Catching up

I've been MIA all week because of a new laptop and the unconscionable effort it's taken to get it set up and transfer all my files. Worst of all was migrating my old emails which took an entire weekend of Googling and wrestling with nerd-speak, getting familiar with esoteric things like .dbx files and trying over and over and over to shift files from Outlook Express via Windows Live to Outlook (for which I'm going to have to pay actual money to use). Thanks a lot, Microsoft. But it's done. Yay.

So what has passed me by in the meantime? Australian soldiers on leave getting drunk in the Middle East - sign of the times that that was a news story, but they were in Dubai, where the official relationship with alcohol is uneasy and it's a behind-closed-doors, consenting-adults sort of activity. Westerners who live there - and there are very many - have to get a licence to buy wine from a few special shops and then have to transport it straight home. You can only drink in hotel restaurants, and even then you're meant to behave yourself. (They frown on PDAs too, public displays of affection between the sexes, though it's all on for women and men to hold hands with their same-sex friends: it's rather sweet to see a couple of swarthy young Arab men in robes striding along with their pinkies linked.)

A dinner-table conversation about an upcoming fancy-schmancy family wedding at Hampton Court House (presumably near the actual HC) led to a mention of Blenheim Palace, which was followed, according to the law of coincidence, by a TV documentary that night about that amazing place, with some fantastic photography. It's a private home, always has been, but it's truly called a palace, and it's awesomely beautiful. And then there are the Churchill stars: handsome John, the first Duke of Marlborough, and Winston of course. Unmissable.

And yesterday a cruise liner inexplicably did a Titanic off the coast of Italy, with shameful losses of life. I wonder if it will give pause to those people who have booked for that trip in April to follow the course of the actual Titanic? The last place their ship will call at before crossing the Atlantic is Cobh, in southern Ireland, where we went last year and were happily absorbed by the excellent exhibition in the old railway station there. They've got a lot of artefacts (though not as many as in the travelling exhibition I saw in Copenhagen, which will be back in Barcelona by now) including a letter in a bottle that was thrown overboard as the Titanic sailed and was delivered to the writer's mother after his death in the sinking. And then I imagine the tourists will call in at Halifax, Nova Scotia, where many of the recovered bodies were taken and buried. I'd like to go there one day. I wonder if I will?

Street life

"Yur fookin' hoortin' may! Yur fookin' hoortin' may!" Moment of drama on the streets of Kilkenny as a man who stole a big bottle of vodka was forcibly detained by a couple of burly store detectives while the Garda came screeching to the rescue, siren and lights going.

It was pretty much all about the streets today: wandering Waterford's maze of lanes before being escorted on a guided tour by the famous Jack Burtchaell, who's been doing it up to six times a day for 21 years and so can be forgiven a certain lack of energy in his performance. Still interesting, though, covering 1000 years of history in an hour and a mile, with plenty of digs at the British, plus sex, violence and the drink. Waterford, a Viking city, is older than all the Scandinavian cities and is third in age only to London and Paris, so there's a lot to talk about; although some things can't be seen any more - the Waterford Crystal factory closed in 2009, alas, though there's still glass being blown here.

Then to Kilkenny through the green as countryside, where the sturdy castle - invaded today by hordes of Germans - is surrounded by a knot of little cobbled lanes lined mostly, it seemed, by pubs. It looked a lively place, colourful and pretty, and it was a shame we had so little time there.

Back in Waterford, we ate in the completely empty Munster bar before following our ears down to the riverside quay to watch a troupe of scout bagpipe band members practising: they were good, though it was odd to hear Scotland the Brave. It was windy and cold, so we had to go afterwards to the magnificent Granville Hotel for a warm-up: all shiny brass, stained glass, comfortable chairs and original caricatures of golfers and jockeys; and birthplace of Thomas Francis Meaguer, who did many things including designing the Irish flag, but for me was special because at one point he was sent to Van Diemen's Land - otherwise known as Tasmania, where I went in February. So that's today's connection.

Good Knight

How I do hate the word 'uncomfortable'. Mostly when it's used by a gynaecologist bearing down on me with a plastic speculum; but also when it's uttered by the captain of a ferry I'm trapped on for the next two hours. Crossing from the Welsh port of Fishguard to Rosslare in south-east Ireland, we were shunted about by 2-metre swells and it was no fun at all, even with a Scopaderm patch behind my ear: it's a long time to stare at the horizon and concentrate on not hearing all the honking up going on elsewhere in the cabin.

