The holiday I'd like

Isn't this the time of year to go and see the Northern Lights? Wouldn't it be wonderful to take a cruise up the Norwegian coast, stopping at the various towns on the way, and go right into the arctic circle to see the lights?
But suppose it was too cloudy the night we were there. As husband points out, how could we be sure of seeing the lights?

A view from the pew

Singing makes you happy. Singing brings joy to the heart. Singing heartily is like a work out and warms you up. So when my daughter inveigled me into joining our church choir, I agreed. Do you sing?
 Ours is a small choir, usually only three or four of us plus the organist. Our organist organises us, suggests pieces, and she gets us to rehearse. We learn to sing in parts: bass, alto, soprano. Our organist has a lovely clear alto voice that you can hear every week at the Saturday evening mass. We also sing at special masses.
We've sung some special masses in the last year, such as our parish priest's anniversary of his ordination. For these special masses, we've practised what seem to me quite difficult pieces, like Bruckner's Locus Iste, The Deer's Cry and Mozart's Ave Maria. This week we sang at the November mass for the dead. After the communion, the choir sang two pieces: The Deer's Cry and Jesu, lover of my soul. They sounded beautiful. The Jesu has four verses, which we harmonised.  The Deer's Cry  requires a solo voice with a choir later in the piece.  Listen to Rita Connolly sing it, or come to our church and hear our organist sing it.
If you came to that mass for the dead you heard and saw us light candles for and read the names of those dead of the parish. You heard and saw our parish priest's blessings over us at the end of mass, and you heard some of the loveliest singing. You'd have felt at peace, blessed and happy.

Influence of BBC micro today

Why has my daughter now moved to another continent? After recently attending a seminar on the history of educational technology, I now blame this event on the BBC.

1. the BBC micro came out circa 1980, 
2. inspiring the start of the games industry in the UK by the 2000s, which is how 
3. my daughter met people through on-line games in the 201xs.
4. then she played gamers from other countries, even continents
5. then she met one special gamer
6. and emigrated...

all because of educational technology
I recommend Mike Sharples slideshow at https://www.slideshare.net/sharplem/introduction-to-educational-technology-55332225

Gunpowder

Did you watch BBC 1's "Gunpowder"? Critics have welcomed it, wondering why the gunpowder plot of 1605 had not been televised earlier. But watching it, its gory and brutal scenes of pressing to death of someone who wouldn't plead guilty or not guilty, or of hanging, drawing and quartering, you remember why you wouldn't want to remind people of the background, the context at the time, the persecution and killing of English Roman Catholics, their exclusion from Parliament and from the professions for centuries afterwards, despite their professed loyalty to king and country. It was dangerous to tell people you were a Catholic. Indeed, even in the twentieth century, I rarely told people I'd been brought up Catholic.
Once, on an airfield, somehow I mentioned my faith. My fellow glider pilot, a young Scottish woman, was astonished, "I've never met a Catholic", she declared. You'd have thought I had horns growing from my head. Unlike Muslims or Sikhs, Catholics are not visible. They don't wear distinguishing garments, and the most you might see if you're observant is a small cross or crucifix on a lapel.
As I was growing up, in one of the most Catholic parts of England, I learned that I was English, that we were loyal to our royal family, so loyal that I childishly announced after reading another fairy tale, that I was going to marry the prince of England. My mother informed me that I couldn't because I was a Catholic and English princes couldn't be heirs to the throne if they married a Catholic. Nothing daunted, I accepted that law and I loyally carried on being English and Catholic.
You might wonder why I didn't seek a foreign prince, like my daughter's found (he's her prince - not a royal prince) but after a stint working abroad, I decided I liked English men anyhow and came home where I soon met her father. And we lived happily for a couple of decades after.
There are two more episodes to "Gunpowder". It won't end happily ever after.

