H.M.P. Heathrow

First thing first: I’m back. Back in London. Back on the boat. Back after 391 days. 

The boat. Still floating but… well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Yes, I’m back. But of course it’s not that simple because it never is. I’d intended to return around March 22 to make it an even year away, which seemed like a nice punctuation mark. However, things did not go to plan. It turned out that the long-postponed job I’d had on the Opening and Closing Ceremonies for the Dubai World Expo finally lurched back to life in the new year and they decided to have an in-person workshop in Dubai in mid-April. I was asked to attend in order to make cheap-and-cheerful prototypes of various actual physical objects to be carried, waved, flapped about and otherwise manipulated in the actual performance space by real people actually in each other’s presence. What a weird idea.

That left me with a choice - fly back to London as intended and quarantine for 10 days on the boat, then have a week of “freedom” before flying to Dubai for the workshops. Or, hang around freeloading off my sister for an extra few weeks and fly directly from Canada. Naturally I took option number two, because the Dubai business meant I’d have to quarantine on returning to London anyway, and I didn’t fancy ten days quarantine on the boat in March, and another ten days after Dubai in April.

Thus, 391 days. And my first days back were, of course, in quarantine. But instead of arriving from a “Amber List” country (Canada) I was arriving from a “Red List” country (UAE). Thus, instead of ten days in the cramped but familiar and much-missed confines of the boat, I’d have to spend ten days at Her Majesty’s pleasure in a managed quarantine hotel. Luckily, the production company paid the £1750 cost of the quarantine package, which included the hotel, three meals a day, and the two COVID tests I’d need before they’d let me out. In my naivety, I sort of thought that quarantining in a hotel might be simpler than quarantining on the boat. For instance, there’d be unlimited wifi. And unlimited hot water. And food would just show up without me having to figure out how to get groceries delivered. And I could raise my arms above my head.

Ha. I truly was naive. Then again, I’m no stranger to quarantine. Before I landed at Heathrow I’d already done 35 days in total, so I thought I knew what I was in for. Sure, it wouldn’t be the same luxurious environs of my first quarantine in Canada. I could accept that a hotel room wouldn’t offer the same space and facilities as a carefully chosen AirBnB, but my thinking was coloured by the comfortable and pleasant week of quarantine in Abu Dhabi.  That room was spacious and well-equipped with a small fridge, generous storage space, a separate couch-ish area, and a large window that faced the sunrise. The Holiday Inn Express at Terminal 4 had exactly none of those things.

Welcome to what I came to think of as Her Majesty’s Prison Heathrow.

But let’s back up a bit again. Because it was by no means a quick and simple process getting from the landing gate to my cell at H.M.P. Heathrow. And while I appreciate that the whole hotel quarantine thing is relatively new, they’ve had a bit of time to work out the kinks now and I was expecting a slightly smoother process.

Stupid Red List.

First, there’s a lot of paperwork required when travelling internationally during a pandemic. Of course I needed proof of a negative COVID PCR test, performed within the proscribed period (differing depending on destination and - word to the wise - sometimes even required when you’re only transiting through an airport not staying in the country. More on that another time…). I also needed a completed “Passenger Locator Form” and proof that I’d booked the managed quarantine package. And for some reason that documentation had to be checked at several stages by several people reached by standing in several long queues of passengers who seemed to have forgotten about trying to stand two metres apart.

And then there was an extended period spent in a small alcove near the baggage carousels while an ever-growing group of exhausted travellers waited for buses to the various hotels. This was especially frustrating, because there was no queueing system, and no sorting of people according to which hotel they’d been booked into, of which there are many. When I finally got on a bus it was full of people going six different places, meaning that the bus had to stop at a hotel, unload the unsorted luggage from the compartment under the bus, check and cross-check the people and the luggage with the information at the hotel, close up the luggage compartment, and then proceed to the next hotel to repeat the same process. Naturally I was in hotel number six and was the only person left on the bus when we finally arrived at my stop. From the time the plane landed to the time I got to the reception desk it was four hours later. 

Eventually I found myself in Room 508, and it was not good. My hotel room in Abu Dhabi had a huge window that even opened a tiny bit. Room 508 had a window of course, but it was a solid pane - no fresh air for me! Worse, though, was that the window faced INTO THE BUILDING. And I don’t mean it looked onto another building. I mean the window looked into the hotel itself. Whatever genius designed that place created a large covered atrium area surrounded on all sides by hotel, meaning that each guest had a 50-50 chance of getting a room facing out at the actual world, or one facing… other hotel rooms. 

A slightly distorted panorama, but you get the picture. Not even a hint of sky. And this light level was enhanced by the camera on my phone. 

This was the amount of natural light that reached the room at solar noon. Again, the phone camera makes it look better than it was. And the navy blue walls didn't exactly help.

Of course there was no min-bar fridge. No drawers to unpack into. No proper desk. And certainly no couch. A Holiday Inn Express is not designed for long term guests. It’s designed for overnight stays by people who have an early flight the next morning. Emphasis is on providing a comfy bed, a giant tv and a good shower. Astute Go Stay Work Play Live Readers will not be surprised to hear that my first day at H.M.P. Heathrow was not a happy one. 

Oh, and that first day? That’s not Day One of quarantine. That’s Day Zero. So even though I’d landed at 7:00am, that day didn’t count. Welcome home. I can understand why page 11 of my 28-page Welcome Pack included a list of eight different mental health services I could contact if it all got to be a bit too much. (Including one called C.A.L.M. - Campaign Against Living Miserably. And I am NOT making that up.)

