Vivat Rex! Good boy

(Coronation photos stolen from The Times)

Since Rex was the name of our family dog, that chanted phrase meant something a bit different to me, during the Coronation. But he was a spaniel, so there was a connection to King Charles. Sucked in to watching the whole event (on TV, natch, but live) my main impression, as with I'm sure most people, was - What a load of old codswallop. 

I mean, all those fancy costumes, every stitch of them loaded with tradition and meaning. All that silly ceremony - did you see the ring presented fitted onto a pink velvet dildo? - and juggling with unwieldy crowns that were so impractical, despite/because of all their huge jewels, that both king and queen shook them off as soon as possible. All the parading, the hours of practice it all took, the swords, the medals, the patently ridiculous and vision-blocking bearskin hats. It was daft, the whole thing, truly. And yet - of course there's an 'and yet' - it was a pretty gobsmacking spectacle.

What made it more appealing was that so much of it looked so familiar. Though it almost feels like another life - it was certainly in the Before Times - I was last in London in 2019 and spent a wonderful day visiting most of those sites, from Buckingham Palace to Westminster, and many points in between (and beyond). It was a big, big day, and I wrote a long, long post about it. It is a great city, and despite the very typical rain, it was the perfect setting for all that pomp.

Though everyone else looked like they were having a good time, Charles did appear somewhat sombre throughout. The weight of royal responsibility, I guess, even more than the actual weight of all those robes and crowns, heavy though they must have been. I reckon, despite a lifetime's preparation and waiting, he would much rather not have been the centre of all that attention. And who could blame him? I too prefer to be just one of the crowd, as was he the first time I (failed to) notice him, at Badminton Horse Trials, many years ago.

La reine est morte. Vive le roi!

 

Since I’m in Akaroa, famously (and, touristically-speaking, helpfully) French-founded, it’s the Tricouleur at half-mast today, to mark the death of the Queen. Had to happen of course, but still a bit sad, even from this distance. Cliché unavoidable: it truly is the end of an era. 

I had a couple of near-encounters with the Queen while I lived in England, both described elsewhere on this blog: at the Badminton Horse Trials, where I tried to get nearer for a photo of her, up on a wagon in her headscarf, watching the cross-country. “Not so close, sonny!” growled one of her (less sharp-sighted) bodyguards. 

And, invited via lucky draw to a Buckingham Palace garden party, we signally failed the audition we didn’t realise was happening as we chatted to a courtier while waiting for the Queen to walk past along a marked-off route to her afternoon tea tent. We were clearly judged too boring to bother with, so it was another nearby couple who were selected to duck under the rope to wait for Liz to stroll along and pause for a quick chat. Shame. I bet my answer to the standard “Have you come far?” would have trounced theirs.

So, RIP, Your Royal Highness. And hello King Charles spaniel.

Hello, 2022

Happy New Year. We've all been saying since 2016 'Let's hope it's better than last year' and that hasn't worked at all, so let's just aim to get to December 31 and be able to say 'Well, that was better than we expected' - ok?

I will also aim to pop in here more regularly, despite not really being much of a travel writer any more, for obvious reasons. I faded out towards the end of last year, waiting for a blog overhaul, but that still hasn't happened, so on we soldier.

One of my Christmas presents was a subscription to Storyworth, which I'd already heard good things about, and my second question to answer (chosen by the Baby) is 'What was your first big trip?'. That's a fun, if frustrating, one to answer because it was a round-world cruise to England, via both Suez and Panama, taking about six months. Fabulous! Except, it was 1957 and I was only three, and remember very little about it - mainly, getting trapped in the outside toilet at my grandparents' house in Farnham.

But, doing a little research, I have found, naturally, connections. Our first leg was the very last voyage of the RMS Mataroa which, after delivering us to Southampton via the Panama Canal, was then sent to be scrapped at Faslane. She had been built in 1922 at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, across from where the Silver Wind was moored on our 2019 Silversea cruise, and which had just been closed down. The ship, originally called Diogenes, carried passengers/immigrants to NZ and Australia, was a troop ship during the war, and then returned to tourism afterwards - though in 1949 she carried a contingent of the nearly 600 'Lost Children' from UK orphanages and foster homes who were brought to NZ in one of those shockingly authoritarian decisions that are sadly so common all over the world. (Also sent to Australia and Canada, many of them were maltreated, and, much later, officially apologised to.)