Ship's cabins

Cruise cabin

Our cruise bedroom, nay, cabin, was adequate with around 160 square feet, twin beds, a space between the beds for husband to stand with his arms on hips and his elbows at my eye height. It was an 'exterior' cabin, meaning it had a window or a porthole. It also had a bathroom, an easy chair, a small round glass-topped table, space for our empty suitcases, more space to store things under the beds, a desk with a screen on it to watch the ship's news and a tray for the kettle and tea mugs.  And there were four mirrored wardrobes with a dozen drawers.
I remember the cabins on the SS St Britain at Bristol, about half the length of this cabin, and not as wide. Each side held three bunk beds, where you berthed perhaps with five strangers.
I wonder how they  managed noro-virus on such ships in the mid 19th century. Here, on the Balmoral, at every entrance to cafe or restaurant or bar or lounge we are exhorted to use the sanitizer on our hands.  "wash, wash, wash" the captain tells us every midday.

Cruising the Baltic

Welcome Aboard The Aylesbury to Marylebone  to Waterloo then Southampton main station

We went by train and taxi to our ship, the Balmoral. This took us 2,444 nautical miles from Southampton and back via the Kiel canal, Copenhagen, Tallinn, St Petersbury, Riga and Warnemunde.

Our ship

The Balmoral has ten decks, 710 cabins, five dining rooms. Our cabin is deck 5. It can carry 1350 guests and 510 crew. Its maximum speed is 18.5 knots. Funny how I got used to hearing that engine speed lulling me to sleep each night. Eventually I woke to it realising that I missed the birds at dawn.

Vocabulary

I referred to our window in our room and got reminded that on a ship it's a porthole and we have a cabin with berths.

Ramblers

We're with the Ramblers group, about 21 people and a leader. We're all in the 'older' age range, old enough to have saved enough to afford this, and to have enough leave to go away for two weeks. Most members of the group have retired or gone part time. Three or four of the men have good heads of hair. Most people wear glasses. We have four single / widowed women, one of whom has Australian permanent residency. I don't learn names because I miss the first few minutes of the first meeting and they're never repeated. I pick most names up during the fortnight, one by one when we sit at the same tables for meals, which we do every night.
One of the innovations that Ian, the leader, suggested, was the use of buddies. When we go on tours, walks and trips, he can't always see us all to count us in and out. A partner might help, though not all of us have partners. So Ian's idea of a buddy is someone who isn't your partner you buddy up with and they check you're present and warns if their buddy is  missing. It works. My buddy turns out to have been an OU tutor like me, and like me, had done her degree and doctorate later in life. In fact, several of the Rambler women did their degree and professional training later in life, having been brought up for the teacher/nurse/typist until-you're-a-wifeAndMother life.
Ramblers briefings are usually every day at the same time in the same place but not for this trip because we only get briefed for shore visits so we sometimes forget and miss a briefing. Fortunately we make most of them. For shore visits we're advised to take insurance proof, debit card, passport, EHIC (for the EU countries Germany, Estonia and Latvia), phone with the number of the local agent. 

Meals

Food on board was good quality, varied and plentiful with starters, soups, salads & main courses followed by desert and coffee.

A lunch menu

 One dinner menu for example:

Starters

citrus cocktail chilled orange and grapefruit segments, dressed with grenadine
roast beef rolls with asparagus
roasted strip loin, filled with grilled green asparagus and served on lettuce with sour cream and chive dressing. 

Soups

fisherman's broth : fish broth with carrots, fennel julienne and salmon quenelles
cream of lamb with root vegetables
mango gazpacho: cold mango soup garnished with red onions, cucumber, coriander & drizzled [sic] with extra virgin olive oil
I've cut out some of the creative descriptions

Salads

house salad with a  choice of dressing
a selection of market fresh seasonal ingredients with a choice of honey mustard, balsamic, Caesar, thousand island or creamy garlic and herb dressing 
Avocado salad with pineapple
a medley of diced avocado and pineapple tossed in an orange vinaigrette, served ... with lettuce

Main courses

pan fried lemon sole with butter sauce
grilled corn fed chicken breast
roast veal leg
lasagna al forno
salmon trio
and there was a vegetarian dish each day and a British dish of the day such as Suffolk stew. on top of that, grilled fish, pasta, omelettes were always available if nothing else met your fancy. Finally deserts were served.