Once I’d resigned myself to Room 508 and memorised the C.A.L.M. number, my next job was the menu. Along with the Welcome Pack, I’d also received full page menus for every day of my sentence. 

A typical day’s offering. Each meal came with some default settings and also had one or two options, including hot dishes. 

Charmingly, I was required to choose my options for every meal of my entire stay on the morning of Day Zero. So, for instance, I needed to report whether I wanted a cheese omelette or a vegan sausage roll with my breakfast the following Saturday. Now I’m generally a person who loves having a plan, but even I found this a bit much. Then again, it actually turned out to be fairly simple, because who in their right minds would want “Vegetable Nasi Goreng” for breakfast when they could have a Bacon and Egg Omelette Bap? All my choices were duly entered into a web-page and, I thought, properly recorded for my future dining pleasure.

Ha. 

On Day Zero I waited two hours for both lunch and dinner, and had to call to follow up in order to be fed. I put this down to that fact that I’d arrived too late for the computer system to record my choices and had to indicate my preferences on paper at check-in. No matter, because surely all would be fine for Day One breakfast, which arrived at 7:30 the next morning in a brown paper bag outside my door.

Not. My Cornish Sausage Roll was conspicuously absent, with a cup of porridge in its place. I managed to flag down the delivery guy, who changed out the porridge, and sat down to breakfast trusting that the mix-up was an isolated incident.

This is really a lot of food. Every breakfast came with milk and cereal, water, juice, fruit, pastry, some kind of snack and the hot option. The other meals were equally generous. Quarantining was definitely not a waistline-friendly situation.

Then Day One lunch was wrong. But this time the woman doing the delivery wouldn’t exchange things, because I’d touched the erroneous sandwich, therefore potentially slathering it with the plague. So she brought me the salad I’d asked for and I kept the sandwich too. Again, not diet-friendly. But surely supper would be correct. 

Not. This pattern repeated for most meals until on Day Four I was finally able to express my frustration adequately to the guest services people, who told me to request a security escort to the reception desk and fill out a paper form for the remaining meal choices. Because obviously the computer system was - and I’m going to use a technical term here - utterly fucked. I did that, and went to bed with a glimmer of hope that the next morning would deliver my Bacon and Egg Bap without drama.

Which it did. Sort of. In fact, it delivered TWO Bacon and Egg Baps, along with the rest of two complete breakfasts, in two brown paper bags. Well-played, Holiday Inn Express, for finding a new and interesting way to screw up. By this point I was beyond caring, and simply had a double Bacon and Egg Bap and put the extra cereal, juice and snacks to my growing hoard of uneaten non-perishables. Eventually you have to accept that you have no control at all and just take the double bacon when you get it.

Here’s what the hoard of uneaten food looked like on the morning I checked out, along with all the paper bags and plastic containers that I brought with me back to the boat.

The food situation certainly kept me on my toes. But the lack of natural light was a downer, and it was weird to have no sense of the outside world at all. Eventually I realised I could get YouTube onto the giant tv and found a nice live-streaming camera of a street in Oxford that I just kept on all day. Oddly, I couldn’t find a nice view from a London camera, but the Oxford one was a street I remembered from my visit during the Grand Tour, and was a close enough shot that I could see people moving around, which was nice.

Kind of like having a window. It also helped to play random cafe noises in the background during the day.

The most exciting development - other than the double bacon - was the arrival of my Day Two COVID test kit. This was a self-administered test of the stick-up-the-nose variety that came with a thick instruction book and a lot of little sticky barcode labels.

By the time this test kit was delivered, I estimate I’d had fifteen different PCR tests done. Still it was a novelty to be wielding the stick myself.

The reason this self-test was exciting is that once I could report a negative test result I could be allowed OUT OF THE ROOM. So when I finally got the all-clear late on Day 4 I quickly pulled on my running clothes and waited for my security escort. (Anyone leaving their room for any reason had to be accompanied by a security guard. I suppose to prevent them from making a break for freedom. Fair call, I guess.) And where did my guard lead me?

To the prison yard, of course. Where I and my fellow inmates did desultory laps, watched over by men in hi-vis vests. It really did feel like yard time. Still, it was glorious to see the sky and breath fresh air, even though I was doing 180 metre-long circuits of a dis-used carpark in the back end of Terminal 4.

And thus the days passed. I was doing remote work on the Dubai project, with the standard-issue ration of Zoom meetings and paperwork. And the wifi was good, and there was Netflix, and I found a routine that passed the time. Luckily, I was free to order in alternative food or other essentials if I’d wanted, though I’d stocked up on the flight back. There was a short layover in Bahrain where I made sure to pick up a few non-perishable snacks, a fresh book for Non-Fiction Hour, and - crucially - two bottles of duty-free red wine. I even made my peace with the ridiculously tiny and non-functional table in the room, which was clearly designed by the same misanthrope who did the window.

First, does it really have to have that many weird corners and angles? And second, when you’ve already made a table that small, why, in the name of all that is holy, would you put a big stupid hole in it? It’s pure form over function. Smarten up!

I've complained a lot here, but it's clear the people at the hotel were genuinely trying to make quarantine an ok experience. I think they were just overburdened and under-staffed and trying to implement a system on the fly. I'm sure most quarantine rooms actually have proper windows, for instance. (Occasionally I got a glimpse of the sky from the window of the guy across the hall, if he happened to open his door at the same time I did. Lucky Room 507!) And really, it was only ten days. 

