Once more into the Field of Battle of Tourism Travelling

When I had left Malabo on my last trip I was definite I wasn’t going to return as my manager was talking about different jobs I was going to work on, Peru was the one I was hoping for and then possibly Brazil, after 1 week back in the UK clearing the accumulated crap out of my house that I hadn’t seen the inside of for 18 months, I was mailed by my manager telling me I was required in Spain to do a weeks babysitting on a new unit. Well this would have screwed up my holiday plans as my wife had only arrived in the UK from Costa Rica and had been with me for 4 days. As you could imagine she wasn’t happy about that to say the least, I told my manager about my situation and that I was trying to organize the selling of my house, he left me alone for a few more days. During this gap I was walking my wife to death, around the historic market town of Chesterfield and the surrounding areas, as well as up to the house from my sisters house where we managed to get a bed as my nephew wasn’t happy with his new bed. My wife was great at helping me clear out all that old crap you tend to keep hold of and we managed to get the local cat protection charity to come and remove it all, free of charge, they got all my old video camera gear and a couple of 35 mm cameras that I had never even used since I got my digital one. Just tons of crap that I had scraped and collected together over the previous years, and this is after 4 previous house moves. I will never collect that amount of crap again. I have developed a philosophy of if I don’t use it I will not collect it which is against my bringing up where both my mother and father collected any old crap just in case they may use it 20 years from now, well when they were kids I suppose that was OK as you never had anything and getting something for nothing was great even if you didn’t need it or have a use for it. When a previous company I worked for was bought out I managed to rummage through all their draws of the guys who left before me or were fired. I got a free hand at everything in their draws to take home, I had to put it all in a waste paper bin to handle all the pens and pritt sticks and marker pens and 15 rulers and staplers and hole punches, I even collected all the power adaptors for old phones and all the different telephone adaptors for all Europe and communication adaptors for the controllers I worked on and tons of useless things and all deposited in that waste bin. I think that I have everyone of the pens from that day and that was 5 years ago, virtually nothing as been removed but believe it or not some of the power adaptors have been used so some things were useful, but I have this built in magpie syndrome that I have to learn to control working amongst lots of equipment that is surplus on the job it is hard not to pick up things and take them home with me, it is easier as the years go on but I used to collect anything that I thought I may need in years to come including a kit to build a conveyer system, what the hell did I want with that, I was insane with the things I used to pick up but I am getting better, I was ruined by my mum and dad, my houses used to spill over with the cardboard boxes of items we had bought and “may need in future to return the item with”, what horse shit they filled me with. Today I clear with ease but in the back of my mind I still want to hoard. My dad told me of a woman he new that had died and her husband being old and infirm asked my dad and his girlfriend to help him clear the house, he thought it was just some old clothes and maybe some womens junk, shoes and knickknacks, but when he opened the door he was faced by a mountain of junk and fantastic stuff this woman hoarded in the house to the extent that it was packed in boxes piled to the roof in every room to the point that you could only just open doors and sit down on the sofa, every step of the stairs was packed with boxes of clothes and food and anything you could imagine, the bath had a door placed on it so she could stack 500 bars of soap on it and 200 bottles of shampoo, this woman could hoard for England. It took my dad 6 months of weekly jumble sales to get rid of it all, 500 hats and 500 pairs of Marks and Spencers bloomers, 1000 pairs of socks and , 1000’s of lengths of material and 100’s of tins of different foods and toys still in boxes and anything you could imagine. This is a mentality of hoarding for the shortages, something that kids of today know nothing about but she was a victim of her childhood and her husband suffered for it all his life, I bet he had terrible sex as she would have been perfectly satisfied doing the shopping each week and stacking the cupboards to the top with a glint in her eye. Anyhow my house clearing went well and I got in a decorator and managed to get the carpets sized up and picked for a fitting after the decorator had completed the touching up of the things I had altered 2 years before, but while Jenny and myself were clearing out, the weather was great and we spent many hours upstairs in the lovely cosy bedrooms overlooking the nice garden we have and it felt very nice to be there, it was almost a relief when she said she would love to come and spend a year or so with the kids to help them learn English properly. So the plan is sometime in the future we are going to move to the UK and spend a year or two living in the UK, I can say that I enjoyed my 2 weeks in the UK seeing my old buddies and relatives, I was startled my the cleanliness of the streets and town centre, being able to shop on the internet and buy anything I wanted from the supermarket was a revelation. It felt nice, but I kept telling her that the weather is normally crap but the sun kept shining day after day, we only got a sprinkling of rain on a couple of nights, Jenny was in love with the language and my dads house and my sisters new house and my house and the fact the school was only 100 yards away for the little girl and the junior school was only 300 yards away for the boy was all she kept thinking about. Why not the schooling in the UK is fantastic compared to the general schooling in Costa Rica, so there it is shopping And schooling what more does a mummy want. I was then mailed by my manager to tell me that he needed me to come for a meeting at the office in Florence with my regional manager, I was upset as they were pissing me about again but I could only think of the upcoming projects I have asking about and I was convinced that they were going to tell me where I was going to be working for the next 2 years, so I managed to convince Jenny that we had to go even though the house had many things to sort out and we were planning a trip to London to go to the theatre and see all the typical London sights that she would be fine even though she was overwhelmed with all the travelling as this was her first trip into Europe. We booked out trip to London on londontown.com we got seats in the Apollo theatre for the Saturday night fever show and two nights in a hotel, it was easy we took the train and arrived mid afternoon and got to our hotel via the London underground. Now I love the underground as it goes everywhere and you can get a ticket to travel everywhere all day for the same price, so we started hopping from one train to the next and went to the theatre and did a lot of walking around the museums and London bridge and the tower of London, not going in as it is expensive and nothing special.


