Bad News From Home

My usual travelogue will have to pause for a moment, although this is a travel related story of sorts. And my apologies for the long gaps between entries - I've been a busy traveller.

When one is travelling, one worries that bad things will happen back at home - your cat runs away, your cousin crashes your car, someone pinches your bike.

But what's the worst possible thing that can happen whilst you're on a long trip out of the country?

Well I just found out :-(

My last remaining grandparent, my Father's increasing frail mother, my grandmother, slipped from us very early Saturday morning Australian time.

I had a premonition this might happen, I mean, it was on the list of worst possible things that could go wrong. I even made a point of visiting her before I left. Which proved, it now seems, to have been the right thing to do...

My family have all urged me to carry on my trip. I was in London when this happened, just back from Paris and heading to Berlin, where I am now, a few days after that. I've never been overseas before, and had been planned this trip for at least eighteen months.

And to give you some idea of how well travelled we are, my family: My Dad was on his way to Hong Kong when this happened - he turned around and came straight back again. My sister and her husband live in Cambodia. I'm here in Europe. My aunt is in Norway. And I have an aunt and four cousins living in Switzerland. And to their credit all these folks will be there later this week for the funeral.

I've written something for my sister to read on my behalf at the funeral, much as I did for her at our grandfather's funeral last year. I will post it here at some point.

She was 97, and so frail she was at that stage when she could slip from us at any moment, from one breath to the next, literally.

And boy has this made me homesick :-(

Sunday in Camden

I'm in transit again, this time on a train from Berlin to Prague. My blogging is waaaaaay out of date, so I might just have to summarise what I got up to in London and Paris. Sounds like the book by George Orwell!

Lets see. The Sunday after Deb arrived, we went out to a small but rather good farmers market near where we were staying in Blackheath. I went a bit nuts and bought three different kinds of cheese, and half a smoked eel, and various other things I now can't recall. We popped back to Zoya and Clives place and had a bit of a feast.

I had promised Deb a steady supply of Squirrels for her amusement, so we wandered over to Greenwich park again. School holidays were on, so the squirrels were already quite well fed. We'd come armed (again) with peanuts in their shells - a not hungry squirrel will then bury them. We managed to tempt some squirrels out of the underbrush but not many, too many school kids had been feeding them. We did come across a couple who were just sitting quietly and waiting for the squirrels to come to them, that seemed to work quite well.

We wandered past the Greenwich observatory again, and I took a shot of Greenwich Mean Time, and we got photos of ourselves at the Greenwich Meridian - the zero meridian! I got out google maps on my Iphone just to seem that we really were at 0.

Then we hopped on various forms of pubic transport - trains mostly - and headed out to a place called Camden.

Camden is in the north of London (I think) and looks a bit like Fitzroy but about 400 years older. One of Deb's friends was waiting for us in a pub there. It was nice enough that we could sit outside. We joined said friend (Marita) and an American friend of hers, both of whom were drinking the English summer drink - Pimms and Lemonade. Later we were joined by another woman, and we befriended a couple of women sitting next to us. Turned out that almost everyone at the table, aside from Deb and I, were on the pull, trying to find a nice bloke to flirt with. Which was hilarious, watching them eyeing off guys all across the pub and trying to get them to start some flirting. I jokingly went to put my arms around two of the woman, and they were flustered and told me to stop - they didn't want anyone in the place to get the wrong idea!

After that, we went for a quick walk in a big park near there - Regents Park? But Deb was still jet-lagged, having been in the country for less than 24 hours, so we headed home.