Lots of gulls spoke about the wonders of Spain, a far-off land where the ports were heaving with fish and where it was never too cold (in gull terms) in winter. But Freda had a problem – as she whirled around in the skies near her home, she sometimes saw swallows and swifts who, so it was said, crossed entire continents without ever touching land. Freda, like most gulls, didn’t like the sound of that – for them flying was just a way to get a better view of where the next meal was likely to come from, and quite frequently standing around on the top of posts or buildings was just as productive, in food terms.

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So if she was going to travel to Iberia, she was going to have to find a boat to take her there. After consulting her fellow gulls once more, she headed off along the coast from the place she’d called home for the last few years, looking back just once at the old familiar places as they disappeared behind her, seemingly forever.

Her journey to a place with lots of boats took a couple of days, but there were plenty of places along the way where she could stop and chat to the local gulls who, on the whole, were quite surprised by her plans, although also supportive.

She’d been told that she needed to find a boat with a lot of people on it. Not too large (those ones tend to sail so far they disappear off the edge of the world, apparently) and not too small, since small ones rarely get that far from the coast.

She settled down on an old boat called Francine and looked around. She was in luck, she thought. Nearby was something that looked about right, with plenty of places for her to perch and watch for food. She flapped over and settled on one of the highest points and waited. She waited for a long time and nothing much happened. There had been a few people on the boat when she’d arrived, but rather than getting busier, everybody had now disappeared, and she had the impression she was now the only living creature left on board.

As she looked around, she saw another boat. This one looked exactly like the ones she’d been told about and, as it pulled away from the shore and moved closer to her, she flapped over for a closer look. She wasn’t the only gull nearby, but as she talked to the others, she discovered that they were merely following the boat for a little while, hoping for rich pickings as it set off.

Freda smiled. She could see people standing on the decks eating ice cream and chips, two of her favourite meals and, as the sun started to settle towards the west, she looked at England, one last time.

Even though she didn’t know the area she was in now, she recognised landmarks that were very familiar to her. Church steeples and industrial complexes of various sorts, the buildings that had marked her way since she the first time she took to the skies, disappearing now forever. She wondered whether the humans had built similar structures in Spain and, as the light transformed to darkness over the sea, she fell asleep, dreaming of what she would see in the morning.

While she slept, any remaining gulls who had tagged along for the ride had disappeared. She’d opened her eyes from time to time, but there had been nothing to see, except, inevitably, for the sea itself

The next morning, when she awoke, there still wasn’t much out there. She looked out onto endless water, all the way into the distance where it met the sky, and wondered if she’d made the right choice.

But then she heard a commotion behind her and looked around. The noise came from loads of seagulls, flapping around noisily and shouting in what she took for Spanish, as the boat passed close to land that she hadn’t spotted before.

She was immediately reassured about one thing. The Spanish built lighthouses just like the ones she was used to seeing. They also had familiar-looking ruins which, immediately made her feel right at home.

One of the gulls came close, and Freda shouted out the only Spanish word she’d managed to pick up before starting her journey.

“¡Hola!”, she bellowed!

The gull looked at her quizzically. “¡Hola!”, Freda cried again The gull came closer and stared. “Bonjour !” it said in reply. Freda was confused, that didn’t sound like Spanish. She tried once more. “¡Hola!”. The other gull shook its head and took off. She watched it disappearing into the distance and wondered why it hadn’t replied intelligibly.

The land was starting to get further away again now. Freda watched as the lighthouse faded into the distance, until it was nothing more than a dot on the horizon. Another lighthouse appeared close to the boat, this one seemingly all alone on a rock in the middle of the sea.

Another gull settled down near her and she tried her greeting again. “¡Hola!”. This time the other gull laughed. Then he looked her up and down and said “Hello!”.

What was going on?

The other gull smiled. “You’re not from around here are you?”, it asked in English. Freda nodded, and explained that she had decided to move to Spain to expand her horizons. The other gull, whose name, apparently, was Alan, laughed. He explained that while she was on the right boat and would, eventually, reach her chosen destination if she stayed on board, thus far she had only reached France.

Freda blinked. In all the time she’d been on board, all through the night, the boat had only managed to cross the Channel.

Alan laughed again. It had managed to do more than just cross the Channel, but the French Atlantic coastline was very long, and they were now sailing close to a place called Brittany, which they would soon leave behind and again end up far out at sea, crossing something called the Bay of Biscay. It would take another full day and another full night before the boat reached Spain.

As he spoke, Freda had a funny tingling sensation running through her. At first, she thought it was because she hadn’t eaten any chips since yesterday, but she started to wonder if it was more than that.

Alan looked at her and explained that he had set off from England a long time before her, to make the same journey to exotic foreign lands, but had changed his mind after meeting French gulls en route. He now used the ferry as a means of transport between Brittany and the place he now called home, a French jewel jutting out of the Atlantic, the Île de Sein, which the boat would be passing close to very soon.

As he spoke, she became more and more certain that she was starting to have feelings for Alan. Yes, they’d only met a few minutes ago, but that’s just what gulls are like. Before she even really had time to think, she decided that the Île de Sein sounded like just the place for her, at least as somewhere to stop for a while. If things didn’t work out, she could always hop back on another ferry as it sailed past (making sure, of course, that it was going in the right direction, she’d hate to end up back where she’d started).

Alan nodded. He understood. Then he slipped off his perch and skimmed the surface of the waves on his way to the island. Freda watched for a moment and followed him.

Would she ever reach Spain? At the moment, she didn’t really know, and she didn’t really care. Life was good, wherever she was, and that was all that mattered.

Farewell (for now) Freda.

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Buy me a bag of chips

Outside, the boys were excited. It was a school trip that had begun early the same morning when the day boys were dropped off at school, while the boarders had been bouncing off the walls for hours in excitement. Mr Farwell had brought his cine camera so that it could record the moment when the coach set off down the school driveway, followed, a few seconds later, by the coach stopping so that Mr Farwell could get off and retrieve the camera in question for the rest of the trip.

The journey to Dover from Dorset in the turd-brown coloured Bere Regis coach had been long, about five hours, and uneventful, only marked by a pause for breakfast at Fleet Services on the M3 – jam rolls distributed to everyone and wolfed down on a grass verge outside the coach.

Now on the ferry, at the top of the stairs, there was a gate. The boys pushed the gate open and went through. Beyond, there was another stairway leading even higher. The lads pressed on, up the stairs quickly to what was basically just a small landing which appeared to serve no useful purpose. The views were good though, a bit like a convenient crow’s nest, designed just well enough to give them, briefly, the impression that they were on a pirate ship rather than a Sealink cross-channel ferry.

An announcement crackled out over the Tannoy. It wasn’t very clear, something about please leave the area, but nobody was really listening, they were getting caught up now with their ideas of pirates, and were going on about who they would force to walk the plank first. There was a good list of teachers who probably wouldn’t last long before being sent to feed the fishes, and they’d be followed by a fair number of fellow pupils too.

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Which was probably a bit unfair, but schoolboys can be like that.

The Tannoy crackled out again. Something about boys in the fo’c’sle. It clearly had nothing to do with our pirates, who had no idea what a fo’c’sle was and were wondering if they could find a sword that looked sufficiently menacing, and possibly a parrot too, which would be much more exciting that the seagulls that were circling overhead, in increasing number, as the ferry moved closer to the French coast.

Ahead of them, Cap Blanc-Nez was now close. Almost, but not quite, close enough to touch, and as the ferry swung about 15 degrees to port and started sailing parallel to the French coast, the speakers crackled into life again.

The voice was no longer one of those reassuring ones used by airline pilots when they’re telling their passengers that they’re about to crash. You know what I mean, when they say something like “assume the brace position” while making it sound like you should also just assume you don’t need to worry about tomorrow’s breakfast. No, this voice was rather more military. The sort of voice an NCO would use when he was telling his scruffy new charges that they needed to do a hundred press-ups before then cutting the lawn with scissors. Blunt scissors.

The very military voice caused the boys to fall silent from the very first syllable. Suddenly it was like they were back in the classroom again, like that time when Miss Bird had managed to get into the room without anybody noticing (who knew there was another small door in the back corner?), and had then shouted at them all for not waiting, in complete silence, for her to arrive.

The military voice continued. “This is an order. Will the schoolboys who have climbed to the area that is out of bounds, the schoolboys who have ignored the signs. The schoolboys who are in the fo’c’sle – the forecastle – leave the area now. That is an ORDER!”.

One of the boys, let’s call him Clements, looked around, slowly. “Guys”, he said, “I think he means us. Fore castle. That sounds like something at the front of the boat. And we’re at the front of the boat, and nobody else is here. We’d better leave”. Some of the others didn’t look quite so sure, but from beneath them came the sound of boots on steps, and shortly afterwards a member of the ferry’s crew appeared. He wasn’t smiling, and he wasn’t very talkative either. In fact he just grunted and pointed.

The boys knew exactly what he meant, and climbed back down, carefully, to the deck where another member of the crew was waiting. The pupils, slightly scared at this point, could see that they were very close to Calais harbour now, and luckily for them there was no time for anything further to be done. They would escape meeting the man with the military voice as they were directed towards the vehicle decks, where their fellow pupils were already queuing.

When they got back to the coach, the teachers counted everybody on. Each of the boys who had been on the fo’c’sle had the impression they were fixed with a stare when it came to their turn. Was it just a feeling, or was that silent stare something more, perhaps a warning that they’d need to be particularly careful, especially well behaved when they reached their final destination, Rambouillet, in just a few hours.

At least there wouldn’t be any evidence, the cine camera hadn’t spotted them, so they had basically got away with it, and they’d always remember what was, for many of them, their first trip across the Channel to France.

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Buy me a ferry ticket

The organisation I chaired (and what a verb that is, conjuring up images of chair as a doing word, perhaps a chair hurtling down a road in some way, I wonder what its etymology is. Of course, I could look it up, but that might spoil the magic a bit) is a membership organisation for translators and interpreters in the UK, and every couple of months, I wrote a column for its much-loved magazine, the ITI Bulletin, sadly now deceased and replaced by another magazine which has only had one issue thus far, so it’s too early to judge really, although I do miss the editor of the previous one.

For reasons that were clear to me at the time, but which I’ve already forgotten today, I was flicking through some of those columns the other day. It’s interesting to look back and to be reminded just what a nightmare the pandemic was for so many of us, and also to see how well the translation and interpreting community came together.

As Mr Dickens said, and as quoted in my last post, so at least I’m consistent, it was the best of times, worst of times, or something like that.

Anyway, one of the columns I wrote, back in 2021, was an acrostic, which is a poem or piece of writing in which the first letter of each new line spells out a word or message. Curiously, one of the best examples of the past few decades was by a journalist called James May, who went on to do lots of stuff on the telly. He talks about what he did here, and here’s an image of the pages in question:

James May’s Autocar Acrostic

My column was nowhere near as interesting as his, but it was also one of the most tricky to write and, having found it again, I’ve decided that it’s time for it to get a second outing, here on Substack. I haven’t actually checked if I can do large capitals at the beginning of each paragraph (update: it seems I can’t, and so the first letters in question will need to be red instead), or if I can do it in two columns, like I did originally (nope apparently not, but maybe that’s more a question of html skills than anything else), but here we go, updated slightly for 2026:

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This post originally appeared in a column that seemed to come back very quickly, every few months. No sooner had the editor pressed the button to send the previous edition to the printers, than my anxiety levels started to ramp up, wondering what on earth I was going to say in the next one.

