I’m “filing my report” a couple of days after the fact; this blog is about my trip to Wimborne, Dorset, to visit Willie Botterill at her house in the country.
Willie is the Associate Director of the Michael Palin Centre and actually lives in 2 places; in London, she has a 1 bedroom flat (i.e., apartment) that she and her husband live in from Sunday evening until Thursday evening. Then, they commute 100 miles home to Dorset to the house they consider as their home. Willie invited me to join them this past weekend.
Her husband David (who goes by “Bot”) had already gone to Dorset earlier in the week, so we took a bus from Victoria Coach Station. Victoria Station is one of the major train/tube/bus stations here in London, along with Paddington and Waterloo stations. You can get almost anywhere you need to go in England using one of these 3 stations.
The bus ride took almost 3 hours to travel 100 miles because of the traffic outside London. Within the city, they have a congestion charge program. There are geographical boundaries that run east-west and north-south that apply from 6:30 am until 7:00 pm on weekdays. If you drive a car within these boundaries, you must log onto a special website by midnight that night and pay £8 ($16) for driving within the congestion zone. They have cameras mounted at various spots around town and will take a picture of your license plate, so if you don’t pay, you get hit with a pretty big fine (I think around $400).
The good news about the congestion charge is that traffic within the city is really very good – not a lot of cars, getting around quickly is fairly easy. However, once you leave London, it’s kind of a nightmare. I guess this time of year is especially bad because the kids have just begun their summer vacation so every family is trying to get out of town to go on vacation.
Bot picked us up in a little town called Ringwood (I had to look this up because I kept wanting to write Ringworm), which seems to be about 10 miles from where they live in Wimborne. When we drove up to their house, I almost fell out of the car. It’s not a house, it’s a MANSION. It was built around 1840, has 13 bedrooms and 10 bathrooms, and is on 5 acres which are mostly gardens. It’s an absolutely amazing house in an amazing setting. I’ve loaded lots of pictures of her gardens because I know some of you will enjoy looking at them but if you’re not a garden-type person, you’ll want to page through them quickly.
The interesting thing about their living arrangement is that they share the house with Willie’s brother Robert and his family. Robert and his wife have 2 young daughters and live in the house full-time. Willie & Bot are only there on weekends. They bought the house together because both families wanted to have a house in the country and if they pooled their money, they could get a large place. When they bought the house, it was kind of a wreck so Bot, who flips properties as his business, did a bunch of construction and fixed it up. One of his biggest projects was to make a 2nd kitchen for the house along with a sitting room, with the reason being that most families spend their time in/around the kitchen, so it was important for both families to have their own space in that department. Willie admits that it’s an unusual arrangement but it works for them for now.
I didn’t take a lot of pictures inside the house because I thought it would be tacky. (I did do some tacky stuff that you’ll find out about in a sec, but it wasn’t in front of Willie & Bot. Ha)
About the house, I can tell you that they have 12 foot ceilings, the rooms are huge (e.g., their dining room can easily seat 25 people around the table plus not have to move out the china hutch or sideboard), and it already had 2 master suites (huge bedrooms with dressing rooms and bathrooms). I had a tub in my bathroom but no shower, so Willie had me use her brother/sister-in-law’s bathroom because it had a shower. I used about 75 gallons of water for my first shower there, though, because I didn’t realize that the shower head operated on a completely different faucet system... I turned on the water in the tub which came gushing out like someone had busted open a dam, then I turned the knob for the shower and water came gushing out of there too. Hmm. Found out the next morning that you can turn the shower on withOUT having to turn on the tub. Yikes.
The weekend was supposed to be a quiet one, but plans quickly changed. Willie and Bot have 2 sons, Sam who’s 28 and Harry bwho’s 24 who both showed up for the weekend. They also have a daughter named Jessie, but she was in Spain with friends. Sam works in London in financial public relations, and Harry is a toy engineer with Lego in Denmark. He was home visiting for about 10 days and showed up Saturday with about 7 of his school friends. The 13 bedrooms immediately came in handy. Both boys are fabulously good-looking (see their pics on Flickr) but better than that, they are smart, funny, kind, and well-mannered.
