Summer Cold

I started feeling the effects of a summer cold today. Or it would be a summer cold, if England were experiencing summer. Sore throat,light-headedness, sweats and chills, fatigue. I am disgusted. I have never, ever had a cold between the months of May and October. But I spend one summer in England and bam! Summer cold. There was an item on the news last night that there is a summer cold going around and the number infected is higher than normal. People have been blaming the cold weather. Others the nasty germs spread around by the flooding. But that's not the reason. It's got to be the terrorists.

Anyway, since University employees on my level get 10 sick days a year and we're told if you "don't use them, you lose them", I came home at lunch today. On my way out, my colleagues told me "don't feel like you have to come in tomorrow - the sick day count only starts with your first FULL day off sick".

Ah, England.

Agent Zigzag

The book I'm currently reading is really quite excellent. It's about counter-espionage and the double-cross agents the British operated in World War II. It got me thinking. I've noticed that rain, other bad weather, terrorists, delays, cancellations, crowds, floods and other assorted bad luck don't seem to get the Brits down at all. I mean, after 23 straight days of rain in the middle of the summer, the average Brit will say something like, "Bit wet out, wot?" It leaves a foreigner wondering. Well, there's a jolly good passage in the book that captures this quite well, I think. Here it is:

He watched his fellow men at war and reflected on their stoicism. One night the Carlton Club was hit by a bomb. The members of the surrounding clubs, in pyjamas and slippers, formed long lines to save the library from the flames, passing books from hand to hand and discussing the merits of each as they passed.

Blimey. I can just hear them now. "H.G Wells or Dickens?". "By God, they were both tossers, weren't they?" "Indeed."

If being bombed out of bed and drafted into a work detail in the middle of the night while bits of your chums are scattered in the street doesn't get a rise out of them, nothing will.

County Mayo

With a few pints of the black stuff (as an aside, they seem to have better tasting Guinness in Ireland. Not sure what the reason, but it was enjoyed by many during our stay, even those who don’t usually enjoy it. Maybe the secret recipe remains in Ireland?!) in our tummies and some happy memories we bid farewell to Dublin. We left the next morning and drove across the country to County Mayo. Brent’s Dad’s grandmother grew up in Ballina so we headed in that direction. About two hours outside of Dublin the roads change from highways to one lane winding country roads. This made for a long journey. Distances that looked on the map as if they should be travelled in under an hour ended up taking over two hours! We stayed at an amazing B&B (the Bervie!) on Achill Island just off the western coast. What a place. We had the waves crashing outside our room and sheep grazing outside our door. It is the closest we’ve been to Canada since we left last September. I had to use all my strength to hold Brent back from getting in the water and swimming home!

Ballina was interesting to see. It is a small town in essentially the middle of no where. It is famous for fly fishing wild salmon and we saw many fisherman when we were there. We toured around and had lunch in a local establishment. In our touring around we were the recipients of many stares as we were clearly not local! I guess they couldn’t detect the Ballina blood running through the veins of Clint and Brent.

After a couple of relaxing days on Achill Island, we made the long drive back to Dublin and flew back to Leeds. It was such a great experience to see a fair bit of Ireland, from the big city of Dublin to the rural and remote western coast. Plus there is still enough we haven't seen of Ireland to warrant another trip!

Dublin

Yes! Another of Brent’s life dreams achieved. Along with watching the England team play one of his life’s dreams was to make it to Ireland. Done and done. We arrived at Dublin Airport and nearly needed to carry Brent’s Mom off the plane. Calling her a “bad flyer” doesn’t even begin to cover the territory. She managed the flight reasonably well, but took a few more pills than the 50 minute flight required. She was in a drug induced haze for most of our first day. Days later she had no recollection of where we ate dinner our first night in Dublin!

We spent two days in Dublin and managed to make it to most of the big highlights. It was really fascinating to see the differences between Dublin and some of the other cities we’ve now been to such as Edinburgh and London. You can tell the Irish have had a hard life. Yet there is a warmth about Dublin that cannot be denied. It feels like your favourite drunken uncle who tells the most funny and interesting stories. Brent probably could have spent another whole week there touring around all the James Joyce sights, but we had to leave him with some reasons to return.

Trinity College

Brent & James Joyce

No explanation required....

Terror Attacks

The less said about this the better. When the going gets tough, the tough write a haiku.

There were three attacks
Security was heightened
We flew to Ireland

Floods....again

It may be old news now, but the North of England has taken a frightful beating the last month or so. Three weeks ago, a “Storm of the Century” dropped 10cm of rain on the North of England in 18 hours causing the most widespread flooding the area had ever seen. A week before that, the same thing happened. Luckily for Brent’s parents, they missed the first of these storms … however, they caught the brunt of the second. This second storm struck just as Brent’s parents were for heading for London. There was a walk to the train station with full luggage in a driving gale, a cancelled train, a diversion to York and a 5 hour train ride where Brent’s Dad stood for the duration. Beth also dodged a crisis in Sheffield that day, where flooding caused evacuation of the train station and closures of many roads. For a grim while it looked as though she may have to spend the night in the Sheffield bus station. Luckily, a bus eventually appeared which was prepared to make the journey to Leeds. After leaving work at 3pm Beth finally made it home at 9pm.

All in all, we had it lucky. It seems a lot of people have family or friends who were devastated by the flooding. A good portion of the homes were without insurance and won’t be inhabitable for up to a year. There have been recent pictures on the news from Hull where the flooding still hasn’t subsided.