Really though, I don’t know what I was so worried about, there was so much going on, both within ITI itself (ITIself?) and in the wider translation & interpreting world, that it genuinely almost wrote itself some months.

As an example, I wrote the original version of this at the end of April 2021 (well, more accurately, I wrote the first sentence in March, dithered and prevaricated through most of April, then broke out into a cold sweat and started hammering away at the keyboard on the May Bank Holiday weekend. The magazine then went to press at some point in June (if I understood how these things work, which I think I did, eventually – I certainly know that I had to write my New Year column in October or so).

Neatly, that means that the ITI Conference happened between writing and publication which meant that I couldn’t fill this column with effusive comments about the speakers, about the sessions, about the awards.

Sadly I didn’t know how it was going to go (I do now, it went brilliantly, although also online, which was a shame but necessary at the time). If there had been a UK-wide power cut at the start of the first day, then I would end up looking like one of those theatre or cinema reviewers who leaves to file their copy before an unexpected twist, and ends up with egg on their face. I like eggs, and I’m sure they’re good for the complexion, but I’d rather have them scrambled, on toast. Curiously, we had several power cuts here overnight last night, which was a nice twist!

Leaving plans to write about the conference to one side, I would just like to take a moment to write about awards.

Awards are one of the more exciting aspects of the Chair’s job - the pleasure that comes from handing over a shiny piece of cut glass, a bunch of flowers, or a bottle of fizz, can’t be overstated, and I was very happy that we were able to continue the awards ceremonies in the online world, as well as being delighted to see the current Chair continue the tradition, in the real world, last week.

Talking of face-to-face events, we did get to meet up in the real world in 2022, in Brighton, which was an excellent place for my swansong. Although I suppose it should probably have been my gullsong instead, since we were by the sea!

I wrote the original version of this post with the news playing in the background, while today I’ve got tennis from Wimbledon in the corner of my screen. I probably shouldn’t really have it on though, or my mind might wander off at another tangent. I have a theory that if you wander off along too many tangents, you get back to your starting point soon enough.

Once you’ve done that, you can delete the offending rambling waffle in the middle of the text and keep going, happy in the knowledge that nobody will ever notice just how far from the point you have travelled. I think I’ve just spent half an hour in South Mimms Services on the M25, my mind is that far from where it should be.

Notwithstanding the wandering mind, don’t you find that sometimes, wandering off into a dictionary can be helpful if you’re curious, since you can end up finding out things you might otherwise never have discovered.

If I’m not looking at dictionaries, I can sometimes be found with my nose in an encyclopaedia I’ve enjoyed perusing since I was a boy. It’s from the 1860s and I used to take great pleasure in finding out things that have changed since it was written. I’m not sure what that says about younger me, sitting alone by the fireplace (it was a very nice fireplace, allegedly “borrowed” from the local abbey just after the reformation), flicking through hour after hour.

Not all of the changes represent improvements. It’s quite interesting, for instance, to realise that there is nothing about the internal combustion engine in there, nor indeed anything about the Antarctic, which hadn’t been “discovered”.

Translation isn’t in there at all either, while the entry for Interpretation defines it as “the explanation of the true meaning of an author, or instrument”, and it goes on to give explanations using legal terminology in Latin, which definitely needs translating.

Even when I wasn’t flicking through ancient reference books, young me could be found perusing paper-based entertainment devices.

Reading, in fact, is probably what made me who I am today (and I’m not talking about the Reading Festival I once went to, although maybe that had some sort of impact too).

Picking up a book is still probably at the top of my list of Things-To-Do, although I’m not alone in finding there are too many distractions at the moment (as true in 2021 as it is today), which is why I’m looking forward to going on holiday before too long, like in ye olden days, and just sitting there, motionless, while my mind gets transported (not to South Mimms).

Reviewing what I’ve written this time, it looks like it’s more rambling than usually, sorry about that!

Even though, as I said earlier, I try to stay focused, sometimes it’s just not my forte.

Taking a moment to look at it another way, it just means I’m multi-tasking.

I’m quite pleased with that. If I can think about lots of things at once, and manage to get most of them done, then maybe there’s hope for me after all.

Now, where was I. Oh yes, I said I’d started typing this column over a Bank Holiday weekend over 5 years ago. Well, it took a week and now here we are again, at the end of what I might call AcrosticV2. I’ve reached the end, before the deadline.

Glad that’s over. Next time I decide to do an acrostic, remind me that it’s not a good idea, although recycling is, for me at least, if not for anybody who has struggled through this.

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Buy me a braincell

I have nothing against translations per se. Indeed, since I’ve worked in the translation and interpreting professions for most of my career, it would be a bit contradictory of me to write a post against them.

No, what upsets me about this development is how the translation is going to be done. You see, translation done by humans is a process that takes time. Translation done by a machine takes no time at all. Sometimes the results can work, but a reader who is unable to compare the languages in the source and target texts isn’t the best placed to judge the quality of the work in question.

When I write my posts, I put a lot of thought, sometimes, into what ends up on the page. Obviously on other occasions I just sort of word-vomit the first thing that comes into my head into the document growing in front of me and move on to the next paragraph quickly. But when I do think about the words, sometimes I think a lot about them.

There are half-remembered rules we were told at school, things about not repeating a word too often in a short space of time. I vaguely remember stuff about not following the same structure in every sentence, because that way monotony lies, and other rules that I don’t think I remember, but which I apply anyway (Mr Valentine, my A-level English teacher would be proud, I think).

If I’ve struggled - yes, I admit, I’m being melodramatic, but ‘struggled’ brings to mind an image of me crafting my posts in a chilly garret somewhere, shivering because I haven’t got another coin to feed into the electricity meter – sorry, that was a long aside, and so I’ll start again, not least so I can break the rule I quoted in the previous paragraph and get ‘struggled’ into the same paragraph 4 times. If I’ve struggled to find just the right word, then perhaps I, or one of my peers working as a translator, would be the best placed to determine what the translation for that word should be in any translation of the original text.

A couple of weeks ago, I interpreted a speech by a man who is quite well known. In fact you’ve definitely heard of him, and the organisation which he leads. His speech referenced Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, as fine an example of carefully-chosen words as you’ll find anywhere, right from the very first paragraph. The book has been translated into many languages, many times, but I bet that every translator who has ever worked on it has spent a lot of time wondering how on earth to start and, in many cases, I bet the more canny translators among them have left the first few paragraphs alone until much later.

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A machine won’t do that, because it doesn’t have the same capacity to weigh up alternatives. As Dickens might have said, if he’d had to consider AI translation, it might have been the best of translations, it might have been the worst of translations.

Another example for you. I translated a legal document a few weeks ago. Again, a machine could have done the translation in the blink of a computer eye, but it took me over a week (which was reflected in the size of my invoice when I delivered the text). At one point, I put a sample, duly anonymised, into an AI tool, just to see what would happen. The results looked very good, but also, once you looked more closely, completely wrong – the machine had managed to get the Donor and the Grantee mixed up, which meant that the person who should have been receiving the money, in the automatic text would have ended up having to hand it over instead.

That would have been fun for the courts to sort out later.

Apologies, most of my posts are much lighter in tone than this one, but the short version of this post is that I like to imagine, modestly, that I, and everybody else who writes here, has thought about their words, and a machine is never going to understand that.

Or am I, perhaps, just a luddite, tilting at windmills or trying to stop the tide from coming in.

Yes, that’s probably it. And I do accept that automatic translations have their place - if they can help understanding, then that can only be a good thing.

But I like translating, and I enjoy interpreting. So consider this post my somewhat pathetic attempt to fight back on behalf of Team Human Translator.

Normal service will be resumed in my next post. Promise.

I don’t have many photos of translating or interpreting (well, I do, but I’m in them which makes them rather boring) and so I’ve illustrated this post with some photos I took on a single day interpreting around London – I wonder what Dickens would say.

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Buy me a pen

Once there’s an image somewhere, then the words start to rattle around inside my head, bouncing off the sides and echoing in the empty spaces, until something reasonably coherent takes shape, at which point the words start to transfer themselves, through my fingers and the computer keyboard, forming themselves into sentences, then paragraphs, and then much more, usually (but not always) illustrated by more pictures that are related, more or less, to the story taking shape.

At other times, though, things happen differently. I had an idea for what I wanted to write this time about a week ago. I knew back then that I’d be quite busy this week, since I was going to be out at a conference for several days, which meant that I had to finish some things before I left, and then focus fully on the conference in question when I got there, leaving me very little time to come up with anything at all cogent for this post.

My idea was to in fact just relax my mind, and not really worry about it, by writing a post about a place near here that I really enjoy visiting. I’ve already written about the wider Runnymede space, but within that site, the newest installation is a piece called Writ in Water. Created by Mark Wallinger, and opened around 8 years ago, at first sight it doesn’t look like much. In fact it looks like the sort of place a farm might use to store water, or an above-ground sewage treatment works, but it’s much more than that.

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Most people reach it by walking across the meadows at Runnymede, following in the footsteps of King John and his barons, at the place where, by most accounts, the Magna Carta was signed the best part of a millennium ago. It also possible to reach it from the opposite direction, or indeed by walking straight down Cooper’s Hill, in which case it’s always a good idea to pop into the RAF memorial first, both to contemplate the many names inscribed there, and to admire the views from the top.

From a distance, it doesn’t look particularly big, but when you get closer it’s actually quite imposing and, in fact, feels more like a military installation, rather like the large second world war German bunkers that you still find dotted along the French coast.

You go in through a doorway, and then follow a curved walkway (either way, left or right, since they lead to the same point) until you reach another doorway on the opposite side of the building, which leads into an inner chamber open to the sky.

Inside, there’s a pool of water, around which is inscribed some text from Magna Carta, specifically Clause 39, setting out the fundamental principles of justice. The words are inverted, but reflected the right way up in the water. The pool is usually perfectly still, but if it’s raining then the message becomes less clear, which is a good metaphor for what sometimes happens to justice itself, which can be obscured by shouting before reasserting itself as things calm down and become clear again.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that I’m far from the only person who enjoys taking photos in there, although I suspect I might have a good claim for the largest collection, taken over the longest time.

Not long after Writ in Water opened, I went there to add a few pictures to my collection. When I got inside, there were some people in various states of undress merrily taking photos and video. Being quintessentially British, I apologised for getting in their way and left, but not before taking a quick photo of them hard at work, and apparently enjoying themselves too, which is always a good thing.

Given how recently the place had opened, I was impressed that they already knew it was there, and I’ve always wondered since whether it was an end of year project, or for a music video, or something else. Since nearly a decade has now elapsed, I’ll never find out now, and when I got back outside, you could see people from the National Trust building hot-footing it across the meadow to chase them away, so I hope they managed to get whatever shots they needed before they were turfed out.

And so, outside in the world again, the big city and the busy airport nearby, and the M25 probably at a standstill on the other side of the river, it’s time to end this little post about a concrete structure in a meadow on the edge of Surrey.

Thank you for reading, or more precisely in this case thank you for looking at a set of pictures all taken in roughly the same spot, but over a period of about eight years.