On the morning of Day 11 I was free to go. In fact, I could have left at one minute past midnight, but I had a good night's sleep and enjoyed one last bacon bap and then treated myself to an Uber XL for the trip home, because I had a lot of luggage and I was in a celebratory mood. And this Uber did not disappoint.

It came with bottles of water, gum, hand sanitiser, blue twinkly stars in the ceiling, two separate video monitors, and diamanté-encrusted tissue boxes. Because I’m fancy like that.

My return to the boat was not without issues, but that’s a story for another day. For now, I’ll just say I’m ok, and despite the issues, it’s good to be back. And I’ll close with these words to live by: 

Just take the double bacon.

Being back

I'm back in London, back on the boat, back home. It's great.

I spent a few days just settling in. My flight arrived in London late-ish at night, which made it tricky getting back onto the boat. While #boatlife is largely pleasant and normal, coming back after a long time away is not as simple as arriving back at a terrestrial home. I can't just switch on the light, toss my keys on the table and settle in. For one thing, getting two large suitcases and a heavy carry-on down the long metre-wide gangway that leads to my boat is not something you necessarily want to attempt in the dark after a long international flight. Also, I left the water tank empty in January (to lessen the chances of green stuff growing in it while I as away) and filling the water tank takes about two hours at this mooring. And I'd left the batteries disconnected as well (which I forgot about, and which would have meant a LOT of consternation, since the lights are all powered by the batteries). Knowing all this I decided to book a cheap B&B nearby, which made the landing a bit softer and meant I started the next day like this:

Bacon! Sausage! Beans!

I got a taxi back to the marina after breakfast and spent the day happily unpacking and clearing out the cobwebs. (Literally. I don't know why it is, but spiders and boats go together.) It was really really good. There was nothing on the agenda other than just being home. I found a proper place for (almost) everything I brought back, and I went through the cupboards and evicted anything that had been hanging around too long in damp conditions, and I stocked the fridge. Then I went for a run on the towpath. It was great.

The boat seems to be basically fine. I had a bunch of mechanical work done on it while I was away, performed by the long-suffering Kevin. Every once in a while when I was up to my elbows in 700 hexagons or trying to figure out how to repair a giant broken pinwheel in Baku, I'd get an email from Kevin saying something like, "I've realigned the grappler flanges and reset your torque modulator, but then I found a leak in the starboard dash-pan. Shall I fix that?" And I'd write back and say, "Yes, please." And then some time later there would be another email from Kevin saying, "I've fixed the leak but in doing so discovered that the cover for the forward Frinkle-lever is cracked, shall I fix that?" And I'll write back and say, "Yes, please." And on it went for months. I guess this is the way it goes with these old diesel engines. I've more or less accepted that I will be replacing this engine one part at a time for as long as I own the boat, but at least I'm starting back from a better place than I was in.

And while I was away I picked up this stowaway - a small tree that took root in one of my fenders... Impressive rate of growth!

I left the boat at a pleasant if far-flung marina near Heathrow, which is great for getting home from the airport, but absolutely rubbish for getting in to central London. The other day the trip to Brixton took almost two hours. So while the marina itself is nice, and allows me to plug into mains power and refill the water tank as often as I want, it's just not sustainable long-term. Maybe I'm being snobbish, but how do people manage when the commute is that long? One of my fellow boaters, Bob, commutes and hour and a half each way every day, all the way the Southwark. I'm not even working and I can't hack it.

On the other hand, being in a marina means you can get to know your neighbours a lot better, as evidenced by Bob's invitation to a BBQ on the weekend when I got back.

It was great to meet a few other people on this pontoon

My plan is to cruise slowly back towards central London, hitting all my favourite mooring spots along the way. Summer is a great time to be on the boat, and I'm especially looking forward to having Karen here for a nice long visit in the coming weeks. We've got a lot of highly blog-worthy stuff planned, so standby for that. In the mean time my main activity is reminding myself that the nagging feeling that I should be doing something is one that must be resisted.

Saturday I went into central London. I had a bunch of life admin stuff to do which involved starting at Tottenham Court Road, walking through Soho to Oxford Circus, and then going from there down Regent Street to Covent Garden. It was about as central as central London gets, on a Saturday afternoon. Tourist hotspot. Zillions of people. Normally I'd think nothing of that. Now, coming back to London after two different terrorist incidents, it was all a bit different. You can't help but think about it. There are noticeablely more police on the streets now - especially in busy areas like Covent Garden. And they're not your regular bobby-on-the-beat either. These ones have big automatic weapons prominently displayed. It's jarring, but also reassuring. (Thank you Sadiq Khan, screw you Trump)

On Monday I found myself on the south side of the Thames at Westminster, needing to get to the north side, across Westminster Bridge. It's a bit different now. Before I left town nothing separated the wide pedestrian walkways from the traffic. Now it's like this:

Welcome home.

You can't argue with this kind of thing. Even in a world without whacko nut jobs I suppose it kind of makes sense for there to be a nice heavy chunk of steel or concrete between people and vehicle traffic. And I can't deny I felt more comfortable walking across the bridge because those barriers are there. On the one hand it was reassuring. On the other it was sad. (And also makes life tricker for London's already beleaguered cyclists, because it reduces the width of the bike lane.)

