Geoff & Chris in the UK     Letters & Photos: Previous Next

UK News 13 September 2003

THE CONKERS ARE DROPPING!!! 
I keep picking up the large green seed heads which lie along the pavements. Invariably they have split open and inside - but peeping out - is this glowing mahogany jewel - oooooooh, how I love them - a thrill each time I find one. Wish I was a child again..... They are larger than the average NZ chestnut and darker in colour.

I've been at Shoosmiths for a month now, with the first full pay packet now received!!! Shame it had to be all spent on the bond for our new flat - over $4,000 had to be paid before we could move in, ouch!
Click here for a virtual tour of Shoosmiths Birmingham office
This virtual tour was broken - but now is fixed!
I've been taking lots of photos for work on my new camera, and yesterday one of them was published in the Birmingham newspaper - with a press release about Shoosmiths.

In my next newsletter, I'll write about the fantastic new website for www.careersnet.com, which I helped Margaret Stead to update a couple of months ago. There's a wealth of great career seeking advice on the existing site, and even more to come on the new site. The new site is not online yet, but soon will be! 

We're made the move to the flat downstairs. Our postal address has changed to 3 Loxley Square, Olton, B92 7DW (the ground floor in this photo). The phone# is the same. It's very posh, quite the nicest place we've ever lived in! It was the show home for the whole Loxley Square development - has voiles (posh name for nets) on the windows, en-suite, plus another bathroom, carpet in the lounge, very trendy wallpaper everywhere, super duper kitchen - with dishwasher, a spare bedroom for our lots of visitors we hope to have, a tiny little front garden with a flax bush and hebes, a front door and a wrought iron fence - as in the picture, and everything!!! However our meagre furnishings don't quite match up to its style! - Shame the freezer doesn't work, ruining most of our frozen food - we've eaten as much as we could and thrown out the rest. I've hated having no phone - there was a weeks delay in getting it installed = couldn't get onto the Internet to check emails nor update this web page - (he has been suffering dreadful withdrawal, which has meant spending time with me in the evenings!!). We've bought two sofas from Argos, and a bed from Levines - except that the bed arrived missing some essential bits so we had to sleep on the mattress on the floor for the first night. Next we need a microwave, video (maybe a combination DVD/video machine) and alarm clock. I have had great fun matching styles and choosing the best bargains - we have been to house clearance sales and boot sales to find things and I have spent my Saturday mornings in bed with the Bargain pages and the telephone (think Geoff was there somewhere too....) . Best bargain was two lamps bases for £3 and matching lampshades from a boot sale somewhere else for £1!! Its been like getting married and starting off again. So with a guest room now available, we hope to hear from as many of you as possible, making bookings for our B&B service! So far, Richard & Beverley, Helen & Robin and Diane Kenny are heading this way...

Retail thrill of the week - the opening of the Bullring shopping centre. www.bullring.co.uk The Bullring is an ancient marketplace, going back to year 1166 when bull were baited there. In the 1960's a grotesque shopping centre and ring-road were built, effectively a concrete collar around the central city. Not many tears were shed when it was all pulled down three years ago, and $1,500,000,000 was spent building a new shopping centre. This is the largest retail development in Europe. Selfridges and Debenhams make up about half of the 4 story shopping and 2 story car parking building. In the first four days of opening, over 1 million people went through. It's a dangerous place for Geoff to go - too many lovely things to tempt him!!! but I do get the benefit of little lovely boxes with nice bows and flowers on and nice things inside! The Selfridges building is the masterpiece (or horror depending on your point of view), a curvy blob of a building with 15,000 spun aluminium disks on the outside. There are massive glass roofs above the shopping walkways, quite a boggling sight. Over a million people went through it in the first four days, so it's very busy! One shop has sold over £1,000,000 of electronics gear in the first week (none to me, yet!).

Autumn is definitely setting in, it was starting to get dark at 6pm tonight, a marked difference from the 10pm dusk of a couple of months ago. Chris cheerily tells me that soon it will be dark at 4pm. Groan... The leaves are beginning to turn brown at the tips and the squirrels are starting to bury things to eat in the winter.

So we'll  be thinking of NZ starting to enjoy spring?! Oh well, perhaps it's a bit early for that - drop us a line when spring has sprung!

More on the airshow we went to at Fairford US airforce base.  This picture is of the famous stealth bomber, renowned for it's magic black coating and weird angular shape, that makes it invisible to radar. A most chilling sight, especially when you think of the payload of bombs that it can deliver with such... stealth.

This is the Harrier jump jet, which at the time I took this photo it was flying backwards and doing a 'bow' to the audience, at the end of it's performance. Its ability for vertical take off, and hovering like a helicopter, then zooming off into the distance, is an incredible tribute to the UK aeronautics industry. The USA have suffer terrible tragedies from their attempts to produce a similar aircraft. 

Above - one of the most beautiful Cotswold villages we have visited is Burton-on-the-water (up the lane from upper and lower Rissington and Baddingtons. Straddling the ??? river, and quite a stunning place. It is also known for a model village, which is a model of the same village. And yes, the model had a model of the model, and so on, and so on. We saw lovely Pear cottage there which we hope to rent sometime.

This place we went to on our canal cruise with the Stiles crew, might be of special interest to Hill Laboratories staff - a tiny little settlement called Chemistry. Don't know why it was called that, and I couldn't see Physics, Biology or anything else nearby! Our visit there was distinguished by two reasonably tidy three point turns by the 65 foot long barge we were on. We came from the North and could not turn into the side canal (tried but failed miserably). So we had to carry on to just before the road roundabout and turned there. Back into the mooring area (we were going to walk 1/2 mile into a village for shopping but then changed our mind), then another turn to get out again. Not easy with the limited steering and propulsion of a barge! Geoff was a natural captain and took to the tiller with ease - so we all sat and drank wine and stuff while he did it!