I had thought that our return voyage, on the SS Orcades via the Suez - a trip so hot everyone apparently slept up on deck - returned us to Lyttelton; but it turns out, from a random photo that my father usefully labelled, that we actually got off in Sydney and flew home from there. So that was my first flight, and not the joyride I had on Air NZ's new plane when I was about 14. And the Orcades? Well, I discovered a big model of that bit of my personal history in the Maritime Museum at Darling Harbour, when I arrived there on the Azamara Journey in 2017...

To be sure, to be sure?

I got a notification today from the Tourism Northern Ireland media library that authorisation to publish images they'd supplied had expired. Naturally, I had no recollection of having had an Irish story published, and it took a bit of ferreting to discover that it was this one, about visiting Londonderry during my Silversea loop cruise from London, in August 2019.

That feels like another world now, doesn't it? Wandering the busy and storied streets of London, Fowey in Cornwall, Cork, Bantry, Belfast, Dublin and Holyhead. Eating in the ship's restaurants, crowding round tables in the bar for Trivial Pursuit, standing elbow-to-elbow at the railings above the bow as we made that magnificent entry up the Thames and under through Tower Bridge. (Although, it was on this cruise that we were both struck down by an epic bout of flu that almost had one of us in hospital, and just might have been pre-Covid?)

The story was published finally on 10 February 2020, just days before everything changed, it feels, forever. After our long spell of almost-normal freedom here in NZ, we're back in Level 4 lockdown nationally, our original single Delta case - which the rest of the world mocked us for panicking at - now, less than two weeks later, up to 562. Here in Auckland, the main location for cases, we've got another fortnight of L4 ahead of us, possibly longer, while everyone sensible scurries to get vaccinated - though it won't help that someone has just died from a rare reaction to the Pfizer vaccine.

So it's maybe good to be reminded of Londonderry, where they've certainly had their share of troubles, capital T and lower-case both. They've come through it all and manage to be pretty cheerful these days, though the tough times will always be there in the background, literally and figuratively. 

(In deference to Tourism NI, this is my own photo of the Four o'clock Knock mural.)

Liver, living, lived

Well, I used the last of my Tabasco sauce last night (liver and bacon casserole, since you ask. When did you last eat lamb’s liver? Thought so. Explains your iron deficit). I have no idea when I bought that bottle - only 60mls, too, which tells you a lot about how exotic a cook I am not (as if the mere mention of liver hadn’t established that immediately). The expiry date though was 2020 and, since Tabasco has only three ingredients, two of them highly preservative, I’m guessing it was, let’s say, heritage.

I didn’t have to check about the ingredients. When you go - as I did in 2016 - to Avery Island, down on the Louisiana coast a 40-minute nail-biting wrong-side drive from Lafayette, and visit the factory, they drum that in right from the start. Red chilli peppers, salt, vinegar, time. That’s it.  My sort of recipe, actually - which is kind of ironic, since the Tabasco motto is 'Defending the world against bland food'.

It was a very pleasant place to wander, read the history, watch the bottles being filled, browse the shop (where I didn't buy any sauce, since I had that bottle in the pantry already and knew it still had years of use in it). Then there were jungly gardens with herons but no alligators, a gorgeous heritage plantation house, a creepy rice mill, and then a triumphantly accident-free drive back to Lafayette. 

Lunch, nice cool museum with a freshly-moulted golden knee spider, another wander around Lafayette's pleasing streets, and then to the railway station for a long wait with Rosa Parks for the inevitably behind-time Amtrak to New Orleans where I eventually arrived at 10.30pm, ahead of the huge annual IPW tourism conference that was my main focus for the trip.

It was a long day, but full of colour, interest and novelty. The drive aside, I enjoyed myself the whole time. It feels like another world, now, doing that sort of thing. Buying a fresh bottle of Tabasco at Countdown really isn't going to be any sort of compensation for not travelling any more. It is, though, a reminder to crack open the Creole seasoning I bought in Lafayette. The Best Before for that one is 2018...

Happy just to have been in the running. Honest.

Heading into the city for an evening meeting earlier this week, I was a) surprised to see these huge and eye-wateringly expensive container cranes actually in use for once and then b) inevitably reminded, because of the hint of sunset in the clouds behind them, of the start of the best day I've ever had in London.

It was August 2019 and I'd got up early for our arrival on Silversea's Silver Wind into the heart of the city, through Tower Bridge to moor alongside the Belfast. It turned out I'd actually got up an hour too early, by mistake, so I was on deck to see dawn behind the cranes as we passed Tilbury docks - which was total compensation, it was a beautiful sight.