One of the interesting things about the boys is that they attended the same boarding school as Princes William & Harry. Sam played on the same soccer team as William, and Harry and Harry built model airplanes together. Their pictures from the school and the team/planes are hanging on the wall together with Willie’s other family pictures. Here’s the tacky part – I was too chicken to take pictures of the interior of the house, but I DID take pictures of the pictures with the princes that were hanging on their walls. Of course, I only took them when I was alone for a bit in the house on Sunday. Because I’m a chicken and tacky at heart. Can you believe it??? UGH I am such a hillbilly. I truly was having a “Should I? Shouldn’t I?” debate with the little devil on one shoulder and the little angel on the other. Needless to say, the devil won out and I took the pics, but the angel is making me feel guilty enough that I’m not posting them. At least not tonight. LOL
On Saturday, Willie and I went into Wimborne Market, a combination farmer’s/flea market. This was an experience. First, the farmer’s produce was amazing – very colorful and tons of it. The interesting thing about this was that the people working in the stalls were shouting things out at people walking by, “Get your grapes here, only 1 pound for a nice bowl of grapes!” “I need some customers, help me clap to get some customers!” In addition to produce, there were also cheese stands, meat stands, antiques booths, knick-knack bad garage sale type stuff, jewelry, used clothing, new clothing.... You name it, you could get it here. I loved it. I bought a dress from one of the new clothing booths – it’s from Paris and is linen, so I’ll fit right in with the rest of the people here. It’s also brown, which will also make me fit in. I wear much brighter clothing than most other women here in London, I’ve noticed... Kind of sticking out to everyone who pretty much looks at me thinking, “You’re not from around here, are ya?”
The other funny thing about Wimborne market is that we saw 4 of Willie’s relatives there. She had warned me that a lot of her family lives around Dorset and we might run into some of them. So, it’s Saturday at noon and I’ve already met 2 of her sons and 7 of their friends, and 4 relatives.
Saturday afternoon, we drove to Sandbanks (on the English Channel), where I met approximately 20 more of Willie’s relatives – nephews, cousins etc. I’m not kidding, we met up with at least 20 as we walked along the beach and various places around Sandbanks. She and 119 other family members own property in this little town, left to them by a grandfather who wanted it to be a place his family met up each year. She obviously takes great joy in having this family connection – every group of relatives we met, she would get a huge smile on her face and there were hugs/kisses all around. It was neat to witness.
If you look on a map of England, and look at the south central coast, you will see a city called Bournemouth and maybe even a harbor called Poole Harbour. Sandbanks is right on Poole Harbour, just a little to the west of Bournemouth. It is the 2nd largest natural harbour in the world, with Sydney Harbour being the only one that’s larger. The harbour is on one side of the town and the English Channel is on the other. When you’re on the beach here, you can see the Isle of Wight in the distance on one side. On the other, you can see some distant white cliffs – these are chalk cliffs known as the Jurassic Cliffs. There are so many fossils embedded in these cliffs along the English Coast that about 240 miles of the coastline is being designated as a World Heritage Site. I tried to take pictures as best I could of the Isle of Wight and of the cliffs, but they were pretty far from where we were standing on the beach. There’s even a castle on Poole Harbour – Gramercy Castle. I tried to google it to see what I could find out but the only thing that kept coming up was Gramercy Park Hotel in NYC.
Saturday night was quiet for the most part – the boys went out with friends and Willie, Bot, and I had a quiet dinner in. Sunday morning, we made breakfast for everyone then made up a picnic lunch for Bot and all the “kids” because they went back to Sandbanks to sail. Willie and I took a walk around the property, she went to the grocery store (and I took pictures of her pictures of Princes then had a guilt meltdown about it), and then threw a barbeque for everyone when they got back. It was really great to meet so many talented and fun young people and it made me really wish that Lindsey had been with me.
