England

I've just come back from a week in Ringmer, near Lewes in East Sussex. I've been going to Lewes for many years now and I supposed I knew it pretty well. However, on this occasion I was really surprised by Lewes Priory Park.
Before the dismantlement of the monasteries by Henry VIII and his crew, Lewes was one of the wealthiest in the country. When the Victorians were putting the railways in they dynamited the ruins that were in their way. It's surprising that there's anything at all. For many years there was a "keep out, danger" sign on the walls. Now there is a park with ruins in it and informative signs to suggest what it might have been like.

I'm amazed at how photos taken with my phone come out!

Trip to England

Broken pier in Brighton

"Hang on lads, I've got an idea" at the De la Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea

The Pyrenees on the way home

It was raining when I arrived on Sunday 23rd September. It was raining when I left Ringmer on Monday 1st October. It rained most of the week I was in England. Saturday was sunny and Sunday it didn't rain. The rest of the time it was mild and wet.

World Cup

I'm away from home for the month. At the moment at the lovely campus of Royal Holloway University, Egham, doing preparation to direct a summer language course in Bognor. We've finished the sessions and have to wait a few hours for a coach to take us to Lewisham on the other side of London. England is playing Germany in the semi-quarter finals of the World Cup (football) and there are about 50 of us in a big bar with big TV screens. At the moment, 5 minutes after half-time, Germany is still winning 2-1. Every movement towards the goal the crowd goes wild. I don't care about football, but this is fun. I can hear the wild screams behind me from inside! In fromt of me at this pub table is the incredible sleeping beauty quadrangle Founder's Building. Great World Cup weather, hot sunshine. The latest report is 4-1. I'll cheer for Spain....

A taste of England

Rather unexpectedly, I'm not spending the summer in Jaca; I'll miss the folk festival which takes place every two years there, as well as the mild climate and the floods of tourists. I'm working in Cambridge, as a director of studies for a Young Learners course. Cambridge is even more full of tourists than Jaca! I'd forgotten how pretty and gracious it is. Not having brought my camera with me, I've bought a disposable one with which I should be able to make a disc and digitalise to put one or two photos on this blog. (On the left there's a photo of a Victorian postbox outside King's college)
Oh yes, a taste of England: Yorkshire Tea, Indian restaurants, cheese scones are some of the indulgences of being here!
Walking on the lawn. there's another luxury. Grass here is so well-tended. And the garden flowers as well. The English really are good at that. In and around Jaca the wild flowers are spectacular. I can think of orchids of various kinds, wild irises on the mountain slopes, gentians of different shapes and sizes to mention a few. In England it's really the parks where I've seen good displays of flowers, like the lovely areas full of daffodils you get in the early spring. I miss that at home in Jaca; my daffs don't come up very abundantly in the garden.