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Buy me a bottle of water

When he’d gone to bed, he’d wondered how much heat was escaping up his bedroom chimney and now, in the dark, he was wondering how much cold was leaking down the same opening. After all, a big hole in the top of the house is probably not the most efficient way to keep things warm inside the building.

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As he lay there, not just awake now, but wide awake, his teeth chattering with the cold, he realised that it was quiet outside. Yes, it was the middle of the night, but there was generally some sort of sound somewhere nearby, such as the sound of foxes making that dreadful screaming noise they love so much, or a milk float whirring along a nearby street, the bottles clinking away in the back.

But today, there was nothing, and so he got up, pulled the curtain back slightly and looked out of his window. It was dark out there, and everything was white. Snow. Everywhere. No wonder his bedroom was cold, it had probably been snowing down his chimney for hours.

He had been the stationmaster for years, and so he knew what he needed to do now. Pulling on as many layers of clothing as he could reasonably wear, while maintaining the ability to move, he went downstairs, put on his thickest boots, coat, and hat, and stepped outside.

Before he’d even reached the ticket office, he knew that there would be a message telling him there wouldn’t be any trains today. Snow covered the tracks, and one of the biggest challenges with the third rail system is that when everything is covered in snow, nothing really works.

He looked the other way, finding it quite hard to keep his eyes open as he did so because the snow was really falling now, and being whipped around by the wind too. The level crossing signs were covered in snow, and partially obscured but, since he was confident they wouldn’t be needed, he didn’t bother to fetch his broom and clear everything off.

When he reached his office, there was the message he’d been expecting. There wouldn’t be any trains through his station until at least tomorrow. He therefore had two choices. He could either sit in his ticket office, in case any poor souls decided to try their luck anyway. If they did, and he told them there was nothing running, he’d probably get it in the neck from them, he told himself, and so he got a marker pen out of his drawer, found a reasonably clean sheet of paper, and wrote a message to the effect that they might as well go home and come back tomorrow. To be slightly helpful, he also wrote the railway information line number (08457 48 49 50), but not the website. If people wanted to use the website, they probably already had it, or an app, on their phone.

And anyway, there was a limit to how helpful he wanted to be that early in the morning.

He got up from his seat, locked the ticket office, stuck the message in the station door, and then locked that (after stepping outside, he didn’t intend to lock himself inside, after all). Then he set off to enjoy the silence and the unusual views of a town that was extremely familiar to him, after living there for many years, but also rather different today.

Everywhere was covered in snow. He could see where some hardy cars had made their way, silently, along the road, but so few in number that they had barely left any trace at all.

When he reached the London Road, it was the same story. There were a couple of cars picking their way gingerly along the carriageway, but that was it.

He kept going, past the gates to the military academy, where the guards where, hopefully, keeping warm in their guardhouse, and past the Catholic church. When he reached the recreation ground, he wondered just how long it would be until the first snowman appeared there – surely there were already children, jumping up and down on their parents’ beds, certain that there wouldn’t be school today and that the best way to fill their time would be to go out and get cold, while having fun.

As he kept walking, it started to get lighter. Imperceptibly at first, and then little by little the darkness disappeared, to be replaced by grey. A single, not very bright shade of grey.

He doubled back on himself, as the snow kept falling.

Russell sighed. It had been a good walk, but he really needed to head back to the station. There might be a dozen messages waiting for him, and he didn’t want to get caught out. And so he headed back under the railway line and up the road to the station.

When he got back to the station, there was nothing waiting for him (and certainly nothing remotely resembling a train), and nothing happened for several hours after that. But he sat, contentedly, in his ticket office, enjoying the peace and quiet, until enough time had elapsed for him to sneak back out again.

He wanted to go back to the recreation ground, just to see how many snowmen and snowwomen and snowchildren and snowdogsandcats had appeared since his previous visit.

Back when he had first woken up, he had wondered where the milk floats were. Now, several hours later, as he headed to the rec, he heard the familiar sound of an electric motor behind him. As he turned around, he saw it, seemingly zooming along, over roads that were still icy and slushy.

Everything else might have stopped, but the milk had still managed to get through.

Thank you so much for reading.

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This story deserves a (bit of) context. Here in my little part of England (and indeed everywhere else, right across an entire continent, so this isn’t a story about me), it’s extremely hot at the moment – it’s been hot for days and there’s no sign of it letting up for a few more days yet. Then, a bit earlier today, the photograph of the milk float appeared on my screen. I took that as a sign, and started to come up with the waffle you have just read. Back at the time I took the photos, I was Chair of Governors at a local junior school and, early one morning, we had to have a discussion about whether or not to open the school that day.

It wasn’t a very long discussion and, since I was awake, I went out and took some photos. In fact, I ruined a lens taking them, because the snow melted into the lens and it eventually jammed up completely. I’ve still got it, as a memorial of the pictures it took, but it doesn’t really work anymore.

Oh well, sometimes creating things has a cost.

If, quite understandably, the thought of subscribing is too much to contemplate, but you’ve enjoyed reading something I’ve written, then you also have the option to simply buy me a snowman (contributions may in fact be used to buy an ice cream, since it’s the summer and it’s hot, but I won’t tell if you don’t ask).

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Perspectives - Photography & Writing

The Chicago Riverwalk

Chicago’s Riverwalk is an amazing place to spend some time. One day is likely not enough for this beautiful 1.25-mile-long path along the Chicago River. The whole area has many features perfect for photography…

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2 months ago · 34 likes · 27 comments · Lauri Novak

Looking at her pictures took me back. A long way back in fact, as far as the final decade of the last millennium. If this post were a film, the words would now wibble wobble across the screen, and somebody would be playing something ethereal, probably on a harp. However, since it isn’t, and I haven’t worked out how to turn my words into harp music as you read them, you’ll just have to imagine the sound.

Let me take you back, back to a business park in Frimley, on the Surrey/Hampshire border where, towards the end of 1993, young(er) Paul went for a job interview for a position as Translation Manager (Europe). Once I’d passed that hurdle, I then had to have a follow-up interview with the company’s global translation manager who, I know, sometimes reads these, so hello to you if you’re reading Ralph!

After the second interview, which took place in a hotel lobby somewhere near Heathrow’s Terminal 4, I was duly recruited, and I started work, in a system software company, at the beginning of 1994. A couple of weeks later, I went on a fact-finding tour of Europe, which involved a lot of time travelling (6 countries in 5 days) and the rest of the time in meeting rooms, all of which looked much the same wherever on the continent they actually were. After all this time, the only things I can really remember about that trip is that I ripped the sleeve of a brand new jacket I’d bought, in Milan, that in Barcelona I stayed in a hotel with lots of buttons on a panel by the bed, including one marked ‘butler’, but that since I arrived there at around midnight and left about 5 hours later, I never got to press it, and finally that when I got back to Heathrow at the end of the week, there had been an accident in one of the road tunnels, so nobody could get out of (or indeed into) the airport by road. I ended up getting the tube to Hatton Cross and then walking to the place where my car was parked from there, which took hours.

Anyway, this was meant to be a post about Chicago, but I’ve already got as far as the fifth paragraph and I haven’t even mentioned the place yet.

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A couple of weeks after the European marathon, I set off to the Windy City for the first time. It was cold – in fact I was told it was one of the coldest Februarys the city had ever experienced. I can quite believe that and, when I tried to walk from the taxi into the hotel, wearing nice shiny leather business shoes with leather soles, I almost fell over. It would have been a shame to end my Illinois adventure so quickly, and so the very first thing I did, after dumping my suitcase in my room, was to slide down the road to the nearest shoe shop, and buy some proper footwear, some Timberland boots that lasted for years.

The hotel was called the Nikko (it’s called the Westin Chicago River North now) and it was the first place I ever had a hot rock, which is a basically a meal where you are supplied with a very hot slab of granite and a selection of sliced meat and vegetables, which you then cook over the said lump of stone. It’s an extremely convivial way to have a meal, and when I got home I bought one which I still use regularly when entertaining (I’ve got one friend who loves it and can’t get enough when we bring it out).

Before I keep going, a word about photographs. Usually, I liberally sprinkle my posts with photos I’ve taken. As I’ve said before, probably far too often, it’s a hobby I really enjoy, and I spend far too much of my time thinking about taking photos, actually taking photos, or editing photos. There are worse ways for somebody to spend their time, and it’s a pastime that gets me out into the great outdoors, which can’t be bad.

However, my photos of Chicago were taken a long time ago, using a good camera (A Minolta X700 I regretting trading in mere nanoseconds after I’d walked out of the shop, but it was too late by then), but the negatives are long gone, and I scanned the prints quite a long time ago too, at a resolution which, looking at them now, is best described as disappointing.

So, when we get to the photos, apologies for the quality, but what they don’t have in terms of detail, they make up for, I like to think, in analogue beauty from an earlier time.

So, back to my times in that fair city. After my first trip, I went over quite regularly and, some time later when my boss resigned, I was invited to replace him. I didn’t accept that offer for various reasons (I could write more about them, but the short version is: family). My refusal was sort of rejected, inasmuch as I was ‘encouraged’ to spend a few months in the city while the company looked for a full-time replacement.

And so it was, that I ended up living on the 33^rd floor of an apartment building in the centre of the city, and working in an office on the 32^nd floor of a building that was basically on the other side of the road, above a railway station. In a straight line, my commute was probably about 300 yards, but the actual journey was further than that, since I had to travel all the way down, cross the road, cross the station concourse, and then travel all the way back up.

The office itself was busy, with a lot of people working over several floors, and the translation department I managed had 50 people working in-house, not something you’ll find in many commercial companies these days.

After a few months, my replacement was duly found, and my time in Chicago came to an end. Or so I thought. For reasons I can’t really remember anymore, they only stayed with the company for a few months and, once they left, I was summoned back. Since I was quite busy doing stuff for the company in Europe (‘stuff’ is the correct technical term here, believe me), the powers-that-be decreed that I would spend one week a month physically in the USA (staying at the Intercontinental hotel each time. The only thing I remember about that place was that it served imported Bass in bottles, which was nice), and the other three weeks of the month doing whatever stuff I was doing on the Old Continent.

Luckily, nobody had made the connection between climate change and air miles back then because otherwise I’d be strung up from the nearest gibbet for my transgressions. As it was, I was just permanently knackered, and living on mid-Atlantic time for most of the month. However, that period lasted quite a while until, one day, the business decided it could save money by switching its preferred airline to one where I didn’t have any accrued benefits. After criss-crossing the Atlantic with my shiny gold card, and turning left on boarding the plane (or indeed going upstairs), it was a bit of a shock to turn right and end up in the cheapest seats at the back of the plane.

And so I resigned, and my Chicago adventures came to an end.

So, to the photographs. I did promise you some, and now you’ve read this far you deserve a rest, even it it’s just to look at some grainy old pictures of places I can’t really remember very clearly (although perhaps more clearly than the captions might suggest).

A shadow of a pointy building on the lake.

The city separated from the lake by a massive road. Oh dear.

I wonder how much this skyline has changed in the intervening decades. Maybe I should pop back and have a look.

Boats and a green river. I vaguely remember being told that it used to flow the other way until engineers decided that wasn’t the best solution for something or other.

Merchandise Mart. Hiding some of the photo’s imperfections in black and white.