I asked Willie if she’d had any Princess Diana encounters and she said that once, the boys were allowed to bring movies to school to watch because it was the end of the semester and they were finishing up with exams etc. Harry wanted to take a movie that was rated PG-13 but she refused and told him that it was inappropriate. They get to school, and lo and behold, Prince Harry showed up with Universal Soldier, which was rated as “18,” meaning only people older than that were supposed to see it. Willie told Diana that she thought that Universal Soldier wasn’t appropriate for the kids and Diana made Prince Harry give it up. Bot said that the advantage to having his sons go to school with the Princes was that they were in the safest place in England; there were 2 police booths on the school property and both Princes had 2 bodyguards with them at all times.
All in all, the weekend was really enjoyable and Willie and Bot’s hospitality and company were fantastic.
Ok, so time for random observations:
-- The English don’t refrigerate their eggs. You can buy eggs off shelves in the grocery, in the farmer’s market, from a butcher shop... And they don’t keep them in the refrigerator when they get them home. Willie told me that eggs will actually keep for quite a long time before they go “off.” This makes me wonder about friends I’ve known who got food poisoning from eating raw eggs. The English also keep their jellies/jams in cupboards rather than in the refrigerator.
-- Dogs are everywhere here – people take them all over the place, sometimes even on the Tube. I have to say, though, that they are 100% better mannered than most American dogs I know including, unfortunately, the Z. They walk calmly on leashes, some of them don’t even have to be leashed, you never hear or see them barking... It blows me away.
-- Proving my point that a 2 ring binder system is against God’s plan for binding looseleaf paper... I bought a large 2 ring binder the other day because the one that the clinic loaned me was too small and was getting filled up. The large binders though, have a weird clasp and lever system by which you open them up to put the paper onto the rings. Somehow the binder I got was messed up somehow and the little lever came off a wheel so that the rings wouldn’t close. I was trying to fix it when POW, the metal pieces exploded off the spine of the binder and one pierced my fingernail right down to the nail bed, right in the middle of my fingernail. I was bleeding and everything, and it HURT. Still does, as a matter of fact. First of all, a 2-inch binder is not a complicated piece of office equipment – a metal lever system shouldn’t be needed. Second, I have used many ring binders in my life and the worst thing that’s ever happened to me is getting a small pinch when I accidentally shut the rings on my finger. I have never had any sort of penetrating wound from a binder. Until now.
-- There was some discussion at the planning meetings for the intensive course about whether it was ok to use the term “brainstorm” or whether we should use a term like “thought shower” instead. The brainstorm term is supposed to be biased against people with epilepsy, therefore not politically correct. It IS ok, though, to say someone is “having an epi” when they are upset and having a fit. Does this seem strange to you, that you shouldn’t use “brainstorm” but it’s ok to use “epi”?
-- When the English make coffee, they pretty much use Nestle Instant Coffee. You can buy the brewed stuff at Starbucks, LaTazza, or Caffe Nero, but if you’re making it at home, you make instant coffee.
-- Knife crime continues to get lots of attention in the papers (mostly because they keep having knife crimes occur). The teenagers who commit the crimes are referred to as “yobs.” From what I can tell, this is the word that would be equivalent to “thugs” or “gangsters.” “A gang of yobs was seen chasing a young woman...” LOVE this word and plan on adding it to my vocabulary as soon and as frequently as possible. Ya big yobs.
-- There are 4 speech pathology students who are doing a practicum placement at the clinic to help with the intensive. They’re mostly observing therapy rather than conducting it themselves, but it seems that one of their main jobs is to make tea for all of the MPC staff and parents. Several times a day, they go off to turn the kettle on, they bring cups of tea to the clinicians, they wash up ... This is very different from what we would expect from students in the US. Although, it does seem like a good idea for students to run and get me a diet coke (WITH ICE) every now and then... Hmmm...
