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Stirling Castle is lies just two miles from Bannockburn's fields, and you can see it looming in the distance, perched on another of those rocky outcrops that proved so defensible. It was said for years that "He who controls Stirling, controls Scotland" because for so long it was the only crossing point over the Forth and up into the highlands for people moving in any number.The building you see is not what Robert the Bruce fought to defend. He burned THAT castle to the ground as part of his scorched earth policy after winning at Bannockburn in 1314. (Interesting concept - to fight so hard to become 'lord of all you set fire to'....)However, Stirling was the principal home of virtually all the Stewart kings (aka the Stuart kings of England, courtesy of Elizabeth I, who died childless, leaving her nephew James VI of Scotland, her heir) so the palace grew as each successive monarch sought to leave their glorious mark. Mary, Queen of Scots was born here, although once the Scottish crown went south, the place was turned over to the military and turned into an out and out fortress. Carefull restoration means the feasting hall, royal apartments and kitchens (the best I'd seen - until I went to Hampton Court... but that's another story) tell tales of courtly life, with food and feasts documented in meticulous detail. Yum.... 
We hired a car to scoot out to Bannockburn and Stirling (I promised Anthony I won't say anything about the episode that involved him going to pickup the car and discovering his licence was expired. So I won't.)Apart from a very fetching replica of the crown of Robert the Bruce - pictured (all the schoolkids visiting that day were clamouring to have their picture taken with "the king" and didn't Ants just lap it up!), Bannockburn also boasts a brilliant account of Scottish military tactics, including the use of spears to beat cavalry charges (as featured in that famous movie that completely re-imagines the life of William Wallace - although they put it in the wrong battle!). It seems there's a kind of 'rock paper scissors' of military tactics - Spears beat Horses; Arches shred Spearmen; Horses ride down Archers. Why they don't teach it like that in school, I'll never know.They also don't teach what a ruthless bastard Robert the Bruce was. Granted, he was something of a military genius at times, but to get to the post of commanding the armies (as King) he's believed to have murdered at least one rival for the throne and allowed his wife, sisters and daughter to languish in English prisons for years until he captured the Earl of Hereford at Bannockburn to ransom for their return. He also pursued a vicious scorched earth policy so his enemies could not pursue him into the highlands, to the ruin of many ordinary Scottish families.But he wupped Edward Longshanks, King of England also known as 'the Hammer of the Scots', so I guess that makes him a hero...
From Anzac Day's dawn service we sallied forth to Scotland (after a wee snooze - that 3am start was a killer!).Edinburgh rocks! We more or less decided on the spot to move up there as fast as we can, for as long as possible (Sarah, Becky and Kerry, you'll understand!). The town itself is stunning, rising from a valley floor, full of winding cobbled streets and steep hills, with mountain views on every side. The Scots have a talent for building huge castles on highly defensible outcroppings of volcanic rock - which is good, because they have lots of them! Thus were born towns like Edinburgh and Stirling (the latter, for many centuries, was the site of the only ford over the Forth river, connecting highlands and lowlands).Scottish pubs serve an abundance of haggis (which Anthony sampled all three days we were there - my favourite is the one that comes with a whisky cream sauce), cheap pints, various whiskies (we counted 32 in one bar alone!), live music and good cheer. The Scots are a friendly folk - although we weren't sure about the fella offering "cheap gammon steaks - just 10 quid" to everyone in the bar. Oh, and they love their literary quotes - from excerpts of the noble "Declaration of Arbroath"* in 1320 to the hilarious "Ode to English Rugby", you'll find something to read on every wall.*"As long as a hundred of us remain alive, we will never be subject to English Domination, because it is not for glory or riches or honours that we fight, but for freedom alon, which no worthy man loses, except with his life". Way better than Mel Gibson's twaddle about some king putting his head between his legs to kiss his own.. y'know.By the way, we also found the best backpackers - apart from its unfortunate name (http://www.argyle-backpackers.co.uk/). Gorgeous room - and a bigger bathroom - than the hotel we called home near Hyde Park. And half the price.The rest of the highlights from this trip deserve postings of their own...