I kept walking, and was immediately cheered by the sound of bagpipes. There's ALWAYS a bagpiper on Westminster Bridge. And there he was. Score one for Normal London. Also reassuring was the fact that there were tourists everywhere, taking pictures of Big Ben. Another point for Normal London. But the tourists were also taking picture of the dried brown flowers and little tributes dotted along the bridge. Hmmm...

Lacking anything else to do I kept walking, past Westminster Abbey and through St. James' Park and past Horse Guards Parade, until came across this at Admiralty Arch at Trafalgar Square.

I'm pretty sure those barriers weren't there the least time I looked.

However, balancing that are the LGBT traffic signals at Trafalgar Square installed last summer ahead of Pride Week. They were only supposed to be there for the festival, but a year later they're still installed, with no plans to remove them.

If you look closely you can see two of the seven different designs of traffic lights

Sort of unbelievably, I'm coming up to my seven year anniversary in London. I arrived in August of 2010. That seems utterly bizarre. It's true that I've also spent close to three years away from London on international jobs, but that's still a significant amount of time. Enough that I think I can somewhat credibly call myself a Londoner. Enough to know that I'll never really know the city. And enough to know that probably no one ever does. But it's also enough time to know that London is not defined by barriers on bridges or policemen with machine guns. London is about the bagpiper at Westminster, and the tourists at Big Ben. But it's also me straining my ear on the tube to eavesdrop on a conversation in Russian a few seats away to see if I can pick up any meaning, and it's a BBQ on a narrowboat dock with a few English people and a lovely couple from Holland, and one rogue Canadian. And it's those crossing signals at Trafalgar Square.

I struggled a lot with how to close off this blog, because it's hard to avoid clichés. ("If I don't stop for a Shake Shack Sticky Toffee Flavoured Concrete at Covent Garden then the terrorists will have won!") So I guess I'll just keep on doing what I'm doing. Living in London, loving London, and appreciating that I can continue to do both those things. And also definitely trying one of those Shake Shacks things because dammit people, I'm only human!

Off the tourist track: Highgate Cemetery

A visit to north London’s Highgate Cemetery has been on my list for a long time. We’ve touched on the topic of cemeteries in London before. I was sure I’d also blogged about a good book on the subject (“Necropolis: London and its Dead”) but apparently I dreamed that, somewhere in between the dream where Bill Byrson emails to say he’s been lurking on the blog for years and invites me up to his place in Yorkshire for a pint and a friendly ramble across the countryside and the dream where Harrison Ford comes and builds new kitchen cabinets for the boat. But I digress.  Back to Highgate Cemetery, which I visited a while back after managing to secure one of the limited number of tickets they issue for guided tours each week.

I seem to be blogging about the Victorians a lot these days - Crossness and Bazelgette, the ropemaking, Brunel’s boat and bridge - but honestly, they were a pretty interesting and clever bunch and I like reading and writing about the interesting and clever things they did, so settle in. Astute Go Stay Work Play Readers will recall that for most of London’s existence the dead were buried in small local churchyards, often one on top of another to pack more and more corpses into the finite space available. By the mid-1800s though, this practise was becoming unsustainable and, frankly, pretty gross, what with the stench of rotting corpses oozing up out of the ground, along with the occasional stray arm or foot. In 1832 parliament passed an act encouraging the establishment of large privately run suburban cemeteries outside the metropolis of London and eventually seven were created under the auspices of the London Cemetery Company, with Highgate Cemetery opening in 1839. Shortly after, in 1851, the new Burials Act prohibited fresh burials inside London, thus firmly establishing the “Magnificent Seven” as going concerns.

Here’s the main entry to Highgate Cemetery, with the chapel on the left side.

Highgate Cemetery is divided into west and east sides. The west was established first, on 17 acres of land below Highgate village, most of which is on a steep hillside with sweeping views south towards central London. Its grounds were laid out with exotic formal plantings and stunning gothic architecture in order to attract wealthy investors. The Victorian attitude towards death was different than our own. As with their buildings and bridges, graveyards and grave markers became a way to show wealth and status, especially with elaborate headstones, crypts and tombs. The prices for plots in prestigious areas of Highgate were not cheap, and with lots of space to fill and an ever-renewing clientele, Highgate grew quickly. More than 10,000 graves had already been created in the original west side when the cemetery it extended across the road to another large swathe of land in 1854. The east side is home to Highgate's more modern graves.

This is Nero the lion, at the grave of George Wombwell, shoemaker-turned-menagerist.  

Despite what you're probably thinking, this one isn’t actually broken.  It was a fashion at the time to depict columns broken off, symbolic of a life cut short.

All this Victorian grandeur is part of what makes Highgate a beautiful place to visit today. It’s known most particularly for the architectural features laid out by the site’s designers. The Victorians had a particular fascination with ancient Egypt, and Highgate’s designers played to those fashions and worked cleverly with the existing steep slope to create the cemetery’s most notable architectural features.

As the Highgate website says: "In the heart of the grounds was created the Egyptian Avenue, an imposing structure consisting of sixteen vaults on either side of a broad passageway, entered via a great arch. These vaults were fitted with shelves for twelve coffins and were purchased by individual families for their sole use.”

"This avenue then lead to the Circle of Lebanon which was built in the same style and consisted of twenty vaults on the inner circle with a further sixteen added in the 1870s, built in the Classical style."

The Circle was created by excavating around a 300 year old Cedar of Lebanon tree that already existed on the site.