Even though we’ve been lucky, we still reserve the right to complain about the rain on a regular basis. Brent’s parent’s visit consisted of rain every single day for 21 days straight. Needless to say, they were not impressed with the weather. If they thought they had it bad, imagine how we feel…21 days of rain, try 45 weeks! Our first English summer has consisted of a steady diet of rain and temperatures never greater than 20C. We are well on our way to cultivating our stiff upper lip about it and the pictures on the news tell us that it could be much, much worse.

p.s. it is still raining! Apparently we will get another 50mm of rain today!

Scotland Forever!

On June 20th we clambered into a rental car and headed for Scotland. Although we got the car upgraded to a fancy Saab 9-3, Brent managed to get the wheel clamped as soon as he got it back to the flat for parking in a no parking zone. After paying the £80 fine, we were on our way! First stop, Edinburgh.

The drive to Edinburgh was relatively uneventful even if it was rather long. It took about 4 hours to get there. Oddly, it seems in England we are willing to drive great distances while in Canada, we rarely drive 45 minutes to visit friends or family. Not sure why that is, but hope to rectify that if we ever get home. We checked into the Novotel Edinburgh which is in the Old Town and quite a nice place to stay for a large chain hotel.

We had been working in cahoots with Brent’s Aunt, Uncle and cousins (the Ancaster connection we’ll call them) since the 20th was Brent’s parent’s anniversary. We took them to The Grain Store in the Old Town which we had discovered on our last trip to Edinburgh and it is fast becoming a Davis family favourite. Brent’s Aunt and Uncle had arranged for the drinks to be provided and they had chosen wisely. It was probably an anniversary that Brent’s parents won’t soon forget and it was nice to be able to share it with them.

Clint & Jennifer on their Anniversary, enjoying some lovely wine from Ron & Martha

The four of us enjoying a pint at a pub.

The next day was our anniversary! Four years of marriage is a long time, by any measure but it has gone by pretty quickly. (Thanks to all who sent us their well-wishes that day!) Beth has finished school, started more school, finished that and started still more school while working as a midwife. Brent has put in many, many years as a lawyer in private practice. Then we moved to England. It was sometimes pretty hard, but never dull. Strangely enough we have now spent 50% of our wedding anniversaries in the UK. We would never have predicted that four years ago. To celebrate our day, we toured Edinburgh Castle and the Royal Mile finally stopping for dinner once again in the Old Town to which Brent’s parents graciously treated us. Unfortunately, there was one casualty that day. Brent dropped our beloved Sony camera at Edinburgh Castle and, despite being able to capture a few more photos with it, the camera finally succumbed to its injuries at approximately 11:05am.

The next day we had our Scottish breakfast and drove for an hour to our hotel in Glasgow. This was really quite a momentous occasion and one Brent’s Dad had been looking forward to for some time. His family is from Glasgow and we were trodding some of the same streets that his Grandfather, Great-Grandfathers, etc. trod many years ago. We had lunch at a Glasgow pub, saw the Cathedral, wandered the streets, shopped a bit and generally enjoyed ourselves to a high degree.

The next day we headed back to Leeds via Moffat, which is where Brent’s Mom’s grandmother was from. (Insert lovely diagram of family tree here…..!) Brent recalls that, as a boy, he watched his Grandfather’s slideshow of a trip to Scotland which included a trip to Moffat. There is a famous family picture of Brent’s Grandmother sitting on the bench at the statue of the Golden Ram in the centre of Moffat. After some twists and turns, we found Moffat and were surprised at what a nice little Scottish town it is. After completing some sightseeing, the men bought some Moffat tartan ties and the ladies got Moffat tartan scarves.

On the way back to Leeds, there was some considerable reminiscing as well as thoughts of ancestors we scarcely knew. Although Glasgow and Moffat were nice to visit, some of us couldn’t help thinking we would be eternally grateful to the ancestors who were crazy enough to leave everything behind, get on a ship and make the trip to Canada.

They're Here!!!

Brent’s parents arrived on June 17th at the Manchester Airport. We went to meet them and took a hired car back to Leeds. It was interesting to see England through the eyes of others as it marks for us how far we’ve come since we’ve been here. They were really interested in the scenery and the architecture. Apparently, they are both quite different from home. We had forgotten this since, frankly, it’s been awhile since we were home. It was also quite funny that, notwithstanding that everyone here speaks English, my parents couldn’t understand what some people were saying. Fast-talking Brits with heavy accents that work in the service industry are a disaster. But for us, the gibberish seems to get through – no interpreter required.

We fed them when they arrived and they napped for about three hours and Beth made us all a great dinner. All in all a pretty good first day for them in England. For the next couple of days we showed them Leeds and York (which is probably the big highlight in this area of England).

Hiatus

We’ve been MIA for a little while. Visiting season has officially begun for us and we’ve been too busy catching up with family and travelling all around the UK to blog. During the last three weeks while Brent’s parents have been visiting us there has been torrential rain and floods, 21 days of rain, a fourth wedding anniversary and a 37th wedding anniversary, a broken down rental car, a broken camera, terrorist attacks, Canada Day!, two airplane flights, several train rides, two research interviews, too many pubs and delicious meals to count, two nights in Edinburgh, one night in Glasgow, two nights in Dublin, and two nights on the shores of the North Atlantic on an island in Ireland….and that’s just the tip of the iceberg! The good news is that all this carrying on has provided us with some fun stories, pictures and reflections which will hopefully spill onto the blog over the next little while.