Monthly Archives: March 2015

Royal Garden Party!

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I have been cordially invited to a Royal Garden Party at Buckingham Palace.

Eeeeeeeeeeeee! 🙂

Image credit Andrew James.

Image credit Andrew James.

Well, me and 8,000 of my closest friends who happen to also be lucky WI members. In honor of the WI’s 100th year, they’re throwing us a garden party at the palace, as they do. They last did this 50 years ago.

Because I can do nothing by halves, this will quite probably be my very first trip to London, as well. Nothing like jumping in at the deep end!

In searching online for images for this post (seeing as I don’t have any of my own yet!), I’ve just learned that these garden parties have “evolved into a way of rewarding and recognising public service. They are attended by people from all walks of life.” (source) They throw four a year: three at Buckingham and one at the palace in Scotland.

There’s a coach (charter bus) going, which the county WI is arranging, down and back the same day. My first instinct upon hearing about taking a coach down ((especially after my experience of it for the NFWI AGM in Cardiff a couple years ago, which took 6.5 hours instead of 4 hours by train)) was echoed by someone else when they said “You’d arrive like a wet lettuce!” Quite. The gates open at 3pm, so a single day is do-able from Derbyshire, but it’s all the pick ups along the way. You can get from Glossop to London by train in less than three hours; a coach picking up all over Derbyshire could take many hours longer. The fear of snarls of traffic on the motorway (traffic jams are a frequent occurrence, especially around London) is high enough for me to think they’re insane to think about making it a one-day trip, especially when going by road.

Trains also frequently have problems, something quickly forgotten once anyone no longer relies on them. I’ve not yet decided on train versus driving, but either way, I shall definitely be going down the day before and staying overnight. Then, if there are any problems getting there, I shall have enough cushion! Doing some arithmetic – not the real numbers, because I can’t be bothered to look them up, but a quick back of the envelope calculation – I realize how incredibly blessed and lucky I am to get this opportunity: I’m absolutely not going to throw it away by trying to cut the time too tight and wind up having something go wrong and arrive too late!

The palace throws four regular garden parties each year, each time inviting approximately 10,000 people. With about 60 million people in the UK, and not adjusting either of those figures (though I’m sure they both change over time), over 60 years (age 15 to 75 or so), a person would have a 4% chance of being invited to a Royal Garden Party. It’s not quite the 1%…!

For this garden party, each WI is to ballot to send one member to the do. Since there are 8,000 tickets and about 6,600 WIs, there are some further tickets distributed through other means. My own invitation is in recognition of my work for the county federation of WIs. It’s been interesting to see the different meanings that balloting has for the different WIs. Most of the time, ballot is taken to mean draw, and that’s what’s happened in many instances: those interested have put their names in a hat and one’s been chosen. In one WI I know of, which is only a few years old, they chose their founder member, saying she deserves to go, since she got them all together.

In another WI, a member who was around for the last garden party piped up to tell the story of an unnamed WI from that time. They did a draw, and wound up drawing the name of a member who’d already decided she wouldn’t be staying on with the WI much longer. ((I don’t know if she was leaving the whole WI, or if she was moving, so she was leaving that WI, or what.)) There were a lot of bad feelings, then, that this was the woman sent to represent that WI. The longtime member, who is well-versed in the rules, pointed out that a ballot is not a draw, but that ballot papers should be made up, and members should vote on who would go to represent the WI. Ballot papers were duly made.

So long as the members of that institute are happy with how it was chosen, it doesn’t matter how their method compares to others, of course – the same as all the other choices we make in how to run our institutes.

I’m thrilled that it’s happened that the three ladies I know who are going are all friends of mine – I must get them together so we can all talk about hats! 🙂

Anyway! I’m going to a Royal Garden Party! I’m excited! I’m just left with two questions — Whatever shall I wear? and Where do I find a hat?!

A Murmuration of Starlings

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Our first outing in the new car!

Starlings!

Starlings!

Originally, I thought we’d spend our first weekend figuring out all the things the car can do – reading the manuals and playing with all the gadgets.

But then, I read in one of the local papers about a particularly impressive flock of starlings worth seeing. I’m no bird watcher – I haven’t the patience – but I’ve seen videos of the acrobatics that starlings get up to, and it seemed well worth going to see. So I marched right up to Chris, thrust the paper at him, ignored the look of confusion on his face, and announced that we’d be going to this the very first weekend we had the car – and hoping it wasn’t too late.

The paper says they roost in this spot from October to March, and this would be the first weekend of March. I didn’t know a thing about the birds, and English being the ambiguous language that it is, and nature not paying attention to a calendar anyway, I didn’t know if that included March or not. We just went and hoped for the best. Saturday was a gloriously sunny day, so we went then.

On our way up the hill.

On our way up the hill.

Once I got home, I looked up starlings a bit, and discovered that they flock together in these huge murmurations in the non-breeding season; they’re at their largest in the winter, when joined by birds that have migrated over from Europe (for the milder climate). Aha – so we just caught the tail end, that explains why we didn’t see the 40,000 to 70,000 that the paper talked about. No matter; we’ll go back later on this year, in November/December, and hope to see more. It was really peaceful and pleasant as it was, so we both enjoyed it.

Awaiting the starlings

Awaiting the starlings

Unfortunately, none of my video came out well – it is not a Serious Camera, and it struggled with the birds as far away as they were, in the low light. Go watch this one from the RSPB instead.

