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Fun times. Celebrated the census by 1. Filling out the census (in party hats to make it more festive.) 2. Hanging decorations (of the Union Jack.) Actually I think that’s pretty much it. We did learn one thing though. Filling in a census in party hats is way more fun then filling it in not wearing party hats.
In the spirit of Earth hour (yesterday evening) we blogged while our computers were off. This is the result:
Useful to know I guess. We do love them though – those screens (we also like gigbytes not gigabites – Jeremy has informed me that I spelt it wrong today while he watches me upload this post, but he had fallen asleep by that point in the blog and thus failed at his duty as the spellcheck.) This is a photo he took of our candle lit home earlier on in the single hour he couldn’t stay awake for once someone has turned the lights off.
Today I had my first experience of going to a local football match. I went with my Uncle to see his local team (Didcot town) play the Leamington Brakes. So that I don’t keep you in too much suspense, the result was a 2-1 victory to Leamington, though I must say that the run of play in the second half was generally with Didcot, so the scoreline was a touch lucky (or unlucky depending on your perspective).
The event was quite different to anything I’ve seen before. There were 503 admissions, which doesn’t seem like that many people when you see them at a football ground, but is apparently quite a respectable turnout. Most of the guys there seemed to know all the players by name, and because the ground and seating were right alongside each other they were able to call out to them. It was also clear that large portions of the Leamington fanbase knew each other very well, which I suppose you’d expect.
Compared to an international cricket or football match (or even just the Phoenix playing at home) it was a much more local experience. All the advertising around the ground was for local Leamington companies, although the primary sponsor, Building & Plumbing Supplies, or BPS, apparently have branches all over the country. Weirdly, considering that you’d imagine the flags at the end of the ground would all be local, there seemed to be flags from other regions supporting other teams that also bore the name “Brakes”, which was quite confusing. Anyhow, that didn’t seem to be that important anyway.
There were, as far as I could tell, 4 types of fan at the match.
It was basically a pretty good afternoon – a couple of action shots follow:
I’ve also been diligently following the cricket on Cricinfo, and I was stoked to watch the score tick over on Friday as we managed to get through to the semis. It’s all been very exciting, and has made me wish we could actually watch some of the matches without going to a bar. I’ll admit, I didn’t think we would beat South Africa, and now I don’t have much faith in our ability to win our next match with Sri Lanka, but I’m supporting our boys, and hoping they manage to pull out another upset! Go the Black-caps!
Very nicely done Jeremy.
Also included below: a view of Warwickshire from the top of the castle tower.
Or, at least, a Saturday of local adventures. As Fran has already mentioned our friends Bevan and Sarah came over from Germany in the past weekend with the express purpose of visiting the approximate coolness of Warwickshire and the Royal Leamington Spa. OK, so that’s a bit of a lie, but they did come here and stay in our spare room, which was pretty great. We started out on Friday, driving down the M1 to London Luton to pick them up, which was a fairly relaxed drive, regularly punctuated by areas of roadworks. I also managed to get us lost and stuck out near Coventry airport on the way home, but worry not, at home we finally arrived.
We started the next day bright and early, set on finally seeing the inside of Warwick castle, which has to be one of the most impressive castles we’ve yet seen. It’s very well preserved, and really fits the kind of thing a 10 year old boy might imagine when told that they were about to visit a medieval castle. In fact, it fits this so much, that the proprietors (who also run Madame Tussauds) have decided to target it primarily at 10 year old children (dressed respectively as knights or princesses depending on acceptable western gender roles). Nevertheless, it was a fantastic place to visit as the following photos will attest.
There was lots to see there – it’s more of a touristy themed attraction than a historical preserve. There are waxworks, themed rooms, people dressed as ladies, nobles, knights, wenches, and scary monks, and of course the obligatory “pay per arrow” archery lessons, as well as a few pieces of disused siege weaponry. One of the definite highlights however, was the birds of prey show (twice daily), which involved probably the most highly skilled worker in the castle demonstrating his mad skills at controlling enormous birds. We saw three birds: a still youthful owl (“Ernie”), who chose not to pickup his prey directly, but instead landed next to it and examined it before taking it (but extremely cute, and still learning to hunt); a Vulture (“Cathy”), who was flying up to the battlements and back for her dinner; and a massive sea Eagle (“Stan”), who mainly looked like he was about to accidentally kill his handler.
More pics of Warwick castle’s exterior can be seen on our post about our walk there! After we had had a sit down and a cup of tea, we continued our adventure by heading for Stratford-Upon-Avon. One thing that rapidly becomes clear about smaller English towns, is that if they have any significant claim to fame, they rapidly become very heavily focussed on it. Stratford is one such town, being completely incapable of letting you forget that it is the home of Shakespeare’s birthplace. The river you see in the photos is the Avon, which shares much of its water with the Leam (which runs through Leamington). Initially I thought they were exactly the same, but it turns out there are a number of junctions in the river between here and there, so I assume that each length of river has its own name.
