Jun 2012 London   (e-mailed to friends & family)

 

I had decided not to do any more of these, and haven't for over a year.  But I find with one thing and another that I do not keep in touch with everyone as I'd like.  And then it's embarrassing when you do eventually get in touch to deal with "I thought you had died" or whatever.

It's embarrassing, too, to list all the things we've been up to (Look at me!  I've been round the world and had tea with the Dalai Lama!  And Quintin has just got into Oxford, and Lucretia is working at a leper colony in Benin!).  So never mind, here goes...

We went to Madrid in April 2011 for 10 days to stay with Amber's son Oak and his girlfriend Ines at their flat in the Lavapies district, which is central and Reina Sofia gallery.  I almost cried last week when I heard that Ines had insisted that if they rented a flat it should have wheelchair access.  Ines' parents are great fun - they came and stayed at our house for a month last time we went to Argentina.  Oak is doing photography, mainly for art galleries and architects, in Spain, Italy, China, London, Brussels etc., and Ines is doing micro-financing for the Aga Khan Foundation, which she can do anywhere there is an internet connection. 

Then in September we went to  Beijing for 5 weeks to visit Amber's daughter Astra (and Finn and LiJi).  The highlight was a road trip to Inner Mongolia - 2000 miles over 5 days, 12 of us in 3 cars.  As you might expect, it was gob-smacking.  Pretty hills, farming, villages, part of the Great Wall, vast empty steppes (China is NOT crowded).  Large empty modern gold and marble hotels in the middle of nowhere.  Grotty hotel by a lake where we went to bed with our clothes on it was so cold, but they cooked us a sheep (it was LiJi's birthday) and several bottles of brandy were drunk.   And we passed through a large million capacity city they have built, but don't have any inhabitants yet.  Extraordinary.

While in Beijing we took a week's trip to Hong Kong to visit Amber's son Cass, and Lucy and Rex who is a complete darling.  On the way, at Beijing airport, the security chap pushing my wheelchair insisted that I pass my wallet through the luggage scanner, and when we weren't looking one of the other passengers had nicked it!  What with cameras etc. they were pretty sure who it was, and in the good old days they would simply have taken him out and shot him, but China is fast adopting Western values, so they let him get away.

Then (!) we went to the Argentine at the end of October, and stayed till the beginning of March.  We went in October because that's when our friends Sally and Steve were going on a Chiswick Wine Society tour of Mendoza.  They stayed with us a few days, then went on their tour, then we flew to Mendoza to join them for 4 days staying in a nice small country hotel, where the owner/chef did all the cooking outside over a fire or in a large clay oven. 

Then in December Oak and Ines arrived, and they slept in our spare room, closely followed by Astra and Finn, who stayed in one of the wacky apartments 50 metres down the road owned by our friend Mercedes.   Christmas was nice and low-key, with only the occasional bit of tinsel in shop windows.  The main meal was on Xmas eve, about 20 of us having a long asado at Mercedes', and eventually well after midnight going to a milonga (a local tango-dancing place).  Oak and Ines and Astra and Finn took a bus to Iguazu which the very impressed by.  The bus was 18hrs, but they were served dinner and breakfast and had horizontal reclining berths, so they quite enjoyed that. 

Li Ji didn't come because the Argentine embassy would not give him a visa, saying they only gave them to tour groups.  In spite of the fact that they had a party in one of LiJi's restaurants and had never paid, and in spite of the fact that every supermarket in Argentina is run by Chinese, and I doubt that they entered on a tour visa.

Oak and Ines left for home after 3 weeks, and we went with Astra and Finn down to Patagonia to El Calafate to see the glaciers.  Our presidenta Cristina Kirchner comes from Calafate, and has a big house there.  The glaciers really are special, and I gasp internally whenever I think of them.  After a couple of days we flew up to Peninsula Valdes, and Finn, who is keen on that sort of thing, was in 7th heaven encountering seals, sea lions, penguins, ostriches, llamas, armadillos and foxes.  No whales, though, which we had seen close up (wow!) from a boat last time we were there in November, but by January they have gone off on their whale holidays. 

On Astra's last day she badly stubbed her toe, and went in agony by taxi with Amber to the Hospital Aleman (German hospital).  Within 10 minutes she had had an x-ray, 10 minutes later they got the x-rays and saw the doctor (2 broken bones), and he sent her to the pharmacy to get some painkillers and a special boot which turned out to be ideal.   Total cost £100.  Go figure, NHS!