Apparently, they’re choosing a place to roost while they’re doing their acrobatics. Chris reckons the sounds they’re making are, “I call dibs on that branch!” “No, I do!” and so on. 😉

The drive was really pleasant. It’s about half an hour’s drive away, through our rolling countryside. Since we were driving, we were able to scope out Chinley, a nearby town, since I need to drive there in a fortnight, on the way back.

Roost chosen - they're settled and we're cold. One more photo, and then we're out of here!

Roost chosen – they’re settled and we’re cold. One more photo, and then we’re out of here!

I’ve read about these starling roosts in Derbyshire for years, but never been able or willing enough to get there. This particular one, it turns out, we could’ve gotten there on public transport, if we were really, really interested. The 18-mile, 30-minute drive there would’ve been 2.5 hours: one and a half hours by bus plus another hour of walking. Then, after watching for the display, we’d have had a 6 to 6.5 hour trek home. We could actually just walk home in that time, or we could:

  • Walk an hour,
  • Wait half an hour,
  • Take a bus for 20 minutes,
  • Walk 15 minutes,
  • Wait 45 minutes,
  • Take a train for 1 hour 5 minutes,
  • Wait 1 hour 35 minutes,
  • Take a train for 35 minutes,
  • And then either:
    • Walk another 30 minutes, or
    • Take a cab for 5 minutes (and about £4).

All of the walking, except that very last 30 minutes (where we’d likely end up in a cab anyway, my feet having given out long before), would be along roads with no sidewalks (pavements), no shoulders, with cars zipping by in a 50 mph speed limit (so, y’know, generally going more than that, as they do everywhere). The trip back would be in the dark – and the countryside, of course, has no streetlights. We could, of course, have walked through the fields, as public footpaths crisscross the countryside, but one false step in the dark and we still might not have made it back. I’m afraid we’re really not that interested in birds – or anything else – to have made that trek.

If we made it, we’d have gotten home utterly exhausted, grimy, irritated beyond measure from the people, noise, and waiting we’d have put up with, and it would have been such a horrible experience, no matter how impressive the birds were – or whatever was at the other end of that trek. To add insult to injury, we’d have paid through the nose for it: the public transport would’ve been £50.20 (or about £55 with optional cab fare); the diesel for the car should have been about £4.72. Naturally, there are costs beyond the fuel, but they don’t add up that much, of course. The public transport companies are making money hand over fist.

So so so very glad we have another car, at loooong last!

No Car Mats!

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Having driven for 17 years, and this being my 4th car, it is a strange sensation to have to buy all the car stuff from scratch. The first morning, in preparing to drive Chris to the train station, I realized I didn’t have so much as an ice scraper yet. It’s a most bizarre feeling – I have a trunk full of car stuff … in my car in the US. Of course, it needs to stay there, because of our two cars, that one’s much more likey to break down and need those things.

However, I gradually acclimated to this notion. I realized that starting with a clean slate gave me the chance to deliberately choose things, instead of just having things that once sounded like a good idea but I had never managed to use in 10 years or some such and would look at every 6 months and think, “I really must get rid of that,” not do, and still have it and think the same thing 6 months later. Not that I know this from experience!

So, I have to get a whole new set of car fluids, ice scraper, and all those odds and ends I think of as essential for peace of mind while driving. I finally managed to get to grips with that.

What’s really discombobulated me, however, was getting our car home and realizing that it had no car mats! This is just so bizarre to me. One friend of mine had advised me to refuse the car mats and all the other extras the dealer would try to sell me. If I’d bought a new car and refused the car mats, then it’d make sense that my car had no car mats. But I wasn’t even given the option. Used cars should already have car mats!

I don’t know how well the bare carpet will hold up, so I quickly set about sourcing some mats. I phoned up the company I ended up ordering from, and had a conversation about the different types of mats they make – the cheapest ones might be expected to wear out and get holes in them within a few years. Holes in carmats? My 21 year old car has the original mats it came out of the showroom with, and it certainly hasn’t suffered wear like that! (There are one or two stains, and possibly a bit of fading from the sun, is all.) I’d never have even thought of holes in carmats. I shouldn’t have to think about this – cars should come with carmats!!!

What I’d really like to know is what happened to the ones that were in the car. The carpet condition is too good for there to have been none. I wonder if they were just ratty, so either the last owner or the dealer took them out to make the car look better. Others have suggested that the last owners removed them to put in their next car, which sounds ridiculous to me because they most likely wouldn’t fit.

At one point during the buying of the car, I found the salesman digging in a closet. He said it was full of car mats – new ones. I guess those would be the ones the new cars came with that the buyers declined to pay the extra fee to keep. This is all so strange, and wasteful. The carmats should just be included with the car; what good is a closet full of extra car mats that don’t fit other cars now? The automaker should be doing everything in its power to have its branding all over – it’s usually on the carmat, too – having unbranded car mats all over is not good for them, either. Very peculiar that the maker lets the dealer separate it out as a line item charge.

The car mat company is going to send me a sample to be sure I’m happy with the quality before they proceed with making the set. Hopefully I’ll find a set that’ll just last and I won’t have to think about carmats again for many years – until we buy our next car!

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I don’t know if I’m just abnormally easy on carmats, or if there are just some really flimsy ones out there. Please, tell me your experiences of car mats! Have you ever worn holes through them, or had other major wear and tear? What sorts have you had?