Much to my amazement, I've had emails from people asking why I've stopped blogging.... (Heavens! Someone other than my parents and my Aunty De is reading this!!!) I've had a very good excuse - April 21 saw the arrival of my partner Anthony, for a three week holiday! Yippee!!!We spent our first four days in a very funky little B&B at Lancaster Gate, just near Hyde Park (there was no way we were going to inflict our reunion, after two months apart, on my housemates!). It was also a fabulous base to explore from, and I began to realise how much of London I haven't seen yet either!Our first day took us for a wander through Hyde Park (which is huge! I always thought, in those English period novels, how silly is was to ride children on ponies in a park... but this is no ordinary sized park...it took half an hour to walk across the 'short' side!) and down to Harrods. Yes, my big burly rugby playing feller was apparently also born to shop.... Harrods is an amazing place to see, although at £400 for a leather belt (thats ($A1000) and £60,000 for a necklace, we didn't buy anything. We did, however find an excellent cheese platter in their deli and some wine. (I even ate stinky cheese!)From there our adventures became something of a 'monopoly board' tour... we wandered up past Mayfair, along Picadilly, stopping at a market we found along the way, where Anthony bought himself a big long stemmed pipe!
Next, we crossed Picadilly circus, down to Trafalgar Square and The Strand, up to Leicester Square and Covent Garden, before grabbing a well earned pint in Bow Street (famous for its history of 'ladies of negotiable affection'... and gents too, by all accounts!
Sunday saw us test the Swan Hotel's claim to the 'best fish and chips in London' (they were rather good!) and ride the London Eye, followed by dinner at Wagamamas - they're a kind of chain of asian diners here. Some people sneer at them, but those people have obviously never had the duck and leek gyoza there! Yum, and more Yum!!
Buckingham Palace, the Horse Guards on Parade, and then suddenly it was evening again and we joined up with Sarah and Mark to check out London's oldest pub, The Olde Mitre, established by the Bishop of Ely in 1534 or thereabouts... Found another excellent old place for dinner, nothing over 7 quid, which is cheap for this part of the world... that boy has a nose for sniffing out good pubs with large meals...Tuesday morning we were up at 3am to go to the Anzac Day dawn service at the war memorial at Hyde Park... Anthony was resplendent in full police dress uniform and cracks a fine salute, I must say! The service itself was rather moving - all of our grandparents were involved in WWII in particular, and, as an Aussie and a Kiwi, the ANZAC identity is something we both share. Of course, one of the things that made the Anzac landing such a tragedy was a series of massive cockups by the high command - if only that idiot in Canberra who keeps sending our lads to Iraq would learn from history, realise when he's in the wrong place at the wrong time, and bring them home...
Dodgy inaccessiblity issues aside, the ability of this place to move more than 20 million people a day never ceases to amaze me. Yes, buses are slow in peak hour, but consider that every bus is about 50 cars less on the road...
And why can't Melbourne work out things like automatic ticketing (most Londoners have a rechargeable "oyster" card - just press against the scanner and presto), escalators (stand on the right, walk on the left, get tutted at loudly for getting it wrong), and scheduling. Granted, when you have 20 million people you can afford to run a train every 2 minutes during peak hour, but even the buses in far flung regions seem to be timetabled so that they'redue to leave after the connecting overland train arrives, not 45 seconds before...And slowly, I'm finding I can get from A to B in reasonable time, with out getting lost. Heavens - today I even had people asking ME for directions. And unlike many Londoners (who will tell you any old bull just so that they're not seen to be impolite and refusing/unhelpful), I KNEW my answers were right!
London would have to be one of the most wheelchair INaccessible cities I've ever seen. Granted, the oldest parts of the Tube are over 150 years old. But I'm surprised that in this day and age there are only 72 tube stops, out of 270, that have disability access. Of these, just SIX are in 'Zone 1', the inner city - Earl's Court, Tower Bridge, Tower Gateway, Elephant and Castle, Southwark and Westminster, - and they (all bar Earl's Court) spread over not more than a kilometre.What are wheelies supposed to do? Compete on the roads with the big red buses?*Murderball is the nickname given to wheelchair rugby, one of the most violent, fast paced and fun-to-watch games I've ever seen. Nowhere else in wheelchair sport do you get a free throw if you tip someone else out of their chair (as long as they have the ball when you do it).
