The Trip To London. (1)

~ beetleypete ~ 37 Comments

For those of you who didn’t know, we went to London this week to celebrate Julie’s 65th birthday on the 14th. She had expressed a wish to go back to where we used to live for the first time since 2012. Re-visit some of our old haunts and favourite restaurants, and see what had changed.

I think this will need more than one part to do it justice.

DAY ONE. 13/01/2026. Catching the train.

I had pre-booked the hotel, the train tickets, and the car park at Downham Market Railway Station. We have been to the Norfolk town of Downham Market a few times, but never to the railway station car park. So I thought we should use the Google Maps Satnav on Julie’s phone to make sure we went to the right place.

Allowing one hour for a 45-minute journey seemed adequate, as our train was the 11:59 and traffic is not heavy at that time. The weather was awful, dark and raining, but with two nights in London to look forward to, we didn’t let that spoil things. As we approached the town, the satnav instructed us to contiune along the main road to the south. I presumed it was taking us on a traffic-free short cut.

BIG MISTAKE!

It took us miles out of our way, along farm roads well outside of the town, and suddenly declared ‘You have now reached your destination’ when we were in the middle of nowhere, along a track road with one house visible. So we entered the actual station into Google Maps, instead of the station car park address. That told us we were already there, so we entered the town itself instead.

Imagine the shock when it told us we were 11 miles away, and our arrival time would be fifteen minutes after the train had left. I became angry and annoyed, but we just had to face facts that we had missed the train and we would have to wait for the next one. We arrived in the car park eventually, but only by ignoring the Satnav, which had taken us along some of the worst unmade, poorly-maintained roads I have ever seen in the UK.

We went into the town, found signs for the railway station, and managed to get the last remaining space in the surprisingly small car park. There were 59 minutes to wait until the next London train, so we went to the cafe and bought hot drinks and something to eat. Then we went to the ticket office, where a very helpful lady explained some things to us.

1) We should not have used any Satnav, as Google Maps has never recognised Downham Market Railway Station. Nobody knows why that is, but all the local people know that to be true.

2) I had booked tickets for that specific train, and they could not be used on the next train. So to travel to London, we had to cancel the now useless tickets and buy new ones at an additional cost of £47 each, a total of £92.($125) That was the same price I had already paid for the tickets we were holding that could now not be used. Fortunately, it did not affect the return journey on Thursday.

The only thing we could do was to ‘put it down to experience’, say “It’s only money”, and wait for the next train.

The train arrived on time, we got good seats, and the 90-minute journey to Kings Cross Station in London went without a hitch. Once there, we got a taxi from the rank to our hotel (it was still raining) that only took 15 minutes.

We booked in, and went to our room to relax, looking forward to meeting up with one of our oldest friends, Christine, later that evening. The hotel was ideally located, built inside a Victorian chapel, and very nice. Here’s a link to that. https://www.thewesley.co.uk/the-wesley-camden-town/

To be continued…

Back From London

~ beetleypete ~ 17 Comments

We are not long back from our two-night stay in London. Despite being away for such a short time, I have no hope of being able to catch up with all the posts from those bloggers I follow. So I will start fresh from tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I will start to try answering all the comments you have left on my posts.

(It’s still raining!)

Best wishes to everyone, Pete.

Handwriting. Use It, Or Lose It

~ beetleypete ~ 74 Comments

I have just written a few words on Julie’s birthday card to give her next week.

Looking at what I had written, I was appalled to see just how badly my handwriting has deteriorated. I used to write with an elegant fountain pen, sending letters to friends who lived too far away for us to see each other easily.

I also wrote in notebooks; ideas for blog posts, story outlines for fiction serials, and all kinds of random things.

But then I just stopped writing properly. The friends died, or lost touch, the ideas for blog posts or stories became saved drafts on WordPress, and it wasn’t long before the only thing I physically write with a (ballpoint) pen is my weekly shopping list.

And that is in block capitals.

Even two lines at the bottom of a birthday card seemed like a mission. And they looked awful too, like an untidy scrawl.

So it seems that handwriting, like so many other skills in life, needs to keep being used to maintain it in tip-top condition. I wish I had thought of that before I decided to write on that card just now.

Sunday Musings In A Bleak January

~ beetleypete ~ 54 Comments

I know, it’s winter. I should expect bad weather, and I do. But I still don’t like it. 😊
We started the week with snow and ended it with heavy rain. Still totally dark just after 4pm, and some daylight hours were very gloomy too.

