Summer Holidays 2010 7: The Call of the Wild

Highclere Castle

When I visited Highclere Castle, the home of the Earl of Carnarvon (yes, the descendant of the one who found King Tut’s tomb), I was pleasantly surprised when I saw a deer cross the road in front of the car. There was never any danger of hitting it, because I was on private land and not allowed to drive any faster than 10 miles per hour so I got a really good chance to look at it. Unfortunately it disappeared fairly quickly into the undergrowth or I would have taken a picture of it. Still, it was a very nice experience for someone who spends her whole life living in a city.

I love spotting animals in the wild like that. A bit later I saw a squirrel and even though it was just an ordinary grey one it was still a good sighting. However, things are a bit different when the wildlife suddenly invades your home.

The cottage in Wiltshire where I was staying is a great place. Small, but it has everything, from a fully equipped kitchen to a flat screen telly with a DVD-player and, oh great joy, this time also a (albeit slightly wonky) wi-fi connection, which saved me a lot of lugging a laptop all over the place at awkward times.

But this time I had some wildlife invading the place. Not the odd fly, wasp or spider (which can be nasty enough, but hey, you’re in the country) and not the crushed snail that had somehow managed to wedge itself between the front door and the threshold without me noticing and which made a nasty smear on the doormat, but when I came home one afternoon I discovered an army of ants marching across the kitchen floor.

My first impulse was to stamp on them but that didn’t make any real impression because for every dead one several others took its place so I decided heavier stuff was needed. Off to the landlady I went who gave me a few of those boxes that attract ants and then kill them. We put a few out on the kitchen floor and hoped that would do the trick. For good measure I stamped on a few more, making the kitchen floor look more and more like a battlefield.

I settled down on the couch with a good book and was well into it when the first flying ant made an appearance. The weather was close and there was a storm brewing and that probably brought it out, and besides, there was only one and I could easily deal with that. I simply hit it over the head with the book, making an end to that problem. It was a pity it left a smear on the cover, but as the saying goes, you can’t make a cake without breaking some eggs and I was not going to spend a night in a cottage with flying ants all over the place. I cleaned the cover of the book and settled down again.

Not five minutes later I spied a full cohort of ants marching across the floor. I swear you could hear their tiny feet stamping all over the tiles. I pondered the problem for a few seconds and then thought it would be a good idea to Hoover them up.

It was indeed a wonderful idea, however it only worked for a few minutes, until they walked out of the back of the Hoover and because I was now in the bedroom I had ants all over the floor there as well.

It was clear I needed heavier artillery than those little boxes, but I was reluctant to use the anti-bug spray. That stuff is toxic (well, it does kill ants) and I didn’t feel like spraying it around and having to sleep in the fumes.

I opened one cupboard after another with the vague idea that I might find something I could use but I got a very nasty shock when I opened a bottom cupboard and a virtual legion of ants came streaming out. That was it. Countryside or not I was not going to bed with such an amount of creepy crawlies around, so out came the bug spray. It didn’t smell too bad after all.

I’m very fond of certain types of wildlife, but not when it’s crawling around my kitchen.

Picture thanks to http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/

More about Highclere Castle you can find at: http://www.highclerecastle.co.uk/
If you want to rent a nice cottage in Wiltshire, go to:  http://www.rendellsfarmcottages.com/  All the ants are gone now.

Summer Holidays 2010 6: Tourists at Avebury and Stonehenge

I confess I’m a tourist myself and I like doing touristy things, like visiting musea, stately homes, small towns and villages, churches and, when in Wiltshire, places like Stonehenge and Avebury; and most touristlike at all, I like taking lots of photographs. Don’t get me wrong, I really like people, but there are times I’d just rather sit in a field and listen to the cows.

The "I'd rather wear a Speedo in Ibiza" bloke

The world is my office

Queen Mum lookalike

Serious photographer

Part-time New Agers

Thank God we can take the kids out for a day so they will be too tired to be annoying to the rest of the neighbourhood

Europe in 8 days and 800 photographs

My friends went to Ibiza and all theygot me was this lousy tattoo

Sheepz in Avebury - Ur doin it rite

Sheepz in Avebury - Ur doin it rong

Can you all see my back hair?

We have been around since the 60s and we're not about to leave ...

The Really Cultural Couple - Ur doin it rite

The Really Cultural Couple - Ur doin it rong

Why do some people look like they'd much rather be somewhere else?

