ANZAC DAY & THE ABBEY

Many of you will know that Aisha & William have participated in Canberra ANZAC Day parades for the last few years as placard bearers. 

AISHA & MICHELLE IN CANBERRA.

LEADING THEIR MEN.

WILLIAM AND JAMES LEADING THEIR MEN.

The parade passes in front of the PM, opposition leaders, Ambassadors and military big wigs and is televised nationally. Aisha in particular had become a regular bearer for the HMAS Sydney supply veterans. This is always at 10 am which has meant we've never been to a dawn service, so decided to make London our first.

GOING PAST THE PM IN CANBERRA.

So, the day after getting back from Glastonbury we were all out the door by 4:20 am and down at the Australian & New Zealand War memorials next to Wellington Arch by 4:45. Again the weather gods looked kindly upon us all and although it was cool it wasn't too cold and, most importantly, it was dry. 

The Australian memorial is beautiful with names of battle sites and all the Australian towns who lost members of their communities to war.  Like all the Commonwealth War Graves / Memorials we have seen in Damascus, Tehran, Jakarta and of course Gallipoli, it is immaculately kept. The service was moving, as all ANZAC services are, but also odd. There was a Grenadier guard in his Busby hat who played the last post as red double decker London buses drove past. It only re-emphaised that we were somehow slightly out of place being in 'The Mother Country' as England would have been thought of back in 1915.

THE AUSTRALIAN MEMORIAL IN LONDON.

We then caught a black taxi up to the hotel where the gunfire breakfast was held from 6 am but had to leave by 7am to get down to the Abbey for the readers' rehearsal. This was for Aisha who was chosen along with several other children of Australian and New Zealand families to read prayers during the service. Aisha was very excited to have been taken out through the shrine of Edward the Confessor to approach the altar from behind and came back hopping around to tell us she had also seen tombs of some of the King Henrys! It was during this rehearsal we were able to take the photos below. 

AISHA IN THE ROYAL BOX.

 The rehearsal finished in just enough time to allow us to race up to the Cenotaph to attend the wreath laying and march there (testament to the strength of the Australian-British relationship, Whitehall is closed for half an hour for Australians and Big Ben chimes 8am after the last post – amazing) !

THE CENOTAPH

That finished in time to then get back to the Abbey, meet Mark’s Aunty Mary at 8:30 and head into the Abbey for the service there. The service was just beautiful and Aisha and all the children did a great job. The Westminster choir sang as did a choir from Perth Modern School, and a small Maori choir, 6 State trumpeter soldiers in buzbees doing fanfare up on the organ platform which sent chills down our spines. Sally sat where 4 days later we saw the Duchess of Cornwall sitting while Mark & William sat where Princess Ann and her husband would sit and Aunty Mary where Princess Eugenie would sit!  At the end of the ANZAC service we all walked down the main aisle of the Abbey, past all the hoi poloi and ended up out on the forecourt being photographed by thronging tourists gearing up for a royal wedding and thinking we were VIPs. 

We were very happy that Mark’s Aunt Mary was able to join us to for the service and later come back to our house for the first time.

AUNTY MARY WITH US OUTSIDE THE ABBEY

By the time we made it home it was noon. At each event we had heard the last post, sung Advance Australia Fair, God save the Queen and God protect New Zealand while all up we had almost 10 minutes of silence.  


A wonderful day!

DORSET & GLASTONBURY IN LATE APRIL

It seems we have been on a constant tour of the old castles, churches and ruins of England. We have spent each of the last 5 weekends away and numerous weekends before those. In almost all cases we have been very fortunate with the weather. Newspaper reports suggest that the weekend of April 24^th – 25^th was the warmest April weekend in 60 years. This April has recently been declared the driest and warmest April since records began. The Brits are now talking about their dam levels being 20% lower than this time last year. Drought.......??? When parts of the UK ‘sweltered’ in 26 degree heat (!).We were lucky enough to be down on the south coast of England at Dorset for Easter staying at the holiday house belonging to our friend Jane and her husband Nigel. Mark lodged with Jane in 1991 in London and we have kept in touch.

Sally climbed  the white horse on the hill behind the village before breakfast.

Not some fossils on the beach !

We then we spent the day searching for fossils   

 (legally allowed) on the World Heritage Jurassic Coast and looking around little towns.  The beaches down this way are almost all pebble beach and can, after some time, be comfortable to lay on.