You might think that things look a bit rough and overgrown in these photos, and you would be correct.  It’s true that running a large cemetery in Victorian England was - initially - a great money spinner. Highgate's grounds were originally open and manicured, with the aforementioned sweeping views. However, Astute Go Stay Work Play Readers will realise that the business plan behind large cemeteries is fatally flawed. (Ironic.) The difficulty is this: plots are generally sold in perpetuity (their occupants almost never decide to relocate) meaning that once a plot is sold it can never be resold. However, this means that the number of plots available to sell grows smaller and smaller, thus income shrinks. Meanwhile the cost to maintain existing plots, grounds and structures increases, especially as the structures age and decay. Therefore, sources of new revenue eventually dry up as the cemetery is filled, but the expenses grow, leading to financial decline.

Add to this the fact that attitudes towards death and practises surrounding it changed greatly after the First World War, with elaborate crypts and tombs falling out of favour, and smaller graves and markers becoming more common. Plots became more and more neglected as families broke up or moved away, and maintenance on those plots declined. In 1960, the great London Cemetery Company - first formed in 1836 - declared bankruptcy and Highgate Cemetery’s gates were closed and the site abandoned. For fifteen years the cemetery was neglected, becoming a vast, overgrown and tumbledown labyrinth. This was unfortunate, but it’s part of what makes the site so beautiful now - the air of stillness and wildness.

See what I mean? Apparently, they recently discovered the grave of Michael Faraday back there.  Or maybe it was some other surprisingly notable scientist you might expect people to have kept better track of.  (My notes are sketchy on this, consisting entirely of the great man's last name, spelled wrong.)

Finally, in 1975, a group of local residents formed the Friends of Highgate Cemetery and slowly began a decades long, and still ongoing, process of clearing the overgrown landscape and pathways and repairing some of the more significant and beautiful memorials. The work is slow, and funded mostly by donations, tour fees and the small revenue stream created by new burials. (It’s still possible to be buried at Highgate, even on the west side, though a spot in a prime location now sells for about £10,000.) Part of the ongoing difficulty of managing the cemetery is that the original plots were not intended for single burials but rather as family plots, with enough space for 12 bodies (two wide, six deep). The same is true for the crypts in Egyptian Avenue and the Circle of Lebanon; the vast majority of the graves are underused, with many crypts almost empty and the registered owners long gone, leaving no legal means of opening and making use of much of the available space in the cemetery.

Alexander Litvinenko.  One of the most recent and notable graves in the west side.

The west side of Highgate, with its Victorian grandeur and overgrown Gothic monuments, is closed to the general public expect on the aforementioned guided tours. (Family members wishing to visit gravesites are accommodated privately in the morning.) The general closure is in order to preserve the monuments themselves, many of which are fragile and unstable, and also to preserve gormless members of the public who would be certain to injure themselves in stupid (though possibly amusing) ways while clambering, unchaperoned, over crumbling stonework. Happily, the east side of the cemetery is open to the public every day, and though it's more modern and less evocative that the west side, it does have a few notable residents.

Me and Karl Marx.  I'm saluting the workers of the world, obviously. 

I love this one.  Modern artist Patrick Caulfield.

And this was my favourite - author Douglas Adams*. Apparently people leave pens in the little pot here all the time. I guess they're tidier and take up less space than towels. (I have a great personal one-degree-of-separation anecdote about Douglas Adams, but it's best related face to face. Buy me a drink the next time you see me and I'll tell you all about it.)

Charmingly, when you stop a cemetery worker to ask directions to a particular gravesite they invariably say something like “Oh, he’s just past the fork in the path on the left.” As if the object of your search is going to be found sitting on a bench having a cup of tea rather than six feet under.

And that's Highgate Cemetery. Tick another one off the list for a summer that seems to have included a good crop of bloggable stuff, coupled with a bunch of time off work, an improbable abundance of sunshine, and a respectable amount of cake, which has all been very nice indeed.

However, by the time you read this GSWPL World Headquarters will have relocated from our location aboard the Lucky Nickel back to foreign climes! As much as I'd like to spend the late summer and fall putt-putting down the canal or refitting the kitchen or walking the Cinque Terra or something, duty calls. I've been asked to go back to Baku, Azerbaijan to work on the Opening and Closing ceremonies for the Islamic Solidarity Games, which will be held there in May of 2017. So the boat is tucked up at a marina in north London, and I've packed my bags and made the trek back to Baku. I'll write more as things progress, of course. And as usual, you can expect the blogging to become more infrequent as the old work-blog balance shifts. For now, I'll just head this off at the pass:

1. "Islamic Solidarity Games? Huh?" I know. I know. If you thought my last Baku gig was a bit obscure, you've got another think coming. But they are a real, if intermittent, thing. I've taken to calling them the Islampics, but suspect I should probably stop that.
2. I have no idea if the women will wear full body covering when they're running the 200m hurdles or synchronised swimming or whatever. I'll let you know. But really, is that ALWAYS going to be the first question people ask?

And that's it. I'll update on Baku as I get settled, and I'll continue to post London-y, boat-y stuff too, because there are still fun things to report from the summer. Watch this space!