I suspect I must have been in a boat to take this photo. Either that or I was walking on water, which I don’t remember doing.

This was the view from my window during my longest stay there. Not bad as views go, and these days I’d spend hours trying to get just the right shot. Not many trees in sight though.

Soldier Field, apparently. Looking online, the stadium is somewhat larger now.

Green water again

Why so green? It must have been taken on St Patrick’s day!

Another one where I wonder how much the skyline has changed.

And finally (at last, I hear you say), evidence of a time when, if you wanted to create an effect, you had to stick a filter on your camera and twiddle with it, then wait for the photos to come back so you could see what the result actually looked like. Folks have got it far too easy these days!

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And, at last, we have reached the end of our journey. If, quite understandably, the thought of subscribing is too much to contemplate, but you’ve enjoyed reading something I’ve written, then you also have the option to simply buy me a transatlantic airline ticket (contributions may in fact be used to buy Chicago pizza, but I won’t tell if you don’t ask).

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A Row of Sun Loungers in Switzerland

Why I Still Send Postcards

There is a former giant of travel that is slowly slipping towards extinction. Once an indispensable part of any trip, it was a travelling companion that couldn’t be left behind, crossing oceans and continents to carry memories home. It was cherished by the friends and family who received it, then rediscovered months or even years later, bringing faraway…

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2 months ago · 7 likes · 8 comments · Rachel Mae

I replied to say that I have a couple of postcards of my house, something which, at first glance, looks extremely cool. It is indeed quite cool, but not to the extent that it appears at first since it seems that, back in ye olden times, people made postcards of just about anything, particularly since postcards were used to send brief messages to others in much the same way as we might send something these days, using our favourite messaging platform.

This postcard was sent, from Camberley, the town where I live, in 1915. Like many towns in many parts of the world, development followed the railways, ribbon-like, alongside the newly laid tracks, out into suburban areas where, previously there had been nothing.

The house itself was built in 1906. The plot on which it, and its very similar-looking neighbour, stand is 50 feet wide, and the original deed states that, if one house were to be built, then it should cost in materials not less than £300 or (as happened in this case) if two houses were built, not less than £500. The reason for this was that, apparently, builders could use surplus materials from one house in the construction of the other. There are curious differences between the houses which presumably were discussed at length at the time, such as one having cavity walls, and the other solid ones, and the staircase in one house is steeper than in the other, presumably to save on wood.

At some point, not long after it had been built, the house had acquired a name, Daphne (its neighbour became Wiston), although it was renamed later, becoming Cartref instead.

Getting back to the postcard for a while. One day back in 2006, when the light was similar, I popped outside and took a photo from pretty much the same spot.

Apart from there being more cars in the later picture, it’s a remarkably similar view except for that fact that there is one extra house that has managed to slot itself into a gap between two blocks of semi-detached houses at some point. I have no idea when. The other interesting thing is the second house along in this photo which we were told, when we moved in, had started to be built before the World War I, but had then been left unfinished until after the end of that particular conflict. In fact that clearly wasn’t the case, since it’s in the postcard too.

Speaking of the Great War (what a name!), the back of the postcard is interesting too.

I have no idea who Ethel is, but presumably she had some sort of connection to Gordon Road, because otherwise why on earth would you choose to send that postcard. She talks about her upcoming trip to Folkestone, and the fact that her mother is going to write and tell Mr Fuller to keep her in if the South Africans come to Folkestone.

Of course, in 1915, Folkestone was a very busy port for troops being sent to and from France. Presumably the South Africans in question were on their way from their homes, many thousands of miles away, to the killing fields of France where, for example, the 4th South African Infantry Regiment had a casualty rate of 74% in one week in July 1916, during the battle of the Somme. They had much more to worry about than whether Ethel would set eyes on them.

Moving on. The next postcard was taken from further down the road, looking east with the house just about visible before the bend.

It rather looks as if Taylor is actually on holiday in the area. The postcard is sent from Blackwater (just across the county boundary in Hampshire) and describes Camberley as “our next village, rather nice isn’t it”. I don’t know that Camberley was ever a village, and I suspect that if Taylor went into the town centre nowadays she might find another way to describe it. But the view in the postcard is, once again, instantly recognisable.

The final old picture I have of the house is undated although it’s obviously later. The fence, still shiny and new in the first image, is now rather the worse for wear, and the trees have grown. The house that was missing from the earlier postcard has now been built and, in the front garden, there’s a rose standing tall. I have nothing to prove it, but I like to think that the rose we still have in front of the house, which is almost as tall as the place itself, is the same one, or at least a descendent of the original. I’ll never know though.

The house has other stories to tell, such as when it got renumbered in 1972, or when, later that year, the council asked people if they would like to name the road so that it had a single name from one end to the other (Gordon Road, rather than Upper Gordon Road, Middle Gordon Road, Gordon Road, and Gordon Avenue). People said no to the renaming, but the renumbering went ahead, but only on one side of the road which has confused delivery drivers ever since (140, renumbered to 168, is opposite 129, while 167 is nearly 400 metres away further up the road).

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Finally, though, here’s a photo of some old wallpaper I found, about a decade ago, hidden under an old shelf. I wonder if Ethel ever knew it. Perhaps she even saw it being hung, maybe when the house was decorated for the very first time.

Who knows…

Thank you very much for reading these words about my home. If, quite understandably, the thought of handing over your hard-earned cash to subscribe is too much to contemplate, but you’ve enjoyed reading something I’ve written, then you also have the option to simply buy me a postcard (contributions may in fact be used to buy stamps, but I won’t tell if you don’t ask).

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Once that’s been done, it’s simply a case of rolling down the driveway, and then turning right and heading along Long Street towards the Abbey.

The Abbey is a particularly attractive ecclesiastical building which, happily, survived the reformation and still stands proudly in the centre of the town. Some of the former Abbey buildings were repurposed for use as a school after Henry VIII had done his handiwork, although there has been some sort of school on the site since AD 705, when the first school was founded by St Aldhelm, which means that Sherborne is one of the oldest schools to have operated continuously anywhere on the planet. I suspect that the first pupils didn’t have to worry about being distracted by screens all that much.

I had a chum whose father (Bill Anstice Brown) was a very talented artist who taught at the school in question. He often re-imagined Sherborne as a port, or as Venice. Sadly I haven’t got his talent, but taking a photo of the place on a particularly rainy day a few years ago reminded me of those paintings, so I had a hunt around for a photo of a gondola which I plonked into the photo in question. It’s not the same, but it’s an echo nonetheless.

If I keep cycling at this speed, we’ll never get anywhere, and so let’s change gear and try to get some speed up before we reach Sherborne Hill, a gradient that starts by the railway line and climbs for the best part of a mile until it reaches the old toll house at the top of the hill.

Then there’s the opportunity to breathe for a few minutes as the road flattens out and heads towards Longburton. Once upon a time, I’d been tasked with driving a priest (Father Barry, sadly no longer with us) from the Catholic church in Sherborne where he’d officiated at a funeral to the convent school outside the town at Leweston for the burial. The idea was that he’d see the funeral cortège off, and then be at the other end to receive it at the convent. The only problem was that we hadn’t really considered the logistics of that, which meant that, on the long straight bit of road in question, we had to overtake the entire cortège, at speed (a quick shoutout to the wonderful Alfa Romeo flat four boxer engine here, which loved things like that). It seemed that somebody upstairs was watching us that day because we managed to do so, safely, and nobody told us off after the event.

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Pushing onwards, and pedalling hard, we now cross through the village of Longburton. Years ago, at a point where the road narrows slightly, there always used to be an old man who sat on a wall, watching. Every time I went past, he was there, until one day he wasn’t. I can understand, sitting on a wall, just watching the traffic, and can quite see myself doing something similar in my dotage, although maybe not too close to home, since I don’t think I’d like to sit on a wall and watch the M3 thunder past – that would be far less relaxing than a Dorset country road.

Continuing southwards, you pass Holnest Church. A particularly attractive hamstone building standing alone by the side of the road. I’ve never stopped there, and quite possibly never will, but it’s a pretty little building, and always a delight to see.

About a mile further south, just before Middlemarch, there’s an old long barn. When I rattled past at a lazy cyclist’s pace, I was able to see what looked like a couple of blanched animal skeletons, seemingly nailed to the northern end of the building. The story was that these were the remains of cats that had belonged to a woman suspected of being a witch. By attaching them to the north wall with their mouths facing downwards, her spirit, seemingly, couldn’t escape and so the locals no longer needed to fear her. What a load of mumbo jumbo. Poor lady, poor cats, good story.

A bit further on, there’s a choice of roads, you can either stick to the main road and swing slightly to the right, or you can head straight on, directly towards Dorchester. It doesn’t make much difference either way, since we’re on a bicycle and, whichever way you choose, there’s another hill coming up. Before long, you cycle past a scrapyard at Lyon’s Gate, the one where the car previously used to transport high speed clerics across the county ended its days, following an altercation with a Suzuki Jeep on Chelsea Bridge, and then you have to start pedalling hard again as you realise that, while Dorset is short of mountains, it’s certainly well endowed with gradients.

Once you’ve reached the top of that, you can take another right and head off across Batcombe Hill, happily travelling along the ridge at the top, meaning that you don’t have to pedal too hard at this point and can enjoy the views to both south, and north, looking right across Dorset and into Somerset and, on a really good day, as far as Glastonbury.

When you reach Haydon, you have to take your life into your hands because you need to cross the A37, the main Yeovil to Dorchester road. Drop down to first gear and pedal furiously and, if you’re lucky, you’ll make it across without having to wait ages for a gap in the traffic. Then you reach the attractive little village of Evershot where, once upon a time, I had to repair a puncture and left my tyre levers by the side of the road. Whenever I pass that way, as I still do occasionally, I wonder if they’re still there although, since it was quite a long time ago, it’s quite possible they’ve rusted away to nothing now.

A little further along, you pass one of the county’s distinctive fingerposts, devoid of useful information such as how far certain destinations actually are. The one shown here has now been restored, happily, but I think that it has lost some of its character at the same time. Perhaps signposts don’t actually need character if they’re doing their job properly.

Near the sign, there’s another of Dorset’s bridges offering free travel to Australia, but only in one direction and so perhaps not as enticing a prospect as it might at first appear.

Continuing our journey. The water bottle in the saddlebag is now empty, and the chocolate has been eaten, but no worry, because we’re getting closer. After crossing another busy road at Toller Down Gate, there is the most glorious long downhill ride, all the way into Beaminster. The now tiring cyclist has nothing to do but press the brakes from time to time and try to stay upright.

Then it’s through Melplash and into the final few miles, reaching Bradpole, then Bridport, and then taking the ‘new’ road southwards towards West Bay and the coast. When I say ‘new’, the road follows the path of the railway line to West Bay station, which closed to passengers in 1930, although the track was used for goods traffic until 1962 before being lifted and replaced by a road by the 1970s. I suppose, though, that it’s newer than New Road in Sherborne, which we passed at the start of our journey. That’s been there since 1860 or so – I wonder if they’ll ever rename it to something more accurate.

