A Discovery

Since retiring from Feba my only journey has been to Derbyshire for a holiday with my wife, Marian, last November (2008). We noticed how beauty, hills and proximity to wealth in cities made the proportion of 4x4s higher than in other places. Steep hills and a wintery imagination made Imagine this in the snow! a holiday catch phrase. The snow in February justified these beasts' existence, though. A different journey this morning: Exploring the word outwith. Grace Community Church, my home church, will welcome a new pastor in April. He's Scottish and has lived in France for 15 years, giving him challenges to begin to think again in English and get used to southern English ways. Erwin used outwith in one sermon at GCC. Another GCC member, also a Scot, used outwith since, whetting my curiosity. A Google search reveals this to be a word in current use in Scotland, even in a government web site about home schooling--children being educated outwith school, as it reads. Outwith means beyond or outside, just like the older meaning of without. In the Victorian hymn There Is a Green Hill Far Away Without a City Wall, the hill is outside the city wall, as later editions of the hymn have it, not a plot subject to possible enclosure. It's good to be on the journey still.

End of a long journey

Last evening my former company had an evening to celebrate my retirement. Since summer 2007 I have worked half time with them, having reached pensionable age then. Val and Jacqui organised it all, inviting former colleagues and current staff. We had a great time. My boss, John, is leaving one month later so we celebrated his time, too. That fact allowed him to steal a response I would have loved to make--that he hardly recognised the nice chap the speakers were talking about. Despite my memory now bringing back fine detail from the distant past and failing to match that for more recent events, I didn't remember some of the incidents recalled by others. Regrettably, I do remember times when I was arrogant and boorish. Thirty five years with one company is a long time, unusual in Britain these days where it is better to have multiple entries in one's CV. The long spell hides that I have, in fact, held many different positions with a variety of responsibilities. For 27 years they required international travel, explaining the title of this blog and my rather feeble attempts to write about some of the journeys. Now the frequency of travel will diminish, but the free bus pass will enable local travel in these days of green concerns. For me, the 35 years have gone by very quickly and left me with a brilliant set of memories of people, places and experiences. My colleagues gave me a 500GB computer hard disk to use as a back up facility for a new laptop just purchased. Converting good memories into computer files is impossible; if it were, 500GB would barely contain them all.

West Sussex Again

The weather forecast for Dallas was for rain. On Sunday there were wisps of cloud around in contrast with the perfect blue dome the previous Wednesday. I can't rate Dallas/Fort Worth airport very highly; my pre-flight wait was pretty boring. After arriving in good time at Detroit our plane had to wait twenty minutes for someone to find the illuminated wands a ground staff person uses to guide the plane to the gate. Then there was no one to drive the air bridge from which we deplaned. All in all not very impressive. Unusually, the rail journey to Worthing was fast because the train had a fault, making it 19 minutes late out of Gatwick, so the slow stops along the coast were cut out so it could get back into step with the planned timetable. Is this a boring post? Not as boring as modern international travel; airport taxes on this journey from London to Dallas were higher than the cost of the ticket itself. And we all know why that is. Who is winning what war, I ask? Outside our home are a fir, an oak, a silver birch and a sycamore (E&OE). The gutters are deep in rich brown leaves. Autumn is here.

Target not reached

I never made it to the Target store. While in transit from the hotel to the meeting place the van crossed the bridge over the seemingly impossible junction. There is a pedestrian walk way over the bridge, so it is theoretically possible to go to Target on foot. Instead I was taken to the Apple computer store in Plano, where I bought some software for the Apple computer I plan to buy soon. While fully appreciating the discipline necessary to run a company's IT, I get fed up with Microsoft's bloated software and storage needs. Currently my Outlook 2007 at home takes a couple of minutes to open up its files and nearly as long to shift an email from one file to another. Don't ask why I do that; I know my cyber-life could be simpler. With an Apple it may be complicated, but it will look nice. Apple has great visual impact; by my keyboard is the business card of Todd, the young man who helped me earlier. It is clean and classy. Unlike the floor of the eating place this evening, which is strewn with empty peanut shells. See my earlier post. While we waited for an empty table, pigeons and some black birds waited for any peanuts that might come their way. As the sun went down, hundreds of birds started gathering on the high voltage electricity cables on the far side of the highway, beyond which lies Target. It looked like it could turn into a Hitchcock event if those HT birds decided to really get more peanuts. My steak was delicious.

As a walker in Texas

Walking is a minority activity here. Yesterday I saw only four other walkers. One was not really walking, just standing in the middle of a road turning, dressed as Father Christmas alongside a resurrected Elvis in white cat suit. They were jiggling sign boards around in the hope drivers would turn in to see the pre-Christmas sale of apartments, standing back a quarter mile from the main road. Most of the time I used side walks (pavements in UK, but here the pavement is the roadway--important to know that) but sometimes they just ended either side of some green space. At junctions with bigger roads there are pedestrian signals with a time span favourable to quick reactors and the nimble of foot. At access points to parking lots I have found drivers invariably courteous, holding well back so I could walk on. I did see one man leaning over to peer at me as he turned right ahead of me. So, are the drivers holding back for my safety or theirs? Solitary walker, huh? What do I make of him?