We've been watching the squirrels running around, gathering nuts for winter. Nice to see drivers stop their cars, waiting for squirrels to finish crossing the road! But sadly there's a few that don't make it... Oh well, at least there's no possums to be seen on the roads. 

A first - a surprise call at the door from one of our neighbors. Steve, who we had met briefly in the car park last week, called over to invite us to drinks and snacks. He's an insurance 'loss adjuster' who spends a lot of time in Thailand, where there seem to be a lot of suspicious insurance claims!

Took George out for a daytrip to Bidford upon Avon - apparently this is where Shakespeare used to go and muse (i.e. get drunk), it is renowned to have been his favourite drinking hole, with lots of pubs in quite a small area along the Avon River. While we were there, the Red Arrows (airforce aerobatic troup) did their business just overhead - a small airshow was on a short distance away. Funniest part of the day was the Bumper cars at a fair which we all went on (except Dad) - Chris acting like a driver possessed! Sorry - no photos of this event! - not sure what he is talking about.... We also went for a wander in the village and found a great little antique shop - wonderful things and not too dear. Thought of our friends Richard and Beverley as there were lots of nice jugs.

To furnish our new (unfurnished) flat, we've been going to 'car boots' - these are the UK equivalent of garage sales, except sellers congregate at a football ground to sell their stuff. There's a particular big one (perhaps 250 sellers) at  Studley. We didn't buy much that day, but had a good scavenge through the piles of things left behind after sellers have departed. They leave the stuff behind with little labels on asking that things be 'given good homes'!! We took the long road home, via Oldberrow, Great Alne, Little Alne, Wootton Wawen, Henley-in-Arden and other wonderfully named placed.

Political Correctness gone wrong (again) department:
Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf illustrates the sounds of different instruments of the orchestra while telling the tale of young Peter who, in the end, captures the wolf and leads a parade to take the wolf to the zoo.  I always thought this was a delightful piece, but evidently it is not good enough for some folks. Their complaint is that Peter takes Wolfie to the zoo instead of setting him lose in the wild.  So now we have a "wolf-friendly" version of Prokofiev's classic with a different ending which will be narrated by former US President Bill Clinton. And you wondered what he was doing with his time now, with his wife away in the Senate and all.

I have been given a mentor!!. I am so pleased, he is a Chief Executive and currently works with the Kings Fund in London (the innovative and extremely prestigious think tank that is responsible for the improvements in the Health industry in UK. Julie - my boss - wants to  'stretch' me!! - (wonder if it will make some difference to my waist line?....) and apparently thinks this man will do it for me - his name is Nigel. I am to have regular meetings with him to talk about my career development.

Have you got AAADD?
 I went to the doctor yesterday and have been diagnosed with Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder. 
This is how it manifests itself: I need to wash my car. As I start towards the garage, I notices there's mail on the hall table. I decide to go through it before washing the car. I put my keys down on the table, put the junk mail in the bin and notice the bin is full. So I decide to put the bills back on the table and take out the bin. But then I think, since I'm near the postbox when I take out the bin, I may as well pay the bills first. I take out my cheque book off the table, and see that there is only one cheque left, so I go to my desk in my study where I find a bottle of Coke I had been drinking. I'm about to look for my cheques when I notice the Coke is warm, so I decide to put it in the fridge. I head towards the kitchen when a vase of flowers on the counter catches my eye - they need water. As I put the Coke down on the counter, I notice my glasses, which I've been looking for all morning. I decide I had better take them back to my desk, but first I must water the flowers. I fill a jug with water when I spot the TV remote control on the kitchen table. Tonight, when we watch TV we'll be looking for it, so I decide to take it back to the TV room, but first I must water the flowers. I splash some water on them but some spills on the floor. So I put the remote down, to wipe up the spill. Then I head down the hall trying to remember what I was planning to do. Now it's the end of the day, the car isn't washed, the bills aren't paid, there's a warm bottle of Coke on the counter, the flowers aren't watered, there's only one cheque in my cheque book, I can't find the remote or my glasses, and I don't know what I did with the car keys. I try to work out who nothing got done today, and I'm baffled because I know I've been busy and now I'm really tired. I realise this is a problem, and I'll try to get some help, but first I'll check my emails... The Times Magazine 

Low light of the last week was having an accident in our car. There's a habit in this country of aggressive drivers coming out of side streets, not giving way. They stop, with their car about 4 feet over the give way line. They expect all traffic to stop to let them in. Chris slowed the car when approaching one of these swines, and he then pulled out directly in front of us. Our car went into the side of his, at about ten miles per hour. Our front bumper is cracked, his car seems to have no damage at all! Then he had the temerity to blame us for the accident, saying he was stationery so we're to blame! We are both ok (except I have a bit of a whiplash injury and tingling in my upper back) from this experience - but I have to admit to feeling a bit nervous now when driving in heavy traffic. Mostly people are polite and there the unwritten rule is based on courtesy so if you feel its safe to let someone in you can stop and indicate for them to do so. In this case traffic was coming towards me so I was not going to let him in - but he did not wait.

Thinking of you all and miss you - Dad is slowly getting worse - he is unable to dress or bathe easily anymore - but he keeps trying and I can usually manage to get a smile from him most days.

Love and all the best, from
Geoff and Chris

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