BLOGGING - RUMINATIONS

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I'm ruminating about that old mystery, love, in this guest post at The Wounded Warrior today.

Just a word of warning: you may find some of The Wounded Warrior's content distressing but you will find some excellent poetry on the site as well.

Thanks for the invitation, Jan.

ANYTHING THAT'S PART OF YOU

Elvis Presley, my twitter stream reminds me, died 34 years ago today.  Below is a guest post about him that I wrote for the [now defunct] Shades of Grey blog in 2007 but I never did  post it here. Ian Grey now blogs at the new Shades of Grey.

Welshcakes from Sicily here, with a post that has nothing to do with Sicily whatsoever:

The King and I

I used to be able to recite Elvis Presley’s army number. I don’t know what good I thought this feat would do me, but my Dad thought I might have made a passable spy because I could commit this kind of information to memory. [To this day, I don’t have to write telephone numbers down.] Knowing and regurgitating useless facts about our pop idols was just something we did in those days of the Romeo andBliss girls' comics.

Elvis Presley entered my life after Tommy Steele and by this time we had 45 rpm records that you could stack on the spindle of your record player. I would watch entranced as the stylus arm automatically made its way across, used its side to knock a record onto the turntable then lowered itself onto the edge of the record to play it. Our record players didn’t need to be wound up any more [yes, I remember the gramophone!] and they were portable – not in the sense that an MP3 player is today, of course – but portable enough to put them on the floor in our bedrooms and stretch out beside them listening to and dreaming about Elvis or whoever else was in the “top ten”. It's hard to explain to younger generations the freedom we felt that this gave us: it made the music "ours", you see; we could listen to it in private or just with our friends; we didn't have to share it with our parents [who knew nothing about anything, did they?]


Elvis, of course, outlasted them all: Every time I received a record token as a present or saved up 7/6d [pre-decimal British currency] I was off down to the record shop in Stapleton Road and time and time again I came back with an Elvis recording because they always made it to number one in those days.


And in some ways, I think Elvis was my generation's first anti-hero [although the world had been assured by no less a personnage than Ed Sullivan that Elvis was a "fine, home-lovin' boy"]: he wasn’t baby-faced like Cliff Richard , ill-looking like Billy Fury or seemingly undernourished, as Adam Faith appeared in those days [though the latter became a thoroughly fanciable actor in a later incarnation]. The older “square” generation [though not my parents] were scandalised by Elvis’s pelvis twisting and you only had to look at those shadows under his eyes to swoon! [My Dad roared with laughter at Elvis’s pelvis antics in the film Love Me Tender, which was supposed to be set in the nineteenth century!] We needed anti-heroes, perhaps, because we had been brought up on so many tales of the unmatchable heroes of WW2.


I saw all the Elvis films and couldn’t have told you even five minutes after they finished what had happened in any of them, for I spent their running time snogging in the back row with my boyfriend Clive. All these films were fairly plotless vehicles for Elvis’s voice, anyway.Blue Hawaii was the first Elvis LP my Dad bought me and I still have it, along with the 45s.


How I cried over that version of Are You Lonesome Tonight?, absurd though the spoken part is: “Someone said ‘the world’s a stage’”; would it have sounded much less romantic to have said ‘Shakespeare’? Or was that too "square"? And that diction! “I wonder if… you’re lonesome tonight…” I played it over and over again after the break-up of my two-year romance with Clive and even now, when I hear it, I think of a “bright summer’s day when he kissed me and called me sweetheart” .


Then suddenly along came a group called The Beatles and the sound was unlike anything any of us had ever heard before . They looked different too – those strange suits and all that fuss over what were quite innocent haircuts. We transferred our loyalties to the sound of Liverpool and the Elvis releases stopped becoming automatic number ones. I’m ashamed to say that some of us forgot him, for a while. But he was still there, in the background and, older, fatter and often drugged up, he started to stage come-back concerts. I didn’t go for the religious songs he recorded in those later years but I loved the newer versions of the ballads – and strangely enough, my generation discovered, so did most of our mothers! I am listening to the “Love Songs” CD now, as I write.


My favourite Elvis songs? Always on my Mind – the line about “little things I should have said and done” always makes me cry and I think of my Mum; Anything that’s Part of You because I’m such a sentimental hoarder! And Return to Sender because it still makes me want to get up and jive!


