There is an ad for Icelandic yoghurt on TV. As you do. Also the subject of much conversation, shows called 'Peter Kay's Car Share' and 'Line of Duty' which are big things here currently. And baking shows of course. I see by funny conincidence that Mark Lanegan has a new album out tomorrow or next day, very well reviewed. Currently have a strong hankering for some Tom Waits who is eternally genius. And Tricky, I have not listened to Tricky in ages. I have not heard any good music since being here, haven't found a good radio station in our travels. I am not sure why I still occasionally click on YouTube links that they seem to think are somehow relevant to the music I like... I just wasted most of the time I was going to use to write stuff trawling through bad music. The Internet was and sometimes still is a great way for new artists to get their music out there, but by goodness you have to wade through a load of rubbish to find it. I got so caught up I forgot who I was going to Obscure Reference. So try some Flying Lotus, he is well talented. Personally I ended up listening to Minor Threat but that is not going to appeal to everyone out there. And I find Straight Edge people unbearably self important, elitist and ironically conformist, just like the people they claim to hate... Funny that.
If none of that made sense to you then ignore it and read on.
As mentioned we headed north on Tuesday the 18th and found some ancestors and nosed around house and church yard. Should really have thought to get in touch in advance and see if we could better look around the place but didn't know when or if we would get there. Church was unlocked so that was good, had a look inside.
Drove around looking at places the forebears would have kicked around and farmed and possibly visited. We ended up in the village of Rock, which is not something you get to say often... I thought the name would have an intriguing story behind it. It didn't really. 'Rock' is apparently derived from 'Oak' so I expect at some stage there was a tree of significance in the area. English: does not always make sense. In Rock we stayed with family, spending a lovely evening with grandparents-in-law and dinner at another very old pub. Next day via more family visiting we returned to Chichester... The day after that to Croydon via Dorking, while there we ate lunch in a cafe that was once the house of one of the original passengers on the Mayflower... He was a shoe salesman and apparently fairly well respected part of the community, and he moved out and took his wife and two kids over to America with the founding fathers, for business rather than religious reasons... Bit of a go-getter he was... Off to make his fortune etc. They all died fairly quickly thereafter, except his young daughter who grew up to be the ancestor of many famous US offspring. So happy ending for some of them I suppose.
Dorking. Why not.
Once in Croydon Thursday evening we quickly decided not to be in Croydon any more and jumped a train into town and revisited one of the rather good pubs in Borough Market for a couple of Guinness and cider, enjoying good people-watching in the busy after work drinking crowd before a rather nice seafood feed at one of the surrounding restaurants. As much as all my new family-in-law are exceedingly lovely and kind to us it was nice to have an evening together to catch up given it was now a fair while since I left home.
We hit the Tower of London Friday to avoid weekend crowds and while busy, it was not too bad given it was also school holidays. Another impressive and ancient place with the oldest bits also nearing 1000 years old. I was most jealous of their collection of shiny stuff including not one or two but forty heavy cavalry swords casually on display in a wall rack along with, obviously, many other things both expected and not... Like a 400 year old set of samurai armour good as the day it was made, which was presented to the King of the time by the Japanese ruler.
Armour and swords and armour and swords and...
The Crown Jewels were of course every bit as impressive as you would expect. We ended with a tour by a Beefeater, the traditional Tower guards, all of whom are retired military personnel who must have at least 22years of exemplary service before possibly being lucky enough to be allowed to live and work in the Tower complex. Our guide clearly missed his calling as a comedian/actor when he went to the armed forces because his whole tour was extremely well delivered with many interesting anecdotes and had the large crowd laughing from beginning to end... Although from the overheard comments of the various Americans they were obviously somewhat taken aback by his blunt and sarcasm-heavy delivery. Which of course made it even better.
Much other old stuff also
The Tower took a full afternoon even with a "short" 30 min queue for the Jewels (apparently 3-4 hours is not unheard of on a busy day), these things are worth doing properly. Looking for a handy place for a feed we found a popular Greek restaurant on the banks of the Thames, where we ordered a range of Greek specialties which were all delicious, and a bottle of a popular Greek wine which proved a good lesson on why to stick to Greek food and get your wine from elsewhere. Hilariously (?) we also found ourselves seated at a prime table directly in front of a Greek duo playing traditional tunes on guitar and mandolin (?) with a drum machine accompanying, meaning we had to yell almost our entire dinner conversation and effectively eliminating what little hearing I had remaining in my left ear. The staff clapped and whooped and dragged groups of women up to dance in circles to the tune from Lock Stock (Zorba?).. They were all very enthusiastic and the old man played his ornately inlaid mandolin with great skill, which was cool to watch, although would have been better to hear from about 50m further away. But the food was good enough to make it tolerable. We retired by tube and train to Croydon and sleep
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