Of course, most things, however prosaic, look dramatic in that light, but as it happened, the entire day that followed was 100% gorgeous and everything looked at its best. That made everyone else be in their best moods too, so it wasn't just the surroundings, but also the overall ambiance that was brilliant. I loved it all. So I'm not letting it get me down that this evening it's the Voyager Media Awards and my entries for the Travel section, which included a description of this cruise (as well as an actual piece of proper reporting) didn't even earn me a finalist place. (This time.)

But at least the Firstborn is in with a chance. Good luck!

Goghing... gone

Naturally, going to the Van Gogh Live show that came to Auckland recently was always going to remind me of Arles. The show is a multi-screen projection of a good selection of his paintings, from early to last, with a bit of modest animation in some of them. The screens are all around the arena, at different angles and heights, and there are several paintings projected at once, so you have to keep looking around - including on the floor (though clearly not everyone felt that responsibility).

Each set has an accompanying quote from his letters or diary, in a handwriting font that takes a bit of effort to read, and the pace is brisk enough that it's far from a relaxing experience. It's good, though, and his paintings, especially the starry night ones, really benefit from the large-scale, super-bright treatment. It's fairly short, so I watched it twice. Overall, though, the story is sad. Poor man. He sold only one painting in his (self-shortened) lifetime. 

Regular 😀 readers will recall that I went to Arles back in - sigh - 2012, beginning a river cruise there with Uniworld along the Rhone, which finished in Lyon. Arles is where Van Gogh spent his most productive, if dramatic, years, and on a tour around that lovely, and appealingly lived-in, town, we visited a number of the scenes that he painted, most memorably the yellow Café la Nuit. 

Incidentally, the self-portrait with the bandaged ear confuses a lot of people: it was the left ear that he sliced at (possibly off) with the knife, but the picture shows his right ear bandaged, because he was painting his actual mirror image. 

Anyway, it was several days later, when fishing the next clean coffee mug out of the drawer, that I saw it was decorated with one of his swirly cypress paintings. I'd forgotten all about it - and also, where I'd bought it. So that occupied me on and off for a few more days, until the mug reappeared in the morning coffee cycle. I suddenly remembered then that I'd bought it at the National Gallery in London, where I'd gone on a Silversea cruise in - sigh - 2019. 

Shamefully, despite having lived in England for years and going to London many times, it was my first visit to the gallery - it was always one of those 'next time' things. If nothing else, recent events should have taught us not to put stuff off, don't you think? Just made that one in time.

That was a chastening lesson, but I was still quietly triumphant about having remembered where I'd bought the mug. Turns out, though, that all I had to do was turn it over.

To be not disappointed

 Although I had two pages in the Sunday Star-Times travel section all to myself yesterday, the triumph was somewhat mitigated by the cover story being about the Southern Lights flight. This is a special organised by Viva Expeditions with Air NZ, to fly from (and back to) Christchurch in a Dreamliner on a 10-hour search for the aurora australis. The plane flies in the dramatically-named stealth mode, all external lights off, internal too, so everyone's eyes can adjust and fully appreciate the aurora.

They found the lights quite quickly, and they were pretty spectacular, according to the photos and video. But - and this is a HUGE but - not according to most passengers' actual eyes. The trouble is, our eyes, and especially older eyes, aren't very good at picking up the colours, so what almost everyone saw were swirls of white - the green and pink only showed up via cameras.

Now I would have found that deeply disappointing, to put it mildly. Seeing the aurora is one of my top wants, but to pay all that money, fly all that way and only see white? Nah, Instagram has spoiled me for that. I want proper colour, end of. And if I have to go to Finland, or Norway, or Alaska for my chance to see it, well, that's just icing on the cake. Or actual ice. Whatever. Even if it turns out my eyes can't do the business, at least I've been somewhere interesting and not just been squashed into a plane for ten hours, flying from A to A.

Travel should not be about disappointment, especially when it involves world-famous spectacles or landmarks. I'm happy to report that right up there with cast-iron guarantees of satisfaction (for the locations, tourist throngs notwithstanding) are the Taj Mahal, Machu Picchu, the Galapagos Islands, Easter Island's moai, the Eiffel Tower and Tower Bridge. There are lots of others. As further proof, most of those listed I've been to more than once, and been 98% thrilled to see them again. And, for today's connection, two of those - Machu Picchu and Galapagos - I visited the second time courtesy of Viva Expeditions. Thanks, Rachel.

Hare, and there

So, I break off from sorting out the airing cupboard (how come there are so many pillowcases in there? Do they breed?) to view a big motor yacht gliding into Oneroa Bay, and straight away get a connection with a couple of boats of quite a different sort (but one exactly the same age), plus Prince Andrew, a round-the-world sailor, and Bluff.

