His mother was fairly freaked when he got home at midday the next day (remember no cell phones in the 1970s), but he was able to give her the money for the night’s work that he had just earned.

And that is how Helder became a baker with a full-time job at age 13.

I find this story very humbling. We all like to tell stories of how hard we’ve had it at some point in our lives. But actually most of us have been coddled into softness. And then you meet somebody who really did have it hard, and we cannot compare.

That’s it
Love, light & peace
Llewellyn


http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/llewellynijones

Letter from Royal Leamington Spa: 19 of 2009

My dear family & friends

The clocks went back an hour from British Summer Time to Greenwich Mean Time two weeks ago. That means that it’s dark by about quarter to five in the afternoon now. Getting used to the early darkness as a South African is quite an adjustment. It feels as though the day is ending just after it’s begun. I see school children walking home in the dark every day; I suppose it’s as quite normal and natural for them, but I struggle to get my head around the concept. I feel as though my day is being stolen.

In a more serious vein, Lucia and I received new debit cards from HSBC in the post a few weeks ago. I thought it was a bit strange because our HSBC UK cards were still valid for the next two or three years. But we carefully cut up our old cards into lots of small pieces. This was a mistake because the new cards were actually for our offshore HSBC account in Jersey which had changed their debit card service provider from Maestro to Visa. I only figured this out when I was doing our accounts and saw strange transactions on our offshore account which shouldn’t have been there. We had assumed that the new cards were for our onshore account because they were Visa debit cards. On closer inspection though, we later noted that the account number and sort code (branch code, for the South Africans) were clearly printed on the new cards. We sheepishly called HSBC to declare that we had destroyed the wrong cards and to apply for new ones. Mine arrived in two days.

One of the things that still amazes here is that credit cards, debit cards and chequebooks are sent to clients by normal postal mail. They stopped doing that in South Africa a LONG time ago when the banks suddenly noticed that none of these items were arriving at their intended recipient but were rather being stolen by the postal workers. The worst culprits were at the big sorting office for Johannesburg. I remember when the Post Office decided to put in some hidden cameras to catch the thieves. They did and they tried to fire them, but they couldn’t because it caused the most prolonged postal strike in South Africa ever. The workers essentially demanded the right to steal, and they won. Amazon, for instance, will no longer send items to South Africa by normal mail; they will only use courier services at vastly increased cost to the client.

Further to Lucia’s passport travails in my last letter, she went to London last week to apply for a Schengen visa at the Portuguese Consulate in London for our Christmas holidays. The Visa was refused because her British residency visa was valid for less than three months. She has to get a new UK spouse visa before she can get a new Schengen visa. The only problem is that the Brits will only allow new residency visa applications four weeks before the old visa expires. Lucia’s residency visa expires on 31 December which means that she can only apply for a new visa from 5 December. We have booked flights to Portugal on 18 December. The Home Office does provide a “same day” service for “simple” applications, but it costs an extra £300. Luckily the official at the Portuguese Consulate gave Lucia a letter that allows her to walk in at any time instead of having to book an appointment. So with luck we should still be in Portugal for Christmas.

Lucia has been working hard and long hours so there haven’t been many adventures over the weekend. We did go walking in the Clent Hills on the outskirts of Birmingham two weeks ago. You can see the pictures in the usual spot at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/llewellynijones. We started our walk in bright sunshine, but were soon caught in a heavy squall which seemed to blow over as quickly as it arrived. We took cover under a stand of trees while it passed over.

We also went to the Guy Fawkes bonfire and fireworks celebrations at the Old Leamingtonian Rugby Football Club on Thursday night. (See pics.)We locked the animals inside and turned the volume up on the amplifier to placate the dogs, particularly Hazel who doesn’t like loud noises and bangs.

What else?

I nearly had a disaster with my latest batch of biltong. I salted and spiced it as usual and hung it in the biltong box in the garage. But I can’t help checking on it every day, and it was just as well that I did because on day four all six pieces were suddenly covered in mould. I searched on the Internet for a remedy to rescue the batch. At £60 I didn’t really just want to give the meat to the dogs. I found a site which said that I should dab the mould with vinegar. Never a person to do things by half measures, I fairly much bathed the biltong in vinegar. I also removed the biltong box into the conservatory along with one of our heaters to heat and dry the air. The doctoring seems to have worked.

Still on food, I recently discovered flambé. I was watching “Floyd on Africa” on the Travel Channel and I discovered how simple it was to add brandy to your food and set fire to it. As a pyromaniac this was a great discovery with which I had to experiment with immediately. Luckily we had some mini steaks in the fridge which greatly benefitted from the treatment. Since then I’ve even been experimenting with setting fire to my stir fries. It’s great fun. Lucia always looks around nervously for the fire extinguisher as I yell out “Whoosh!” followed by a pleased cackle.

Oh, and I also bought some more technology. A couple of weeks ago we went to dinner with Rebecca, one of Lucia’s colleagues. Rebecca’s partner David was in Japan recently and had bought a really small wireless hand-held keyboard and mouse touchpad called an Ipazzport which was exactly what I’d been looking for for our home entertainment centre. I emailed the manufacturers to find out where I could buy one in the UK and how much it would cost. They replied fairly quickly and it was really cheap so I bought it the next day. (See pics.) I now have everything I want for my home entertainment centre apart from the cabinet which I still have to build.

Finally, I recently noticed that the soles of my shoes have been wearing out very quickly. I bought a pair of (expensive) Timberland boat shoes which lasted just a few months. At first I thought I had bought fakes, but then I noticed that all my shoes are wearing out really quickly. It must be something in surfacing of the roads and sidewalks. Quite strange!

That’s it for now
Love, light & peace
Llewellyn