Lunch in the Spey restaurant

If you had dietary requirements, your waiter gave you the dinner menu the night before to choose from and sorted it with the chef before you arrived. so for example if  you fancy the tagliatelle "perugia", but avoid gluten, then the chef would prepare it with gluten-free tagliatelle . 

On the last weekend, they arranged a Neptune menu - loads of seafood.

Fish picture - lettuce represents the seaweed

Seafood Neptune lunch

Unfortunately, it was the same day that Ramblers had our afternoon English tea. Having eaten so much seafood we had hardly any room for the dainty and delicious sandwiches and cakes with proper leaf tea in the Observatory lounge.

English high tea

Crew

The captain, Lars Juel Kjeldsen, a Dane who'd lived in Sweden, welcomed us to the ship and gave us midday updates on progress on sea days. He had a tag phrase, "it is what it is" about the weather or life.
On the last night, he gave awards to nominated members of staff for their particularly good service. I daresay they deserved it; i cannot think of time or place where all the staff seemed so happy to see you and serve you and talk with you and remember you. We had our stewardess, Joecyn and Billy our waiter. Both were from the Philippines. Perhaps that's why there were Tagalog classes during the voyage. I learned to say good evening to them: "Magandang gabi". I also met crew from Bali, India and Thailand.

Activities at sea 

Each day, whether or not a shore day, offered activities, announced in the ship's "Daily Times" a short newsletter that arrived in your cabin in the early evening. Activities included: yoga, Pilates, line dancing, ball room dancing, fitness classes,use of the gym,  Bridge, chess, craft, knitting. Classes were offered on Haiku, cooking Thai massage, iNdiean head massage. There were talks on Faberge & the treasure of the Tsars, on genealogy, Port talks e.g. on Copenhagen or the Hanseatic nations. Some went to bingo or quizzes, or gambling. There were shows every evening - one evening specialized on Great Britain and everyone sang English, Irish, Welsh or Scottish songs, wore red, white and blue, and waved Union Jacks.

Russian Capella singers

St Petersburg opera singer

In St Petersburg, we visited the cathedral in St Peter and Paul's Fortress where we heard these professional opera singers. The first minute is the heavily Russian accented introduction. Listen for the deep baritones in the last half minute. It's amazing. 

More cities to describe but others have described them before me.

Summer was good(ish)

Summer was fun, perhaps cos daughter was home. Together we got new hens.

The college of education that trained us for teaching decided to award us honorary degrees, which meant getting together with old friends from college.

A nephew of my husband's got married. He'd married someone from South Africa so had a wedding there and then another service and celebration over here for his side of the family and her UK friends.

Husband and I went on holiday with SD #2 and her family to Bavaria. From our holiday house we could see para gliders circling.

Late husband would have been 65. This is the last photo of him, taken the first day of that holiday, on the gliding field in France.
Our mother died.

Then daughter emigrated.

Preparing for October

This last week I've mostly been preparing for our holiday. I've packed and repacked, listed what to pack, found a suitcase to pack, window shopped for other suitcases. So all rather muddly and messy.
The hens have someone to keep an eye on them and collect their eggs - not many at the moment.
WE're going on our first cruise ever. Normally we go on rambling holidays with the company Ramblers.
But this time we're going on one of their Cruise and Walk to Discover the Baltic. We go through the Kiel Canal, to Copenhagen, then Tallinin in Estonia, and spend a day at St Petersburg. We return via Riga in Latvia and Warnemunde with a trip to Rostock, before coming home. It'll take two weeks.