At last, the now hot and tired cyclist can dismount from his bicycle, one of Halford’s finest, and sitting in the cellar not far from where I’m typing this, although I haven’t actually ridden it for decades and suspect it would turn to dust if I tried. The bell still works though (I just checked). Once the bike has been safely stowed in the garage, alongside the Hillman Imp, it’s time for cheese and Marmite sandwiches (on sliced white bread) in my grandparents’ flat in the Old Shipyard Centre, and a welcome cuppa and a chat, before easing back into the saddle and heading away from the coast again, happy in the knowledge that, on the return journey, there is no need to pedal at all for the final two miles.

Happy days.

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Thank you for travelling across Dorset with me. I hope you’re impressed that I’ve managed to avoid mentioning Thomas Hardy even once. I certainly am. If, quite understandably, the thought of subscribing is too much to contemplate, but you’ve enjoyed reading this, then you also have the option to simply buy me a jar of Marmite and a lump of cheddar, so that I can recreate the sandwiches of my youth (contributions may in fact be used to buy beer, but I won’t tell if you don’t ask).

Buy me Marmite and cheese

It’s clearly a place which is defined by its political affairs, and in opposition to its northern neighbour and, at the time I’m writing this, it does appear that its days, at least in its current form, may be numbered since the current government of the larger neighbour in question is rattling sabres and implying that things might change.

This isn’t a political post. I’m not expert enough in that area to be able to make any intelligent judgments about what’s happening at the moment, although I’m not keen on bullies and like to think that in any David v Goliath type contest, I’d support the underdog.

Anyway, seeing so much talk about the place in the news got me thinking about a holiday we had there back in 2013. At the time, relations between the country and its closest neighbour were, while not exactly warm, slightly less glacial and, perhaps more comfortable with a tourist industry that was developing nicely thanks to contributions from their northern neighbour’s northern neighbour, as Canadians flocked south to enjoy a dose of sunshine during the winter months when the sun hardly showed its face in their beautiful, but rather chilly, country.

Our visit to the country began, as I suspect they all do, in Havana, where we stayed in a hotel that had once, apparently, been graced by Hemmingway and others of his ilk. Certainly the furniture was the right vintage, as was the plumbing. We spent a bit of time there, learning how to roll cigars and visiting open-air book markets, and cruising around in a succession of old American cars before, after we’d recovered from jetlag, heading east, stopping at a couple of places before ending up at some sort of resort called Las Terrezas built, apparently, for Cuban worthies to live the dream for a while. When it rained, the water came through the roof in floods, but it was very attractive nonetheless.

We continued to bumble around the island, being pulled along by a rickety old steam locomotive along very uneven tracks at one point, and visiting places where you could see vestiges of the means used to control slaves (tall towers so that there was no way they could escape without being spotted). We swam in the sea at different places, and had some surprisingly good meals, especially where we went into people’s houses, giving them an opportunity to make a bit of cash while serving us something they had nourished in their back gardens (it looked like every house outside the most built-up urban areas kept chickens, the better to feed hungry tourists with ready money to spend).

One of the things Cuba is known for is its old American cars. Often, it turned out that the big thirsty American engines had been replaced by more efficient Japanese ones at some point, but necessity had kept the cars running and, they were clearly something their owners were proud of. It was also good to see European cars of similar vintages popping up, things like Triumphs and Hillmans, and even a couple of Renault Dauphines, along with some of their Soviet cousins, with Ladas being a reasonably regular sight too.

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Having been inspired to write this, I decided that I should illustrate it with ten photos from my time there which I have liberally sprinkled through the text. Why ten I have no idea, other than the fact that it’s a nice number and one that means I don’t just turn this into a post with dozens and dozens of pictures of old cars. Obviously I could just have used photos of them, since I took loads, but I did remember to snap other things too, which I think I’ve reflected with my choices, although, scrolling through this again before I upload it, maybe not.

One thing I was expecting to see was plenty of ghost signs, but in fact there were very few, since any signs of the capitalist world were exorcised completely after the revolution. They didn’t manage to hide them all though, so I spotted a few which, obviously, made me very happy.

One final thing of note is that it was almost certainly the last time that I was somewhere where I couldn’t access the Internet, except for a couple of places where you could book access to a computer lurking in a hotel lobby, and then get onto the internet (very slowly) but not access American sites (little things like Gmail, for example). That was fun for somebody running a business, but nothing went wrong while we weren’t connected, which is a lesson of some sort. Probably.

On which note, it’s time to end – thank you so much, as ever, for reading.

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If, quite understandably, the thought of subscribing is too much to contemplate, but you’ve enjoyed reading something I’ve written, then you also have the option to help my work towards buying an old American car (contributions may in fact be used to buy petrol for the non-American car I’ve already got, but I won’t tell if you don’t ask).

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Being in a flat in the middle of Antwerp, above a very popular pizza place in a pedestrian street is a completely different experience from being stabled in what was effectively a shed near an Essex beach, or an old house in Whitby, but once we’re there (wherever there is), it doesn’t really matter, since we all seem to enjoy the same things.

That’s got to be chalked up as a success in the parenting logbook really. We’ve got a wonderful photo, which I won’t share here, of teenager daughter sulking because she didn’t want to walk a single yard more, and so she just sat down by the side of the road, where we left her (I promise that she followed us eventually, she isn’t still there 15 or so years later). Nowadays, that same daughter takes herself out for long walks across the Surrey Hills just for fun.

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When planning our trips, our starting point is to try and ensure that most of our journeys to the various places take more or less the same time. We don’t always quite manage that, so I’ll expand it by saying that I’m obviously using ‘more or less’ in its loosest sense here, since clearly Whitstable and Antwerp don’t take the same time to get to, but our intention in each case is for it to be a journey that isn’t too far, and isn’t too tiring. Distance certainly isn’t always the easiest way to determine time – our trip to the place in Essex was complicated by the fact that it involves a lot of M25, London’s orbital car park motorway, which was closed at various points on our journey back, meaning that somewhere which is, in a straight line, a mere 80 miles away (it’s further by road, because there’s the small matter of a large city directly in the way) took us about 5 hours on our return journey, which ended up being about the same as the drive back from Antwerp last year.

This year, we decided to add another place beginning with W to our collection. Watch out Weymouth, you could well be next unless we decide that a trip to Weybridge, just round the corner from here, is on the cards – we could go and visit a colleague for a cuppa if we did that! We also decided we would make the journey as easy as possible, and so we chose to go to the Isle of Wight, a destination which meant catching the ferry from Southampton (a mere 50 miles from home, if only we hadn’t gone via daughter’s place to pick them up on the way, which added about 20 miles more). The entire journey, from home back to home covered 280 miles - 140 miles to Southampton and back, and another 140 trundling around the island itself, and the thing that really struck me was just how efficient fuel (well, electricity in my hybrid car) consumption was. At an average speed on the island which was comfortably below 30mph, it’s fair to say that our MPG (or indeed miles per KwH) figures were outstanding. There was quite a bit of traffic around because we’d managed to book the same weekend as an event called the Isle of Wight Takeover, which seemed to involve almost every souped-up car in southern England converging on a field, or driving around in convoys of what, in most cases, were very shiny Ford Focuses of one kind and another.

I should have known when we boarded the ferry really, since most of the cars on it looked like they had been modified in some way.

Anyway, the crossing from Southampton is always fascinating. There’s so much to see, from massive cruise liners to cargo boats to little things bobbing about on the water. Squinting eastwards, if you’re lucky, you’ll see the hovercraft on the horizon, speeding from Southsea to Ryde, and many, many yachts. One thing that caught my eye this time was a boat carrying wind turbine blades. When you look at the turbines out at sea, they look very small, but when you see them right next to you, they’re enormous.

Once we’d arrived on the island and had lunch (some things are important), we went off to our first destination, which was somewhere called Quarr Abbey. Honestly, we were completely enchanted by the place which, amongst other things, sold its own beer. As we walked through the woods, we spotted a red squirrel. Then another one. Then another one. At one point we saw four of them together. Honestly, that was going to be very hard to beat, and if we’d turned around and headed straight back to the ferry, I think we would all already have been able to agree that it had been a good weekend.

However, we didn’t do that. We stuck to our original plan and visited plenty of other places too, always in the company of at least one shiny Ford Focus RS.

I also finally managed to visit Appuldurcombe House, somewhere that’s so photogenic I could have illustrated this post just with photos taken there. I’ve tried to visit it before, but for some reason (I have no idea what), it’s closed on Saturdays, which I’m sure catches quite a few people out.

We had lovely walks along the coast and through woods, we visited Osborne House, which has nothing to do with Ozzy, apparently, where we got absolutely drenched while walking back up from the sea, and, not that far from Yarmouth, we saw an abandoned Croc on a seawall, poor thing.

And, of course, I kept my eyes peeled for ghost signs, as I always do. There are plenty of them around, but I’ll limit myself to sharing just one here.

Thank you for reading yet another of my posts that has gone off in a different direction from the one I thought it would take. Oh well, at least I’m consistent.

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Buy me a ferry ticket

And Gitanes or Gauloises

Monsieur Dupont reached out and grabbed the gear stick poking out of the dashboard. He pressed the clutch pedal down with his left foot and simultaneously pulled the stick back, gingerly, to the bottom left side of the H + 1 pattern, as the disproportionately large flywheel in front of the engine spun. It slid into first gear easily enough, and as he lifted the clutch slowly, the car eased forwards.

Once he reached about 20 kilometres per hour, he slowly pressed the clutch pedal again, and pushed the stick back into the dashboard, allowing it to guide itself into the top middle position. Twice more, he did the same thing, pressing the pedal, listening and somehow feeling the flywheel, until it was rotating at the right speed, up until he was cruising along nicely at 80 km/h.

It wasn’t a very warm day, and Monsieur Dupont was pleased he hadn’t yet opened the roof. Mind you, the heating in his little old car didn’t really work until he’d driven for a good half hour, and so he wasn’t really any warmer sitting inside the car than he would have been outside, and every time he exhaled, he could see his breath on the windscreen for a moment.

The engine had now warmed up a bit and was positively purring along. The power of the two horses, uprated from the original 425 cc to the 602 under his bonnet, had made all the difference, and his old friend was now able to get up hills (well, most hills) without struggling.

In no time at all, he had reached his first stop. Andrée came out of her door, clutching a basket containing bread, saucisson, cheese, olives, a bottle of wine, and some water. As she climbed in, he felt the car levelling itself, as her weight compensated for the slight angle it had had with just him in it.

He started the engine again and instinctively, without even really thinking about it, went through the same ritual of pressing the pedal, listening to the noises, sensing the flywheel, and easing the vehicle away from the side of the road.

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The road to their next stop took them up a long hill before an even longer descent down into the next village. As they climbed up to the top, he was pleased that the car didn’t have its full complement of passengers yet, since even though he knew his car could reach the summit, he wasn’t sure he’d really want to try anything too challenging.

As they rolled into the next village, slowing to 50 as they drove past the sign, he realised that he was now quite warm and so, when they stopped outside Gilberte and Mauricette’s house, he got out. While Andrée went to knock on the door, Monsieur Dupont got out and rolled the roof open. If he’d been British, he would have thought it looked just like a Swiss roll, but he wasn’t, and had no idea what one of those was. To him, it just looked like an open 2CV roof.

He had just finished when their two final companions came out, each clutching another basket with more goodies, which he stowed in the boot alongside Andrée’s. Then everybody got back into the car and off they went to their final destination.