When, thirty years ago today, I heard that Elvis had died I couldn’t believe it. It seemed that part of the “punctuation” of my youth had gone and of course it was so sad: all that money; a still fine voice; women who adored him all over the world; yet the king of rock ‘n’ roll had been so unhappy, walled up in Graceland finding solace in goodness knows what. So much has been written about that final decline that I am not going to go into it here, except to say that the death of his twin at birth may have had much more effect on him than we realise and certainly affected his relationship with his mother, whose death I don’t believe he recovered from.


I miss Elvis, who most inconsiderately did not show up in a Carson City supermarket during my one visit to the USA . I imagine him as a stunningly handsome older man, portly perhaps, but with a shock of white hair and still those haunting eyes, wowing the ladies as ever. But it was not to be. Perhaps he would never have been content. Who knows? And like another icon who died twenty years later during August, I don’t think Elvis ever knew how much he was loved.


“No reason left for me to live
What can I take, what can I give?
When I’d give all of someone new
For anything that’s part of you.”

We weren't able to upload youtube videos directly to blogs back in 2007 so I'm happy to be able to post my two favourite Elvis songs here today:

GUEST POST FOR ANDREW

I have a guest post up here at Andrew Allison's. As we are coming up to the Sicilians' favourite festival of I Morti, it is an edited version of a post I wrote in the early days of this blog about death traditons in Sicily.

Guamka

I must say thank you to Welshcakes for an invitation to guest post while she is away; I feel privileged, not to mention relieved that I have finally found time to do so just before she gets back. She has asked for posts themed loosely about travel or life abroad, so I hope it is not too much of a stretch for me to return to what was meant to be a series in another place about my adopted country. I mentioned that Russia had many stereotypes attached to it, despite Churchill's famous phrase about enigmas, riddles and the rest, which I hoped to try and unpick a little. The series was curtailed by, er, a trip to Russia, but now seems like a good opportunity to restart it.

One such stereotype revolves excess: no-one was really surprised to see Boris Nikolaevich conducting orchestras, now, were they? If we're talking about travel, have you thought about spending your next vacation in Chechnya? The Caucasus undeniably has some spectacular scenery, but you don't necessarily have to risk bullets to see it. One of the things that doubtless swung the 2014 Winter Olympics Sochi's way was the fact that the mountains run right down to the Black Sea. For those who still think that Putin's Russia has moved away from Soviet ideals, someone close to me was forced to stay at work until 2 in the morning "to support the bid". To be fair, she was allowed to quit, afterwards.

Over the summer, I was invited to Guamka, home to a famous gorge. The gorge itself is about 3km long, but its sides are up to 400m high. As we had driven south-west from Krasnodar, we came to a town called Apsheronsk, and noticed a narrow gauge railway running parallel to the main-line. You can read a railway enthusiasts' account of the line here (you may find the .pdf more easily laid out, if you can bear the download time and the risk of your system hanging. Get a proper operating system to help avoid the latter!) In fact, the line continues up the gorge, alongside the river. Our train-spotter is laconic:

Later, in thousands years, people hollowed this long ledge in the cliff, on which they laid steel rails and ran trains.

Well, that's strictly accurate, but I can't help feeling that the fact the line was laid by the manual labour of camp inmates is more than a little relevant. When we were there, the temperature was 40 degrees; it was an uncomfortable stroll until we reached the shade. My imagination falters to think what it must have been like to be breaking rocks in that heat. 40 plus in Krasnodarskii Krai, or 40 minus with Ivan Denisovich somewhere in Siberia. Russia has not been prone to treat its ordinary people well. Why was the line built at all? Past the gorge was a forest of oak trees some 700 or 800 years old, with height and girth to match - the previous evening our host Zhenya had described it as a kind of primeval, legendary, even magical place. The local Bolsheviks were delighted at this resource of timber, and determined to exploit it in the building of Communism. The whole exercise proved incredibly wasteful of human life and natural wealth - nobody can remember now where the wood from these unique trees actually went.

When not taken to such excess, this tendency to throw people back on their own resources is refreshing to one used to the increasingly nanny-ish fussing in Western countries. Zhenya casually remarked that we may prefer to walk on the side of the track closest to the cliff-face. That way, we were less likely to be struck by the rocks that occasionally come away from the gorge sides, and plummet down. In direct contrast to Hull, this is no empty threat, but there were no offical warning signs, just occasional mute memorial plaques.