A mate in Melbourne reckons Christy Moore, Irish folk singer extraordinaire for the past 40 years, doesn't do gigs outside Ireland any more. He was wrong. Christy played London over Easter and, by merest fluke, I saw the gigs advertised in time to snaffle one of the last FIVE tickets, scoring a lone seat in the front row of the balcony.And Christy rocked! It was a funny sort of gig - it was at the Barbican, which is kind of like the Melbourne concert hall - a very wide, round theatre, lots of early 80s decor, and initially at least, polite applause but that's all. Very odd for a bloke who, at 61yrs of age, walks out looking like he's straight out of Trades Hall or off a picket line somewhere... It took about half an hour for both Christy, and the crowd, to fire up, but he scored 2 standing ovations at the end, and in the meantime played some of my favourite songs (he wrote such legendary pub songs as Lisdoonvarna and Delirium Tremens as well as some serious protest songs against nuclear armament, South African apartheid and pro peace in Northern Ireland), and got all of us to sing along for choruses, which was rather fabulous.Definitely glad I didn't go to Penzance for the weekend now (although Penzance would almost have been cheaper!)
Easter was relatively light on the chocolate for me... my cousin Sam and I were discussing the fact that, when you're living 'overseas' from home, there are no chocolate eggs,christmas/b'day pressies often arrive late... (he launched into this tyrade after I'd just presented him with an egg, because it was the first he'd been given in 3 easters!) But he's right - my only choccy was eggs I bought myselfChoccy aside, it's interesting being somewhere where the easter traditions are obviously 'similar but different'. In Melbourne, Good Friday is one of the two sacrosanct public holidays each year, so I was all prepared for there to be no shops open, almost no pubs, and very little action on the streets. How wrong was I - from the hustle and bustle it seems it's not such a big deal here, although certainly all offices are closed (along with fully half the Tube system, for 'planned engineering works. Good sense, I guess, but a bugger if you're spending the weekend in London).Sunday was an interesting experience too, as I took myself off to see Christy Moore (!!!) Brixton is probably best known for its vibrant black community (who have come a long way in their standing in England since the riots that were 25 years ago this week). Easter Sunday was party time in this part of town - the streets were full of kids on easter bunny hunts, seemingly impromptu street parties broke out everywhere, with chatter and music and lots of noise. And everywhere were parents and kids, hair immaculately wound, woven and lacquered into place, dressed in their Sunday best, for church or play I'll never know. But Brixton rocked for all the right reasons today, and it was lovely.
This last weekend I escaped Londong with my friends Sarah and Mark to Mark's parents place... three years ago Paul and Linda (said parents) bought a rundown old manor house and have been restoring it to its former glory - and what a job!! All the main timbers and most of the brickwork dates to the 1300s, with about half the house in the 'half timbered' or black beams/white walls style we think of as "Tudor". Apparently the family that built the original house were given the land when they came over with William the Conqueror, and this was the second house built on that site (no idea what happened to the original - 'burned down in a terrible fire' seems to be a common fate... all those dodgy old chimneys and dried out thatch...) There are two wells, and a 15th century barn... Inside, dark 'tudor'/cromwellian panelling and a priest hole (for hiding catholics during the wars of religion). They've done a gorgeous job with it - especially compared to photos of the two of them wading through piles of rubble... in the dining room!
Hosepipe ban notwithstanding, their garden, the whole acre of it, is gorgeous - Linda is planting lots of low-water plants, like lavendar and rosemary. Utterly, utterly gorgeous... And Paul and Linda, Mark's parents, are lovely people, with lots of interesting tales to tell (Paul dives, has run several London Marathons, most recently at the age of 50, and last year climbed Mt Kilimanjaro for something to do). We ate and drank our way through the entire weekend. Life should have more of this.
Australia has Simpson and his Donkey, England has Edith Cavell - although I'd never heard of her, and I suspect many English haven't either. I walked past her statue last weekend, between Leicester Square and Trafalgar and had to know why this stranger figured so prominently among the city's monuments.