The next day, Saturday 23^rd, had us on our way to Glastonbury via a 2 hour stop at Studlands beach – ranked 6^th best in Britain. 

We wondered what the best might be like and understand why the Poms go elsewhere for beaches! For a British beach it was quite unusual being a 100% sand beach with not a pebble to be seen. It was very crowded and, while the water was very cold, we all went swimming although not for very long.

Lyme Regis is not too far down the road. This is where a young Mary Anning started unearthing fossils from young age in the early 1800s. She and her brother Joseph found the first ichthyosaur skeleton to be correctly identified, which when she was just twelve years old, as well as the first two plesiosaur skeletons ever found.  We will organise an autumn or winter visit there as William wants to go ‘hunting’. Winter rains constantly bring new fossils to the surface and discoveries are made almost weekly. 

We made friends with Rachel who was learning Arabic at the same ‘Mahad’ as Mark in Damascus. Rachel, then 21 and already fluent in at least 5 languages, was a class, or maybe two,  ahead of Mark.  Since last seeing Rachel in 1993 she had married Danny and had three kids whom we had never met while we had our two whom she had never met. At Glastonbury we visited Rachel’s mum Valerie who stayed with us for a few weeks in Damascus while visiting Rachel. Valerie has a fantastic house just outside Glastonbury in Somerset. We were able to crash their Easter weekend and had a great time.

THE BIG J COMES TO LONDON TO VISIT THE STRUTTS

We came home from surrey the day before Jane’s 14 year old son Julian came to stay for two nights.  Aisha & William loved having the ‘Big J’ here taking him on the tube, playing monopoly endlessly as well as musical jamming. See his thoughts on anti-bullying tactics expressed in a musical fashion here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCUXYwyk9M0 . This was all Interspersed with visits to the excellent Science Museum and the even more amazing British Museum. We also squeezed in watching buskers at Covent Garden before going to a performance of the Queen inspired musical ‘We Will Rock You’. Although the story line was a little ….loose the music was excellent and very LOUD.

The British museum is simply amazing. Amongst the endless exhibits of centuries of British colonial looting are unbelievable wall reliefs from Nineva in Northern Iraq. The exquisitely carved wall slabs created for his palace at Nineveh show the hunting exploits of the last great Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal (668-631 BC). The detail is astonishing with lion whiskers, dog claws and tunics all in incredible detail. 

The night before we went to Guildford was the Legacy/ High Commission Gallipoli Ball held in the Exhibition Hall. Apart from its various diplomatic purposes this grand hall’s most recent claim to fame was to be the location for Greengot’s Bank in Harry Potter films. It gave us our first opportunity to in London abandon the kids to the care of adult son of one of the neighbours ! The ball was fun and supported the great work that Legacy still does supporting the families of deceased veterans. A recent edition of Australian Geographic has a photo \Gallery on Australia House. http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/journal/view-image.htm?index=3&gid=8799 

DOWN TO GUILDFORD IN SURREY - MID APRIL

After several weeks of trying we finally found a weekend that fitted with visiting a university friend of Mark’s from …1984. We had caught the train down to Guildford in Surrey to finally catch up with Christine (who has barely changed at all in the past 25 years !) She came here for a holiday in the 90s with her then husband Jake and they never left. Now with two adult daughters Christine is heavily involved in local council affairs and leads a very busy life with her partner Geoff. They are surrounded by gorgeous green rolling hills (including some where Agatha Christie went missing!), the home of Lewis Carol, the family home of Richard Branson (he did not start from nothing!) and quaint, quaint villages. It was wonderful to catch up and stay the night and then be driven around some of the local sights and villages again under beautiful clear warm skies. 

YORK - 2ND WEEK OF APRIL

The middle of the kids’ three week end of term holidays, had all of us drive off for five days in Yorkshire and our first stay at Youth Hostels. We went first to York, a beautiful partially walled town, the birthplace of Guy Fawkes and scene of countless incredibly violent ‘War of The Roses’ battles. The city originally called Eboracum was founded in 71 AD by the Romans who made it the capital of their Province of Britannia Inferior. By 400 though as a result of the periodic flooding of the Ouse and Foss rivers the town was abandoned. In the early 5th century the area was settled by Angles, who called the town Eoforwic. The Vikings captured the city in 866 AD, and was finally incorporated into the Kingdom of England in 954.