In St. Petersburg, at the posher end of Nevskii Prospekt, there remains a sign from the time of the German blockade, saying "Citizens! During artillery bombardments, this side of the street is more dangerous". I always felt that this was an odd way of phrasing the danger: imagine you were on the other side of the street, caught sight of the sign, and crossed over to get a closer look. In Guamka, you don't even get this hint as to the trajectory of incoming projectiles.

If you can manage to avoid falling boulders, however, the gorge today belies its destructive past; it is a beautiful and tranquil spot. Twelve sips from a particular waterfall that flows down the valley side are reputed to prolong life by twelve years - I took my dozen. Zhenya asserts that, no matter how much vodka vanished on the prveious evening, you can always make it to the end of the gorge and back, and feel uplifted for doing so. Again, I can vouch for this. Approximately halfway along is a little building now given over to the sale of beer, ice-cream, and that sweet peach "nectar" which is so inexplicably popular in Russia. Yet again, we approach mythic status, for, apparently, the restorative properties of the canyon meant it was one of several locations dotted around the former Soviet Union chosen for Yuri Gagarin to recuperate in after his historic flight, and this building was put up specially for him. He never came. Of course, the conspiracy theorists would have you believe he was not the first man in space, he was merely the first one to return. Given what I have already described in this piece, not to mention what else you know about the Soviet Union, is that so very hard to believe?

I name this Ship...

Final guest post from Ian (shades of) Grey

It seems to be part of the human condition that we want to leave a lasting memory, preferably a positive one. (There is a well known joke about a Welshman with the punchline "I sh*g ONE sheep...")

One Country where this was particularly obvious was Canada, a great place that I spent a couple of long stints working/training in during the mid eighties. There was a tendency to name things after people there- Toronto Airport was Lester B Pearson Airport, Belleville in Ontario (where I spent most of my time) was named after a Lady Arabella Gore and the town even had a multi-purpose venue called the Ben Bleecker Auditorium. Now naming airports and the like after elder statesmen is fairly common (JFK, Charles De Gaulle, et al) but I was rather bemused to see a multi-story car park in Kingston, Ontario named after someone. (I can't tell which one it is now, as there are several of them with the word memorial in, one of which is actually next to somewhere called memorial park). So, who was Ben Bleecker? Lester B Pearson? Lady Arabella Gore? Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn. If I lived there I might show some interest, but just naming something after someone isn't always a big enough hook to be interesting.

I must admit that if I died and went to heaven, I wouldn't quite know what to make of it if Peter at the Pearly Gates said "In your favour- you have a car park named after you in Morley. Now about all those spiders you pulled the legs off..."

Sometimes things get named after people or businesses due to patronage. The Leeds Grand Theatre Auditorium is now known as The Yorkshire Bank Auditorium but to me that sounds a little crass. What if it had been called The Betty's Tea Rooms Auditorium? The Bargain Madness Auditorium? The Milletts Auditorium? (Millets are a UK chain that sell outdoor clothes & camping gear, not renowned for fashion).

Some names are posthumous and well deserved, such as the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough. For his own reasons, Tom Paine from The Last Ditch named his various second life transportation after Blogpower Lady Bloggers. From memory, there is a speedboat Ruthie, an Airship Liz and a huge Zeppelin known as the Air Liner Limoncello, currently in use as a floating Art Gallery. He still has a Mercedes without a name (I suggest Betsy) and he has a huge spaceship as well, complete with Holodeck. I don't know what he calls that but no doubt someone will tell me.

(Tom, if you buy yourself a Blimp, I wouldn't be flattered if you called it Shades!)

Normal programming will be resumed tomorrow, we apologise for any inconvienience...

So good they named it twice

Thank you to Welshcakes for the invitation to guest-post on her blog while she is in Wales. I'd been thinking about what to write about when I suddenly realised that she'll back in Sicily tomorrow ... whoops. So here it is.

The day before Husband and I were to fly to New York Daughter phoned me.
‘Um … have you heard the news today?’ she asked tentatively.
‘Oh, yes,’ I sighed.
‘I was hoping you wouldn’t have done.’
‘Oh well, it can’t be helped.’
‘No, and it’s not likely to happen on two days running.’
‘What’s not?’
‘Another plane to New York crashing.’
‘WHAT?!!’
‘I thought you said you’d heard that Concorde had crashed on take-off?’
‘No, I meant I’d heard that Central Park was closed because of a mosquito outbreak.’