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Julie had two home visits from medical specialists this week. One from the Stroke Nurse, and one from an Occupational Therapist. They were both very pleased with her progress, and eventually discharged her from the care of the home team on Friday. However, she has to do one week of blood pressure monitoring at home to make sure that is stable, and she is not allowed to drive at all until her next appointment with Opthalmology at Norwich Hospital in February.

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We have had my oldest stepson staying with us again, as he was between accommodations. He has now found a place he likes, and has moved to stay with his sister until that flat is available to rent.

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Next Tuesday, Julie and I are going (by train) to London, to celebrate her 65th birthday by staying in a hotel for two nights close to where we used to live, and exploring a couple of our favourite restaurants that we haven’t been to since 2012. That is my birthday present to her as she tells me she really doesn’t need anything else.

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I hope that you all have a happy Sunday, doing whatever takes your fancy.

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Some New Random Facts

~ beetleypete ~ 45 Comments


Cows have accents.
Dairy farmers in the UK had noticed that cows mooed slightly differently depending on where they lived, so a team from the University of London decided to do a study. It turns out that yes, cows do moo differently based on their location! Birds have also been known to have regional dialects.


Reindeer and caribou are the same animal.
The difference, at least in the US, is that caribou are wild animals and reindeer are domesticated. In Europe, they’re mostly just referred to as reindeer.


The blinking light at the top of the Capitol Records building in Los Angeles sends out secret messages in Morse code.
The blinking light has been sending out messages since the building opened in 1956, and Samuel Morse’s own granddaughter Leila Morse flipped the switch to turn the light on for the first time. The default message, which is active most days, spells out “Hollywood.” However, the building sometimes sends out special messages, such as when the building celebrated its 50th anniversary (the light spelled out “Capitol 50” that year). It’ll also sometimes announce major album releases, as with Katy Perry’s Prism.


Abraham Lincoln is in the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.
Lincoln was an accomplished wrestler in his youth and has a spot in the Hall of Fame, along with fellow presidents George Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft.


Sunglasses were originally prescribed to people with syphilis.
Syphilis causes sensitivity to light, so in the 19th and early 20th centuries, people would wear sunglasses and rest them on metal nose coverings, since skin deterioration around your nostrils is another symptom of the disease.


Stop signs used to be yellow.
Up until the 1920s, there were no standardized guidelines for stop signs, so they could be any color or shape. In 1922, the American Association of State Highway Officials decided that the signs should be yellow octagons…red wouldn’t work because the paint would fade over time and look too dark at night. It wasn’t until the 1950s, when a fade-resistant red paint became available, that stop signs were standardized as red.


“A second is called a second because it is the second division of the hour by 60, the first division being a minute.”


“From a botanical standpoint, strawberries and raspberries aren’t berries, but bananas and avocados are.”


“The Atlantic Ocean is saltier than the Pacific Ocean.”


“You can fit all the planets of the solar system between Earth and the moon.”


“On Venus, a year is shorter than a day — meaning it takes Venus less time to orbit the Sun (year) than to complete one rotation (day).”


The world’s largest wild camel population is in Australia, not in the Middle East or the Sahara Desert.

Grateful For Rain

~ beetleypete ~ 42 Comments

At 5pm on Thursday, it started to rain heavily in Beetley. By the time I went to bed, the wind was lashing the rain against the windows, making it difficult to sleep.

Then it didn’t stop raining.

It rained all night, all day Friday, all night on Friday too. It finally stopped early this morning, and I got up to a ‘watery sun’. The forecast for the next 4-5 days is for more rain, but for now I will appreciate the break.

While that was going on here in the east of England, other regions of the UK were hit by a snowstorm, and winds of up to 100mph. This caused extensive property damage, injuries and deaths from falling trees, coastal erosion, heavy snow, and sheet ice.

Over 50,000 people are still without electricity, many roads are impassable, trains are cancelled, and airports closed. Hundreds of cars had to be abandoned by their drivers, adding to the chaos on some major routes.

I complain a great deal about rain, and always have.

But this time, I am grateful that rain was all we had, during one of the worst storms to hit the country in ten years.

Britons on Holiday In The 1950s/1960s

~ beetleypete ~ 56 Comments

This bleak weather we are currently experiencing has made me feel nostalgic for the summer holidays of my childhood again.

