Jos's tip for the day

Don't cut fresh chilis for dinner, then take your contact lenses out.

The little things

I thought for a change I’d talk about some of the little things that make life just a bit different over here. Sure, there’s the fact that I only get 5 hours daylight at 3 degC, and that I’m surrounded by places built many centuries ago. But they’re not the things that make up your day to day. Well, ok, the weather does make a bit of a difference. By the way, for all those who have asked me what it’s liked – Newcastle in winter feels exactly like Jindabyne or Queenstown in NZ in winter – I keep thinking I’m heading up to the snow. So I love it. It doesn’t rain, and it’s decently cold enough to never actually feel cold because you’re always rugged up. Of course, I hear Manchester will be wet, warmer and miserable, so I’ll enjoy Newcastle while I can.

Anyway, here’s my list of small oddities.

A sign in KFC regretting that they had no facilities to warm baby’s bottles. Apparently this is a stock standard thing – take baby to the restaurant and get them to heat the bottle. Bottle feeding is rife.

A lot of the doors are really, really heavy! I wouldn’t want to be old and feeble over here. I think it’s a combination of fire codes and insulation.

Letters come in A5 sized envelopes, so you only have to fold your letter in half not in thirds.

The cost of everything! I’m keeping a running list that looks a bit like this:

Things that are numerically equal to the cost in Australia, making them 2.5 more expensive in real terms:

electricity, pizza, red bull, scones, ugg boots

Things that are about 1.5 to 2 x more expensive:

petrol, fruit and veg, meat, junk food, rent, property in general, clothes

Things that are roughly equivalent:

beer and wine (yay!), hire cars, sandwiches, books, makeup

Things that are cheaper:

salmon, duck, chocolate, crisps – and that is pretty much an exhaustive list.

The people at the check out in the supermarket tend to be older people supplementing pensions, and they get chairs to sit on.

You use a pin with your credit card, so you don’t have to sign for anything. This is apparently a recent innovation given the surrounding fanfare. But the concept of linking your credit and savings accounts is totally foreign.

They have these little roundabouts painted on the ground of the intersection with a single pole telling you it’s a roundabout in the middle. Very easy to miss I found.

The news is a bit weird. There seems to be only about 2 or 3 news items, and they go into such depth for each one (endless details on the latest murder investigation say). I just read the internet news.

Electrical wiring rules mean that you can only have one of those international shaver sockets in the bathroom – even the light switch has to be outside the door. This means that I have to blowdry my hair in the bedroom and let the laptop run on batteries when I want it playing triple j as I soak in a hot bath with a book.

I have to listen to triple j, because the radio over here has been uniformly appalling. I’m hoping it gets a bit better in Manchester, we’ll see. Each station, say BBC Radio 1 for example, has a range of frequencies (“hello, and you’re listening to BBC Scotland on 99 to 99.8”), so as you’re driving along from town to town you follow the same station through it’s a range of frequencies.

Everything's on "the High Street". I had no idea what this meant at first, when the bank lady was talking about how there were no charges if you used your card on "the High Street". I was looking out the window with all the other aussies/kiwis/south africans thinking does she mean Oxford St? Or is there another street called High St? Turns out it means on the street rather than in a shopping centre. Say a street cash machine rather than one in a service station.

Well, that will do now for. I’m sure I’ll think of plenty more.

Happy New Year!!

And it was certainly a livelier new years for me than last year, which I saw in nearly asleep in my parent’s spare bed listening to the music from the party down the road. This year I travelled down to London to stay with cousin Tash, and together with her sister Cint and partner Dan and assorted friends and in-laws when went to a brilliant club called Turnmills, where we danced to the Chemical Brothers’ all night. Home to Gatwick by 6:30, on the train home by 10am. And the funny thing is, landing in the Newcastle train station after a weekend in London really did feel like coming home.

The office shuts between xmas and new years, so I hired a little car and spent the time tripping around Northumberland. It’s beautiful countryside, and I’m glad I’ve spent some time exploring it.

Just before Christmas eve, I took this photo just as I was about to get to work at about 8am. It was the shortest day of the year, so daylight hours were very scarce.

That night, I walked home in the mist and took a photo of my neighbouring church spire. I might not have seen quite as much scenery on some days as I hoped to because of the fog, but at least I wasn’t trying to get out of Heathrow!

Fog at Heathrow News

A colleague, Paul, was also free the first day of the holidays, so we set off across the moors to England’s largest waterfall, the aptly named High Force. First there was another country ramble. It’s not quite like your average bush walk in Australia - here’s a pretty typical instruction for one of the walks I did.

“At the kissing gate turn left and go through a five bar gate, ensuring that the gate is closed behind you. Once through the gate, head up the field towards Dunstan Square Farm, keeping to the lefthand side of the field. At the farm go through the gate and turn right, then straight ahead through another gate onto a concrete road. After about 1.5 km the road reaches Dunstan Steads Farm.”

http://walking.visitnortheastengland.com

Fortunately we got to the High Force walk in the end, and don’t worry, it might have been a steep cliff, long way down and fast flowing water – but hmmm, I’m sure the life buoy was bound to save us.

The waterfall doesn’t look much in this photo, but there was certainly a lot of water. It wasn’t until I got close that I really understood what the name meant.

The walk continued along the river, past “Low Force” (I think you can use your imagination there, you don’t need a picture), and across a bridge, where we stopped for a quick bite to eat.

We drove home via Barnard’s Castle (yes, that is actually the name of the town) which was the scene of my first ramble.



It was great for a bit of last minute xmas shopping, and the main street had lots of interesting shops, including the smallest car yard I’ve ever seen. Ummm?

The next day I got up early because I was doing the scenic coastline between Berwick and Alnmouth (pronounced alnmouth, being the mouth of the river aln. Please note this for later). Driving round Berwick in the fog I seemed to pick up a little bit of condensation on the car…Who gets ice on your side mirrors? At about -4 deg C it was one of my colder drives, and I could hardly see anything for fog. Didn’t stop the xmas eve golfers though (new definition of keen). I would have taken a photo but I could barely see them through the fog so I’ve no idea how they saw the golf ball!

I went to Bamburgh castle, which is an incredibly majestic craggy castle, but virtually shrouded, as was Holy Isle. So I’ll let you read about them here instead as I couldn’t take photos.

Bamburgh Castle
Lindisfarne Holy Isle

The walk for the day started at Craster, a little fishing village, and took me through farmland, over the golf course and up to the Dunstanburgh Castle. It ended in a lovely little pub drinking a pint of Speckled Hen and sampling the famous local smoked fish (although salmon, not the kippers).

Can you see the green? There are windswept rocky sea cliffs to be seen too. Possibly not the easiest golf course around.

I finished up in Alnwick, just 4 miles up from Alnmouth, also on the river Aln but mysteriously pronounced annick. Go figure. That’s not the worst example round here either.

Alnwick not only has the Harry Potter castle (closed for winter, maybe I’ll come back in Spring) but also one of England’s largest second hand bookstores! Barter Books is located in an old railway station, and has model trains running around as well. I spent £20 and brought away 28 books – my new library is well on the way to being established I’m afraid. Maybe I’ll learn to let some go this time (aha, that’s likely).

I also went to Hadrian’s Wall, but I think I’ll leave that story for later, or I'll never get finished. I spend many hours a day already with this laptop warming my legs in bed - it's just too addictive. Particularly since I've been downloading movies. Watching Veronica Mars episodes briefly took over from reading George Martin books, but now I've caught up with the US screenings, so I have to wait like normal people for the show to air there and for some nice person to stick it up on the net for me to download.