Big big books

I do wish that publishers would create books that I can carry. Look at the size of this Jodi Picoult book - a hardback that didn't cost much, yet it is enormous. Compare its size to those paperbacks of the fifties and sixties, and of earlier, when books were expensive. Then you could fit a book into a handbag, or even a pocket, to read it as and where and when was convenient. Now you need a desk to hold these big books as you read them because they are so heavy.
One of my favourite old books is Arthur Ransome's Old Peter's  Russian Tales, which is a small now battered red book of six and a half inches by four and a quarter inches by less than an inch.  The edition I have was printed in 1942 and became my mother's in 1943. It is small enough to hide in a deep pocket, or a small handbook, light and easy for travelling. Perhaps I'll take it on holiday in October.
Do we have to be so ostentatious that we show what we're reading instead of just enjoying that private moment in another world?

La Motte du Caire gliding

La Motte du Caire airfield used to have a web cam but it's not been working for six months. Today I cannot look at the airfield, out to the mountains.

Belonging to sports clubs

"Tell us about sports clubs you have belonged to", asked a Toastmaster.
Now I belong to a tae kwon do club, where I kick people, or rather I get kicked, cos the idea is that it's a defensive martial art, and I should be able to block kicks and punches. I like the club, not only because of it being a fun way to get and keep fit, but also cos I learn new things, things I find hard to do and so I achieve when I do them. And on top of that, it's a mixture of people training, old and young. I'm probably the oldest in the club, but I train with 16 year-olds and even with six-year-olds. That can be fun.
Decades ago, I joined a gliding club. As a young single woman, I immediately realised this was a good idea for the amount of talent on the field, literally on the gliding field. Many healthy young men with enough energy, intelligence and money were out on that gliding field. You have to have a job and some money to afford to fly. So there weren't many women competing for attention but plenty of men: tall men and short men, men in the services and men at the local university. Some were highly educated, but one, learning I was teaching English as a Foreign Language to non-native English speakers, said, "Oh great! I'm trying to get my English 'O' level." That was not a good pick-up line for me. One young man was tall and blond and beautiful and intelligent - he hardly noticed me. Another somewhat plump chap with straggly whiskers would come on the field in wearing green operating theatre pyjamas being a trainee doctor. The summer of 1976 was incredibly hot so the pyjamas were understandable because they were so comfortable. I discarded him because of his desert's disease (wandering palms).  My language students and I had to beg lifts out to the airfield, and one day a curly haired young man with thick rimmed 1960 style glasses and a geeky jumper picked us up in a big white Volvo estate. Not trusting his driving I sat in the back but leaned over to remark on all the fancy dials on his car's dashboard. That drew his attention to me. When we'd finished gliding, that evening, several of us went out for a meal together, foreign students, green pyjamas, blond beauty, geeky glasses and I. Then we went back to someone else's for a drink. But finally, geeky glasses and I finished the evening together for coffee.
 
Fellow toastmasters, I married him.

Another funeral

Mum's older cousin died a few weeks after her. He was the last of her cousins, the last of  that generation.
This photo is of him on the canal trip we made in 2013 at Birmingham, a family get-together that one of my cousins organised. Thanks to him I knew my mum's cousin and his family.

"Slightly nutty Nanna"

"Slightly nutty Nanna" is the fond epithet afforded me by one of my relations, a SiL. I quite like SNN. If I weren't slightly nutty, I wouldn't at my age be able to do the physical things I can do, like tae kwon do. It's thanks to another relation that I took that up in my early fifties, keeping a teenager company. Now another teenage relative keeps me company at tae kwon do.
Slightly nutty Nanna last week had the good luck to be invited on holiday in Bavaria with a family of young relations, where we climbed every mountain (well we walked up one),  and drank copious amounts of Bavarian beer, that is, some of us drank beer and none of us drank copious amounts.
One afternoon, leaving Gran'pa behind, we went for a first ride ever for some of the shorter members of the family, in a cable car, and a round trip walk in the lower slopes of the mountains. We saw black butterflies with white tips, a huge ant hill, and several cows or bullocks with bells called scheller.