It turns out you CAN go home again

I’m back in Winnipeg, where I lived for twelve years, and where I bought my first house, and where the preponderance of My Stuff still remains.  In a former life I had a house full of belongings that I loved.  Books, housewares, yard equipment, tools, furniture… all the trappings of modern existence.  Then I sold that house and downsized from 850 square feet of living space to a 75 square foot storage space and a single carry-on sized bag.  I sold some things and I gave some things away, and the remaining stuff - stuff that felt significant or useful (for what I was assuming would be a continuation of my previous lifestyle in some other Canadian city) - got carefully packed and put in a storage space that I’ve now been renting for six years.  I did have a few boxes sent to London (for an outrageous sum) and also managed to cram everything else into a slightly smaller storage locker down the hall in 2010.  But otherwise that life has remained suspended in time with only occasional visits to fetch hockey skates and winter boots.

So when I knew I’d be back this summer I finally decided enough is enough.  Hanging on to stuff I may not use for a decade (or ever) is silly.  And paying $78.75 per month, every month, simply for the privilege of owning a complete set of David Eddings mass market paperbacks and an olive pitter is even sillier.  And now I've also got a tiny storage space in London and hence was paying for storage space on both sides of the Atlantic which is, frankly, too silly to bear.  So I rented a van and opened up the under-used and unsurprisingly recalcitrant padlock on the rolling shutter and girded myself for a dive into the past.

Thankfully, friends who were on vacation offered their house as a sorting zone, so I spent a couple of days unpacking and repacking boxes and sending occasional photo text messages to my sister with pictures of treasured old kids books and other mementos, including a vintage pair of Star Wars pillow cases and a particularly evocative old tin of broken crayons. (It's the smell. The smell of crayons.  It is the smell of childhood.)  I think I was pretty sensible, and purged about six boxes.  Though Karen, who’s had to clear out two family homes in the last year, is utterly heartless about these things.  I suspect she would have advocated for simply handing the padlock key to a truck driver from Value Village and saying “Have at ‘er!” I've ended up with about 14 boxes of stuff to save which will, I think, be a profound disappointment to her.

This is the first load, off to be sorted.

Happily, some friends of friends came over by chance and hauled away a good number of books, CDs, bits of furniture and kitchen gear (“Welcome to Discount Pam’s Crazy House of Random Stuff!  Every book comes with a shelf to put it on!”).  I guess they’ve got grown kids who are just starting out in their own places, so my old two cup food processor and mis-matched coffee mugs and bike lock will have a good and happy home.

Anything unclaimed is going to a charity shop.  I do have small twinges, especially about giving away the bits of furniture I actually built with my own hands.  But then I remember that I now live on a very small boat very far away.  And I genuinely don’t know when I’ll live somewhere “normal” again.  And even when/if I do live somewhere normal I don’t know what continent that normal place will be on.  So as much as it tugged at my heartstrings, it just feels like someone else can use these things more than I can.  Why keep stuff locked away, weighing me down, using up space and money and mental energy, when they can be useful to someone else right now?  And really, 15 or 20 years on from when I built it, I’d like to think I’ll be in a position to build or splash out on a brand new coffee table.  Or perhaps I'll be in the right place at the right time to receive the cast-offs of someone like me, who's decided they can live without an old coffee table but not without a sense of moving forward.

*****

And on the subject of going forward, let's talk about going backward a bit!  I’ve also been back in my home town Saskatoon on this trip and had a chance to reconnect with a few locations from the dim reaches of my childhood.  Back in the mists of time, when dinosaurs roamed the earth (around 1975) I was a kid growing up in Saskatoon.  And in that magical time the Kinsmen operated a very very small amusement park near the riverbank and across from the city's art gallery, the Mendel.  Both the park and the gallery were relatively important landmarks in the city at the time, and both are undergoing some significant change right now. So what better excuse for a quick jog through the past?

Kinsmen Park is a small bit of green space whose chief attractions to a 6-year old in 1975 were the merry-go-round and miniature railway.  (And here I am obliged to mention that my niece, who is now 9-going-on-16, used to have a great love for merry-go-rounds, which she referred to as the "Horsey-up-and-down”.  Which of course makes perfect sense.) So Kinsmen Park had a Horsey-up-and-down that you could ride on and a miniature railway that would take you on a very short tour of the park and, later on, even added an exceedingly small ferris wheel.

The old train

My great-grandmother used to take me and my sister to the park and sometimes buy us ice cream and also give us dimes to pay for the rides, because that's what they cost back then. (Now they're two bucks each.  Sigh.)  I'm sure my parents took us too, but what I really remember is Nanny... Dimes... Rides.  The rides closed down some time ago, so imagine my joy when I learned the park had been refurbished.  (Well, perhaps joy is a strong word.  Mild interest might be more accurate).  Conveniently, it was slated to open while I'd be in town, and it's a short walk from my Mom's house.  So with nothing else on the agenda, I walked over to check it out on Opening Day.

The Ferris Wheel is new, and much bigger than the old one, which I'm pretty sure had just six seats.  I suspect a high angle rescue from the top seats on that ferris wheel would have required standing on a chair or, at worst, a short step ladder.

Better, though, was the newly refurbished merry-go-round.  All of the cast aluminum animals had been removed, stripped and completely repainted in correct heritage colours, then reinstalled on the original structure.  This means all the quirky animals I remember are back, including the red-nosed reindeer, dog, elephant and, of course, the chickens.  Because of course no Merry-go-round is complete without chickens, right?  Or is that just a prairie thing?

Chickeny-up-and-down.  (Or I guess one of those is a Roostery-up-and-down.)  There is also a Rabbity-up-and-down and a Goaty-up-and-downs and even a Black Labrador Retriever-y-up-and-down...