Love,
Lisa
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nedc/sets/72157606345036905/
Willie is the Associate Director of the Michael Palin Centre and actually lives in 2 places; in London, she has a 1 bedroom flat (i.e., apartment) that she and her husband live in from Sunday evening until Thursday evening. Then, they commute 100 miles home to Dorset to the house they consider as their home. Willie invited me to join them this past weekend.
Her husband David (who goes by “Bot”) had already gone to Dorset earlier in the week, so we took a bus from Victoria Coach Station. Victoria Station is one of the major train/tube/bus stations here in London, along with Paddington and Waterloo stations. You can get almost anywhere you need to go in England using one of these 3 stations.
The bus ride took almost 3 hours to travel 100 miles because of the traffic outside London. Within the city, they have a congestion charge program. There are geographical boundaries that run east-west and north-south that apply from 6:30 am until 7:00 pm on weekdays. If you drive a car within these boundaries, you must log onto a special website by midnight that night and pay £8 ($16) for driving within the congestion zone. They have cameras mounted at various spots around town and will take a picture of your license plate, so if you don’t pay, you get hit with a pretty big fine (I think around $400).
The good news about the congestion charge is that traffic within the city is really very good – not a lot of cars, getting around quickly is fairly easy. However, once you leave London, it’s kind of a nightmare. I guess this time of year is especially bad because the kids have just begun their summer vacation so every family is trying to get out of town to go on vacation.
Bot picked us up in a little town called Ringwood (I had to look this up because I kept wanting to write Ringworm), which seems to be about 10 miles from where they live in Wimborne. When we drove up to their house, I almost fell out of the car. It’s not a house, it’s a MANSION. It was built around 1840, has 13 bedrooms and 10 bathrooms, and is on 5 acres which are mostly gardens. It’s an absolutely amazing house in an amazing setting. I’ve loaded lots of pictures of her gardens because I know some of you will enjoy looking at them but if you’re not a garden-type person, you’ll want to page through them quickly.
The interesting thing about their living arrangement is that they share the house with Willie’s brother Robert and his family. Robert and his wife have 2 young daughters and live in the house full-time. Willie & Bot are only there on weekends. They bought the house together because both families wanted to have a house in the country and if they pooled their money, they could get a large place. When they bought the house, it was kind of a wreck so Bot, who flips properties as his business, did a bunch of construction and fixed it up. One of his biggest projects was to make a 2nd kitchen for the house along with a sitting room, with the reason being that most families spend their time in/around the kitchen, so it was important for both families to have their own space in that department. Willie admits that it’s an unusual arrangement but it works for them for now.
I didn’t take a lot of pictures inside the house because I thought it would be tacky. (I did do some tacky stuff that you’ll find out about in a sec, but it wasn’t in front of Willie & Bot. Ha)
About the house, I can tell you that they have 12 foot ceilings, the rooms are huge (e.g., their dining room can easily seat 25 people around the table plus not have to move out the china hutch or sideboard), and it already had 2 master suites (huge bedrooms with dressing rooms and bathrooms). I had a tub in my bathroom but no shower, so Willie had me use her brother/sister-in-law’s bathroom because it had a shower. I used about 75 gallons of water for my first shower there, though, because I didn’t realize that the shower head operated on a completely different faucet system... I turned on the water in the tub which came gushing out like someone had busted open a dam, then I turned the knob for the shower and water came gushing out of there too. Hmm. Found out the next morning that you can turn the shower on withOUT having to turn on the tub. Yikes.
The weekend was supposed to be a quiet one, but plans quickly changed. Willie and Bot have 2 sons, Sam who’s 28 and Harry bwho’s 24 who both showed up for the weekend. They also have a daughter named Jessie, but she was in Spain with friends. Sam works in London in financial public relations, and Harry is a toy engineer with Lego in Denmark. He was home visiting for about 10 days and showed up Saturday with about 7 of his school friends. The 13 bedrooms immediately came in handy. Both boys are fabulously good-looking (see their pics on Flickr) but better than that, they are smart, funny, kind, and well-mannered.
