One Day in a Decade

Today is not only the start of British Summer Time here in England, when the clocks spring forward by an hour, but it is also Census Day. Which, come to think of it, makes it an odd day to choose – give every household in the country an extra job to do and then take an hour out of the day on which they are supposed to do it! But then “Government planning” has always been an oxymoron. :-)

So, this morning we sat down and filled out the form giving information such as the number of rooms in our house, employment status, educational qualifications, etc. For the first time ever it was possible to complete the questionnaire online this year, but we opted instead for the traditional paper form. It somehow felt as though it had more import that way. Of course, not being a traditional couple, the form did present us with a couple of difficulties – such as trying to write a US address into boxes that were structured for a British one. But, overall, the process was relatively painless and was completed surprisingly quickly, given how thick the form was! At least that job is now done for another 10 years.

The rest of the weekend’s highlights have been sport-related, and I did promise not to bore you all here with my sporty witterings now that I have a separate sports blog. So, head on over to The Sports Ground tomorrow if you want to know how else I have been filling my time this weekend.

Hopefully it won’t be another five and a half weeks until my next post, like it has been since my last one! Well, I know it won’t be because Dori and I are going on a little expedition within that time which I think a number of you may be interested in. Stay tuned for more info!!

Weekend at the Yellow House

I hope that everybody who celebrates it had a great 4th of July. Coming from two places, as we do, Dori and I get to celebrate the holidays from both places, which is great. We can celebrate Independence Day, as well as Bonfire Night, Memorial Day, St George’s Day, Thanksgiving and all the others. There is nothing like a good excuse for a celebration :-)

On Sunday we cooked burgers, corn on the cob and beans and bacon and had a great eat-out meal – although we actually had it indoors for one reason and another. As a Brit, I guess I shouldn’t really be joining in on 4th of July celebrations, but what the hey! It was a good day.

As we ate our celebration food, we also watched the men’s final at Wimbledon. Not unexpectedly, Britain’s Andy Murray failed to make it into the final and so it will be at least 73 years now between the last British finalist and the next! Both the men’s and women’s finals were a little one-sided and were decided in straight sets. But both were won by true champions of the game, and congratulations have to go to both of the deserved winners – Serena Williams and Rafael Nadal. It has been a great Wimbledon fortnight this year, with many a cracking match – not least the longest tennis match ever. And there was not a single rain delay in the whole two weeks, which is a very rare occurrence indeed! The Wimbledon fortnight is my favourite two weeks of the year, as I have mentioned here before, and this year was no exception.

Of course, this year I also had the added distraction of the World Cup taking place simultaneously, over in South Africa. On more than one occasion I found myself watching the football on the TV, whilst having my other eye on the tennis on my laptop! It’s not easy – even less so when you are also tweeting about both events at the same time!! Who says that men can’t multi-task!

Talking of the World Cup, we are now at the semi-final stage having seen some shock results in the quarter-finals. What was looking like a Brazil-Argentina final has now totally been thrown out of the window after both teams were eliminated in the last round. The quarter-finals also saw the end of the last African team in the tournament, as Ghana were beaten by Uruguay in a penalty shoot-out. This now leaves Uruguay plus three European teams in the competition. Tonight sees Uruguay take on the Netherlands, and then tomorrow Germany will play against Spain. The winners will meet in the final, to be played on Sunday.

Other than the sport, it has been a relatively quiet time at the Yellow House. Dori is now just about recovered from the jet-lag and we are slipping back into our routines. It is good to be back together again :-)

We have a wedding reception to attend on Friday, so that may prove interesting as it is being held in a hotel that we have been trying to find an excuse to visit for a long while. LOL You may hear more about that on one of our blogs at the weekend!

I hope that you all have a good week.

Back to London, the Thames and the O2

In my last post I shared some pictures of London taken from the Thames river, and as it happens we travelled a similar journey yesterday. We journeyed up to London in order to see the Michael Jackson Exhibition at the O2. As I have mentioned before, we were due to go to one of his “This Is It” concerts at the same venue last summer, but MJ’s tragic and untimely death prevented us from achieving what had been a long-held ambition for the both of us. As a small compensation for missing out on seeing Michael in concert we decided that we would travel up to the O2 on the last day of the MJ Exhibition.

And so yesterday we rose early, well early for a Sunday anyway, and prepared for our day out. I managed to see a little of the start of the Australian Open men’s final as we got ready, but it was obviously not going to be Andy Murray’s day. Still 74 years and counting since the last British male winner of a Grand Slam tennis tournament! Maybe this year at Wimbledon or the US Open? Time will tell. Anyhoo, I was talking about our trip.... We left home about 9:45 which should have left us plenty of time to catch the train up to Paddington, but unfortunately we had forgotten to bring enough coins to pay for the parking while we were gone and so had to turn back towards the Yellow House after 5 minutes and go all the way back to get some more. This meant that our time window for catching the train was getting very narrow indeed! So, it was a race into town to go and get parked, and then a mad dash to the train station as the time ticked away. We arrived breathless at the station just as the tannoy announced that our train was waiting at the platform. So we ran again up the steps to the platform and jumped on the train, relieved that we had made it in time.