The sign you see pointing to Shakespeare’s grave is as close as we got to it, as we’re pretty cheap and it turns out you have to pay to actually go inside pretty much anything in Stratford. Nevertheless, it’s a very pretty town and well worth a visit. It’s only a bus-ride away from us, so we’ll definitely be back there another time to investigate further, and maybe burn some excess cash.
We finished the weekend on Sunday with a trip back down the M1 to drop off Bevan and Sarah in the wonderful town of Milton Keynes. Actually, it looked pretty dull, but it did have a reliable rail connection with London – something Leamington could not claim this weekend. On this road we took two diversions. The second (more intentional one) was to a small town called Potterspury to track down Sarah’s ancestral home. The first, was Breakdown City, and was mainly because, you guessed it, our rental car broke down. The AA guy was very helpful and got us going again, but our faith in the car was destroyed (it never really felt the same again). We close then, with the metal horse of our own Knight in shining armour: The AA van.
Not the TV show, but actual friends, from Hamburg.
YAY!
Maybe it’s because I’m used to the New Zealand met-service. But I am so fed up with the BBC weather presenters talking about ‘sunshine’ as if it was some kind of meteorological force.
I miss the isobars.
I spent the weekend drawing a comic-strip in between the usual weekend chores and a shopping expedition. This was based on a late night conversation I had with the very talented Kea about the potential for such a story. Interestingly when it was searched online we discovered it was not per-say a completely original idea, websites dedicated to such things as fan-fiction hosting a few tales of Scully and Mulder as students at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry already – though this is an original drawing.
Enjoy!
One of the main reasons for coming over to the UK was to be close enough to Europe to facilitate visiting places that are prohibitively expensive to get to from New Zealand, and we’ve finally booked our first wee jaunt. Thanks to Kate and William getting married, there’s now a Christmas scale bunch of public holidays towards the end of April, and with a dramatic amount of forethought I have booked the three days in the middle of them as leave, giving me an uninterrupted block of 10 days off.
So, where are we going for our first trip?
FRANCE!
We’re heading to Paris, which is going to be extremely exciting, neither of us having ever set foot on French soil (although we did go over it in the Eurostar on our way to England from Belgium). In an almost unprecedented degree of preparation, we have already booked both our flights (on Air France, from Birmingham International) and our accommodation (in a random little hotel that cost as little as we could find on Expedia).
We are not in general very well prepared tourists – our plan for Brussels being a perfect example. We had a great time, but in general didn’t know what we were going to do from day to day until it actually happened. With that said, I think we cannot possibly be less prepared than the British SAS were when they landed in Libya in the past week. We can categorically make this statement provided:
None of these things are on our to-do lists, which tend more towards the following:
Fran has recently been providing much in the way of high quality visual entertainment to go with our blog posts. As I am not much good with a tablet, here is a bit of code that I have recently written in my spare time, turned into an image:
This is the Enqueue method from my implementation of Herb Sutter’s low lock generalised multi-producer, multi-consumer, queue. You will notice that my implementation isn’t much different to his, but it helps to actually do these things and test them out for yourself, to cement the ideas presented!
In other news, I’ve been following the Cricket over here, and feeling pretty good about where we are so far. True, we’ve only played 2 really good teams and we lost to one of them, but we’ve not wobbled against our weaker opponents (something that not everyone in this tournament can claim!). The English are on the edge of calling for blood in the papers, saying that their team needs to be much more consistent (they probably do), and everyone’s in doubt about who will win. My office has representatives from India, Australia, England, South Africa, and of course myself from NZ, which spices things up a little. I can only hope that things remain as exciting as they have been so far!
Jeremy managed to catch whatever plague was going around his office and by Wednesday had come down with a cold. A man-cold.
Jeremy deals uniquely with the cold. Instead of getting into bed and staying there he wanders aimlessly around the house sniffing and sneezing wrapped in a blanket and attracting dust like the giant duster-wombat-snail he has metamorphosed into, complaining of a headache/running nose/tiredness.
In the end I became the Jeremy-cold-recovery-plan enforcer, bribing him with orange juice, magazines, croissants and a homemade Cesar salad to stay in bed for the large proportion of Wednesday and Thursday. I enjoyed drawing a quick picture that I think illustrates our week – the cold has now abated.
In other news: more dinning chairs have appeared in the hallway stairwell. Also, we have changed our blogs colour-scheme, it is still the same blog though! 🙂
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