Visiting our daughters in London doesn't leave much free time with my work schedule but the routine is very pleasant. We take turns to walk each pair of grandchildren to school in the morning and then afterwards usually walk the dogs along the tow-path between West Molesey and Hampton Court, often stopping at the little Cricket Club for coffee and croissants.
Our daughters both have dogs with a lot of character. Jessica's dog, Smokey likes to steal the ball from other dogs and run away. Sometimes right out of their mouths. The game doesn't last long but can be annoying to the owner and dog who were robbed! Emma's dog, Sonny is fixated on balls. He will chase them down and leap to get them if they bounce.
He also wrecks every ball end ends up spending time with.
Arriving in late spring means you get to see new life. Some trees still have blossoms and flowers plants everywhere and of course on the river the goslings
and cygnets are at different stages of growth with their extra fluffy feathering and mad scrambles to keep up with their parents.
Weekends are also fairly full of activities with the grandchildren and so my writing has had to take a back seat.
On our first full weekend in London Anne and I spend a night in a hotel Chiswick which turned out to be a quaint and rather beautiful town.
The occasion was a visit to a small family-run circus (Gifford's Circus) that has been operating since 2000 and has an annual stop in a park in Chiswick. Anne came across the circus after following a British author
whose sister founded the circus with her husband.
We were all pretty enchanted by the show which featured a house band that performed ELO's "Mr Blue Sky" so well that at first I thought it was a recorded backing track. Everyone in our family turned to look at me because of how much I had loved to play the soundtrack to the 2004 movie "The Eternal Sunhine of the Spotless Mind" every Sunday morning (which starts with this song) leading up to and for years after the movie's release in 2004. Anne occasionally calls me Mr Blue Sky for this reason (or perhaps because of my sunny disposition?)
As usual and on cue more or less - I found myself thinking through the practical realities of living in England (again) when we wandered around Chiswick and looked at the outlandish prices of properties there.
A huge draw is how closely our upbringing matches the sensibilities and character of the British. I suppose it is fair to say that there is a whole world to being British that we overlook because we haven't (and still don't) have a sense of how conscious of class people in England are. You hear the occasional mention of "posh" as a reference to someone who is or sees themselves as above the common person but I suspect there is a ton of nuance there that we have no idea about.
I wondered whether we sound "posh" to people with strong accents in England? I went looking and found articles claiming that English South Africans from the former British strongholds in South Africa (Cape Town, Eastern Cape and probably the Durban area) have what is known as a "received pronunciation" or BBC English. I remember, growing up, that we would jokingly refer to someone speaking English without a regional South African accent as using "The Queen's English" and laughing at the English TV programs with their fake affected English accents.
Of course the answer is that the South African accent is to most Brits both instantly recognizable and nothing like the British accent. People failing to make the distinction are most likely from North America where the British, New Zealand, Australian and South African accents all sound "British". In America we had times where people were less friendly (clerks at the local town hall or library) because, we later realized, we sounded like snobs with our close-to-but-not-quite-british accents.
Accents aside, it does seem that we would slot rather neatly into a community with social clubs and activities that interest us. Given that house prices decrease as you travel away from London we could probably afford to buy a house somewhere close enough to our children for regular visits and far enough to avoid becoming "baby-sit magnets".
The price of goods and restaurants did shock us this time around, though. We were paying close to 16GBP ($20 or R391) for 2 coffees and two toasted cheese and ham sandwiches at the cricket club and our few trips to restaurants were all a little alarming once we took a look at the menu.
Our second weekend involved a long drive to a sculpture garden which had some amazing sculptures made from interesting objects like a dragon made of horseshoes
and a rather evocative statue of a rust-colored woman caught in a pause peering at something in the woods, which reminded me of my wife.
Anne and I took a few trips into London on this visit. Anne had a some art galleries that she wanted to see (the National Portrait gallery reopened after two years of renovation)
and the July 4th weekend gave me 2 weekdays off that we used to do a standard tourist whirlwind tour of the center of London. We started at Piccadilly Circus
and made our way down the South Bank and onto a short river cruise from the Tower of London to Westminster Hall.
We discovered that unless you book tickets in advance, the standard attractions (Big Ben, Westminster Abbey) are impossible to visit but we enjoyed wandering around and looking at the sites.
One of our trips included a stop for dinner with friends at an Ethiopian Restaurant and another to Regents Park where we met up with friends from Toronto who also happened to be in London.
We have been told by a number of people that we should visit Cornwall and so that will be our next step. I've recently been reading the detective novels that JK Rowling wrote under a pseudonym and remember her descriptions of Cornwall where the main character has his roots. It will be interesting to see the countryside and get to know a little about life in Cornwall.
I've already started looking at real estate listings which has Anne rolling her eyes.
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