Long before cheap flights led to holidays abroad being more affordable, most British people were happy to spend their annual two-week holiday by a beach in the UK. The emergence of two large chains of holiday camps run by Billy Butlin and Fred Pontin introduced the concept of inclusive accommodation, meals, and on site-entertainment. The holidaymakers were happy to join in with all the organised events.

They were incredibly popular then, and some still operate today.

Other people were happy to just rent a chalet or caravan or stay in a guest house, then spend time sitting on the beach, walking along the pier, taking donkey rides, swimming, or playing in the sand.

Simple pleasures from a very different time.

Let Him In: Part Fifteen

~ beetleypete ~ 44 Comments

This is the final part of a fiction serial, in 858 words.

Refusing to cry, Sally sat down at the table holding the spare key. He had warned her, but she had never expected it to happen so soon. Jake ran in from the living room with a question.

“Mummy, where’s Jim? Has he gone to the shops? I’m just turning on the TV, and he is usually ready to watch it with me”. There was no point trying to sugar coat anything, so she told him the best thing she could think up on the spur of the moment.

“He had to go back to the army, my darling. They needed him, so must have contacted him while we were at school. We might see him again one day”.

Jake seemed to take it surprisingly well. Children were adaptable, more so than adults.

“Okay then. I hope he comes back soon”.

She went back up to the spare room to see if anything had been left for her. A note perhaps. The bed was perfectly made, everything spotlessly clean, but no farewell of any kind.

It was easy enough to keep Jake’s mind off Jim’s departure. A trip to the park on Saturday morning, followed by a two-night sleepover with Rudy at Bernice’s house. Bernice could tell things had changed.

“He’s gone then?” Sally nodded.

“Probably for the best, it was all too much too soon really”.

October and early November passed for Sally as if she was in a haze. She did her best to keep Jake amused, and marvelled at how he would now eat any food she served him. He had stopped asking about Jim once two weeks had passed, but she saw that he always looked at the bench as they got near to it.

Then Christmas was coming up, and seemed to come around faster every year. There would be the school holidays to deal with, and Bernice would let Jake stay with her on the days Sally had to work.

Although respectful of Jim’s wishes, she really wanted to invite him to come and spend Christmas with them. Jake would love him to be there when he opened his new football boots and goalkeeper’s shirt, and she would lay on a lovely turkey dinner for the three of them.

An idea had been forming about how to contact him. She knew his full name and rank, and the regiment he had served in. Surely they would have some kind of records? Perhaps an association of former members who might have some kind of contact details for Jim.

The first attempt was an email to the army, using a contact address that she found on the British Army website. She pretended to be a family friend who had lost touch with Jim, telling the truth that she wanted to invite him to stay over Christmas. When she received a standard acknowledgement, she was excited, and checked every day for a reply. When it came, she was disappointed.

Reading between the lines of a lot of offical gobbledegook, they did not divulge details of any serving or formerly serving personnel except to proven next of kin whose details they had on record. So that was that.

After a couple of days, she tried something similar, contacting Jim’s regiment directly through the regimental website. It even had a section for ‘Reunions’, so she phrased her request around that, once again saying she wanted him to visit for Christmas, and she left all of her contact details, even her address and phone number. This time there was no standard acknowledgement, and no immediate reply either.

The end of November came, and she changed the calendar hanging on the kitchen wall to December. It was a Premier League football calendar, bought specially for Jake. On the blank box for the twenty-fifth, she drew a small Christmas tree in red marker pen.

Standing back to see how it looked, she was startled by her phone ringing in her coat pocket. She didn’t recognise the number on the screen, but answered it anyway. The man at the other end had a very posh accent, and sounded like a newsreader on the BBC.

“You made an enquiry about Staff Sergeant James Alexander, I believe? Well my name is Captain Mark Carlyle, and I am the adjutant of that regiment”. Sally’s heart skipped a beat as she waited for him to continue.

“I have to ask you if this enquiry is a joke, or some kind of malicious communication”. She assured him it was genuine, but he didn’t sound convinced.

“In that case I am sorry to inform you that Staff Sergeant Alexander was killed in action in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in two thousand and ten. So it must be a very long time indeed that you have not been in touch”.

She didn’t notice the phone fall from her hand onto the kitchen floor, and her legs felt like they were going to give way. So she clutched the back of a chair and lowered herself into it slowly. When she picked the phone up the screen was cracked, but it was still working.

Captain Carlyle had hung up.

The End.