I hadn’t flown for over twenty years and with each successive year I’d become more and more nervous. The next day wasn’t the best day to be in Heathrow. Every newspaper carried a photo of Concorde exploding. Then when we finally boarded we were left sitting on the runway for two hours; the captain kept telling us, ‘There is a problem with the engine.’ Encouraging to know they were sorting it out on ground.

The main reason for our visit – and the reason why I’d persuaded myself to get on a plane – was for me to finish interviewing the ex-NY cop whose autobiography I was ghost-writing. The publishers wanted the manuscript by August and by June I still didn’t have all the material I needed. So there we were in New York City on some of the cloudiest, most humid days of the year.

We queued to go up the Empire State but when we were within seeing distance of the ticket office, they announced that the clouds had come back and there wasn’t any point going up if your main reason was to see the view. I suppose if you were going to jump or propose it wouldn’t matter but we were there for the view. We never got to see it.

While I spent two days locked up in a hotel interviewing Mikey, my cop, Husband, got to go up the World Trade Centre, see Grand Central Station and various other sights that he told me about.

What did I think of New York?

Well, everything is just so tall.

I know I should have expected it – and I did – but I didn’t expect to be so overwhelmed. I spent most of the time wandering round with my mouth open. I’d breathe, ‘That is so tall,’ then round the next corner there’d be an even taller building. It is truly awesome.

I’d like to go back some day.

Because of Blogger's strange handling of spacing I'll tell you here what everything is and hope you can work out what is what.

Top photo: view over south Manhattan from the World Trade Centre.

Next left: Twin Towers in the mist. Right: looking down from the glass floor.

Next: tall building.

Next left: St Patrick's Cathedral. Centre: Empire State Building in the mist and a brief glimpse of Macy's department store. Right: Chrysler Building.

From Cyberspace to reality

Another guest post by (shades of) Grey

Welshcakes has met up with two other bloggers in Wales this afternoon, an event so significant that it even has its own blog here!.

Meeting up is a strange experience and I have three cyberspace scenarios to share.

The first one was actually a Ham Radio meet up when I lived in Maidenhead in the mid 80s. Out of the blue, someone who I knew slightly on the air asked to meet up in a Pub with his Fiance'. I was rather suspicious of this but it actually turned out to be perfectly benign. His motive was to convince his future Wife that Amateur Radio people weren't all sad anoraks and he thought that I sounded the most normal one of the bunch. It was a calculated risk on his part as I might have turned up wearing a Parka and carrying a Thermos. All I can recall of the evening now was that his future Wife was very nice and that he worked for British Rail in catering management. (He assured me that BR sandwiches were fresher than M&S ones).

The second meet-up was ten years ago, a Coronation Street trip to Granada TV Studios, organised by the online USENET fan club, R.A.T.U.C.S. (which stood for rec.arts.tv.uk.coronation.street). This was an entertaining afternoon and an opportunity to put lots of names to faces, particularly Mike Plowman who used to post a screen-grab review of each show that had a cult following, particularly by some of the Granada TV writers. (Background here, photo below, I'm in the back row to the right in front of Graham, the Guy with the glasses who is a Corrie Guru. Karen is to my left, she is the Fan, not me).


The third meet-up was with a number of Disney obsessives at Disneyland, triggered by rec.arts.disney.parks, another USENET meet of RADPers. This was a more diverse bunch but we still had an interesting time and we met a couple of legendary Disney onliners, particularly Al Lutz.

So what are these events like? Never entirely as expected. People are generally shorter or older in real life than the photo personas suggest. A common interest helps but I've met a couple of people this way that I'd hate to work with or wouldn't dream of socialising with.

I'd like to meet up with lots of Bloggers that I read regularly, both in and out of Blogpower. Sadly, for many of them, it is unlikely, even in second life.

Photo Hunt ---- Curvy

PhotoHunt

CURVY

Since I'm guest posting occasionally during this week for Welshcakes Limoncello I have decided to cross post my Photo Hunt picture here as well as there. Confused? She lives in Sicily so it is only fair that I should post on her site something with a Sicilian connection .

So may I present the CURVY ladies depicted in mosaic at La Villa Romana del Casale, near Piazza Armerina in central Sicily, around 330 AD. I visited this amazing place in 2000 and took this photo. It's scanned from a print, and I apologize for the quality. Click to make it a little better. While depicting young women exercising in a gymnasium it is commonly known as the Bikini Girls mosaic.