But eventually we got back onto terra firma and wound up at the world's "oldest intact still-working lighthouse," said William, choosing his description carefully to avoid any possibility of challenge. Hook Head in County Wexford has had a light since the 5th century, and an actual lighthouse for 800-odd years, so I reckon he's pretty safe. It was a fine and stirring place to be on a blustery day with dark cloud and bright sun and, ever a sucker for lighthouses, I would have been pleased to be there on those grounds alone - but one-third of the way up its 150 steps, we came across an amazing coincidence.

Regular readers (hollow laughter) will recall that earlier in this trip, we stayed at the Inner Temple in London - a privilege accorded to members only. Just metres from the door of Dr Johnson's Building was the Temple Church, built in the 12th century by the Knights Templar, they of the Crusades. We went in and looked at, amongst others, the effigy of William Marshal who made King John sign the Magna Carta in 1215 and thereby also made his own name, amongst the legal fraternity at least.

But something else he did was to found the town of New Ross in Wexford and, to encourage trade there, also built at the entrance to the river, Hook Head lighthouse, where there's a picture of his supine statue back in London. Connections, eh? Love 'em.

Connecting

[By the way, next time you're slumped glumly in your armchair while your favourite TV programme keeps breaking up into its constituent pixels and disappearing off the screen, don't sit there passively, and unscientifically, thinking "Well, I knew rain wrecked the satellite signal, but what's with this gale? Is is blowing the rays around the sky, or what?" Get up and go outside and remove the wayward branch of rose bush that's waving in front of the sensor, and save yourself a $90 technician call-out fee.]

Because of breaks in the programme (see above) I missed David Attenborough's introduction to the footage of a bird eating flowers on some sort of bush, but then he said "currawong" and I thought, "Currawong! Australian crow-type bird! I remember seeing one in Tasmania, when I was walking around Dove Lake in the unexpected snow, in my smooth-soled sneakers, and there was a man eating his lunchtime sandwich by the water, and suddenly a currawong swooped down and snatched it from his fingers right as he was going to bite it, and he didn't know whether he was more shocked or hungry!" And then the close-up was swapped for a wide shot, and there was Cradle Mountain and Dove Lake. I love it when that happens.

Then we watched 'Buildings that Shaped the World' which is much more interesting than it sounds, about city planning this time, and shouted "Bath! Edinburgh! York! London!" all the way through as the pictures came up on the screen. It's just as well we were on our own. When other people do that sort of thing, it's simply indefensible, don't you think?

Star-tling!

Now see, if I were one of those super-well-prepared travellers, like the one who lives not a million miles from this house, who swots up all the travel books before a trip and assembles a labelled loose-leaf folder with dividers with notes and addresses and opening times all printed out in colour and punched and filed, I wouldn't have had the fun of today's surprise to enliven my work.

No deadlines at the moment, so I'm flitting on sheer whim from country to country writing stories, and today it was Queensland again, specifically Charleville. That's a little town 760km inland from Brisbane in the south-west (that I hope escaped the floods this time) where there's a surprising amount to see and do. One of the major attractions is the Cosmos Centre where we went to see the stars in the inky Outback sky, natch, but also, astonishingly, the surface of the sun next day through the telescope. Heavily filtered, of course, but scarily orange and shimmering in the solar wind. Amazing. And they had ancient meteorites there from China and more recent local ones, prettily known as 'sky stones' by the Aboriginals. And I found out my age on Venus (83!) and on Jupiter (4!); and my weight on the moon (10kg!); and I ate star-shaped biscuits.

But that's not the surprise. We went to a park and looked at tall funnel-shaped things that we were told were Vortex Guns: invented in Italy to disperse hailstorms over vineyards. A self-taught meteorologist called Clement L. Wragge thought they would be the answer to the long and disastrous 1902 drought, and got backing to have some made and fire them into a likely-looking cloud. It didn't really work, and the second time they tried, two of them blew up and nearly took out a couple of spectators, so Wragge slunk away in disgrace (the drought broke a couple of weeks later all by itself).

But Wragge (who, incidentally invented long-range weather forecasts and first thought of naming cyclones after people - actually politicians, ha ha - so he wasn't really a failure) left Australia and ended up in Auckland some years later, supplying the NZ Herald (for which I was writing that particular story) with forecasts. And, even more surprising, he lived in a suburb not far at all from where I live in this very spread-out city, and is buried there.

So that was all fun to find out about today, instead of just churning out a dutiful story of known facts. Moral: leave yourself stuff to discover later.

PS One of the few things I remember from my mid-seventies trendy but useless sociology paper at Canterbury University was that coincidence is much more common than people think, and the prof demonstrated it by finding several sets of birthday twins in the lecture hall before he'd even got halfway up the side section. That lecture hall? Shown on the TV news last night as an example of earthquake damage in the city, its turret dangling from a crane. That turret? This one. Explain that away, Prof Catton!