Random Drumsticks

My other blog about Irish townlands has taken off as a proper project requiring me to be organised and accurate.  So I find myself back on the Distant Drumlin blog in a frivolous mood.  Ready for some random numbers?

Today is the 30th, so here is 30 Saint George Street.

Saint George Street is in Mayfair.  Originally the street was called “George Street Hanover Square”, having been named after King George the First, who became king of Great Britain and Ireland in 1714 and was the first monarch of the House of Hanover.  In the 20th century the name was changed to “St George Street”.  I don’t think there was any ill-will towards the 18th century king, just a desire to sort out the confusion of duplicate street names, i.e. too many “George Streets”.  Adding the “saint” to this one was an obvious option, because the most famous building on the street is St George’s Church.

My next number is 39.  This one is very close to home. Devonshire Street runs across Harley Street on its way through Marylebone’s medical district.

On the subject of the number 39, here is a link back to my Indian days.  The next photo shows a stall in London’s Drummond Street selling Indian vegetables.  Front and centre is a box of moringa, also known as drumsticks.  In April 2013 I bought moringa/drumsticks in Bangalore for 39 rupees per kilogram.  How much would you pay in London in 2015?  Ten times that price.

No wonder a company in Mumbai is exporting them to Britain, as there is clearly profit to be made in drumsticks.   So how many did I buy?  Absolutely none.  I’m not a fan, as you may have seen already – click here to read my post from April 2013.

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NOTES

I spent too much time puzzling over the name change for Saint George Street.  I think the name change was probably made by London County Council around 1939.  The most useful website was this one: www.maps.thehunthouse.com

Companions in London

Walking in Hyde Park on Wednesday, I met these Greylag Geese waddling in a line towards me.

Their gait reminded me of the geese in the Disney cartoon “The AristoCats”: English twins called Abigail and Amelia Gabble, on a waddling tour through France.

I deny totally any similarities between the Gabble twins and these two lovely lady bloggers lunching in Covent Garden on Tuesday.

The blogger on the left, gabbling about life in London, is me.   On the right is Carissa, who gabbles regularly about life in India on her blog called “Everyday Adventures in Asia (mostly)”.

Carissa was passing through London on her way from Canada to India, and I’m so pleased that we met in real life, after a few years of reading each other’s blogs.  Does the photo show that we’d been having fun? I hope so.

If you want to read more about Carissa’s international life, from Winnipeg to Mumbai via Jakarta and other places, click here.

I’ll be back tomorrow with some more London images.

 

 

 

Tagore in London

It’s five months since I left Bangalore, but I still have an interest in India, so today’s post celebrates the birthday of an Indian poet.  Rabindranath Tagore was born 153 years ago today.  He won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1913 – the first Asian person to do so – and died in 1941.

Tagore is commemorated in London by a bronze statue in Gordon Square.  If you could zoom out from the photo below, you would see a garden (owned by London University, open to the public), then Gordon Square, then university buildings (like the School of Oriental and African Studies, University College London and the Institute of Education), some more garden squares (Tavistock Square and Russell Square) and the whole Bloomsbury area of central London.

Zooming in again to the statue, you can read the opening lines of Tagore’s work “Gitanjali” in two languages – Bengali and English.

This is part of the English version.  Even if it loses something in translation, it is still beautiful.

“Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure.

This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.

This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.

At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.

Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine.

Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.”

Most of Tagore’s writings are in Bengali, so the Tagore Centre UK has set up a lending library with books available in English.  Click here for a link to their website.

The statue was created by the sculptor Shenda Amery, and unveiled by Prince Charles in 2011, the 150th anniversary of the year in which Rabindranath Tagore was born.  Click on this link to read the BBC report of the unveiling of the statue in 2011.

Another memorial to Tagore exists in north London – click here for a link to more information about that blue plaque, as reported in the local newspaper, the Ham and High.

 

Top Trunks

No birds today – just trees.

If you move from India to the UK, don’t move in December.  You condemn yourself to weeks of dark mornings and grey afternoons.  But when the sun does shine in London in winter, it shines low in the sky and gives a beautiful light, showing off this tree in Regent’s Park in February.

The winter sun also gave me this great shadow in London’s Tavistock Square in January, of a drainpipe trying to be a tree.

Like the first photo, this was taken around 11am, so the low angle of the sun isn’t coming from the sunrise or the “golden hour”. It’s just the effect of winter at a latitude of 51 degrees north.  I don’t remember light like this in Bangalore, which lies much closer to the equator at 13 degrees north.

But I do remember one tree from India.  A banyan tree that sticks in my mind, because I spent two years hating it.

It lurks on the 13th hole of Clovergreens golf course.  And I would love to know how it causes every golf ball hit down that fairway to veer sharply to the right and lodge beside, behind, or inside the tree.

International Shipping of Statues and Toast

What would you ship home from your life overseas?

We packed up our stuff in India on 5 December – remember this picture? Twelve weeks later everything has been unpacked on the distant drumlin.

The packers from Crown Relocations did a great job at both ends of the move, from wrapping each item in plenty of paper, numbering and (creatively) labelling the cardboard boxes, and carrying the heavy furniture out of an Indian villa and into an Irish farmhouse.

What happened between Palm Meadows and the distant drumlin? After our shipment was cleared by Customs authorities in India, a wooden crate was built around the boxes, and the crate was loaded inside a container for shipping.  The ship was delayed at least once by port congestion in Sri Lanka, but it finally arrived in the port of Felixstowe in England, ready to face UK Customs.

Crown Relocations dismantled the wooden crate in the south of England, and waited for the wind and rain to stop. When they spotted a gap in the weather, they sent the boxes in a van by road to Scotland, by ferry across the Irish Sea to Belfast, and by road again up to the top of the drumlin.