As you can see her blog is called Sicily Scene and she talks about her life there and her move from Wales several years ago.

HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND EVERYONE

Crossposted at Sicily Scene and Nobody Important

Homesick

This is another guest post from Ian (Shades of) Grey

One of the downsides of moving (and travelling) abroad is in missing home. Sometimes it is just a mild yearning because you know that you are missing an event with friends. Other times it can be a wave of self doubt. Why am I here? Was it a mistake? If I hadn't have come here what would I be doing instead?

My first attack of the latter was when I left home to go and work/study in Coventry, back in the mid 70s. As a City it was much less vibrant than Newcastle and the Pubs seemed a lot less relaxed. My first awareness of this was in seeing all of the buses roar out of the Pool Meadow Bus Station at exactly 10:30 (Pubs closed at 10:30 as well in those days) and finding out there wasn't an all night bus service. My real first yearning for home was unexpected and also Bus related: I was walking through the City Centre towards Broadgate (home of the Lady Godiva statue) and saw the destination board through the trees. It said Wyken but I misread it as Byker. I suddenly felt very alone, sad and disappointed. This was entirely unexpected as Byker is not a part of Newcastle to yearn for, having a reputation for Pubs where you chalked up your name on the dartboard for the next fight. (I have mentioned the Byker Raby before on my own Blog). I realised quickly that the reacton was causal, my sub-conscious shouting up that there was too much change and seeking solace in familiarity.

Despite spending a year in Norway, I never felt homesick there at all. This was because I was on a "six home flights a year contract" so I was never more than a couple of months from some R&R and could juggle the dates and flights to suit. There were times when I was bored of course and going to the Pub involved some serious Wonga at £2.50 a half Litre when it was less than a Pound back home (& not a short measure either).

I followed this with a year in Saudi Arabia and realised very quickly that this was a bad move. The role was a bit of a non-job with lots of make-work and the terms & conditions were unilaterally degraded during the year. I verbally resigned within about six weeks of starting but my Boss managed to persuade me to stick it out which I did but essentially as an economic mercenary. The TV was much better there (the oil company had its own TV channel) but it was heavily censored, as were the films in the camp cinema. I saw "10" with most of the racy bits cut out (kissing couples did the Saudi two step, where they approached and then backed away again). I recall going to see the Blues Brothers, seeing a Nun in the credits and wondering what happened to her in the movie as she had been completely snipped out. This contract was based on two weeks off every four months or so and it gave me (and everyone else) plenty of anticipation time to the forthcoming holiday. (Lots of my workmates just went to Bangkok rather then back to North America). (You can read more views of my Saudi year on my blogif the whimsy takes you).

Another time when homesickness kicked in was a trip to Doha for a week which stretched out to a month when I was held to moral ransom whilst specialists tried to fix a peculiar software problem over a dial-in link during the early hours. I got to be really friendly with my "kidnapper", which is common for hostage victims!

Sometimes homesickness is for a time as well as a place. I am still very fond of Coventry but for the memory of my friends there, not the architecture which was rather lacking. (What survived the Blitz was subsequently blighted by the Planners).

Now, approaching middle age, I find that I can get homesick just spending a couple of nights away from home. Not that I am necessarily missing anything other than that warm comfort of being totally at ease with the family. But having been an only child and having married late in life, the joy, trust and acceptance of simply belonging is still quietly delightful.

P.S. I didn't realise that my last post here was only yesterday!

Fabulous Fjords

This is a Guest post from Ian (Shades of) Grey

Signora Welshcakes expressed a desire for some guest blogposts to be about living in foreign places. Whilst I’ve lived in Morley, Yorkshire for a long time now, I have had stints abroad in my youth. So, happy to oblige, I'll recount some memories of living in Stavanger, Norway, a quarter of a century ago. (They are about things rather than people).

Going there was my first experience of flying and only my second trip abroad, having previously nipped over to a Belgian Beer Festival on an organised coach trip with an overnight stopover in Tourcoing, near Lille. Norway is visually stunning and the water and mountain join in long deep finger ravines with what Douglas Adams's character Slartibartfast called "those lovely crinkly bits".

First impressions were of cleanliness. The people looked fresh faced, the office environment was designed to high standards, the buildings were in good repair and the streets well swept. This was my first culture shock as it was the antithesis of my previous home, Coventry in the West Midlands. English is widely spoken by most Norwegians so the language barriers were not too high.

