Oct
25
16 weeks have passed by. I don’t know how and I don’t know where they have gone to? We have celebrated birthdays, taken trips; we have found friends and made a life in a different country. Who would have believed that you could re-create your entire life in such a short space of time? One thing that I will say is that we planned and prepared for this move properly before we committed ourselves to it – and this may very well have made all the difference. You can’t do something like this on a whim and then wonder why it all doesn’t turn out the way you had hoped.
I must always add at least a paragraph into this blog about what happens to the children at school, because I know that many of their friends back in SA read it and it keeps them up to date on the happenings in Mitchell and Jenna’s lives. So to all the school friends back home: Mitchell and Jenna are on half-term break this week. They have 1 week off school and then they go back for term-2 until the 18th of December. Jenna’s school had a real fire alert this week, where the alarms sounded and all the children had to go and line up on the netball courts. The fire department was called and the source of the fire was somewhere in the kitchen. In Mitchells last week of the term they had a “Humanities Day” where they were put in their house groups and they “travelled around the world” on the school property, going to various countries, learning about the culture, sampling the food and discovering facts about each country.
The weather has still not got cold enough for us to start to complain about. I don’t know if we are just not realising it (ignorance is bliss, and all), or if we are just a bit thick-skinned, but we have not had any frost on the car in the mornings, we have not used the central heating to any great deal and Jenna still tries to get away without wearing shoes and a jersey.
One of the things I really enjoyed the most this week was waking up to mornings of thick fog. If we ever got fog in SA it would burn off before 7 or 8 o’clock in the morning and you would be left with a beautiful hot sunny day, but this week we woke up to mornings under a thick blanket of fog and the longer the day went on the thicker the fog got. It just seemed to roll in and envelope us. 
There is something so mysterious about it. It left the air with a beautiful, cool, damp feeling. I only ever remember seeing scenes like when we used to visit Hogsback and Katberg but here we were this week, in the middle of suburbia, blanketed in fog. It does make driving a little trickier, but the sight of the tree-tops disappearing into a smokey covering makes it all worthwhile.
This weekend we travelled through to Surrey and/or Hampshire (depending on exactly where we crossed the county borders). Philip invited us to come and visit. Philip works for the Amery veterinary practice with clinics in Alton, Borden and Greyshott. He has been over here for almost 18 months and it is really good to have someone so close to us, so close by.
We took Mitchell and Jenna on the Watercress Line which runs from Alton to Alresford and back. Its is a beautiful old rickety steam-train. You can buy a ticket and stay on the train as long as you like. It is like a hop-on-hop-off service where you can get on and off the train at whichever stations you like and then just hop back onto the next one coming through. This week on the Watercress line was “Wizard Week” as Halloween approaches this weekend. 
There were Harry Potter characters on the train, all the stations along the way had Halloween displays, the children could enter a fancy-dress competition, the train was decorated in pumpkins, ghosts, bats and witches, the ticket conductor was dressed up like a witch and the characters from Harry Potter came around and handed out goodie-bags for the children. The scenery from the train window was absolutely beautiful. Rolling green fields (you would never have looked at those green fields and imagined that winter is approaching) framed by lines of Autumn coloured trees, stretched out in every direction. We passed fields with horses and quaint little farms, lakes and ducks. It was a beautiful trip. Before we left the station for our return journey to Alton, I took a photo of the station from the pedestrian bridge over the train. In this one photo I saw the whole of what England is becoming to mean to me. 
The photo is so quintessential England. There was an old steam train standing next to modern cars, an old coin-operated telephone booth standing next to people on modern mobile phones, there was a beautiful monochrome grey sky covering bright Autumn colours, there was a quaint little station building with its chimney pots, there were neat little flower pots standing next to bright green benches, the station platforms were wet from the rain we had had earlier and there was just a wonderful atmosphere of excitement from the kids about all the activities taking place on the trains and stations.
We popped in to visit Donna and Mark Scott (Philips boss) in Alton. They are a fantastic, energetic ex-South African family who I met when I visited the UK a year ago. It is always wonderful to spend time to people who are both positive about South Africa, but who still love the UK and have settled here. Thanks for the chat and the tea and we’ll see you guys soon.
On the way back to Philips apartment in Greyshott we stopped at an oasis called Waggoners Well. 
It is just a stone’s throw away from Philips apartment, but you enter the forest and you soon forget that the rest of the world exists. When you can stand still and hear the water trickle over the rocks under a pretty little wooden bridge, listen to the birds and wild animals in the forests, and smell the natural earthy smells from the fallen leaves and trees, then you know that you can find peace within your soul. That some of the stuff in this world really doesn’t matter. There are always places you can go to where you can just sit and be.
We ended the day off with dinner at “The Fox and Pelican” in Greyshott. If you are ever passing through, stop and get a bite to eat.
And then finally, today the clocks changed from daylight saving to normal time. We moved from a 1-hour, to a 2-hour separation between the UK and South Africa. This means we win a few extra minutes of daylight for a week or two, but as we slip excitedly closer to the depths of winter, those few extra stolen minutes of sunlight will soon be swamped up into the darkness of a UK winter. We look forward, waiting for the cold to arrive and usher in whole new experiences.
PS: We have booked tickets to see the Springboks play at Wembley Stadium on the 17th November – I can’t wait to blog on that in a few weeks time.
October 26th, 2009 at 8:48 am
Wow! the Springboks.. I am definitely booking tickets.