I’ll be going a bit silent for the next week or so. I’m sporting a sling after long-awaited shoulder surgery (Four years ago in France, I tried a spot of unsupervised branch-sawing, and decided the resulting pain would go away on its own. I’m really not cut out for D-I-Y).
Advantages:
Plenty of time to read.
Plenty of excuses not to clean the house/iron.
Disadvantages:
Can’t really cook (knife-wielding is far too difficult)
Can’t drive.
Can only use the computer for a few minutes.
Even having a shower is a bit difficult.
I’m not very good at enforced laziness.
Right. That’s me then. I’m off to do my little-old-lady mobility exercises.
We’ve been back from South Korea for a week now. We’re jogging back into routine, but the jet-lag won’t go away. A week on then, I think I should share my final holiday snaps.
These are from the plane. Much of our long, long eleven hour journey was above thick layers of cloud. But when we could see down to the ground far below, we were thrilled. We could barely comprehend the vastness of Siberia. Mile after mile after mile after mile of forested mountains, dusted with snow. How could it be that in all these endless miles we saw not a path, not a field, not a settlement? How could anywhere be so …. uninhabited?
Eventually though, there were settlements. Straight roads passed between towns that seemed to be all about industry and factories, with large rectangular fields beyond.
Then there was the Volga, immensely wide, lazily spilling itself over plains and valleys, dividing, re-forming, leaving sandy islands in its midst as it meandered northwards.
We travelled over a cottony carpet of white cloud for a very l-o-n-g time. And emerged over islands round Sweden. There were coastal villages, isolated farms, fishing boats. We spied on communities whose ways of life looked as if they had changed little over the years. And then it was cloud again, all the way to England.
These are terrible photos. They’re fine for me as souvenirs of a tantalising journey offering glimpses of lands I’ll never see, and that few others have seen either. Except distantly, courtesy of a journey in a plane.
It’s Chuseok today, the 15th September – and yesterday, and tomorrow. It’s a time when Koreans enjoy their families, honour their ancestors, and used to celebrate the harvest.
Come on girls, you’ll enjoy the chance to dress up and parade the streets in gorgeous traditional dress. Go on – you know you want to. Make your man dress up too. You know he doesn’t want to.
You’ll want to give gifts too. I know just the thing. Presentation boxes of tins of spam. They’re in every shop. The Americans introduced the stuff during the Korean war in the 1950s and the Koreans love it to this day.
We’re still being tourists in London. British Museum today, passing a Korean caff on the way. Korean is the second language on museum signage, Korean Airways sponsors the audio-guides, and we visited the Korean gallery. But this is what caught our eye.
Javanese shadow puppets. I’ve always liked them. Today though, I left warriors and gods aside, in favour of Sammy, Wayang hip-hop puppet. Isn’t he fine?
Here we go again. Apparently WordPress doesn’t support my sort of smartphone, so I have to post via email. This is my first attempt. Fingers crossed. I think I feel rather like these people battling along the river Ure this afternoon against the current. It’s all a bit of a struggle.
A whole gallery of smartphones. Aaagh.(Wikimedia Commons)
That’s me. Was I the last person in England not to have a smartphone constantly about my person? No, actually that’s Malcolm, and he’ll never have one.
Once, some years ago, Ellie and Phil gave us each a cast-off iPhone. We gave them a go, hesitantly and suspiciously, decided they were far, far too difficult, and thrust them in the back of a drawer. And continued quite happily to use our outmoded mobiles to phone and text – though we often forgot to take them with us as we simply didn’t use them often enough.
Now though it’s different. This trip to Korea. Perhaps it would be useful to have some connectivity in order to check travel details, get tourist information, stay in touch with Emily … and even post occasionally on my blog.
Ellie to the rescue again. She’d got herself a simple back-up smartphone in case her iPhone, which in her case is a business essential, ever let her down. She decided in the end she didn’t need it, and gave it to me.
This time I was motivated to Get To Grips. But it was terrifying. Icons appeared randomly on screen, and just as randomly disappeared again. I couldn’t even work out how to start a text off. Various patient people (all young, obviously) sat me down, and kindly and carefully explained – at least twice – what to do. And then explained again, three days later.
Slowly I made progress, though I wasn’t convinced I’d ever really be able to use it when it really might matter.
But then, on Thursday, I had a breakthrough. I loaded an app. All by myself. It was the WordPress app. So this week, when we have a holiday with the twins in Anglesey, I’m going to have a go at doing a simple post – a line of text and a photo maybe. I hope I’ll be fine. I shall have two eleven year old techies with me after all, and their affectionate if patronising contempt for my inabilities to cope with all this technology knows no bounds. Who knows? I may even return from our holiday with a wind-borne tan and feeling really rather tech-savvy.
