Strutting around London: BACK FROM ISTANBUL, THE ISLE OF WIGHT & A BUSY FEW WEEKS BEFORE !

Just a quick post to let everyone know we are back from Istanbul and safe and sound. We were unaware of the problems there until a few days before we left. Istanbul was wonderful, great sites, lovely people and good food. Mark's mum Elizabeth is up here with us and she came along too. She kept up with us which is pretty good going for 80.

Just a quick taster of the Istanbul blog to come.

It seems we brought some of the excellent Turkish weather with us too ! At least for a few days. That was the forecast for the week ending 9th June. Sadly it petered out by Thursday with a return to grey cool weather.

It had been a very busy few weeks before we left for Istanbul.

We realised while we were away that, by the time we returned from Istanbul, William would have taken an international flight each weekend for a month. The long anticipated school trip to New York came along two weeks before the trip to Istanbul. He very nearly didn't go !!!!

To read the shocking details have a look here.

Mark's Auntie Mary always goes to South Africa from early January to mid March. Her birthday is in February and in previous years we have missed celebrating it. Before she left for South Africa this year we booked her in for a visit in early April (the earliest we could all fit it in) for a surprise birthday party.

Will made again made his heavenly chocolate mud cake. He has expanded his repertoire, but the chocolate cake is just too good.

The following weekend we went to the Isle of Wight for one of the seemingly innumerable British bank holiday long weekends - this one in early May. Aisha had long wanted to go there to see Osborne house - the preferred residence of Queen Victoria and where she died.

The Island also has a reputation as being generally warmer than the mainland. Unfortunately the weekend we went there the mainland enjoyed sunny skies and temperatures in the low 20s while the Isle of Wight was breezy with temperatures in the low to mid teens. We had a good time anyway.

Osborne House was very interesting as it is now much as it was when Queen Victoria left it. It is an impressive house with lovely gardens.

Many of the private rooms displayed personal items of the Queen and Prince Albert. The Queen died in her bed in 1901.

The more commonly known images of the Queen as a bit of a grump are in contrast to her as a bit of a looker at 18 or so.

HRH Chicky Babe.

Queen Victoria is the great-great grandmother of Queen Elizabeth II and also of Prince Philip, who is also Victoria's oldest living descendant as well as being related to the last of the Russian Czars. In 1993 his mitochondrial DNA was used to confirm the identity of the remains of several members of Empress Alexandra of Russia's family, several decades after the notorious 1918 massacre by the Bolsheviks.

Victoria was the last of the Hanoverian monarchs while her son, Edward VII, started the Saxe-Coburg and Gotha line of his father. This line was to change name to the current Windsor durng the course of WWI in response to anti-German sentiment. Given Britain's modern history it is interesting that Victoria was three quarters German while her husband Prince Albert was fully German, as well as being her first cousin. Even more spookily both Albert and Victoria were delivered by the same mid wife !!!

At Osborne house the Queen enjoyed the relative privacy and normalcy that the extensive grounds and the small beach that the house backs onto provided. In 1847, at the age of 28, Victoria took her first swim in the sea. In keeping with the times, she encouraged all her nine children to go 'sea swimming'. She had a 'bathing machine' built by a Portsmouth coach builder. It had a pitched roof, dressing rooms and plumbed-in toilet. At some stage after her death the machine was removed from the beach. It ended up on a neighbouring farm where it served the nation as a chicken coop. It was rediscovered and restored in the 1950s. She also had a rather elaborate pavilion on the beach where she could shelter form the summer sun.

The bathing machine.

The pavilion.

Apart from royal holiday houses, the island is famous for its natural heritage. It used to be a part of the mainland until about 10,000 years ago when the ice sheets started to melt. By about 5,000 BC it was completely cut off. It is only 5 miles off the coast though and is clearly visible form the mainland.

The Romans knew the island as Vectis and was first mentioned by them in a 2nd century geography compilation by Claudius Ptolemaeus. According to the Roman historian Suetonius the entire island was captured by the commander Vespasian, who later became the 9th emperor of Rome, during the 2nd Roman invasion of Britain in 43 AD. The remains of at least 5 Roman villas have been found on the island, including one which is now submerged.

At the end of the Roman Empire, the island of Vectis became a Jutish (Danish) kingdom ruled by King Stuf and his successors until AD 661 when it was invaded by Wulfhere of Mercia and forcibly converted to Christianity at sword point. When Wulfhere left for Mercia however the islanders reverted to paganism.

30 million years ago the hot and dry climate was ideal for dinosaurs and the island is famous for being a rich source of fossils. We went on a fossil hunting trip and found lots of fossilised wood, some fools gold but no bones as such. We were shown dinosaur foot casts which are now easily missed as looking like lumps of rock in the sand.

The island also has had some spectacular geological movement over the millennia that has have given the island some very unusual rock formations. The most famous and most visited are the Needles.

The Needles

The cliff plateau behind the Needles was the site for a battery built to defend against French invasion. Constructed between 1863 and 1895 it was armed with six rather large canons each of which took 9 men to load and fire. So big were they that it was feared that the concussion of the guns would crumble the cliffs below. As it was the guns were never fired in anger. In 1903 the guns were considered to be obsolete and were simply pushed over the edge into the sea. Decades later several were retrieved and restored.

It was near the Needles that, from the 1950s, the British aero-space industry tested the engines for rockets that were later to be tested at Wooomera in Australia. The British had grand plans and even grander names for their hardware such as Black Knight, Black Prince, Blue Streak and Falstaff. Eventually just one satellite, Prospero, was launched from Woomera in 1971. It is still orbiting, beeping away.

The engine test sites.

Prospero.

As with much of the Dorset coast of England, the cliffs of Wight are slowly slipping away. This slip happened around 20 years ago.

Sally's mum, Margaret worked as a chamber maid at The Wellington hotel on the island back in the mid 1950s. We went back to the hotel to see where she worked. She really did have to empty chamber pots !

As on previous trips around the country we all delighted in the slow,narrow,windy but picturesque roads of England.

For reasons best known to themselves, Sally & Aisha decided that it was on the Isle of Wight that Aisha could do her first bit of defoliating using Sally's epilator.

While trying to learn classical Arabic back in 1991 in Damascus, Mark met Rachel, an English girl of phenomenal linguistic ability. She became friends with Sally too and over the years we have all kept in touch. Now with a family of her own, Rachel lives and works in Brussels. Rachel is Valerie's daughter whom we have visited several times in Somerset. Rachel's eldest, Anna, who at 15 is almost a carbon copy of Rachel when we first met her, came to stay with us. We taught Anna how to make sushi.

Like her mum, Anna is hugely talented and as well as the other instruments she plays had taught herself guitar. Will taught Anna The Beatles ' Blackbird' and Anna reciprocated with 'Mr Sandman'. Sadly, that tune is used here on an ad by a pay-day lender so Will immediately knew it as 'Mr Wonga'.

Our former neighbours from Canberra, Laurie & Trish, visited us as part of a trip to visit their son in 2011. They came again just before we headed off to Istanbul. When the kids were little Laurie and Trish were surrogate Grandparents to them and it was wonderful to see them again and renew that special relationship.