Rugby and Walking

The six-nations Rugby competition (with thanks to Sean for pointing out the mistake in the original post!) is in full swing and it was a good weekend for us. Remember that Gwilym is (of course) Welsh and Janine is (of course) French. As Wales defeated England and France managed to beat Scotland, it was a 100% success rate! Near to us is the London Welsh Rugby ground, where they had a few marquees with big screens. It must have been quite festive there, to say the least. We watched from the comfort of our home here. Here is the Welsh flag on the clubhouse.






Yesterday was again a very early spring day with lots of sun. We took a nice walk from Wimbledon Park to Richmond, through Wimbledon Common and Richmond Park. This is part of the Capital Ring, a set of 15 day walks all around London. The 'Commons' and Parks around London (and especially in SW London) provide a fantastic environment for walking, horse riding, cycling and several sports, from golf to athletics.
















There are special 'equestrian' crossings between Wimbledon Common and Richmond Park!

On leaving the park, we came to Petersham Parish church. This is a small, unassuming (but very old) church with some very interesting graves in the churchyard.

This is the headstone on the grave of a grandson of Napoleon's brother:






And this is the explorer who first came to where the city of Vancouver is now, Captain George Vancouver:






So many interesting things to do and see within walking distance!

A bit of spring?

It was a beautiful day yesterday. 23 February, but up to 17 degrees and sunny to boot!
So we went with Gwilym and Janine to Kew Gardens, we are very fortunate that we live less than 10 minutes walking from the main entrance! The gardens are actually officially called the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Please click on the link to see more detail about it.

For some time, we had wanted to see the 'Tropical Extravaganza' display there, in the Princess of Wales pavillion. This is an exhibition of orchids, anturiums and a number of other tropical colourful plants.
Here are two examples from a big photoshoot Lyn had!

After seeing the 'inside colours' we went to see what was to be found outside. You may remember that we wrote a post back in autumn with lots of brown, yellow and red colours.
Now there is definitely a hint of spring in the air, especially on a warm, sunny day (17C may not sound warm to our South African readers but it is about 10C warmer than normal at this time of the year!).

Apart from snowdrops, which you would expect, there were quite a lot of crocusses out and even a fair amount of daffodils:

Finally, here is a heron, fishing in the river Thames, near a lock just upstream from Richmond.

Project Loft Insulation

As I have reported earlier, we currently live in a Victorian house, it's 125 years old. Heat conservation by insulation was not a big thing in those days, so the walls do not have cavities and the lofts (there are two) have inadequate insulation. As a result, the walls and ceilings are cold in winter and it takes a lot of gas to heat the house. But things have changed and insulation is a priority, not only for comfort and costs but also to save Carbon. Now it's not possible to add cavities to the walls, but it certainly is possible to insulate the loft. The British government realises this and subsidises (for DIY only) loft insulation, sold in rolls of a sort of fluffy blanket made out of recycled PET bottles. A set of 3 rolls roll of 5m2 in total therefore only costs £3.





It is thus not surprising that we set out to put some insulation into one of the lofts (the other one is OK). First the loft needed to be cleared from a lot of old building rubble and then Gwilym applied 3 rolls of insulation. As there is not enough space for 2 people to crawl around on the joists and under the roofline, my job was mainly to take bags of rubble down and hand rolls of insulation and tools up. After a week, the job is done. And the house is cleaned because you certainly get a lot of dust coming down!

Next I'll write a post on a walk in Kew Gardens we did this afternoon. It felt like spring, 15C, but as its only 23 February that is being a bit optimistic!

Bath

It was our wedding anniversary a few days ago, so we planned to spend two days in Bath.
Bath was originally a Roman settlement, the fact that it is the only place in the UK where there are natural hot springs which made it attractive to the Romans, who also assigned religious connotations to the spring and called it 'Aquae Sulis'.
Most of today's Bath is Georgian, built in the 18th century, when Bath fell in favour with well-to-do Britons, again because of the springs.
It is a fascinating and beautiful town, with a 14th century Abbey on the spot where an earlier, Saxon  church was already built in the 10th century and where in 973 King Edgar, the first effective King of all England was crowned (or so the brochures say). But there are many more interesting and good looking features. After visiting the Abbey yesterday, we took a guided walk through the town this morning (we have never been disappointed in these guided walks, be it in London, Stratford u. Avon or even Cape Town!). This afternoon, we visited the old Roman baths and the temple which the Romans built around it. And then this evening, we actually 'took the waters': "when in Bath do as the Romans do!" Now I realise why Lyn brought our swimming costumes from Cape Town ;-). By the way, the word 'SPA' is associated with the Latin phrase 'Salus Per Aquam' or 'health through water'.

The bridge over the river Avon. Shops on both sides, like the Rialto bridge in Venice and the Ponte Vecchio in Florence but the only one of its kind in Britain.

Bath Abbey

You can drink the spring water, it has been brought up to this fountain in the Pump Room restaurant for 100's of years (but everyone who drinks from it pulls a face, so we did not try it!)

The old Roman Bath, with the Abbey in the background. The water in the current facilities is NOT green!

Tomorrow, we return to London. Although the distance is not inconsiderable (Bath is close to Bristol), the train to London Paddington does 190 Km/hr at times so it only takes around an hour and a half.
Of course Paddington station is where bears are found.......