First, the boat: 58m long, and now called the Dancing Hare, it was built in 1986 for the Saudi businessman cousin of recently murdered (and dismembered) journalist Jamal Khashoggi. It was later bought by media mogul Robert Maxwell, who named it Lady Ghislaine after his daughter. He disappeared off the yacht near the Canaries in 1991 when big trouble was looming for him - jumped, pushed, fell while peeing in the nude? - and his (or maybe not his...) body was later found floating in the sea. Nobody's telling who currently owns or is using the boat, but it's been hanging around NZ for a few months now.

It's an obvious link from the yacht to Maxwell's daughter Ghislaine, and then from her to Jeffrey Epstein - was it suicide? or murder? - and from both of them to Prince Andrew. Now that's a story we're all going to be horribly fascinated to follow, when they finally get around to the trial. But, the royal non-sweater with a sailing ship? And all of this with me?

Right. Back in - also - 1986, when I was living in England, our loose group of regulars at the White Hart Inn got involved in organising fun events to raise money for the pet charity of one member, Liz (whose handmade Christmas tree decoration present to me I packed away today for another year). The aim of the Jubilee Sailing Trust is to enable the physically handicapped to enjoy sailing on the ocean, in the company of able-bodied people. We helped raise money to build a sail training ship, the STS Lord Nelson, a three-masted barque, and were then invited to attend the naming ceremony in Southampton in July. The Patron of the organisation was Prince Andrew, but the person performing the actual naming was Miss Sarah Ferguson - as she still was, just, their ill-fated wedding coming a fortnight later.

It was all very grand - I wore a hat! - with band, anthem, prayers, Rule Britannia and so on, and then after the naming ceremony there was a lunch at long tables, and the host on ours was Sir Alec Rose. He was knighted - despite not being the first - for doing a solo circumnavigation of the world by sail. That was back in 1967 in the 11m Lively Lady, during which he had to call in at Bluff, way down south, to do some unplanned mast repairs. His previous port of call, incidentally, had been Melbourne, where PM Harold Holt came to see him sail in, and who later that day went swimming and disappeared, presumed drowned. Bit of a theme here, eh?

Even 20 years later, Sir Alec was lapping up any adulation that might come his way, and made sure to tell us all about his adventure - but he was jolly enough, I suppose. Preferable to seedy Andrew and his mates, anyway. And the whole connection is certainly a lot more interesting than tidying bed linen.

Until yesterday, iGNorant of a connection

I didn't mean to stalk Graham Norton. I didn't even know I'd done it. It was only yesterday, over a year later, when I was listening to an old RNZ interview with him and Kim Hill that I realised I'd done it. He mentioned how he liked living in Bantry because although, same as in London, he was recognised everywhere he went there, Bantry is so small that he can recognise people right back - supermarket checkout lady, petrol station guy, man who fixes the boiler - so it's fair.

Regular 😀 readers will recall that in August last year I went on a Silversea cruise from London, around Ireland, and back again. It was blighted by a terrible case of the flu/possible pre-Covid that laid us out for most of the trip - yes, I'm still coughing, thanks for asking - but, diligent as ever, I did force myself off Silver Wind at each port to do an explore. Bantry was a little gem: colourful old houses reflected in the waters of the harbour, bustling main street, picturesque ruined church with a wild cemetery outside, grand mansion up on a hill, lively history, passers-by full of banter with our funny guide... it was a treat, and well worth dragging myself out of what had been feeling would become my deathbed. It was, if further proof is needed, memorable enough for me to properly remember it, and not rely on my trusty notebook which, for the first time ever, I had no energy to actually write in:

Not enough contact to qualify as stalking? Fair comment. But before the cruise began, we had to be driven from our splendid hotel right next to Tower Bridge, where the ship was meant to be moored, way out to distant, and desolate, Tilbury Docks. That was because the wind had been too strong for the ship, despite its small size, to be safely sailed through the Thames Barrier and up the winding Thames through Tower Bridge to its mooring beside the Belfast. It was disappointing (though made up for at the end of the cruise, by doing exactly that) but it did mean we had a long and very expensive taxi tour, at Silversea's expense, from St Katharine's through, initially, Wapping. Which is where Graham has his London residence, our helpful driver told us. Helen Mirren too, apparently. (Gary was very chatty - it took him 4 years to do the Knowledge, part-time, which he reckoned was equally as necessary to the job as GPS.)