Texas and Large

Texans' reputation (in British humour) is that everything in Texas is bigger than anywhere else. I walked down for supper to Logan's Roadhouse, the nearest one to the hotel. It was fine, with crackly floors. Each table has a galvanized bucket of unshelled peanuts where Brits might expect bread. Emptied shells are dropped on the floor. I saw no spittoons. As a Brit, I find the portions huge and there are no other vegetables than potato. I had potato soup to start, nice with cheese and bacon. Then thin slices of beef on Texan toast, which was really just white bread toast, next to a heap of mashed potato cradling thick brown gravy in a dip. Not a solitary veg; nothing green, orange, red or yellow. Except in the mini dessert of cheesecake, served in a miniature galvanised bucket, the kid brother of the peanut holder. Apart from dessert the portions are huge, no wonder so many people there were overweight. A South African Feba colleague once joked that when beef is on the BBQ his vegetables are pork. In India I learned: After lunch rest a while, after dinner walk a mile. Which I did, stalking out the Target store for the weekend.

May Be In Mombasa

In 1971 my first extended time outside UK was in Kenya's capital, Nairobi, for 5 months before I returned home to get married. July can be cold at 5,000 feet elevation, so my memories include woodsmoke, jacaranda and the dark silvery song of a nocturnal bird. Bathing one night in the concrete floored bathroom I met a moth with a wingspan of 6-8 inches and curiosity to match. I don't think my light was shining that brightly.

In May 2007 all I saw of Nairobi was the airport en route to Mombasa, down on the coast. Actually my group was staying north of Mombasa in an ocean-side hotel drenched with seasonal rain. The wind was quite high, the Indian Ocean breakers roaring constantly as they hit the reef edge. My room had mosquito nets, thank goodness, as Mombasa is close to the equator. Surprisingly, the lizards were nearly as bold as the moth.

One afternoon a tribe of monkeys moved across the compound atop the palms. I was amazed to see one leap several metres, landing on a much lower palm branch on his next tree. Clever or stupid? Reckless or finely judged? He made it, so it's your call.

Old Mombasa was fascinating, even on a rainy late afternoon after a visit to Baraka FM, a station serving both the Christian and Muslim communities in the name of Jesus Christ. From their offices there's a great view over the shipping lanes.

Did the Journeys Stop?

No. I'm still travelling both for work and for pleasure. It's just that this blog is neglected. I repent and promise myself again to get to writing. Taking up from April, the next big journey after the walk round Arundel was to Singapore for my work. Despite the horribly long air journey, I enjoy Singapore. The warm, damp air reminds me of Seychelles, where wife and I spent our earliest married years. We took our firstborn at 9-weeks old and our second son was born there. After the air, that similarities end. Singapore has a reputation for being a controlled society. The end result is a clean, crowded, safe-feeling, prosperous, and--yes--regulated society. A Swedish colleague and I walked from our hotel into town to eat. The traffic flowed, drivers obeyed traffic signals. The pavements were crowded with young people looking healthy, well off and enjoying themselves. We heard that the Christian church in Singapore is thriving. I'm glad that the prosperity is being moderated by spiritual growth. Materialism, like a nuclear reactor, needs moderating with other, spiritual influences to avoid melt down. Local TV was fun. In Thailand once I saw a cooking programme on preparing rats. My stomach turned when I saw a dozen tails hanging over the side of the wok. In Singapore I was caught up with a TV soap whose daily tensions grew in the fertile soil of loves gained and lost, flirtations with dishonesty and manipulation, a son watching his father regret infidelity and longing for his parents to be reconciled. I was sorry to leave.

Arundel is in the top ten

This last week has brought some Spring-like weather to West Sussex. Sunday last, wife and I drove into Central London to visit oldest son and his wife. We walked though St James Park, with hundreds of others, and enjoyed the sunshine and keen wind. It turns out they had visited Arundel two weeks earlier to walk along the river and through the Duke's estate, as wife and I reported in our last posting. Saturday night wife and I were at the Black Rabbit with two American friends, with whom we'd just seen Amazing Grace, the film celebrating William Wilberforce's struggle to outlaw slavery. For wife it was the third meal at the Black Rabbit that week! Multiple dining medal to be struck and passed over, no doubt.

Success on Sunday

Wife and I walked just over 5 miles Sunday afternoon, guided by the GPS. We started at Arundel, West Sussex, parking the car on the road to the Black Rabbit pub, then walking alongside the river Arun to it. The path was pretty muddy. Then on the paved road to South Stoke, beyond which we breasted one hill, then on down to the river bank again. The Duke of Norfolk's estate is walled, but The Monarch's Way traverses it from Arundel itself to the gate in the wall where we joined it. The GPS was tracking us quite well, but overlaying the track on a digital map at home showed us walking along the middle of the river just before the climb to the top of the estate. We're good, but not that good. It was a windy, overcast day, but that section of the South Downs is lovely. We promised ourselves a visit in summer. Light was failing now, but it was an easy walk downhill to Swanbourne Lake. The water fowl were grumbling about things and across the valley some teenage boys competed to be loudest. We needed the compass once, again in woodland; the torch several times as we came down off the Downs; the printed map pretty often. GPS handhelds seem to be fine in open areas but get far less precise in our kind of territory.