The Wars of the Roses Battle of Towton was fought just outside York in March 1461. It is claimed to be largest and bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil. Around 50,000 soldiers from the Houses of York and Lancaster fought for hours amidst driving snowstorms on what was then Palm Sunday. Not long after the battle it was reported that 28,000 soldiers had died. As a result of this battle Edward IV displaced Henry VI as King of England, forcing the head of the Lancastrians and his key supporters out of the country. The brutality of some of the battles that went on was evident in the skeletons of ancient soldiers on display in Jorvik centre.

The town itself oozes history with Damascene/Baghdad style medieval narrow twisty lanes (The Shambles being the most well-known) with overhanging houses that almost touch above the laneways. 

We went to the Jorvik centre which is a recreation of the old Viking settlements of York. Complete with the sounds and supposed smells of the old settlement.

Set into the walls are various ‘bars’ or gateways. Miklegate Bar was the place where the heads of vanquished leaders or traitors were displayed. Some of the more notable exhibits included the heads of Henry Hotspur in 1403, Richard Plantagenet in 1461 and Thomas Percy in 1572.

The York Minster is truly amazing - very similar to Westminster Abbey but perhaps with a lighter, airier feel to it. The current 12th century Gothic cathedral was has its origins in its early 600s foundations. We went down to the undercroft to see Roman and Norman (10th century) remains as well as climbing the 2756 steps up to the top of the tower.

We also visited the York Dungeons, an archaeological dig centre and went on an evening ghost walk. We walked walking the city walls several times over including with a historian to learn about life in the time of Towton. The Transport Museum had a fabulous collection of old steam trains, including several Royal trains with the one used during the war complete with line on the bath so the king and queen could save water like everyone else! It made us think of Sally’s mum Margaret !

AISHA AT THE YORK TRANSPORT MUSEUM

WHITBY - 2nd week of april

After York, Sally then headed back to London and Mark took kids up to Boggle Hole a small inlet just below Robin Hoods Bay (some legends say named as such because Robin kept a boat there for a quick escape ….)We loved this classic British seaside fishing town. 

The youth hostel where they stayed is an old converted mill with loads of atmosphere. They went for a quick walk along the pebble coast found a seahorse fossil and were nearly cut off by the very rapidly rising tide ! 

They went up to Whitby home of Whitby Abbey, Dracula and Captain Cook. We visited the house where a 19 yr old James Cook lived for 6 yrs as an apprentice. We were able to go up into the attic room where he and the other apprentices lived and to look out the round window onto Whitby harbour much as he would have done.

We also visited the ruins of Whitby Abbey which sits perched on a windswept cliff top. It is impressive now as a ruin and would have been simply astounding in its day.  Apart from its own history Whitby Abbey was also the location that Bram Stoker chose for Dracula to be peeled out of his coffin after his journey from Europe. 

We also stopped in at Scarborough and sat next to WWII bunkers on the beach. 

STRATFORD UPON AVON, WARWICK CASTLE AND BANBURY CROSS IN EARLY APRIL.

The first weekend of the end of term holidays, had us staying at another farm stay this time outside Stratford Upon Avon.  No need to explain much about Stratford.  We saw a fantastic performance of Comedy of Errors by Royal Shakespeare Company aimed at kids, visited several, but not all of the Shakespeare houses.

We went to the amazingly well preserved Warwick Castle just 20 minutes away from Stratford. The castle was built by William the Conqueror in 1068. From 1088, the castle traditionally belonged to the Earl of Warwick, and it served as a symbol of his power. The castle was taken in 1153 by Henry of Anjou, later Henry II. I. Under the ownership of Richard Neville – also known as "Warwick the Kingmaker" – Warwick Castle was used in the 15th century to imprison the English king, Edward IV.t was used as a fort until the early 17th century, when Sir Fulke Greville converted it to a country house. It was then owned by the Greville family until as recently as 1978.

Again Sally ended up head on home while Mark & the kids stayed on. They wandered around the farm picking some of the bazillions of daffodils that dotted almost every piece of public land everywhere we went in March and early April. 

They also visited the Stratford butterfly farm where William was able to convince the butterflies that he was, in fact, not a boy but a flower. 

On  way home we detoured to Banbury to see Banbury Cross. The 'new cross' is a short distance away from the 'old cross'. Nearby is a statue to the 'fine lady upon a white horse'. 

BANBURY CROSS

A FINE LADY UPON A FINE HORSE.