Once there, he pulled up onto the grass by the side of the road. Then once everybody was out, he unfastened the three seats and lifted them from the car, carrying them over to the spot where they would enjoy their picnic. Two single seats for him and Andrée, while Mauricette and Gilberte settled down on the same double seat they’d been sat on in the car.

It didn’t take them very long to demolish the contents of their three baskets. Andrée’s was finished first, followed by the two apple tarts Gilberte had made, and the (admittedly somewhat sickly) strawberry tarts Mauricette had bought from her local patisserie.

Monsieur Dupont took a Gitane from the blue packet in his jacket pocket and put it in his mouth. He didn’t light it straight away because he was struck by the similarities between the blue of the packet and the shades of blue he could see as he admired the view of the blue skies over distant cliffs, with the deep blue sea separating them from whatever was on the other side.

At last, he lit his cigarette and the thick, also slightly blue, smoke curled upwards, before it was caught by the wind and disappeared, travelling to who-knows-where.

He awoke with a start to find his three companions smiling at him kindly. They’d let him snooze while they’d tidied everything away apart from the seat he was still using, but now it was time to make their way home.

After wandering behind a nearby bush for a moment, he reappeared and, picking up his seat on the way past, he headed back to his car, waiting faithfully for him to begin the journey home.

As they headed back, his companions were now chatting about politics and other things like that. Monsieur Dupont didn’t much care for such matters and so, while they spoke about the recent signing of the programme commun, on 27 June, he let his mind drift away again, back to the shades of blue he had seen in his cigarette smoke, in the sky, and in the sea.

The 2CV purred, his friends kept chattering, and Monsieur Dupont smiled. On days like this, he was happy to be alive.

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If, quite understandably, the thought of subscribing is too much to contemplate, but you’ve enjoyed reading something I’ve written, then you also have the option to simply buy me a packet of Gauloises (contributions may in fact be used to buy a pack of Gitanes, but I won’t tell if you don’t ask).

Before you ask, no I don’t smoke, but writing this has brought a long-forgotten smell to mind, and now I’d quite like to smell it, drifting through the air, an echo of an earlier time…

Buy me a packet of Gauloises

Beyond the many bits of timber hiding in various corners of my house though, reading the posts got me thinking about a lump of wood which, curiously, hasn’t been very far from my side at any point in the last half-century or so (I obviously first came across it when I was very young). So I’ve decided to tell you about it too, you lucky people!

The house where I spent much of my childhood, in Dorset, is quite old. When I was a nerdy young teenager, I saved book tokens until I could afford the huge sum of £45 or so to buy a massive book called An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in Dorset, Volume 1, West (London, 1952). Surely the definition of a snappy title, and just the sort of thing for an annoying boy who could then bore everybody rigid by telling them about 17th century mullioned windows and stuff like that (I bet you’re glad you didn’t know me – I’d grown out of that sort of thing by the time I discovered guitars).

Anyway, where I lived had (and still has, all things being equal) a fireplace in the front room which, in the cautious language of the book is “said to have come from the Lady chapel of the abbey”. The abbey in question is quite close to the house, but given that the latter wasn’t built until a few decades after the reformation, I’m not sure that fact is actually true, but equally I don’t suppose anybody is ever going to check, and it’s quite possible that the people who live in the house now don’t even know about that claim, unless they’ve also read a book that was published nearly 75 years ago.

But I said I was going to talk about a piece of wood, not a fireplace, and so, as this post crawls, kicking and screaming, into its fifth paragraph, I’ll get around to it. Unless I digress again and point out that actually I won’t get back to the point until the sixth paragraph.

Sometime after we moved into the house in question, although I can’t remember exactly when, a man called Mr Chamberlain (I don’t think he had a first name, he was the sort of person who would have had “Mr” on his birth certificate as well as his death certificate), who had known the house for a long time (he’d been a gardener there when that sort of house had a big garden and somebody to work it) gave me a lump of carved oak and told me that it had come from the very same Lady Chapel (this was ages before I’d heard about the fireplace’s provenance) – it’s a wonder the chapel in question is still standing with all those bits disappearing from it. And for another reason I can’t really remember, it’s always been somewhere nearby ever since. it started out in my childhood bedroom (I can see it in a photo I’ve got of me in that room that I won’t share here), it was in my room at Uni, it has followed me through subsequent dwellings and now it’s in my office, resting against the old JMI Domino guitar amp I’ve had since I was 14 (which makes that a fairly sustainable piece of equipment too since it was made in 1961).

Looking at this photo, I feel I need to explain that it’s the top of the amplifier and the wood in question, which have kept each other company for many years, along with a John Player Special cigarette box I’ve had for about as long, and that’s full of banknotes and coins that are no longer legal tender. There’s also something a child made at school a few years ago which represents, I think, a doorway in Chiswick, and a papier-maché doll I was given when doing a job in Braga, Portugal, a few years ago (she made it to the UK in one piece and has lived in that spot ever since).

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Now I’ve digressed off into talking about what’s on top of an amplifier, although at least I haven’t started to witter on about the glorious classic Celestion Blue speakers it has, but I’m determined to bring this back on track before the end. So, the piece of wood is a lion, carved, with a little hole in its mouth, which makes me wonder if a metal pipe might not have passed through the hold for drainage of some sort. I say it’s a lion, but it could equally well be a spaniel – what do you think? If Sherborne Abbey does think it might be theirs, then they’re welcome to get in touch, but it probably isn’t.

And I have now written a post about a lump of wood inspired by much more interesting posts about lumps of wood. Thank goodness it’s Friday afternoon now, so you’ll have something better to do than read it!

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Buy me a lump of wood

I don’t often visit Aldershot station, but if you’re going from home to Guildford by train then you need to change there and (usually) wait for 20 minutes. It means the journey takes at least twice as long as it does by car, but it’s relaxing too, and avoids the fun and games of traffic and parking in Surrey’s county town.

Aldershot is an attractive example of the sort of station common across large parts of southern England. The main building is a modest and attractive brick-built structure, and it’s in a much better condition than some. Historically, Aldershot (which until recently still had signs announcing that it was the home of the British army) had a very large military presence, and there is still plenty of army stuff (this is the technical term) that goes on in the local area.

Aldershot has a very clear identity. It’s one of those places that many families in the UK will have heard mentioned if they ever look at family history. Until quite recently, almost every soldier in the country would have gone there at some point (if you live near Catterick or other similarly military places, don’t feel you need to comment), and there’s a long straight road (Queen’s Avenue) which was built solely for Victoria and subsequent monarchs to review their troops, something which wouldn’t take as long these days as it did when Victoria was around (I wonder what they did for toilets during parades back then – probably not a thought to dwell on for too long).

So, as I said, I was in the station on Monday, heading by train (via Guildford) and the Wey Navigation towpath, to a Bank Holiday lunch in Godalming (I’m sure you wanted to know why I was there). While waiting, I decided I had time for a coffee in the newly opened café there (a 20-minute gap between trains isn’t always a bad thing).

What caught my eye was that the café there had found exactly the right tone for an establishment in a town with a long military history. I couldn’t photograph them all, because the door was wedged open, but the signs I could see were absolutely spot on. There are references to deployment, references to Wellington, one about “Shots fired…”, which manages to get in a reference to the town and to the local football team, and one about “Now Stationed at Aldershot”.

It’s the sort of marketing that works so well because it’s in exactly the right place. The next station up the line towards London is Ash Vale, and not a single one of the puns and references would have worked there. Also, Ash Vale has got to be a good candidate for the ugliest station in the entire area, so I can’t really imagine wanting to hang around there for too long, even though there is a café that’s open during peak times.

Anyway, back to the point I was trying to make on LinkedIn, which is that as translators and interpreters, we should all aim to be like that café. Rather than trying to be the same as everybody else (unless your name happens to be Costa, in which case your marketing is already made for you on every high street in the country), we should all aim to stand out as individuals, as real humans (or even as fake humans, if you think you can get away with it).

Basically, this is a post that suggests we all be more like a café in a garrison town in Hampshire.

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Now, what milk would you like with that?

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Usually, I make a point of coming up with something different in my pleas for your money at the end of these posts, but I think that, just for once “buy me a coffee” fits the bill perfectly, so If, quite understandably, the thought of subscribing is too much to contemplate, but you’ve enjoyed reading something I’ve written, then you also have the option to simply buy me a cup of coffee (contributions may in fact be used to buy a KitKat, but I won’t tell if you don’t ask).

But me a coffee - no really, please do!

In French, they often refer to them as “vieilles publicités”, essentially “old adverts”, and my interest goes beyond the strictest English-language interpretation of that term to include metal and indeed carved signs too. I’m also happy to take photos of places that are actually still in business, such as this one which I took only a week ago, in the middle of Troyes. It is directly opposite the cathedral, and indeed the tower in the background has peregrine falcons nesting in it. I’ve been there on all three of my visits to the town so far this year, but I haven’t seen the birds yet, although I did ask in the church if they’re still around and was reassured that they are indeed. Maybe I’ll be luckier next time.

The wall the sign above is attached to hints at the activity that used to be carried out on the site before it became an up-market wine shop.

I took this photo about 15 years ago. Sadly, the sign has now been restored, with the lettering in black now much clearer, while the less visible lettering underneath has almost completely vanished.

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If you turn your back on the cathedral and head a few hundred metres up the road in the general direction of the town centre, there’s a narrow street with a café in it, as well as a very good Lebanese restaurant which I could happily digress into a post about, but I’ll try to keep focused and not do that. Getting back to the café, luckily, it has a room on the first floor, from which you can look out of the window and admire the building opposite, which was once used to make biscuits.

It’s almost impossible to photograph the entire thing in one go, so this photo is an amalgamation of several, as you can see if you look closely – in real life, nobody makes windows quite that shape, but since they aren’t the focus of the image, I don’t think anybody will tell me off too much for the fact they’re rather wibbly-wobbly.

A couple of weeks ago, I was doing a job where the subject of pastis came up (the topic we were interpreting mentioned Marseille quite a lot). There are, naturally, several different brands of that particular beverage, and the drink’s fans will very enthusiastically support their favourite, while simultaneously talking down the other brands on the market. Outside France, Pernod is (arguably) the best known, and the next ghost sign was snapped (back in 2005 apparently) slightly further out of Troyes, on the main road through Sainte-Savine. You can just about see it from the church where I got married in fact, although as far as I remember, no pastis was consumed on that day.

If you do a left and then a right, and then continue your journey south-westwards along the N77, you soon reach the village of Saint-Germain where your thoughts of drink will be encouraged to turn to Dubonnet. I don’t know how many old Dubonnet adverts can still be found across France (I’ve got 18 on Flickr, and plenty more on my computer), but I do know that it’s a lot. Most of them feature large quantities of blue paint, unlike this one which is, I suspect, rather older.

Indeed, if you turn around and head back in a vaguely easterly direction, until recently it wouldn’t have taken you long to find several blue ones, in Lusigny-sur-Barse for example, or the one shown here, on a bend in the road a few miles further on, in what is basically a hamlet with a restaurant on the way to the lakes, at Le Ménilot. Sadly, this building has now been renovated and the sign has essentially vanished.

When I say “sadly”, that is of course a moot point. It’s much better for buildings to be restored and retained than just to be left crumbling, especially when they’re by a main road and look like they could, at any moment, collapse onto the carriageway.