The new miniature train is (oddly) quite big and impressive and lives overnight in a purpose built Train House (that’s what they’re called, right?) with sides that open right up to reveal the platform.  I didn’t ride the train (or anything, for that matter) mostly because the line ups were long.  Perhaps if the stars align and my niece decides she actually is 9-going-on-6 maybe I’ll hit it next time we're both there.

I can’t help but feel it lacks some of the charm of the original, but perhaps I'm just being curmudgeonly.

There’s also a new adventure playground and water park and even a zip line, which is all very modern and fun looking, if a bit wet.  I wandered around long enough to take a lot of photos and even had my own photo taken so as not to disappoint the lovely RobH.

Me at the train crossing

And then I headed across the street to the site of the aforementioned Mendel Art Gallery.  The Mendel is Saskatoon’s major public art gallery, and opened in 1964.  However, the building closed last year and they're now in the process of building a much bigger new gallery in an up-and-coming part of the south downtown area.  The existing building is slated to turn into a children's museum, though designs are still up in the air.  More significantly, though, is the fact that the Civic Conservatory that's always been part of the same complex, is still there and will remain after the revamp.  Yay!

The outside of the Conservatory.

Kinsmen Park and the Conservatory occupy the same "Childhood Outing with Nanny" part of my brain, so it seemed natural to walk through there after I'd had my fill across the street. The Conservatory is a large greenhouse stocked with both exotic and seasonal plants and is open year round to delight Saskatonians (yes, that's what we're called) with cacti and palm trees and other things that seem frankly impossible and slightly magical in January in Saskatchewan.

The cacti

As with so many things from childhood, the Conservatory seemed smaller than I remembered. Maybe it's because I've now seen the Victorian glasshouses at Kew Gardens and Amsterdam's Hortus Botanicus and probably a half dozen other grand greenhouses around the world.  Or maybe it's because I'm now 5' 10" instead of 3' 2".  Or maybe, just maybe, it's because the Saskatoon Civic Conservatory is actually genuinely quite small.  A mere 68 steps took me on a complete circuit of the collection.

Nevertheless, it was great.  The smell on entering was just as evocative as opening that 40 year old tin of crayons.  Humid and warm and lush and green and very very UN-prairie. Walking into the Conservatory in the middle of a Saskatchewan winter, when the glass walls would be coated on the inside with thick ice from the frozen exhalations of plants and people was a genuine treat.  Now the adult in me wonders how much they spend in heating the place through the winter.  So instead of begging pennies from Nanny to throw into the fountain for luck, I got the café to break a fiver and tossed in a bit more cash to help cover the heating bill. And I made a wish (not telling).

The fountain.  It was always the aim to land your coin on that little tongue that the water flows over.  It turns out this is much easier when your arms and legs are long enough that you can lean over the railing and basically place it where you want.

And that's my summer so far.  Actually quite nostalgic: horsey-up-and-downs and coins-in-a-fountain and dusty boxes full of one or two forgotten treasures and a high percentage of what-did-I-keep-this-for?s and a reasonably gratifying amount of oh-yeah-I-miss-thats.

Now does anyone need an olive pitter?

Catching up

Yeah, it's been a while.  Sorry about that.  I have no excuse other than the usual run-up-to holiday busy-ness, the distractedness of being in London and messing about with the boat, the normal Christmas busy-ness of backing-and forthing among family members, and the busy-ness of settling back into life and work in Baku, all coupled with a general disinclination to blogging as instead of, say, laying on the couch with Netflix or sitting with the crossword in a café, or whatever.  So let’s catch up a bit and I’ll try to resume normal service in the coming weeks.

The Boat:
Things are not ideal with my poor little boat right now.  I deliberately routed myself through London for a few days on the way from Baku to Canada, so that I could check in on the boat. In the weeks before my return the globe-trotting Nes (the aforementioned certified guy who knows about engines and elecrticalish stuff) came back to London and spent some time on my boat doing a bit of recreational electrical installation while killing time waiting for various work visa-related things to be sorted out.  In addition to fixing the existing hot water heater, he also installed all my fancy new solar panels, mostly motivated by the fact that I said he could have my old solar system if he installed the new one.

Yes, I know that roof is filthy, but check it out!  600 watts of solar power!

While he was on board, though, the boat had another of its now-familiar "so you think you're in charge, well think about THIS" moments in which the timing chain broke leaving the boat very much dead in the water.  Luckily, this happened with Nes on board and not me.  Also luckily, the news came to me at the staff Christmas Party in Baku, after I'd already had several glasses of wine, so I was not as freaked out as perhaps I should have been.  Since I'm not at all an engine kinda person, it had to be explained to me that when a timing chain breaks it is potentially a Very Very Bad Thing, because the timing chain controls when the valves and pistons go up and down and when it breaks they can get all out of sync and potentially crash into each other creating enough damage that the engine is instantly transformed from a Useful Thing That Propels a Boat into a New Anchor.

So it really was lucky that Nes was there because he happily dived in and tore the engine apart and determined, much to his amazement, that there seemd to be no major damage at all.  (A Christmas Miracle!)  And he tracked down the replacement parts and started to get everything put back together.  By the time I arrived I was able to help in the reassembly (and by help I mean "fetch spanners and help hold recalcitrant gear-pullers and ask stupid questions"). Sadly, once everything was back together and the key was turned there was a disappointing lack of actual engine-running.  There was a lot of engine-turning-over, no trouble with that. But once you let go of the key the engine is generally disinclined to continue running.