We crossed a bridge on the way.
"Beware of the trolls!" warned SiL. SNN threatened to puke on them to scare them off.

Our Ferienhaus (holiday cottage) was near the bottom of the mountains, but still an 800m walk up from the town (Oberstdorf). Each day, above the summit of the mountain, we watched yellow, flamingo pink and white sails of hang gliders whose pilots must have taken the cable car on and on further to the very top. Somewhere up there, they jumped off into the air a couple of thousand feet above our Ferienhaus, soared in any thermals they could find, then glided down to the landing field in the valley below us. You could hear a raucous chain saw and the rushing of the river, an occasional bird twitter and an engine from the cable car vibrate far off from the house. Husband alias G'pa stretches out on the path sunbathing his hands sheltering his eyes

Mum

My happy mother, beautiful mind, fun to be with.

May month

May was a busy month for

• work, which I enjoyed because it included a writing week with research colleagues in a Cotswold village. See some photos on Twitter or Facebook
• meeting old friends from decades ago when honorary degrees were awarded at the Royal Festival Hall 
• visiting aged auntie and getting her old carpet changed for new. No flying carpets, or magic lamps or genies sadly. 
• washing a hen. And losing an old one.
• Just a nice month - sunset near us

New hens

I'm back to five hens now. Two new ones joined us a couple of weeks ago. One is a Rhode Island Red, and the other some sort of Ameraucana, with a fluffy tail and a coronet of feathers. We'll call her Crown or Queenie (to go with Lady Grey).
Lady attacks them both to make sure they knows their place in the pecking order. Here's Ebony. Her feathers are black with a glint of petrol green.
And we're getting eggs again. Good.

Three funerals

Going to three funerals in less than a year is a bit unfortunate. This week the third of the funerals was of a colleague, Sheligh, a couple of years younger than me. She used to tease me about being older than her, yet she's died. She got liver cancer. Why? It's supposed to be rare, yet I know three people who've had liver problems, two died, one had a transplant.
Sheligh used to help us with all the practicalities of research, like finding recording devices, and she kept our grumpy director of studies in order, inquiring sweetly when he was effing and blinding, "problem Geoff?" She asked to go part-time, but they said it was a full time job, so she retired early. They first replaced her with a part-time temp - so much for it being a full time job, and then removed the post. In the meantime, Sheligh who'd thought to fulfill her pleasure in gardening, developed arthritis in her fingers and couldn't enjoy that part of her retirement so much. Then the cancer - they discovered it too late to do anything. She leaves a husband and four children. Sad.

Family influence

Today is my son's birthday. He influenced his family, and one really good influence happened on a car journey. Son sat next to me as I worried about my doctoral viva, and he told me about Toastmasters, the club where you practise speaking in front of people. He asked me to speak for two minutes about my doctoral topic, and I did!  Shortly afterwards, I found our local Toastmasters club and joined. It was such a useful experience that I told his sister, and she joined. Then a year or two later, when his step-sister had to make a speech at a wedding, she joined, and she got her partner to join too. The two of them got so involved that they were on the local committee helping out a lot.
All through the influence of one member of the family.

My hen, Gigi

I had a hen and my hen pleased me and I fed my hen under yonder tree. Pretty hen, Gigi, is no more. She'd been sitting around looking sorry for herself for the last five days, walking, no, waddling, less and less. Tuesday she sat under the Hazel tree, which when I noticed because the other three hens came running out to me but Gigi just stayed nestled in the leaves. Each day got worse. Yesterday morning she struggled to leave the coop, so I took her to the vet.
The vet said she was egg bound. Gigi hasn't been laying eggs for weeks and months, but I wasn't surprised because of it being winter, and she is a bit old at three years. But apparently she'd still been ovulating, the yolks had got stuck at some damaged place in the oviduct, and accumulated in the abdomen, gathering germs. The swollen abdomen made it hard for her to breathe, and eating when you can't breathe is difficult. Her crop was empty and she was very thin. Poor thing looked as unhappy as my 93 year old mother.
I left her at the vet's.