Anyway, back to ghosts. The same crumbling building in Le Ménilot doesn’t just encourage you to drink booze. On the other end of the same wall, there is a sign for Evian, a mineral water which, according to advertising claims they wouldn’t get away with these days, had positively miraculous health properties.

Before the A5 autoroute was built from Paris towards Dijon, traffic between the French capital and Troyes used to take the route national 19, now downgraded to route départementale 619. It’s an utterly featureless road. Long, boring, straight bits, interspersed with “coroner’s corridors”, those overtaking lanes in the middle which cars can (and do) use heading in either direction, sometimes playing chicken with traffic coming the other way towards them. The only buildings breaking up the monotony being places where cars, buses and lorries used to be able to stop to fill up (vehicles and their passengers), but which closed years ago and are now nothing but ugly blots on the landscape.

I had decided to head to Méry-sur-Seine, a small town on the Seine river (perhaps not too surprisingly, given its name), and also a place the Canal de la Haute-Seine passes through, with a very attractive basin which is very good for photographs of reflections, and people fishing, and generally a nice place to have a walk along the towpath. The Canal in question was never actually finished, despite Napoléon (yes, that one) decreeing in 1805 that it should be fully navigable within 6 years. It lasted rather longer than he did, but it never really got any further than Troyes, and finally met its Waterloo with large sections filled and transformed into roads at different points from 1956. Despite that, there are still some sections visible in the centre of Troyes itself.

I digress – something I’m quite good at.

I decided I wouldn’t head to Méry along the boring road but would take the old road (the d78 rue Saint-Savinien) that runs essentially alongside the Seine. My reward was this absolutely gorgeous rusty metal sign in a blink-and-you’ll-miss it village called Rilly-Sainte-Syre.

If there had been even the smallest chance that it could have fallen off the wall and into my boot, then it would have done but, luckily for posterity, it’s a fairly substantial piece of work, and I suspect that the reason it’s still there is that it would take quite a bit of effort to get it off the wall.

Still smiling at my good luck, I bumbled a little further along the same road, and in an equally small place (with a restaurant), Droupt-Saint-Marie, I spotted this on a bend. I have no idea what the first half of the sign says, but the second half clearly says Eau de vie. The water of life. I haven’t been able to find anything out about it at all, but I was very happy to see it.

Méry itself had several ghost signs, as well as the aforementioned photogenic canal. When wife was a girl, her grandfather used to take her with him when he went fishing in the canal basin there, a fact she had completely forgotten until we reached it, at which point her memories came flooding back, which was sweet.

I’ll end this post with a photo which isn’t of an old sign, just to prove that I do take other things as well.

Thank you so much for reading.

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Buy me a roll of film

Here on Substack, I tend to let myself go a bit more. The starting point might be a photo I’ve taken, or something I’ve seen while out and about, or it might be linked more tenuously to my job which, after all, is what puts food on my table. Sometimes it’s just because I’ve read something somebody else has written and liked the idea enough to borrow it and develop it in my own way. There’s something about imitation and flattery involved here but, in particular when it comes to something like photography, there’s a lot to be said (and seen) when one person takes another’s idea and gives it free rein. I’ve got a post festering somewhere at the back of my mind on shadows which has come about only because of two different articles on that subject that I’ve read here recently, but I hope (if I ever get around to it) to put my own stamp on it.

But who knows. Some ideas that fester for ages just fizzle out, without ever becoming words on a virtual page, which is probably just as well since, if they aren’t good enough to develop, they certainly aren’t good enough for anybody else to read.

Mind you, that isn’t necessarily the end of the story either. I’ve got a lilac in my garden which I planted about 25 years ago and which has never done anything at all. Eventually it got sort of eaten up by the rhododendron next to it, which was very happy and grew massively over the same period. A couple of years ago, I chopped the rhododendron back and found, much to my surprise, that the by now long-forgotten lilac was actually still there. Hidden, certainly, and not much bigger than it had been when I first planted it, but definitely not dead either. So I was careful to avoid it as I chopped and was rewarded, last year, with absolutely nothing except a slightly larger lilac branch. This year, however, it’s a completely different story, with that branch now a reasonable five feet tall, and flowering nicely, just a few yards from where I’m typing this.

I’ve been interpreting furiously for the last few days, and it’s been a delight to see and, as it continues to flourish, I’m expecting to have a ten-foot lilac watching me work within the next couple of years.

Where was I before I started talking about lilacs? Oh yes, some ideas that might reasonably be considered dead may well re-emerge from a hidden chrysalis at some point, butterfly style, flutter their delicate wings, and fly off into the world, quite possibly illustrated by some sort of tenuously linked photos. Or not, depending on what I can find.

But anyway, why did I start writing these things in the first place?

Well, once upon a time I used to write a regular column for a magazine. It started, many years ago, with the occasional article about topics such as how to use translation memories (at a time when many translators were able to make a perfectly good living while only using paper dictionaries) and one from 2009 which I’ve just dug out, which was an introduction to the concept of cloud computing (yes, it was already a thing back then, but not many people used it). I’m not going to reproduce it here, because it’s quite cringe-worthy, but the first paragraph explains how the MD at a company where I once worked didn’t understand why managers and sales personnel would need computers, since they would distract them from the business of actually selling, and there were perfectly good secretaries back in the office to that sort of computer thing.

That’s quite enough about that article except to say that I illustrated it (in arty black and white, since the magazine wasn’t colour back in those days) with a photo of my then state-of-the-art phone photographed in my garden, resting delicately against various plants.

Then, a few years and quite a few articles later, I ended up having to write a column at the back of every issue of the magazine. Quite by chance, this opportunity coincided with Covid, which meant that I didn’t have anything particularly meaningful to say about translation or interpreting, so I ended up just waffling about myself.

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By the time the column came to an end three years later, I’d got into a rhythm of writing roughly 1,500 words of nothing for each issue, which was tough, but also quite a routine to get into (usually corresponding to the moment when the email turned up from the editor asking where the column was). And so, when I stopped, I realised that a part of me missed it and I kept having ideas, and so I just kept writing. I’ve put over 300 on LinkedIn, which over time seem to disappear magically into the ether, and some of those, along with new ideas, now turn up here on a regular basis.

Recently, Substack has gone the way of other social media platforms, with some fairly unpleasant names, of people I would most definitely cross the road to avoid, turning up in the “most popular” box on the right of the screen. I have no desire to move at the moment (there’s a good community here, and it takes time to build connections, so if it ain’t completely broken, I’m not going anywhere).

I’ve completely lost my train of thought now. When I started the first paragraph, this was going to be a post about bad translations I’ve photographed over the years, but it’s morphed into something quite different. The original idea may (or may not) resurface one day, lilac style, but for now, I think that’s quite enough and I’m going to go and see if I can find that 20 year old HTC phone in a box somewhere instead.

And in case you’re wondering, the photo (well, collage) that I spotted in my collection and which was going to be the original starting point for this post was this one. It’s got absolutely nothing to do with what I’ve written, but it’s been sitting in the corner of the screen since I started, and I’d hate to disappoint it, so here you are.

Thank you for reading.

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Buy me an idea

The slightly yellow fluorescent light above her head was somehow soothing, as was the fact that the temperature in the box was a few degrees warmer than the street outside. The instantly familiar smell was a strange combination of electricity, Bakelite and disappointment.

The door has closed slowly and silently behind her, the enormous closure mechanism above her head doing its job as efficiently as ever, and she placed her bag on the little shelf above the phone directories and put her stack of coins on the top of the phone, observing as she did so that it was very dusty, as if it hadn’t been used for a very long time. Then she reached back into her bag and pulled out her address book, flicking through it until she found the first number she wanted to call.

She balanced a 10p in the slot, ready to push it in as soon as her call was answered. She picked up the handset and put it to her ear, listening to the purring dial tone for a moment, and then she dialled the number, placing her finger in the hole above each number in turn, and then rotating the dial clockwise to the stop, before releasing it.

She could hear the phone ringing at the other end and breathed out heavily. A long exhalation, followed by a moment of nothingness. Ring ring, ring ring. Time passed, while at the same time seeming to stand still. But nobody answered.

She flicked through her address book again, finding another number and repeating the process. Ring ring, ring ring. A voice at the other end, which was then obscured by the pips, beeping urgently. She pushed the 10p coin into the slot. Bang, clunk, chink as it landed on the other coins inside.

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Brrrrr. The line had dropped before the coin landed. 10p gone, 90p left.

She dialled another number. Again, there was no answer.

She continued the process. Sometimes there was no answer, while at other times somebody at the other end picked up, and then she got the pips, followed by the line dropping before she had time to say a word.

In her mind’s eye, she could see the places she was trying to call. Red K6 telephone boxes for the most part, dotted around the country and indeed around the planet, standing silently, waiting for somebody to step inside and pick up the receiver as it rang, and then to give her the answer she was looking for.

You see, her address book had a list of telephone box numbers that she’d been given, and she was working her way through them. She looked in her bag again, pulling out a pouch of tobacco and some Rizla papers absentmindedly, before putting them back and looking at her mobile phone (she didn’t have any matches, so even though she’d love a cigarette, there wasn’t much point in rolling one now). Her mobile was off, and its battery was flat.

In fact, the battery had been flat for ages and, where she was now, there were no cellular telephone networks. Owing to a quirk she didn’t really understand, the only way she’d get back to somewhere where she could use her mobile again was to make contact with somebody waiting for her call.

And yet nobody was answering. She knew that some telephone boxes had ended up in graveyards, unloved relics, with peeling paint and most of their 72 panes of glass damaged or missing. Often without doors.

She shivered suddenly. It started to feel like it was snowing, so she looked up.

The paint inside the top of the phone box had become detached from the metal and was starting to fall, like snow, landing on her head and on her shoulders. Her bag looked like it hadn’t moved for decades as the flakes got bigger.

When she looked down again, she had just one 10p left. She wasn’t quite sure how that had happened, but as she watched the flakes turn into larger lumps of paint, she decided she needed to get out before everything came down – perhaps this box was getting ready to head to the graveyard too.

She pushed against the door and stepped out, back into the chilly darkness. As she walked away from the box, she looked back. There, on the top, completely silent, was a cat. Not miaowing, not purring.

Just watching.

It slowly dawned on her that the cat was the first living creature she’d seen for ages, so she looked back at it, and then walked away, sadly. If she couldn’t make contact, then there was no way out.

She decided that the only solution would be to keep trying, from a different phone box each time, until she managed to get through to the person at the other end.

She sighed and took out the Ordnance Survey map folded into her pocket. It showed where all the boxes were. She stared at it for a few moments, then folded it back up and set off up the road towards the next box.

Maybe she’d be luckier next time…

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Thank you for reading this not particularly well written attempt to find an excuse to show some photos of telephone boxes. If, quite understandably, the thought of subscribing is too much to contemplate, but you’ve enjoyed reading something I’ve written, then you also have the option to simply buy me a 10 pence piece (at a very reasonable price) so that I can use it to make a phone call, if that’s still something you can do (contributions may in fact be used to buy mobile data, but I won’t tell if you don’t ask).

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So here goes.

A few years ago, I had an interpreting job in Malaga. To get there involved a flight from Gatwick, which isn’t the closest airport to home but isn’t all that far really, and is very easy to get to (M3/M25/M23, simples). And so, four hours before the flight, I set off, looking forward to settling down somewhere in the city centre a few hours later, to enjoy tapas and a Spanish vibe.