Edith Louise Cavell was born in 1865 in Norfolk, in that 'bulge' of the eastern coast called Anglia, the eldest daughter of a vicar and a handmaiden. Well educated and outspoken (she famously lobbied the local bishop for funds for a new hall, and then, when he said he'd match what the town raised, coaxed her sister into painting postcards with her, which they sold as part of a £300 fundraising drive. She was about 12 at the time). She later became a governess, moved to Belgium (something I entirely understand!), had a love affair with her distantly related cousin Eddie (it happens, okay!) and took up nursing at the age of 30 after returning home to care for her father through an unspecified, but serious, illness from which he recovered.In 1897 she was seconded as part of a group of nurses to care for patients during a typhoid outbreak. Of 1700 who contracted the disease, only 132 died and Edith received the Maidstone Medal for her work there. She worked at famous London hospitals for the poor including St Pancras (night superintendant), Shoreditch (assistant matron) and Manchester and Salford Sick Poor and Private Nursing Institution (matron), where a plaque was mounted in her honour for her work.In 1907 she returned to Belgium where she found work training professional nurses "along the lines of Florence Nightingale", a role then unknown in Belgium where nursing was carried out largely by nuns with little medical training. She wrote home that "The old idea that it is a disgrace for women to work is still held in Belgium and women of good birth and education still think they lose caste by earning their own living" but the school prospered, helped by patronage from the Queen of Belgium, who sought their care after breaking her arm.When war broke out, Edith declared her work "more needed than ever", refusing her ageing (and now widowed) mother's pleas to return home. Her nursing work was distinguished by the fact that she accepted German and Allied patients irrespective of nationality, and her clinic became an official Red Cross centre.At some point during the early part of the War, Edith's clinic began to receive Allied soldiers who had been isolated from their lines, or who had escaped from German captors. All were quietly spirited back to England, often via the Nederlands, through contacts she made in the Underground. While keeping her nursing colleagues completely unaware of her activities, she received and despatched more than 200 soldiers back to their homeland.Eventually she was discovered and, convinced by her German captors that they knew everything, freely confessed. Edith was tried, convicted and sentenced to death. On the morning of her execution, on October 12 1915, she dedicated one of her books to her cousin Eddie, packed her possessions into a handbag to be sent home to England, and begged the German priest to send word to her mother, now aged 80, so that she wouldn't hear of it first through the newspapers. Edith Cavell was executed by firing squad by men who were told that, although she was a woman, she is not a mother, so don't feel too bad about aiming true.The priest who attended her that last morning passed on to the world her last words:"I am thankful to have had these ten weeks of quiet to get ready ...Standing as I do in view of God and Eternity, I realise that patriotism is not enough, I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone".You can read a detailed account of her life, including the priest's full account, here and I am endebted to this article for the information contained above.
Yes indeed! One of the rooms in Sarah's flat here in Brixton is becoming vacant, so seeing rent and bills (and funny things called council tax and a television licence!) come to less than 100 quid a week, I thought I'd grab it.It's not the flashest flat in the world, and Brixton not quite the nicest part of town (!!!), but it's safe, very cheap, close to lots of things, will help eke out my dwindling funds while I'm jobhunting, and best of all, I don't have to stress about finding somewhere else before Anthony arrives in a fortnight.My room comes with a bed, cupboard and shelves, a sloping attic roof and a view of the 12th C norman church in the park between here and the station. I move in at the start of May. O happy day!
... although so far there's been little indeed of the "little April showers" for which this land is famed. The rainy country is in the grip of a drought, which is terrible for farmers, and people with lush gardens - pretty much the whole country has a blanket ban on using hoses for watering, washing the car, anything!) However the distinct lack of rain makes it grand for travellers - it's sunny for at least part of most days, which is grand. And spring here is amazing - one minute everything's dead and grey, and then, literally in the space of a week, daffodils shoot up out of the lawns everywhere, blossoms appear on trees, and the place becomes a riot of colour. That week seems to have been the one during which I was in Dublin, so the change is quite marked.
London is actually more green and less grey than I imagined. A few places are very proud of the fact that 34% of London's surface area is public park/garden (more than any other city in europe,and not half bad for a city that crams 13 million people into an area the size of Melbourne!). So now leaves are starting to appear on trees, and I have had my first 'day without wearing my winter coat outside' just last week! Bring it on.