Lime blossom tea - not for the wasps

The council, one of them, town or vale or county, has pollarded the limes in our street.
Perhaps this Autumn we'll have fewer wasp nests because there won't be as many insects enjoying the  sweet lime sap for the wasps to eat.
On the other hand, this year I won't be getting my fresh lime blossom tea from these trees.

Tae kwon do progress

My daughter needed to do a sport for her Duke of Edinburgh Award, and found and chose a local tae kwon do club, to which I had to take her. It wasn't a very salubrious walk however, so I would stay and wait for her. Boring!
Then I realised that Bytomic tae kwon do isn't just for kids; they were taking from six to fifty-six. I was then younger than 56 so I joined in. Years later, I'm still going, have attained first Dan black belt and know a lot more about Korea where this martial art started in 1956, than I ever guessed I would! And am I fit! From a health check I had a month or so ago my metabolic age apparently is younger than my chronological age by about 15 years. That means I'm metabolically younger than I was when I started tae kwon do.
I don't rate my skills highly though, so I need extra practice and training, probably more than the younger members do in order for me to keep up with them. Some ways I do that are to

• go to more than one class a week 
• cross-train with a variety of instructors, 
• attend the black belt sessions every six months
• aim to grade
• participate in tournaments

Now I'm so pants, so slow and clumsy that I have only participated in two or three tournaments. So you can imagine how chuffed I am that at yesterday's tournament I gained a medal for my pants patterns!
I must tell my daughter. And by the way, they've taken away the upper age limit, so if you're near or over 56, please come and join so I'm not the only older woman in the club.

Biphosphonate news

Today the BBC tells us that Osteoporosis drugs may make bones weaker drug.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-39122541. Their apparent success has been that when bone density is measured, it is denser when on the drugs than off. But that doesn't say what the quality of dense is. The Eiffel Tower would be denser if you put concrete in its spaces, but it wouldn't stay up better. These biphosophonate drugs stop old bone being removed, hence old and new bone cells are present, and more cells equals denser. Now scientists have found a new way to measure bone, and find hairline cracks. Ha! I could have told you biphosophonates can't have been effective because it was such a horrible drug to take  We know biphosophonates are dangerous because they are so acidic that patients must stand or sit up to take it and stay upright for half an hour and take it with water only once a week, or inject it even less often.

In 2010, I broke my hand. Yet, they didn't check me for osteoporosis, despite being over 50.
 I should have got me enough vitamin D, then I wouldn't have broken the bone or got BC. But after the BC and prescribing a BC drug that induces osteoporosis, a DEXA scan showed I had osteoporosis so they gave me biphosphonates. A couple of years later, a DEXA scan showed I had less osteoporosis, and my GP accepted I came off the drug, not realising that I stopped them every few months because of the joint and bone pain that spoilt my tae kwon do activities. But I'd changed my diet and got more vitamin D (sun & supplements).

Imagine taking this drug from 60 till 90... that's when the cracks show - in people who live long enough to show the damage. Several of my aged relatives ought to get vitamin D from sunlight and oils. But how much sunlight does someone in a care home get? Zero. Or if in sheltered accommodation? Then once a week if someone can help to take you out. And what do carers do for elderly vegetarians who don't eat oily fish or liver as a source of vitamin D? Nothing. And the doctors don't advise the carers or warn the elderly people. Sad and wrong.

Coffee with mother

I go up to Yorkshire to see aged Aunty sometimes, passing my mother's care home on the way. If I'm there in the morning I make and share a cup of coffee with her. Mum likes coffee in the morning so I make some fresh for her. She doesn't drink much, and I give her only half a mug but she seems happy to have it. Otherwise she'd wait till the weekend when my brother is back from work and can go in and make her coffee. A mid-week coffee is the nearest I can get to giving her a treat.