One of the interesting things about the boys is that they attended the same boarding school as Princes William & Harry. Sam played on the same soccer team as William, and Harry and Harry built model airplanes together. Their pictures from the school and the team/planes are hanging on the wall together with Willie’s other family pictures. Here’s the tacky part – I was too chicken to take pictures of the interior of the house, but I DID take pictures of the pictures with the princes that were hanging on their walls. Of course, I only took them when I was alone for a bit in the house on Sunday. Because I’m a chicken and tacky at heart. Can you believe it??? UGH I am such a hillbilly. I truly was having a “Should I? Shouldn’t I?” debate with the little devil on one shoulder and the little angel on the other. Needless to say, the devil won out and I took the pics, but the angel is making me feel guilty enough that I’m not posting them. At least not tonight. LOL
On Saturday, Willie and I went into Wimborne Market, a combination farmer’s/flea market. This was an experience. First, the farmer’s produce was amazing – very colorful and tons of it. The interesting thing about this was that the people working in the stalls were shouting things out at people walking by, “Get your grapes here, only 1 pound for a nice bowl of grapes!” “I need some customers, help me clap to get some customers!” In addition to produce, there were also cheese stands, meat stands, antiques booths, knick-knack bad garage sale type stuff, jewelry, used clothing, new clothing.... You name it, you could get it here. I loved it. I bought a dress from one of the new clothing booths – it’s from Paris and is linen, so I’ll fit right in with the rest of the people here. It’s also brown, which will also make me fit in. I wear much brighter clothing than most other women here in London, I’ve noticed... Kind of sticking out to everyone who pretty much looks at me thinking, “You’re not from around here, are ya?”
The other funny thing about Wimborne market is that we saw 4 of Willie’s relatives there. She had warned me that a lot of her family lives around Dorset and we might run into some of them. So, it’s Saturday at noon and I’ve already met 2 of her sons and 7 of their friends, and 4 relatives.
Saturday afternoon, we drove to Sandbanks (on the English Channel), where I met approximately 20 more of Willie’s relatives – nephews, cousins etc. I’m not kidding, we met up with at least 20 as we walked along the beach and various places around Sandbanks. She and 119 other family members own property in this little town, left to them by a grandfather who wanted it to be a place his family met up each year. She obviously takes great joy in having this family connection – every group of relatives we met, she would get a huge smile on her face and there were hugs/kisses all around. It was neat to witness.
If you look on a map of England, and look at the south central coast, you will see a city called Bournemouth and maybe even a harbor called Poole Harbour. Sandbanks is right on Poole Harbour, just a little to the west of Bournemouth. It is the 2nd largest natural harbour in the world, with Sydney Harbour being the only one that’s larger. The harbour is on one side of the town and the English Channel is on the other. When you’re on the beach here, you can see the Isle of Wight in the distance on one side. On the other, you can see some distant white cliffs – these are chalk cliffs known as the Jurassic Cliffs. There are so many fossils embedded in these cliffs along the English Coast that about 240 miles of the coastline is being designated as a World Heritage Site. I tried to take pictures as best I could of the Isle of Wight and of the cliffs, but they were pretty far from where we were standing on the beach. There’s even a castle on Poole Harbour – Gramercy Castle. I tried to google it to see what I could find out but the only thing that kept coming up was Gramercy Park Hotel in NYC.
Saturday night was quiet for the most part – the boys went out with friends and Willie, Bot, and I had a quiet dinner in. Sunday morning, we made breakfast for everyone then made up a picnic lunch for Bot and all the “kids” because they went back to Sandbanks to sail. Willie and I took a walk around the property, she went to the grocery store (and I took pictures of her pictures of Princes then had a guilt meltdown about it), and then threw a barbeque for everyone when they got back. It was really great to meet so many talented and fun young people and it made me really wish that Lindsey had been with me.