The journey into London was much more relaxed! We always enjoy travelling this way, as you don’t have to worry about the driving, or the other idiots who drive like crazy, or about getting parked at the other end. As the old adverts used to say here, we “let the train take the strain”. :-) Once we had arrived we headed towards the tube station. Normally we would take the tube all the way to the O2, but unfortunately the line that goes there was shut for engineering works yesterday, as were a lot of other routes. So we had to be very inventive with how we got to Greenwich. We took the tube to London Bridge (via Elephant & Castle) and then walked over to London Bridge pier in order to catch a Thames Clipper – a catamaran river-taxi – that took us all the way to the O2.

This trip on the river, although once again on a very cold day, was much more comfortable than the one I spoke of previously as we were inside this time and not sat freezing our wotsits off on the top deck! Here are a couple of videos that Dori took on our trip from London Bridge to Greenwich. The first shows the approach to Tower Bridge...

And this second one gives an idea of what it is like to travel the Thames. You get to see a mixture of old and new buildings, as well as some old industrial buildings that have been converted to new luxury apartments. The skyscrapers you can see in the background towards the end of the video are at Canary Wharf which is the modern centre of London’s financial district.

It was a very enjoyable half-hour trip along the river, and we agreed that we will have to do this again sometime in the summer.

We arrived quite quickly at Queen Elizabeth II pier just alongside the O2, disembarked and made our way over to the arena. After the rush earlier in the day, we now found ourselves with a little time to kill before our allotted time to enter the exhibition came round. Sadly not quite long enough to grab something to eat though! There are some great restaurants at the O2, many of which we have yet to sample. Before we knew it though, our time had arrived and we made our way into the exhibition.

The MJ Memorabilia Exhibition was just great. There were so many personal items there, as well as films, photographs and paintings of the great man. It was so sad to see some of the footage of Michael, and to see the little sandwich boxes that his children used to pack for him when he was in rehearsal for “This Is It”. But there were plenty of uplifting exhibits too, such as his handwritten lyrics to “Beat It”, plenty of his stage clothes and some items taken from Neverland. We were in there for a little over an hour but the time flew by – a sure sign that you are having a good time!

The exhibition was fantastic,and I felt that it was fitting that we got to see it at the venue of what would have been his comeback concerts, and indeed what was the site of his final public appearance in the UK. We would both so dearly loved to have seen MJ in concert here, and judging from everything I have seen both in the exhibition and in the “This Is It” movie, those shows were going to be something out of this world. Nothing could make up for missing out on that experience, but visiting this exhibition has gone a long way to healing some wounds and helping me to reconcile that some things are just not meant to be. The world lost a kind and gentle soul last June – a true Legend.

For Dori's view of our day out and of the exhibition, click here.

The Price of Progess ....Part One

So, as Dori mentions in her blog post today, it was a relaxing weekend in the Yellow House this week. We watched some DVDs, worked on a project, and did a bit more organizing of a couple of trips we have coming up before the year’s end. We got some things done that needed doing, but they were done at our own pace and without any self-imposed pressure or timelines. It was a good weekend – despite the weather!

I was also able to watch the highlights of the Ukraine v England World Cup qualifier on Saturday evening. You may not think that is anything remarkable, but there has been a controversy raging here for the past week or so concerning this match. To cut a long story short, the TV company who had the rights for this match went bust a couple of months back, and no other UK TV companies were either able or wanted to step into the breach. As a result, the company to whom the TV rights had reverted decided to screen the match live on the internet with no live TV coverage at all, and charged up to £12 (about $20) for the privilege.

Thankfully, England have already qualified for the World Cup, and so there was no burning need for most people to fork out a portion of their hard-earned dosh to view the game. But the thought of this being the way of the future is not at all appealing. I would certainly not appreciate paying £12 only to spend two hours watching a message say “please wait....buffering”. And, whilst having an option to watch sport online is a good thing, restricting live sport to only the internet is far from it. I hope this isn’t the start of a slippery slope. Anyhoo, the highlights of the game were screened on Saturday night by the BBC, but they had been prevented from advertising the fact that they would do so until after the end of the game (just two hours before their show started). Presumably this was to ensure that everybody who may be tempted to pay for the live coverage would do so and not just wait for the free-to-air highlights on the BBC a couple of hours later. So, it was only by pure luck that I saw the listing for the game on the Electronic Programme Guide as we were flicking through to see what was on.

As it happens, all of this fuss was for nothing as England had their goalkeeper sent-off after 15 minutes and went on to lose the game 1-0. Ho hum.