I want to share this post. It says more about raw grief, and about sustained love through good times and bad than anything I have ever read. The writer has asked to remain anonymous. But if you’ve been following my blog for a while, you’ll know very well who wrote it.
See if you can read it without it making you cry. And when you’ve read it, you might want to read some of her other posts. Maybe not all at one sitting though, they’re scarcely escapist reading matter. Oh … and ignore the swearing. The writer has plenty to swear about.
We went to a party on Saturday night. It’s not the first time we’ve been out, the boys and I (or indeed I on my own,) since D-Day, and although I mainly want to stay at home curled up in a ball, I know it’s A Good Thing to go out and I need to make the effort. We need to socialise, and I’m determined that my hubby doesn’t just slip into obscurity, and become some legendary bloke who we all vaguely remember. No. He has a name, and we use it often. Still, I’m pretty selective about who I feel up to partying with, as the fixed social smile often gets wiped away by tears. For the most part, the small talk I used to be so good at makes me feel a bit nauseous, and I don’t want people to ask how I am because they won’t like the…
Nothing else seems to matter at the moment. It’s hard to focus on life outside the post-referendum nightmare, hard to believe that after securing only 52% of the vote (and just 72% of the electorate voted), leaving the EU seems to be universally accepted in the House of Commons – though not out here, not in the wider community I know. Like just about everyone I come across, I’m angry, upset and feeling pretty impotent. Then I read this. It pretty much sums up how I feel. Please read it.
I had hoped after Friday’s absolute catastrophe of a day that the country might somehow magically rally over the weekend. I mean, when you plunge your country into possible ruin on the promise of a golden future that will allow it to rise like a phoenix from the flames, you have a plan, right?
As it turns out, you don’t. The only person that seems to have any plan at all, and be acting on it rather than just spouting meaningless Churchillian rhetoric is Nicola Sturgeon, and I can’t even vote for her.
I was distraught and angry on Friday. I had hoped to feel better by today. Instead I am running on barely controlled rage and getting more enraged by the moment.
Here are a few things I am furious about:
Firstly, leave voters telling me to calm down. I’m sorry…
Many of you know already that Phil died on Thursday. Though the news couldn’t be surprising, somehow the reality is shocking. We mourned the man we knew and enjoyed spending time with: the family man, a husband, father, grandfather and uncle. We remembered his wit, his generosity, his Sunday roasts, his techie skills and strongly-held opinions. We wept.
Knowing that he’d been on regional radio and TV back in the ’70s and ’80s – before we knew him, Malcolm and I thought he’d qualify for a mention in the local press.
I first heard he’d made the national news when fellow-blogger Agnes Ashe told me. I googled him. Over the next hours, articles from the Guardian, the Independent, the Daily Mail, the Daily Star tumbled into the search engine. Then Spanish media. Then sites in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, even the USA.
And all because this was the man whose voice any visitor to London will know. The voice that admonishes you to ‘Mind the gap’ as you step from the platform onto the London Underground.
Ten years ago, just as Ellie was giving birth to their twin boys, the couple’s voice-over business won the contract to do a huge number of station announcements for the London Tube, with Phil’s deeper, masculine tones being required for the all-important ‘Mind the Gap’.
Phil followed this up by winning contracts to do similar announcements for South West Trains, the Southern Network and Northern Rail. As we take the train on journeys through the UK, and in London, we’ll listen out for Ellie’s voice, or Phil’s, and excitedly text our friends when we hear them. In the early days, when it was all very new, I accosted a porter on Wimbledon Station on hearing Phil’s voice announcing the arrival of the next train. ‘That’s my son-in-law, that is’.
So though he was never spotted in any visits to London or as he travelled round the country, his voice was known by millions. That’s why he made the cut in the BBC Radio 4 and TV national news, and on BBC One’s North West programme yesterday, as well as further afield.
And just for a while, I found that my pride in his achievements, and the knowledge that his work would live on as a memorial for Ellie and the boys cut through the grief and brought a smile to my face.
You’ve seen a picture of Phil in a previous post. And as he’s known for being in a certain sense unknown, I thought this image of Ellie and Phil, take from their website, would be appropriate.
Irritatingly, both German and Dutch reports use video of the only station in London, Embankment, that does not use Phil’s voice to advise people to ‘Mind the gap’. This is in deference to the widow of the previous ‘voice’ who regularly uses this station.
We’re still being tourists in London. British Museum today, passing a Korean caff on the way. Korean is the second language on museum signage, Korean Airways sponsors the audio-guides, and we visited the Korean gallery. But this is what caught our eye.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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