I asked Willie if she’d had any Princess Diana encounters and she said that once, the boys were allowed to bring movies to school to watch because it was the end of the semester and they were finishing up with exams etc. Harry wanted to take a movie that was rated PG-13 but she refused and told him that it was inappropriate. They get to school, and lo and behold, Prince Harry showed up with Universal Soldier, which was rated as “18,” meaning only people older than that were supposed to see it. Willie told Diana that she thought that Universal Soldier wasn’t appropriate for the kids and Diana made Prince Harry give it up. Bot said that the advantage to having his sons go to school with the Princes was that they were in the safest place in England; there were 2 police booths on the school property and both Princes had 2 bodyguards with them at all times.
All in all, the weekend was really enjoyable and Willie and Bot’s hospitality and company were fantastic.
Ok, so time for random observations:
-- The English don’t refrigerate their eggs. You can buy eggs off shelves in the grocery, in the farmer’s market, from a butcher shop... And they don’t keep them in the refrigerator when they get them home. Willie told me that eggs will actually keep for quite a long time before they go “off.” This makes me wonder about friends I’ve known who got food poisoning from eating raw eggs. The English also keep their jellies/jams in cupboards rather than in the refrigerator.
-- Dogs are everywhere here – people take them all over the place, sometimes even on the Tube. I have to say, though, that they are 100% better mannered than most American dogs I know including, unfortunately, the Z. They walk calmly on leashes, some of them don’t even have to be leashed, you never hear or see them barking... It blows me away.
-- Proving my point that a 2 ring binder system is against God’s plan for binding looseleaf paper... I bought a large 2 ring binder the other day because the one that the clinic loaned me was too small and was getting filled up. The large binders though, have a weird clasp and lever system by which you open them up to put the paper onto the rings. Somehow the binder I got was messed up somehow and the little lever came off a wheel so that the rings wouldn’t close. I was trying to fix it when POW, the metal pieces exploded off the spine of the binder and one pierced my fingernail right down to the nail bed, right in the middle of my fingernail. I was bleeding and everything, and it HURT. Still does, as a matter of fact. First of all, a 2-inch binder is not a complicated piece of office equipment – a metal lever system shouldn’t be needed. Second, I have used many ring binders in my life and the worst thing that’s ever happened to me is getting a small pinch when I accidentally shut the rings on my finger. I have never had any sort of penetrating wound from a binder. Until now.
-- There was some discussion at the planning meetings for the intensive course about whether it was ok to use the term “brainstorm” or whether we should use a term like “thought shower” instead. The brainstorm term is supposed to be biased against people with epilepsy, therefore not politically correct. It IS ok, though, to say someone is “having an epi” when they are upset and having a fit. Does this seem strange to you, that you shouldn’t use “brainstorm” but it’s ok to use “epi”?
-- When the English make coffee, they pretty much use Nestle Instant Coffee. You can buy the brewed stuff at Starbucks, LaTazza, or Caffe Nero, but if you’re making it at home, you make instant coffee.
-- Knife crime continues to get lots of attention in the papers (mostly because they keep having knife crimes occur). The teenagers who commit the crimes are referred to as “yobs.” From what I can tell, this is the word that would be equivalent to “thugs” or “gangsters.” “A gang of yobs was seen chasing a young woman...” LOVE this word and plan on adding it to my vocabulary as soon and as frequently as possible. Ya big yobs.
-- There are 4 speech pathology students who are doing a practicum placement at the clinic to help with the intensive. They’re mostly observing therapy rather than conducting it themselves, but it seems that one of their main jobs is to make tea for all of the MPC staff and parents. Several times a day, they go off to turn the kettle on, they bring cups of tea to the clinicians, they wash up ... This is very different from what we would expect from students in the US. Although, it does seem like a good idea for students to run and get me a diet coke (WITH ICE) every now and then... Hmmm...
Love,
Lisa
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nedc/sets/72157606345036905/
1 comment:
Wow, a very cool place to spend the weekend.
Do they have ice makers in the refrigerators in their homes?
Post a Comment