So, ok, maybe stalking is stretching it a bit. But two GN connections in one cruise, without even trying? Good enough for me.

Crowning glory

Time has been passing unexpectedly quickly - various national elections, the relentless creep of Covid, vaccine buzz, family stuff will do that, of course. Not as much time as since 1981, of course, but tonight, watching (with so much of the world) The Crown, the eve of the royal wedding felt very fresh.

In episode 3, Charles stands at the windows of the Palace, watching fireworks - and I remembered that I watched those fireworks too, that night, in Hyde Park, in a crowd more vast than any I've been part of, before or since. Actually, to be a stickler for fact, Charles and most of the royal family (but not Diana) were out there in the dark with me too, rather than having a dramatic conclave in the Palace. After all, it was the most spectacular display - massive fireworks that went on and on, a huge Catherine wheel, cannons, band music, choirs... oh, and a bonfire that Charles lit, the first of a trail of beacons that led away across the country.

Even more memorable, though, was being literally swept along afterwards through the dark by the crowd, like an ocean, with absolutely no chance of choosing my own direction. It was actually quite frightening. But we made it out, and eventually onto our train home - the milk train, stopping and starting all the way to Gloucester, pulling in finally at about 5am, with just enough time for a bit of a zizz before we had to get up again to watch the lead-up to the wedding itself, the streets outside completely dead as everyone in the country sat glued to their screens.

Charles and Diana came to Gloucester in December that year, going to a service in the city's magnificent cathedral, and we saw them as they left on a snowy winter's morning, Diana in an enviably stylish big coat and muff. It was my least personal royal encounter, of several over the years I lived in England, which included suddenly noticing that on the other side of the car window I was standing next to at the Badminton Horse Trials was the Queen Mother herself. At the same Badminton, equally distracted by the horses, I had to have it pointed out to me that the grey I was admiring was actually being ridden by Prince Charles. Plus, of course, there was the garden party I went to at the Palace in 1982.

It was lovely to see London in the programme, looking so fabulous, and so familiar: the steps up to St Paul's, the Victoria monument opposite the Palace, the Mall. It reminded me of being there, in August last year, and the perfect, sunny day I had, the last of my Silversea cruise. I left the ship, which was moored right by Tower Bridge, in the morning, took the tube to Buckingham Palace, did a tour around the rooms, so big and high and opulent and gorgeous, and then walked back through summery St James's Park, to Downing Street, past Big Ben to the Thames, and along the Embankment to climb, eventually, the Great Fire monument and finally return home to Silver Wind for my last night onboard. 

It was a brilliant day, and a happy ending to a cruise that actually had gone really badly, almost ruined by our both getting terrible, terrible flu that laid us out and left me with a permanent cough, to this day. Except, in other news today, it's been found that some people in Italy had Covid months before it was first recorded in Wuhan in November. I wonder...?

Once in a blue moon? Not any more.

Seeing as how it is my birthday today, as a token gesture towards the (increasingly tiresome and irrelevant) custom of celebrating the occasion, I have drunk what is likely to be my last ever Blue Moon beer. It was given me as a 6-pack, brought back from the US by the Baby on her last-but-one trip, and eked out since then in a very miserly manner. Regular 😀 readers will recall, since I have harped on about it a number of times, that I first tasted this beer six years ago while on a post-IPW famil in Wisconsin, at lunch in Popeye's Restaurant on the shores of Lake Geneva. It was properly served with a slice of orange, and I became an instant fan, and have sought it out ever since.

Sidenote: we had a little down-time for browsing round the town and, while trying on a top (which I bought and still like), I heard a woman in the next changing room say excitedly, three times, "You're gonna grieve yourself to death!" Still trying to imagine the scenario for that. Also, in April, the lake was still partly frozen and clinking musically with small icebergs - inside which it's apparently possible to find freshly-frozen fish, we were told.

Anyway, I've found Blue Moon in some odd places since, including on tap in the Lord Nelson pub beside the Thames where I saw a couple of cliché red-coated Chelsea Pensioners walking past. The most unexpected place, though, was in the bottle shop around the block from where I used to live in Auckland - what a joy that was! But a few years later, the imports ceased, and that was that. sigh. 

That glass, by the way, I bought in Reykjavik in celebration of the Einstök beer I enjoyed there - that memory, though, always tinged with regret over the four bottles of my airport-bought six-pack that I left, forgotten and unopened, under my seat in the van I did my guided tour in. An unplanned tip for Páll, which I'm sure he enjoyed - but I would have appreciated it more...