Being an oil town, Stavanger had a large ex-pat community so advice was readily available on anything by asking around. My Employer sorted out an apartment and the various facilities so I didn’t have to struggle with officialdom other then registering as an alien with the local Police (a formality that took no more than five minutes).

Little things stick in your mind about minor details. Why are the light switches upside down? (Up for on! Perfectly sensible really, that’s how you would arrange a slider dimmer control). Why is the house lovely and warm mid winter with tiny 400W heaters? (Because it is well insulated, unlike my room in the Coventry shared house that needed a Calor Gas heater on full blast all evening). Why does everyone leave their outside lights on at night? (Hydro Electric power is uncharged below a certain level) Why is there a meter like a petrol gauge in the kitchen under the light switch? (It is a maximum demand meter so stay out of the red and it is free). Why are the car tyres so noisy? (They are snow tyres with metal studs). Why is the beer so expensive? (Lutheran Socialism).

My flat was a few miles out of town and I had a choice of taking the bus or the train (although I had a car available when the Boss was on R&R). The first time I went for the train, I very nearly couldn’t find the station as it was just a simple single platform up a narrow leafy lane. The only furnishings were a sign with the station name (Vaulen) and a bull-horn type speaker screwed to a tree. I found out what the speaker was for one morning when five minutes after the train should have arrived it crackled to life to tell us that the train was cancelled. I didn’t have enough Norsk to fully understand it, although I heard Toget (the train) and ikke (not). The collective groan and subsequent departure of the other passengers made it obvious however!

It seemed that every corner had a video hire shop and I was soon to realise why; There was only one TV station and it wasn’t very good. This isn’t just the view of an ex-pat, but most of the Norwegians I met at the time! The TV highlights of my week were #4077 Mash and Soap! Which were on every week. Being subtitled, it helped me understand Norsk a little better, indeed I can still remember that Soap! in Norsk was translated to something similar to Forviklingal. (Although soap you wash your hands with is såpe).

The strangest thing to get used to for me though, was the public telephones. They looked and worked the same as everywhere else, but when you picked it up, you had to wait for dial tone, sometimes for up to 90 seconds. Telephony was heavily oversubscribed in Stavanger and the planners had failed to anticipate the oil boom ten years previously when the main industry was fishing. Consequently there was a shortage of lines and a shortage of resources within the systems. It also opened the way for telephone fraud on a large scale in the business as users could get round the dialling restrictions by just dialling 9 then calling a local number to fool the system; then when dial tone arrived, they could dial any number with impunity. (Dial tone detection was a software feature I worked on in later years for the Scandinavia market).

A trip to Oslo turned up another quirk, the Oslo reverse dial on rotary dial telephones. It started with 9 (where the 1 would be) and counted up to 0 (if I remember it right). Apparently New Zealand was the same, but to have a Capital City different from the rest of the country is very quirky.

Because you couldn’t get a home phone line for love or money, instead you got a radio phone that was the size of a briefcase. If it bleeped, you said your number and they told you what channel to tune to. It was push to talk so you sometimes missed bits of the conversation. If you wanted to make a call, you went on a hailing channel, told the operator your number and they told you what channel to switch to. I had one in the flat for a couple of months when it was prudent for me to be contactable.

When I didn’t have the radio phone, if I wanted to make a call, the nearest phone box was about a mile away and the bottom third of the box had large slats on all four sides so that whilst it kept the rain out it let the wind in. I was told that this was to deter the underclass from sleeping in them…

The lovely open sandwiches (called Smørbrød) seemed very exotic at first but became the norm very quickly and soon became rather predictable after a few weeks in the staff canteen. One thing I did miss was decent bacon, all of the rashers were streaky & rather scrawny. Surprisingly Denmark was just the same, most of their back bacon being exported to us Brits. Most of my shopping was in a supermarket in town called Domus, I name I had never seen before or since, apart from once seeing a Philipino with a Domus Carrier Bag at Dhahran Airport in Saudi Arabia. Why he had one or that I should remember it is a mystery.

Being Male, my clothes washing regime consisted of waiting until all of my clothes had been worn, then putting them through the house washer and drip drying everything on hangars in the bathroom overnight (with the heater on, no charge). I may have had an iron but I found that the hanger treatment meant that I could dispense with that step. I imagine that this was delusional but being an Engineer I had a Permit to look shabby.

One other quirky memory- a Noregian could peel a plate full of prawns for you in no time flat, you just had to demonstrate that you were inept at it.