We had one heavy item in its own crate – everything else was just in cardboard.

Here are some packing lessons, from the collective wisdom (from our foolish past experiences) of my expat friends and me.

1.  If the waste-paper baskets around your home are full of rubbish on moving day, don’t pack the trash and cart it halfway round the world.

2.  If you are eating breakfast when the packers come, don’t let them pack the toast inside the toaster.

3.  If your serviced apartment is full of items thoughtfully provided by the letting company, don’t steal them!  (This is the only one that actually happened to us. We were leaving Shanghai, and opened the boxes back in London to find coat-hangers, hairdryers and umbrellas all labelled with the landlord’s name).

4.  Don’t let the movers pack your passport just before your international move.

5.  Do clean the BBQ.  If insects have crawled in there to explore the crumbs of meat, you may end up fumigating your new house.

6.  Do bring the beautiful statue that you bought in India.  Will it still look good without the backdrop of sunshine and bougainvillea? Yes of course it will.

Twelve Days of Christmas

Happy New Year!

Can you hear me blogging above the noise of the wind?  The New Year rode into the UK and Ireland on the wings of a storm.  We get a few calm days, then another gale hits us from the North Atlantic, bringing rain, wind, floods and, today, very high tides.

Here on the drumlin we are safe from high tides, but not from high winds. This tree didn’t do any damage and will serve as firewood now.

Here is my weather report, set to the tune of “Twelve Days of Christmas”.  If you don’t know the traditional words or tune, click here.

“On the 12th Day on the drumlin, I woke up to the sound…of…

…12 gales a-blowing,
11 branches snapping,
10 roof-tiles rattling,
9 waves a-surging,
8 hours of rainfall,
7 swans a-swimming,
6 geese beside them,
In a Field that’s Now a Lake;
4 bedraggled cows,
3 wet sheep,
2 muddy dogs,
And a road blocked by fallen pear trees.”

This is my second attempt at adapting “The Twelve Days of Christmas” after a verse about India written in December 2012.

Here is last year’s song, with some links to photos of the stars of the song. It helps to know that a silly, unfounded rumour had recently spread around my gated community of Palm Meadows, claiming that a leopard had been spotted inside the compound.  The other thing that might trip you up is the Innova – it is a Toyota car, strangely popular with expat families in Bangalore.

“On the 12th Day of Whitefield I woke up to the sound…of…
…12 snakes a-sleeping,
11 lizards looking,
10 squirrels cheeping,
9 cows in trash heaps,
8 mosquitoes biting,
7 street dogs barking,
6 stray cats prowling,
5 Expat Wives,
4 wheeler Innovas,
3 wheeler autos,
2 wheeler Hondas,
And a leopard in a palm tree.”

Before I move on completely from India, I would like to find a winner for my photo poll. Which of the pictures in my post of 9th December 2013 is your favourite?  As of today (3 January 2014) 31 people have voted, and three photos are tied for first place – the tumbling flowers, the smiling girl and the dog on the bus.  We need someone to vote for a winner!

Top Ten Photos of India

I am in London now, looking back over my life in India. What did I enjoy most? The sunshine and the mangoes. What did Distant Drumlin’s readers enjoy most? Well, according to the statistics, you are fascinated by my post about red custard apples. Really? Why?

I want to try something new – a poll to see which photo of India is the most popular. It’s easy to take part; just look at the ten photos below, choose your favourite, then click on the poll at the end of the post.

I am including links to the original posts, but you don’t need to go back to them to vote – the photos are right here.

[UPDATE: Keep Voting! It’s New Year’s Day – 1 January 2014, and three photos are tied for first place: the tumbling flowers, the smiling girl, and the dog on the bus.  We need someone to vote for a winner!]

Let’s start with those mangoes.

Do you like the sunshine on these baskets?

Or do you prefer this photo, from the day in August 2013 that I finally admitted that Palm squirrels are cute?

Peeling the yellow skin off

I did get a little obsessed with bananas, so I am hoping at least some readers liked this photo of the gardener harvesting our bananas in January 2013.

Or do you prefer the photos taken on my trips out of the city, like this farmer ploughing with oxen?

Or did you enjoy the moment that I captured in March when I saw a man splashing water over a cow?

I took several photos of bullock carts– is this your favourite?

Maybe you prefer portraits of people, like this one?

Or do you prefer the Dussehra flowers tumbling out of the sack?

Or was this dog really the star of the blog?

I would love to have your comments as well. Let me know why you like a photo….or just tell me that the custard apple genuinely is the most interesting thing about the blog.

Filling a Drumlin-Sized Gap

This is almost the last post from my home in Bangalore. The packers were here yesterday.

And there are gods and flowers on the car dashboard to protect travellers.

If you are still keen to hear about life in Bangalore, and you need something to fill the drumlin-sized gap, I recommend clicking through to these blogs.

Bangalore Blogs

The author of Kittie’s Vindaloo moved to Bangalore recently. Read on to see if the city lives up to her expectations, somewhere between the sublime and the ridiculous.

All kinds of Bangalore subjects are covered by Bangalore – Nature and Life, not least the local birds, bugs, wild boars and squirrels.

For more birds, go to Residual Thoughts.

And I must plug the blog written by my friend Helen, who moved from England to California, and then to Bangalore. She writes about the exotic and the school bus on Towers Take a Trip.   Get there quick, before she too leaves Bangalore.

Other Blogs on WordPress with Indian Connections

Read about Mumbai as seen through the eyes of a longterm expat: Everyday Adventures in Asia.

If I can’t sleep on the distant drumlin because it’s too quiet, I may replay the recordings of Bangalore sounds on World Listener.

Random Recommendation of another Blog

Nothing to do with India, just high-quality photos of Canadian wildlife presented with a high-quality sense of humour: Krahnpix.