The London Transport Museum

Today we planned to go to the London Transport museum in Covent Garden, but first we needed to go to Lyn's favorite haunt: Foyles bookstore in Charing Cross road. You can take Lyn into any bookstore at any time of the day or night, but the main branch of Foyles is something extra special, thanks to the huge selection of interesting material. We found the textbook that she was looking for. Here is Lyn in front of Foyles:





Next we walked to Trafalgar Square. We had made a plan to see Sean for lunch, but we were a bit early so stopped for coffee. In front of the coffee shop, there was a typical London scene: an old 'Routemaster' double decker bus (these old buses are now only used on a few very touristy routes) and two red phone booths:





Next we had lunch with Sean in the 'Cafe in the Crypt', below the church of St Martins in the Field in Trafalgar Square.





Then it was to the London Transport museum. This was very interesting. I have been planning to write a blog entry about the amazing public transport system here in London. So a picture of how the first underground routes were constructed (digging a trench by hand and covering it up) will suffice for now.





Tomorrow I plan to write a post about the latest 'project' here in Richmond (insulating the loft). On Monday we travel to Bath for 2 days, which certainly will be reported on as well. The 'public transport post' will probably follow after that.

Snow and ice in Richmond park

It is still very much winter here in Richmond. We reported on last week's snow and just when it had all more or less melted away, we got a new helping on Thursday night, but not quite as much as the first lot. On top of that it has been quite cold, with tempertures hardly above freezing during the day for the past few days (and down to -4 at night). Now that is nothing compared with what they have to cope with in continental Europe (there was even snow on the pitch at the Italy - England tri-nations Rugby match in the Olympic stadium in Rome last night), but it is still pretty cold in our experience.
Today, we went for a walk in Richmond Park, to see the frozen ponds there. Richmond Park is one of London's Royal Parks and covers 2360 acres (almost 10 square KM's). It has over 600 red and fallow deer. Although just above freezing, it felt pretty cold as it was one of these grey and damp UK days. But a very nice walk nonetheless. Here are pictures of one of the frozen ponds and of a herd of deer.

There were actually quite a few people in the park, although not on the ice as there were signs to warn of 'thin ice'. Did not look that thin to me, but the famous (and sometimes somewhat over the top) 'Health and Safety' laws will probably require these signs to be erected as long as there is any water under the ice....

The Apple store

We took a trip into Central London today, in order to visit the Apple Store in Regent street (there are a number of Apple stores in London, but the Covent Garden and the Regent Street ones are the most important ones).
The reason is that we are considering switching our computing activities to Apple. The time is drawing near that we need to replace at least one laptop and the other one is not that far behind. The good experiences we have with the iPad (on which I am typing this blog entry) and word of mouth about the available software makes us think that way. Now Apple offers (free) workshops on their hardware and software. There was a workshop on 'Pages', a word processing and desktop publishing programme at 2pm, so we booked for that (it appears you don't have to book, you can just turn up). There is a sort of a lecture theatre at the back of this enormous store where they give a good hands-on overview of the application. We also stayed for the 'Numbers' workshop immediately after (spreadsheets). Pretty good marketing, I think.
The store is also really interesting, with lots of Apple products you can play with and lots of people in blue sweaters to give you advice.
We have not bought anything yet (well, apart from a set of earphones so that Lyn can listen to the music on her iPhone when she wants to).

Here is a picture of the Apple store as seen from the Regent street entrance.

Snow!

On the European continent it has been (very) cold with in many places a lot of snow for quite some time now, but we in the UK have been spared this inconvenience until now. Last night it started snowing and this morning the road outside looked like this:

Lyn is as excited as a little girl, I guess just like we were as kids when the first snow of the year fell.
She has experienced snow before, in Austria when we were there for Christmas in 2009. For Sean however, this is new (apart from a few flakes in December which did not even reach the ground).
He built a snowman and a snow woman last night and called them Ben and Jane:

It is already +1 degree C outside, so the snow will be short lived!

Location:Richmond, UK

Traveling back to London

This post was supposed to be done from the train back to London, but there was a problem with 'Blogpress', the iPad app I am trying to use for 'mobile' blog postings. It appears that there was a problem with the latest update. I have now re-installed it, so we are trying again. Although we are back in Richmond, here is a picture of the train that got us back.

Ice!

Yesterday, we took a bus ride to Moreton in Marsh, as per the previous post. Although the weather was not that nice (cold and grey), the attraction of the market was enough to overcome that. The bus trip (about an hour each way) was quite nice, going through a few pretty villages once we got into the Cotswolds. But the market was disappointing, not really specific to the area. The cold weather and the disappointment in the market caused us to have a pub lunch and head back home quite early.

This morning, it was clear and cold. The temperature had dropped to well below freezing overnight and on the Stratford canal behind our apartment there is now a 3mm layer of ice (with clear patches where the ducks and swans swim and keep it open so far). Now 3mm of ice is not all that significant, but for us it is, as it was the first time Lyn saw ice on any stretch of water! That's what happens if you grow up in South Africa.

Its not easy to walk on ice, even for ducks!

Looks cold, doesn't it?

This afternoon we tried once again to get a look inside one of the Shakespeare theatres. When we arrived, almost 2 weeks ago, we asked if it was possible to have a quick look inside. The answer was 'usually its no problem, but a the moment they are doing a scene change'. Little did they realise that we are not here for 2 hours like most visitors. So we went back the next day. Now the story was that they were changing the overhead lighting, but usually... no problem. So we tried a few more times, but its always the same: 'usually yes, but today...'. It seems likely that they dont want to have visitors have a quick peek into the theater (no money in it..), but they dont want to admit this. Pity!

Tomorrow we go back to London. Its also about time we get some good news from the Dutch Embassy about Lyn's naturalisation.......