The born-again Iron Age lady

Summer Holidays 2010 5: This Sporting Life

They say that to truly understand British culture and the British way of life you should be able to understand everything there is to know about cricket. Well, bummer! That means I don’t understand anything about the British at all! I’ve heard about a wicket, stumps and ashes and I believe sometimes someone calls out: “Howzat!”, and I’ve seen people playing cricket on Saturday afternoons, usually on lovely summer’s days when the sound of the ball on the bat can be heard miles away and the only other sounds are those made by bees flying from flower to flower in the eco-friendly borders of the cricket field, but that’s where it ends. I have no idea what they’re doing, only that it takes a long time.

It’s always men playing it seems. I’ve never heard of an all-women cricket team, but that doesn’t mean a thing because as I said, I don’t know anything about the game at all. So I decided to do some research, because in my job you really need to understand the British way of life, and of course I found out all about it on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket . Still don’t understand much of it unfortunately. Maybe the reason is that my mind started wandering about halfway through the article.

The game sounds simple enough, just like any other ballgame really, but why are the British so fascinated by the game? Or by any other game come to think of it?

It’s probably me. I have a big problem understanding any game involving a bunch of men (with or without bats or rackets) running about after balls that have to be caught or kicked into goals, hurting or maiming as many opponents as they can in the process and trying to look at death’s door when an opponent treats them in the same way.

It seems the British are obsessed with sports and I am not.

Does this mean that I will never understand British culture? Maybe, but it may just mean that I won’t be able to understand the particular part of British culture that involves sports. Do I really care? Actually, no. Actually, I’m really proud of the fact that I don’t understand anything about sports and why most people are so obsessed by it.

There. I’ve said it. So shoot me.

Summer Holidays 2010 4: Good Manners

When I was still in high school, a long, long time ago, and later when I was studying English, I was taught that English people have very good manners. They queue when they have to wait at a bus stop, they patiently wait their turn in shops and they are all extremely polite. Now apart from odd exceptions like lager louts on holiday in Ibiza and the occasional a***hole who tries to jump a queue and whom the other people in self-same queue start complaining about loudly once the culprit has disappeared, I found this all to be very true.

Today I had to do some grocery shopping and I thought it would be nice to treat myself to the Waitrose-experience. Of course everything there is vastly overpriced, but the shop is light and big, the aisles are wide and the assortment of goods you can get there is very extensive. I love the way the salespeople are dressed, not so much the ones at the tills, but especially the people at the fish, meat and bread counters. Whoever thought of making them wear those silly white hats? And the ladies as well?

I can understand that from a hygienic perspective people who handle food have to wear some kind of headgear, something that covers the hair completely, but silly hats like that? And especially the ladies have a way of wearing those silly things without covering their hair really. When a waist-long ponytail comes down from under the hat the purpose is totally defeated if you ask me.

After my little excursion through the shop I arrived at the till behind a little old lady who looked like the late Queen Mum. She was taking her time paying for her shopping while the cashier patiently waited until she had put her enormous handbag down, carefully opened the zipper, took out a little purse, discovered she didn’t have enough change, put the purse back in the handbag, found a bigger purse, produced a credit card, fiddled with card in the machine, forgot her pin code, found a little book in the handbag with the pin code written inside, entered the pin code three times (did it wrong the first two times), put away the credit card in the big purse and the purse in the handbag, nearly forgot the little book with the pin code, asked for a carrier bag, started putting the groceries in the bag one by one, found out she did it the wrong way and repacked everything at leisure.

Now I’m a teacher and as such you have to be of a very patient disposition, but this tested even me. The waiting itself was not so bad, but the problem was I needed to find a ladies’ room very badly. It is unfortunately very true that when you get to certain age you do really need to go more often. But I was in England and there was nothing for it but bite my lower lip, stiffen my upper lip and exercise my pelvic floor muscles until it was my turn and I was literally bursting. However, I managed to reach the ladies’ in time.

This little anecdote describes very well the British state of mind. It doesn’t matter who or what is waiting, when it’s your turn, it’s your turn and you can take your time.

How different it will be when I get back to The Netherlands. The last time I was at a supermarket there, I was nearly pushed away by the woman behind me. I’d just paid but my groceries were still on the belt as it is physically impossible to pay and at the same time pack your groceries. Of course the belt was not in operation, so I had to shove everything to the end of it, but while I was trying to do that as quickly as I could, the woman behind me was clearly getting impatient and started pushing her cart against the back of my legs. Giving her a deadly stare didn’t make any impression at all.