As I trundled along, I was singing away merrily and generally enjoying the fact that the road was nice and clear when, up ahead, I saw a gantry with tell-tale signs of a looming slowdown. The 60 in the first red circles had become 50 by the second, and 40 by the third, by which time I’d stopped moving completely. Just after junction 8, the one before the M23 turning. The views from the top of Reigate Hill are amazing, looking eastwards for miles towards Kent, and I had plenty of time to contemplate them as we edged, slowly, down the hill, before coming to a complete stop at the bottom.

I started to wonder about whether I’d make my flight. I’d booked the car into the long-stay car park, and it was starting to look like it would be tight to get into the terminal an hour before take off. No matter, I still had plenty of time.

Tick tock tick tock.

Eventually (after literally an hour or more), we edged onto the M23. That means that, directly ahead of us, those of us sitting in our cars could now see planes landing at the place we wanted to be. So near, and yet so far. I started to realise that I might actually miss my flight, and began wondering what to do (and how soon I’d get to the tapas I was now slightly obsessed with thinking about). At last, we passed the blockage (somebody had driven their van into something very solid and immobile by the side of the road, happily nobody had been hurt), and I realised that, since I’d get to the airport with just a few minutes to spare, I’d need to park in the short-stay car park.

I duly did so, and rushed into the airport and straight to the person at the airline desk. They explained that all flights were leaving on time. No delays at all caused, mainly, by the fact that most passengers were still stuck on a motorway somewhere. Then they told me to come with them and they ran me to a shortcut through security (the posh bit you usually have to pay for) and told me that once I was through, I should hotfoot it to the gate.

Maybe, just maybe, there’d be a chance I’d make the flight.

I ran. Oh how I ran. I don’t think I’d run like that since a school sports day back in the last century, when I took part in the consolation race (the race for everybody who hadn’t won a prize yet) and managed to overtake almost the entire school before not quite coming first. Happy times.

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Anyway, when I got to the gate. I couldn’t speak for a while. When I got my breath back, I explained what had happened, and the lady behind the counter told me that it wasn’t the right gate, because that flight had gone and, for some reason, they were operating a second flight to the same destination 45 minutes later. I could get on that but, in theory, I’d have to pay.

She looked at me and smiled. Then she started tapping away on her screen, while also talking to a colleague in a language I didn’t understand. A bit of tapping (and a bit more talking) later, she looked at me and said, “traffic delay?”. I nodded. She tapped away a little more, then printed me a boarding pass for the flight that was about to leave. And she didn’t charge me because “traffic delay” apparently worked, on that day, because so many other people were still stuck somewhere and, when I boarded, the plane was half empty.

Sometimes, airlines get a bad rap, but I have to say that I was really impressed with how Easy(jet) they made that part of my journey. After the stress of getting that far, it was exactly what I needed.

I made it to Malaga in time to get out for late night tapas and, perhaps more importantly, I was actually in my booth, the following morning, bright and early and ready to start work. Rather than still sitting on the M25 somewhere.

But what about my car? After all, inspired by Simona, that was the starting point for this post, wasn’t it.

A few days later, I flew back to Gatwick, without any delays, on the last flight of the day. After walking through security, I headed to the car park. Then I stopped. I was vaguely aware that I’d been in a bit of a hurry when I’d finally reached the airport a few days earlier. I hazily remembered that I’d gone forwards into the first space I’d found (very unlike me, I always reverse into spaces), and then I remembered running. I didn’t even remember if I’d locked the car. The only thing I did know for certain was that I had no idea where it was.

The short stay car park at Gatwick airport is quite big. With several entrances and many levels. I sighed and started walking. The ground level was quick – that’s the level with disabled parking and spaces for people with more money than sense. Then, working methodically, upwards to the top, I walked from end-to-end on each floor until I reached the final level.

No sign. I’d landed over an hour earlier and I was no closer to actually getting out of the airport. I sighed and worked my way back down, level by level until, eventually, there it was, on one of the lower floors, waiting (and locked). I’ve never been so happy to get into my car and to head home.

Effectively, dumping my car in the first space I’d found, and leaving it there, meant that the first day of the job I’d done in Spain had basically just earnt me enough money to pay for my parking (the short stay car park, plus the space I’d originally booked). That’s not necessarily a good thing but, on the positive side, it meant that I’d managed to get to the job I’d been booked to do. The client didn’t need to know that anything had gone wrong and didn’t need to try and come up with an alternative solution at the last minute. And so everybody was happy.

What about me? I have now changed my car – the current one is red and therefore much easier to see across a crowded car park. It also comes with an app so that I can find it on a map, even if it’s in a different country, which is quite fun sometimes (“your car is 1,200 miles away”).

Also, a few days ago, they announced that they are going to start running trains to Gatwick from Reading/Guildford throughout the night. This is extremely good news because, assuming they keep doing so, it means that I’ll never need to drive there again, something that makes me very happy indeed.

Of course, when writing about the time I lost my car, I could have written about a morning when I lived in Lille and went to drive to work only to find nothing but a little pile of glass where I’d parked the previous day. It would have been a more definitive tale of a lost car, but I don’t think I’d have managed to get as many words out of it (lost car, never got it back, the end).

So there you go.

Thank you for reading.

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If, quite understandably, the thought of subscribing is too much to contemplate, but you’ve enjoyed reading something I’ve written, then you also have the option to simply buy me some tapas next time I’m in Spain (contributions may in fact be used to buy chorizo without the need to travel, but I won’t tell if you don’t ask).

Buy me some tapas

Speaking as a translator and interpreter, it was interesting to see the answers demonstrate the lengths we will go to, as linguists, to track down the right answer, and I’m pleased to have given you pause for thought, for a few minutes, before you went back to finishing whatever you were doing. Given the talents on display across our community, I expect a few of you were probably hand-crafting Easter eggs, or placing disciples on the top of your own simnel cakes, or possibly running the length of Hadrian’s Wall before tea.

The actual answer is that the shop was in Hull, so most definitely in Yorkshire, England. Just typing that sentence made me wonder how many other Hulls there are out there, and now I know that there are 9 Hulls in the USA, and 13 other places worldwide (although none of the others glory in the full name of Kingston-upon Hull).

The photo was taken in 1906, meaning that the King in question would have been Edward VII, and the shop was in Porter Street, not far from Hull Railway Station. The area itself has changed completely since it was bombed in both World Wars (a historical footnote being that the bombing in the First World War was carried out by Zeppelins, at a time when nobody on the ground would have expected bombs to fall from the sky. How dreadful).

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Linguistically, it’s interesting to think how the rules have changed over the years. These days the shopkeeper would probably be getting insulted online for his dreadful spelling, but given that posters like those would probably have been mass-produced, most people would, presumably, have been perfectly comfortable with it.

Having written this, I’ll turn the computer back off and go to do something completely different now. Today is surprisingly warm and, after looking out of the window at my garden all day, I think it’s time to get out there and do something a bit more productive in horticultural terms, even if the something in question is nothing more than a little bit of cutting along, perhaps, with pricking out some seedlings that seem to have got very excited by the sunshine too.

Post illustrated with the photo I posted on Friday, back on Substack for its second outing in less than a week, superimposed on a Street View of the same location now.

Thank you for reading!

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I appreciate that this is only a brief post, and hardly worthy of the time you’ve taken to read this far, but if you’ve enjoyed reading something I’ve written (some of my posts are more interesting, honest!), then you also have the option to simply buy me a cup of tea (contributions may in fact be used to buy cheese, but I won’t tell if you don’t ask).

Buy me a cup of tea

One of the towns he portrayed went by the name of Shaston, “the ancient British Palladour… was, and is, in itself the city of a dream”. The paragraphs in Jude the Obscure where Hardy describes Shaston are among the best I’ve ever been lucky enough to read, instantly bringing to mind images of the Blackmore Vale and views from the “summit of a steep and imposing scarp, rising on the north, south, and west sides of the borough out of the deep alluvial Vale of Blackmoor, the view from the Castle Green over three counties of verdant pasture”.

The town itself is also one that many people who have seen a legendary TV advert for Hovis bread will recognise. Originally shown on TV as long ago as 1973, and directed by none other than Ridley Scott, it firmly positions the town itself as Dorset’s best known Yorkshire town. That advert itself was parodied perfectly a few years later by the Two Ronnies.

So yesterday, on a gentle and relaxing drive to Sherborne (Hardy’s Sherton Abbas), I paused in Shaftesbury. I’d already broken my journey at Figsbury Ring. I had intended to stop at Old Sarum but the weather was a bit iffy, so instead, I could be found at lunchtime enjoying a sandwich sitting on the top of a neolithic fort (which also turns up in literature, in E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey) looking out over Wiltshire, across Salisbury towards Dorset.

As I ate, a red kite circled just above me, but I’m not sure what it would have made of my cheddar and Marmite sandwich if it had swooped down and grabbed a bite. It was probably better off sticking to mice.

Because I hadn’t stopped at Old Sarum, by the time I’d crawled through Salisbury in Good Friday traffic, my thoughts were firmly focused on finding coffee. I considered stopping in Wilton, but instead opted to continue my journey until I reached Shaftesbury. I haven’t stopped there for a long time (more than a decade apparently) even though I drive through it several times a year.

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I parked up, topping the car up with a few extra kWh while it waited for me, and went off to check on some ghost signs I’d photographed in the past, which was quite disappointing, because most of them have either disappeared completely, or have faded into illegibility.

And then, clutching my coffee, I went to take the cliché photo of Gold Hill you can see a few paragraphs above this one, luckily mere seconds before a car appeared at the bottom of the slope and parked in front of a house. Then I finished my coffee on a bench at the top of the aforementioned “imposing scarp”, a place from which you can literally see for miles (at least 15 on a good day) and, pausing only to contemplate the sign that inspired me to write this post, I got back in my car and headed further west along the A30.

You see, the reason I’ve written this post is that, while I was in Shaftesbury and contemplating books I enjoyed immensely when I was younger (and which inspired me to cycle to places described by Hardy, although never to Shaftesbury itself because it’s at the top of a very long gradient, and I’m not that much of a glutton for punishment), I came across this sign.

Where once Hardy wrote about Jude’s “heart throbbing in spite of him”, there is now a sign above a shop announcing, proudly, BARGAIN S. Now, I’m not one to post too often about missing (or over-present) apostrophes, but this sign made me chuckle because of the gap before the last letter, which really suggests that the signwriter was hedging their bets. Looking more closely at the photo when I got home, it does vaguely look like there might have been an apostrophe there, once upon a time. What made me photograph it was the difference between the words rattling around in my brain as I walked around the town, and the word(s) I could see with my eyes.

From Jude arriving in Shaston after ascending “from the nearest station for the first time in his life” to BARGAIN S is but a short journey, but at the same time, a long one, and as I conclude, I wonder what Hardy would have had to say about it. What’s certain is that if he’d written something, I would have enjoyed it!

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If, quite understandably, the thought of subscribing is too much to contemplate, but you’ve enjoyed reading something I’ve written, then you also have the option to simply buy me a bargain (contributions may in fact be used to buy cheese, but I won’t tell if you don’t ask).

Buy me a bargain