October 2021.
We only had 2-3 days to spend with Heather’s relatives in the UK on this trip. I was a bit worried about meeting Uncle Bert, the BOAC pilot, again. He definitely hadn’t drunk me under his sister-in-law’s table when he came to New Zealand, but apparently I did need his help out to the car so Heather could drive us home. We had a great time with them all, talking family history, who in the family had painted what, and if not why.
Heather’s rellies were the only people we met in the UK who talked posh. Oh, and a Scotsman, who said it was beaten into him at boarding school. Everyone else flaunted their regional accent — part of recovering from the loss of Empire, I guess.
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Our reason for being in England was to put on three days of seminars in the Lake District and at the renowned Moxhull Hall, outside Birmingham. Moxhull Hall was, um, interesting. Beautiful buildings, lovely grounds — and everything else totally drab. Like Fawlty Towers without Basil.
One of its little idiosyncrasies was a dearth of chairs, so that when our morning seminar session concluded we each had to carry our chair into the dining room so we’d have something to sit on at lunch.
That night an archetypal group of working men gathered round the bar drinking warm beer and saying fook this and fook that, and making it clear that the place belonged to them, not the fookin’ visitors. I don’t like to feel middle class but there you are.
Next morning Heather ordered an English breakfast, but told the waitress that she didn’t want the fried bread. Her meal arrived complete with fried bread. When Heather queried this the waitress replied, “Chef says you’ve got to have it.”
Actually we did see Basil that morning. Once in the front office, leaning his lanky frame over the counter to read the paper, his lips pursed under his moustache — and waiting a decent interval to acknowledge us. We had a bill to pay that was big enough to buy a decent used car. As we were getting ready to leave we saw him again in the garden. Maybe he was cutting down a leafy branch to beat us with if Amex let us down.
So why did we hold our gig at Moxhull Hall? (We called it Poxy Hall.) Because the professional photographers guild recommended it.
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We had a lot of trouble finding our way round England. It was a help to realise that the Brits have taken to placing their street signs near pavement level so that, even if they’re not obscured by parked cars, there’s a good chance they’ll be over-grown with vegetation. This is to confuse the Germans should they ever look to invade again.
Some of the Brits were as easily confused as us. We stopped and asked a lady out walking her dog down a country lane for directions to our B&B at Pear Tree Cottage. Never heard of it, she said. Well is this Blah Blah Lane, we asked. No it’s not, she said. So we pulled into the next driveway to retrace our steps – it was Pear Tree Cottage.
The dog walking lady was probably an under cover Muslim terrorist en route for the Cheadle Curry House to activate a sleeping cell. But come to think of it, anyone running a curry house in England would be too busy to moonlight as a terrorist. They do like their curries, the Brits.
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We also spent a weekend with Trevor and Pat Holmes and their extended family. They share a Georgian house in Lincolnshire which they are doing up beautifully — the house, that is, not Lincolnshire, although Lincolnshire seemed pretty nice. Trevor was my boss in the Solomon Islands 1978-81 and it was wonderful to meet them again for the first time in twenty years and find that our project had been successfully completed.
Their son-in-law Nick dedicated his weekend to cooking us the most wonderful meals and plying us with fantastic wine. We insisted that he choose the wines to accompany dinner, so, impeccable host that he was, he served what seemed his entire cellar to cover all bases. It’s not easy going to bed after heaps of food and grog when the dining room is in the basement and your bedroom is one of four on the second-to-top level — you think. Given the hospitality it was rather like being at Graeme and Christine’s in Melbourne, but with more rooms to be confused in.
With impeccable timing, Nick was flying out to Saudi Arabia after the weekend, to help negotiate a deal for a consortium including Exxon and BP. The budget for the NEGOTIATIONS, plus a bit of preliminary seismic investigation, is US$70m. Most of that seems to have been spent on housing Nick and Sarah, judging by the pictures they showed us.
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One of the best things about Britain after 20 years was the hugely improved food, especially on the motorways. 20 years ago the only reason for stopping for grub on the motorways was that everywhere else was closed on Sunday, or you were lost.
The biggest confusion of food categories I experienced was a pub menu item called a Tower of Black Pudding. I was looking for some healthily phallic comfort food. What I got was, yes, a tower of black pudding — but chopped into roundels, as if the Sisters had got to it first — and interspersed with sautéed leeks and a dijon sauce. Actually it did the trick, too.
By the time we had a few seminars under our belts Heather and I were sleeping better. The scars on my head from the low overhead beams in the B&Bs were healing, we could look prices in the eye without visibly flinching and life was picking up. Time to leave.
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In Dublin we were picked up by Ricky and Joan from the Irish photographers and given the full treatment. This was different. Five Star Hotel, Five Star dinner and the last two rooms at the Burlington after the seminar (Ricky was an accomplished schmoozer). Those Irish know how to put on a show, and they bought a lot of starter kits.
But, like England, Dublin cost us a lot of money. And that was before I got the phone bill.
New Zealanders will be interested to know why the Irish are wealthy and we feel we aren’t.
It’s clearly a recent thing — some of them look like they’re still wearing the clothes Mother bought them, and they’re only now getting used to driving on their very first motorway. But they’re quite clear about the cause — they’re sucking hard on the teat of the European Union. For example, the flash new motorway was paid for by the Europeans. There’ll be a price, they say, they’re just not sure what it’ll be yet. Anyway, Kiwis, we can’t do that.
(The Canadians, for their part, are sucking hard on the US teat. Cross-border trade has trebled since the NAFTA agreement, though “free trade” is predictably unpopular. Note for Kiwis — no US teat available either.)
I wondered what the Irish would think of Helen Clarke and the Sisterhood. Politics is so corrupt, the Irish said:
“When you get a letter from the government in the UK it has a crown on the letterhead — because it’s the crown that runs things.
“Here they put a Harp on the letterhead — because what matters here is who pulls the strings.”
“We just gave our prime Minister a watch,” they said. “It has three hands — the hour hand, the minute hand and the back-hand.”
Why do they laugh at themselves and we don’t? First, I suppose they’re Irish. Second, they’re getting wealthier and we’re slowly going downhill.
However, we mustn’t feel too sorry for ourselves. The average annual income in both Ireland and the UK is £22,000, I was told, and I certainly wouldn’t be splashing out recklessly for beer and pub food on that income, any more than we can afford to be reckless here, I suppose. Heather’s Aunt was earning about £4.50 an hour as a long-standing admin person at a private school. She would have had to work for almost three hours to buy Heather and me a sandwich-type lunch on the Motorway. It’s different for the high fliers, but which team do we play for?
We loved Dublin – for all of 36 hours anyway. We didn’t go to the Guinness brewery, but we did go to a pub in Temple Bar for the music and dancing — and hell, there was Guinness everywhere. And Murphy’s. And Jamesons, and Powers. And three sorts of potato with practically every meal, and Boxty when there wasn’t. I was in heaven.
The Troubles seemed far away, except for pointed comments (from Irishmen) that being an Irish man in an Irish bar in America was a sure way to get money stuffed in your pockets “for the cause”. One man’s terrorist is another man’s romantic.
The only other reference to politics was on a bus tour round the City. We passed a green and grassy sward which the driver said contained thousands of Irish martyrs buried in mass graves.
“But the graveyard’s no longer used,” he said.
“Why?” we asked.
“The last person laid to rest here was the Irish Hokey Cokey champion, and it took them sixteen hours to bury him…
“Sixteen hours?”
“That’s right! They put the left leg in, he took the left leg out, they put the left leg in but he shook it all about…”
Next stop, Turkey.