Then in February out friend Diana Mason came for 3 weeks.  Every day or two we went to the Darling Tenis (rhymes with tennis) Club for a game, a swim and a leisurely lunch out under the trees.  They play together in London, and one of their friends there kept insisting that we get in touch with her cousin in Buenos Aires.  Yeah yeah, she had not even met us, why would she want to meet visiting strangers etc., but eventually we phoned her and she invited us out to their estancia, just like that!  Toya was about our age and delightful, she picked us up on the Sunday morning and we drove 3 hours west (it is flat and gently rising all the way to the Andes).  Then we went through these gates and were in 10 acres of English gardens, with beautiful tended lawns and flower beds, a swimming pool and tennis court, a 10-bedroom Home Counties style house, and complete with a labrador (and a rhodesian ridgeback).  Her brother Nick and his wife Vivienne share the house, and are keen gardeners.  Nick showed us the new 1 acre special garden he is planting, with bushes and plants chosen not so much for themselves as for the insects they attract.  They were unbelievably kind, generous and nice to us, and we stayed till Wednesday.  Talking to my sister Alison in Peru later, it seems that their father was my grandmother's family doctor in Buenos Aires.  And they gave me the phone number of their good friend Geoffrey Edbrooke, who was a close childhood friend of mine in BA 60 years ago.

So our 4 months in BA turned out very well.  The life suits us.  The San Telmo area suits us, there are about 50 restaurants within 3 blocks of our flat.  The square 100m away has cafe tables, tango dancing, and the Sunday antiques market.  With the internet we never feel at all isolated (apart from the petty sort of UK news, which is a boon).  The people are delightful.  And our health there is significantly better - better sleep, better digestion, no aches and pains or headaches, and we lose weight!

Back in UK it was my 70th birthday on May 8.  70 is old, no doubt about it.  About 20 mostly family gathered for lunch in a local restaurant, and we had an excellent relaxed time.  The following weekend we went down to Devon for a car hill-climb, Amber driving the Stinson which is a 1929 red single seat 3.3 liter American racing car, which our frind Michael Fitzmaurice has rebuilt so it is nice and fast and reliable.  The course is the drive of about a mile of a country house set deep in a beautiful valley, and you go up it as fast as you can (and dare), one at a time.  Amber's best was 54sec, a whole 3sec faster than last year, and she won a cup - she has about 8 of them now.  I reckon she is faster than I was, and is starting to be noticed.

In May we flew to Hong Kong for a week where Cass and Lucy seem to find time to keep us fascinatedly occupied.  Rex is 20 months, and a real sweetie.  They had spent 2 weeks with us in London in April, so Rex is very comfortable with us.  And Oak and Ines spent 2 weeks with us un May.  It is definitely the paradoxical case that you get to spend more time with your kids when they live abroad than when they live in the same country.

Then after HK we went on to Beijing.  Our (and now Astra's) friend Mercedes from Buenos Aires came over, and together with Astra's friend Shao Jie we spent 8 days on a road trip.  We saw the hanging monastery built on a cliff,  grottoes with 4000 statues of Buddah (some of them up to 20m tall), spent a couple of days in the un-modernised town center of Pingyao, and 3 days in Xian, which is largely Muslim and has fabulous street markets with stalls selling all kinds of food - nuts, fruit, kebabs, don't ask etc..  Then of course we went to see the terracotta army, which is as impressive as you would expect.   All these places have been very developed, with car parks, shops, visitor centers etc. - a bit like the Stonehenge Experience but 50 times bigger and more professional.  When Astra first visited some of these places there was just a dirt road to where you could park right at the thing, rather than 2 kilometers away.  It is all part of necessary modernisation and preparing for the truly vast number of Chinese who are starting to do tourism.  So go now, it is not going to get better!  We did over 3,000km, mostly on motorways.  High voltage pylons criss-crossing all over the place, any number of enormous crossroads with flyovers all over the place, mile after mile of high speed railway track for some reason elevated 30m in the air, and every few miles there would be a town with 5 or 10 blocks of 50 storey flats under construction.  A truly amazing place.  And we only went about 1 or 2 cm away from Beijing on the map! 

So we have spent 6 months of the year out of the country.  It is great fun (and it has to be said a great privilege).  But without a doubt it does affect the time we have to see all of our friends in UK.  But we miss you, and think of you, and have no intention of abandoning you!