Southend, Essex

A walk on the beach in Southend. A blustering day. Colourful beach houses. Nigel walks ahead alone. Beach front property for sale.

An English Summer Wedding

I have now attended my first English summer wedding in Rochford, Essex. Some of the family members pose together. The children run in the large fields and find the only mud slide in the area! Yes, the wedding lover above does have a radio and earpiece and is listening to the football match. Summer drinks of pims. The flowers are all in bloom. Despite not being a gardener, I am a painter and was taken with the colours. More colours. A view of the grand house from the lawn. The wedding cake which turned out to be a fake. Elaborate tables (with chocolate at every seat). Looking down from the upstairs level. Dessert. The sun sets.

Saturday in London

Saturday in London is spent meandering through town from event to event. Part of the Slow Down London Festival on in London at the moment includes a special free Wallpaper Printing Workshop with master printmaker, Linda Florence. We team up and print a long roll of wall paper. Some choose white stars. We choose red on gold. Next we take the Tube east. To find ourselves wandering through Portobello Market in Notting Hill. All sorts of antiques line the streets in stalls and stores. Old film cameras. Food stalls galore. We find a falafel place and hunker down. Next we hop on a double decker bus to meander for most of an hour towards the city centre. Through streets lined with taxi cabs and shoppers, we pass through Oxford Street. A day of English folk-inspired performances are taking place in celebration of St. George's Day in Trafalgar Square. The crowds gather in front of the National Gallery. There are some great dancers that show up in toupes, thick gold glasses and and disco outfits. All the while Napolean looks down on the crowds. We wander off through the square. And head over to Leicester Square instead. We find a small cafe and get the best hot chocolate I've had in a long time made by the Italian owner, Fernando. The drink has us under such a spell we accidentally leave our roll of hand printed wall paper in the corner. We wander through China Town... ...and head over to Soho... ...where we gaze at more food in the windows. Finally we settle into a cheap theatre to watch The Tale of Benjamin Button before heading back home to bed.

Mercy Ship Talk

I attended a talk this year by a dentist who had worked briefly on the Mercy Ships in Liberia. Nigel and I were invited as guests by a surgeon to the members only event that was made up of mostly medical doctors in different disciplines. I was very interested in hearing someone elses talk after Nigel and I had given two already on our experience. Well, no one can quite prepare you for suddenly having background knowledge on what would turn out to be a bit of a scam talk. I can only say that Nigel and I were incredulous as we listened to tales of patients who we had been directly involved in. One funny story he had involved the sunken ship that sat beside our ship in the harbour. He had some elaborate story about how it sunk and a dozen people were killed. They had never recovered the bodies but the ship had been dragged out to sea. The photos show this very same ship, which still sits in Monrovia's dock half sunk. It was being loaded or unloaded and became unbalanced and tipped over. The ship loses the country US$3000 a day in port fees by just sitting there. There are so many sunken ships in the port that the port police have to navigate you through to your own dock. Fortunately, there were no deaths and the ship was still sitting there when we left, despite efforts to refloat it.