Nes in the bilges with bits of timing chain, old and new

So as of now, my boat is not running, which means I may need to take a long weekend and dash back to London to have it towed and fixed and blah blah blah.  On the plus side though, I have HOT RUNNING WATER and actually had a hot shower on my boat for the first time ever, which was momentous indeed.  Also, among the tools and parts that Nes had to get for the boat repairs was a feeler gauge and an awesome torque wrench.  The torque wrench is matte black and came in it’s own special case and is very cool.  So I might not be able to move the boat under its own power, but I can do the dishes without having to boil the kettle and I can torque down engine head nuts to exactly 72 psi.  So, you know, it’s all swings and roundabouts.

The Holiday:
In many ways it was a typical trip home for Christmas: lots of time going to and from airports and sitting in airports and sitting in airplanes and sitting in cars.  I flew from Baku to London, then London to Calgary (through Toronto).  Then I sat in a car to drive from Calgary to Saskatoon.  Then I drove from Saskatoon to Moose Jaw and back, then back to Calgary.  Then flew from Calgary back to London (through Houston), then from London to Baku (through Istanbul).  So it was, you know, a fair bit of travelling encompassing eleven time zones in twelve days.  Unsurprisingly, there was some jet lag.  I’ve been playing with an app on my phone that purports to analyse your sleep patterns and every morning it produces a little graph that shows how I slept.  Normally it looks something like this:

Here’s how I slept last night.

And THIS is the sleep graph of East-to-West jet lag.

However, jet lag aside, I did have a very nice break.  Even though there was a lot of travelling, there was also a good amount of relaxed sitting around, and I did manage to see all the correct people and eat all the correct food.  And not just the expected turkey supper (which was lovely) but also TWO ROUNDS of leftover steak-and-kidney pudding breakfast, along with these delights.

Correct Christmas Morning Breakfast

Correct Post-Overnight Long Haul Flight London Breakfast

Correct Any-Time-Any-Where Christmas Treat

I also managed to have a few runs along the riverbank in Saskatoon, though the weather turned quite cold on Christmas Day, and since I just don’t have the gear for extreme cold weather running these days so I was forced to give up my Christmas Day run and instead lay on the couch with a book and a gin & tonic.  Tragic, I know.  And we celebrated my niece’s ninth birthday, though I think she's actually skipped a few because I’m pretty sure the last time I checked she was six.

Gratuitous picture of winter at home

The Return:
And now I’m back-u in Baku.  Weirdly, it felt a lot like coming home.  I know I’ve only been here for a few months, but the fact is that in some ways this is the most home-like place there is for me right now.  Of course there will always be Home Home in Canada.  And the happy house in Brixton still welcomes me for a few nights here and there and accepts packages and stores everything that won't fit on the boat and generally acts as a terrestrial base of operations in London.  And of course there’s the boat, which is kind of Proto-Home.  But right now my slightly chilly flat in Baku feels very much like home.

That’s not to say it’s all sunshine and roses.  Baku had its first real blast of winter this week when temperatures fell below freezing and we had a fairly respectable amount of snow - enough that it’s hung around for a day or two.

Here’s Triangle Square in the snow.

On the day of the worst weather - Thursday - I met up with my regular Thursday night run crew and was surprised that five of us showed up to brave the worst of the snow and wind for a 7.6km jaunt through Baku.  The temperature was not so bad, perhaps -5 degrees, but the wind was epic.  The first half of the run was ok, especially after we abandoned the idea of climbing the slick marble steps covered in ice, and especially since we were running with the wind at our backs, through a sheltered area.  On the way back?  Oy.  I come from the prairies and I lived for 12 years in Winnipeg, which is sometimes known as the Windy City, but I’ve never run is such an intense head wind for that length of time before.  And the ice crystals blowing into the face at 40 or 50 miles and hour were a nice added touch.  Nonetheless, we all pressed on and then enjoyed a well-earned beer or two and some hot food at the end.  And I was very very grateful that Santa brought me a new fuzzy running toque for Christmas

Sadly, when I got home from work on Friday I discovered that the water in the flat wasn’t working.  When I got in touch the estate agent said the pipes were frozen (in -5 degrees, so you can assume the standards of pipe-placement and insulation are somewhat less strict than in Canada).  There was nothing they could do until things warmed up.  I was mostly unfussed since I’ve got a water cooler for drinking water which would do me overnight.  The next morning some unlucky man carried two more bottles of water up the 112 steps so I’d have a back-up supply, and then the water came back.  Sort of.  In fact, it’s still only sort of back. It’ll run for a few minutes, then it dies out to a trickle and stops.  Yesterday I was forced to dash over to Gerald’s apartment for a shower since I didn’t want to risk getting stuck in the dwindling trickle with shampoo in my hair and soap in my eyes.  I’m no longer sure I believe the “frozen pipes” explanation, and am monitoring things today before I get in touch with the landlord again.

On a happier note, this week at work my Props Team expanded by 150% with the addition of two new international staffers and one young local guy.  It’s great to be at full strength finally, though now there’s a lot more management to do, especially in the early days while everyone is still figuring out their jobs and, in the case of the internationals, the city, the language, the metro, the banking system, etc...  Still, I’m glad to have them here finally, and in celebration we all went out for a big supper of Azeri food last night, which was just great.

Here we are.  Wish us luck.

Now we’re all caught up, I think.  And next time maybe I’ll tell you about some of the yummy Azeri foods we had a dinner. GRUB! Azerbaijan-style!