I did it maybe 5 years ago, while we were walking around we came across the theatre which had the show Chicago on and we just popped in to see if they had seats available for the show and we were surprised to be offered tickets for the gods at £15, I was over the moon as they had Brook Shields on in her first week, we had to rush back to the hotel hopping on and off trains and to get ready for the show and hopping on and off trains again to get there for the curtain up,I loved the show and it was great, and the performing was flawless, OK Brooke didn’t have a great voice but she didn’t miss a word and I was in heaven, it took me back to the days when I worked in the local theatre in chesterfield as a school boy. We left late and went for a Macdonalds as it is cheap and quick, we got back to the hotel after a long day and slept like logs in a very small but very nice and comfortable room in central London. The next day we were up and active once again jumping from one tube line to another to get to the British museum which is my first time there and I was so impressed by the scale of the things there, the new atrium is vast and the displays of the ancient Egypt and Rome were just fantastic, incredible even, I was in awe at the monumental size of some of them, Jenny loved it as this was exactly what she was thinking about for the entire trip. We went along to the museum at Somerset House which houses the Cortauld Collection, and the Gilbert collection of expensive snuff boxes, the renovation of this fantastic ex inland revenue building is very impressive, the Cortauld collection has the Van Gogh self portrait of his bandaged head after he cut off his ear, what a fantastic painting, so full of expression, it had many fine pictures and I enjoyed it a lot, we went into the Gilbert collection and saw snuff boxes that were beyond description, full of jewels and made of the finest crafted gold and precious materials, especially the ones made for some king of the Hapsburg empire, Hagar the horrible or something like that, they must have had 2 pounds of tobacco in them, all for show but it was pretty fantastic with all the other fine things he collected, he must have been fantastically rich, lucky bastard, or hard working bastard. We went to our evening show at the other theatre to see the Saturday night fever show and it was again a perfectly performed theatrical performance with great singing and dancing, Jenny loved this the best out of the two and in some ways it was as good but the Chicago was better in my eyes for the length and varied type of acting, I was surprised to find out how empty the place was, less than half, the circle and gods were shut to save on staff and we got upgraded to the stalls a much better view all for the same £15, again we left and had a Macdonalds on the way home as it is quick and cheap and I do love them as I hardly ever get the chance to eat them these days. We crashed into bed again and overslept for breakfast and the 9.30 start to the cheap day all London tube tickets, we went to the National gallery to see the finest collection of painting in the world, possible and we found the new entrance impressive and the Sainsbusy wing quite impressive, there was some fantastic works of art and I did enjoy the Impressionist collection very good, especially the sunflowers by Van Gogh , I love his work , I saw another of his in the Smithsonian gallery in Washington DC, another self portrait, I find these days I have been spoilt by seeing so much fantastic work all around the world, unless it is better than great I am unimpressed, I hope this doesn’t spoil my choices for future holidays. We staggered back to St Pancras main line railway station and slumbered with aching legs into the uncomfortable seats and slept for some of the trip, I am feeling worn out and I don’t know if all the walking in Malabo is making me feel old but even Jenny was complaining about all the walking we were doing, but for me it was another day of walking and my feet were aching and burning again but we got back to Chesterfield tired but we had to get ready for travelling to Florence the following day. Next episode the Florence walking expedition.