Maybe she was in a hurry; maybe someone needed her urgently; maybe she was a woman of a certain age as well and she needed to pee, but actually I don’t think it was any of that. I think she was just being Dutch. And being Dutch means speaking very loudly in company so everyone can hear how interesting and intelligent you are, push yourself to the head of the queue in the unlikely event of there being one at all and trying to run over every co-shopper while in a supermarket.

I’ll enjoy the British manners patiently for as long as my holidays last and next time I have to go to the supermarket I’ll just visit the ladies’ first.

Picture thanks to www.seafoodtraining.org

Summer Holidays 2010 3: Food, Glorious Food

Tea and scones, photograph by Jeremy Keith from Britghton and Hove

When I first went to England nearly 45 years ago, food was a bit of a problem. My dad had had stomach problems for years and needed a very specific diet, so because the only thing we knew about English food was that it was horrible compared to any other type of food in the world (as told to us by the same people that know it always rains in England), on that first memorable holiday my mum took enough food from Holland for my dad to survive on for a week or two.

There was of course the problem of where we were going to stay. We had no experience with travelling abroad and because of my dad’s illness we wanted to keep the journey itself as short as possible so for that first holiday we decided to stay as close to Dover as possible and we rented a big old rambling place in the middle of Deal, at that time a quiet seaside town where hardly anybody ever spent their holidays.

We’d never stayed in a house that big before, so even that was an adventure, especially the going to the toilet in the middle of the night, because the bedrooms were upstairs and the toilet was far, far away, down an immense flight of stairs. The bathroom consisted basically of a long corridor with the toilet itself at the very end of it and a window right behind. I was 15, my sister a year younger and we brought a friend of hers, who was a few years older and had just started work as a French teacher at the school we both attended. It was very easy for the three of us to get really worked up over nothing. Of course we told each other all kinds of scary stories in which axe murderers behind toilet windows played a prominent part, so the only way any of us dared to go down in the middle of the night was if we could all go down together. Needless to say we had a great time.

It was a good thing, however, that my mum had had the foresight to take so much food, because whatever there was to be had in the village shops was nothing my dad was allowed to have. Vegetables were limited to cucumbers, cauliflowers, onions, tomatoes and potatoes and of course there were always tinned baked beans. Because my mum didn’t feel like doing much cooking we feasted on cucumber, potatoes and beef one day and baked beans, potatoes and beef the next, while my dad got the diet stuff she’d brought from home. Not really such a bad diet for a few weeks, but after a few days of baked beans flatulence hit the household and that was rather an inconvenience. Fortunately it was a warm summer and we could keep the windows open all day.

When we got older and were allowed in pubs, we found out that pub food was a better way of staying alive especially when my dad wasn’t around, and the added advantage was that you never had to do the dishes.

Nowadays you can get the same food all over Europe. The big supermarkets all sell more or less the same things, sometimes under a different brand name, but if you want to you can prepare the same food during your holidays as you would at home if you wanted or needed to.

However, that’s not what I want when I’m in England. I always like to have the British things, like lamb in mint sauce, fish and chips and scones and clotted cream for tea.

For tea and scones you can of course visit one of Ye Olde Teashoppes (usually given a name like that by some big chain) and if you’re lucky you might get a decent cup of tea and a halfway fresh scone, but more often than not the tea is made by dangling a teabag in hot water and the scone is made the day before and if you were to drop it inadvertently on someone’s head it would instantly kill him.

The other alternative is to visit the Caen Locks in Devizes, a flight of 29 locks in the Kennet and Avon Canal, where there is a small refreshment shop that sells the most amazing scones and real tea.

Of course, the British have many more wonderful dishes and the days when people were right about the British food being atrocious are long gone. Maybe British food is not all that refined, but I certainly enjoy it enormously when it’s well prepared.

Caen Locks, Devizes

More about the Caen Locks can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caen_Hill_Locks.

More about British food can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_cuisine and http://www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/customs/questions/food/index.htm .

If you like to try out some recipes you can find most of the best British cooking in: Traditional British Cooking, Consultant Editor: Hilaire Walden. Published by Hermes House. I was able to get it for only £3.99.