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And us....

And us....

And us....

And me....

And me....

Hornsby's secret cemetery

Old Man's Valley is a bit of a secret place itself. It's very close to suburban Hornsby - just below and to the west of Hornsby TAFE and the currently-being-renovated Hornsby Aquatic Centre.

It was named by Thomas Higgins, the chap who was granted land in the area in 1824 (not granted by the Dharug people though, who happened to be the previous owners). He named it after a large old kangaroo who also lived there.

Old Man's Valley is notable also for the huge, disused quarry, which Hornsby Council was forced to buy (at exhorbitant cost) a few years ago, and has little idea what to do with or how to remediate. It's also the location of a rather spectacular and extremely scary mountain bike track, that I've (sort of) circumnavigated a couple of times, though at less than half the speed of many of its visitors.

I actually thought I knew the area quite  well, but recently discovered an extra little secret. It has a little known and well hidden heritage cemetery; the Higgins family cemetery, no less. It's fenced in, and to find it you have to bush-bash through about 100m of quite dense scrub. It's completely invisible from any of the easily accessible bits of the valley, and there are no signs or clues of any sort about its existence, until you are right upon it.

Poor possum & the wired up WIRES lady

This poor fellow was sighted recently in a nearby street. He was rather badly inured, and seemed to have been in a fight, maybe with a cat or a dog.

He was a ring tailed possum, he was looking very sorry for himself, and was dragging his injured limbs around on the grass verge.

"What can we do? What can we do?" I was asked. "This is a case for WIRES" I responded confidently.

WIRES stands for Wildlife Information Rescue & Education Service. It's a very fine organisation, with over 2000 volunteers within its NSW branch. Its mission statement is:

Mission Statement

WIRES aims to actively rehabilitate and preserve Australian wildlife and inspire others to do the same

which sounds good to me.

As a temporary measure we put a cardboard box over our patient, to immobilise him, then we waited for the cavalry to arrive.

Enter WIRES volunteer Sandra, always at the ready. She'd been on her way to work when she got our call, but her higher duty prevailed, and within minutes she'd returned home, collected her kit and caboodle - special possum cage, special possum handling blanket no doubt - and here she was striding purposefully up, transferring patient to the possum ambulance, and heading off to the possum-friendly vet. She carefully noted the exact location, so the volunteer possum-friendly vet could return it to its home turf once it was fully recovered. Then Sandra headed off to her other work. A very impressive operation all round.

 

Naturally we inquired later as to the health of our possum. Maybe we  could even witness its return to the wild? "It died", she told us. "It had too many internal injuries". I guess it's often like that.

Something fishy about this Sauce

Worcestershire's got sauce. Lots of it, mostly in a display cabinet at the Worcester City Art Gallery & Museum, which I visited during my recent stay in Birmingham. I like esoteric little exhibits like this.

The 'Original and genuine Lea & Perrins sauce' was first manufactured in 1838 in Worcester, after a recipe was brought home by someone from the East India Company, who'd discovered the sauce, or something similar, in Bengal. Or so says Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcestershire_sauce   (What would we do without Wikipedia? I might even donate something to it. It's not a multibillion dollar company, like it could be. It's a charity, basically.) Later they moved production to Birmingham, where it is still made to this day. Lea & Perrins was later owned by HP Foods, the Imperial Tobacco Co, and now by Heinz. The sauce's ingredients include tamarind, molasses and anchovies, so it's essentially an Indian fish sauce.

 What else do you see in Worcester Museum? You see a very big fish that once swam up the River Severn, you see a rather nice cafe, you see a display about the Worcestershire Regiment, and down the road, on the banks of the flooded River Severn, lots and lots of swans.

Wet day in London town

It was time for a break from Birmingham's subtle charms, so I decided to take myself off on a day trip to London.

I wanted to avoid crowds, and somehow decided that New Year's Eve (a Tuesday and not a public holiday) might be a good bet. In the evening there would be people congregating for the midnight fireworks show, but I'd be back in Birmingham by then. Besides, it was cold and wet and winter, so how many tourists were likely to be about?

Wrong, very wrong. I arrived at Euston station and was confronted by massive queues at the Underground ticket booths and machines. Not to worry, I can stroll along the street to St Pancras station, thus doing a useful recce for my forthcoming Eurostar journey of the following week. I'd get my day's transport ticket there.

St Pancras was even worse. Literally hundreds of international travellers were jammed into there, all trying to get their London experiences started. It was going to cost them hours off their precious day, just to get going! I strolled off again, eventually finding Euston Square station, and a usefully functioning ticket counter (not their machines though - a forlorn Dutchman was standing at one, warning us that his machine had just taken his £20 note and given him nothing).

I made my way to Queensway, and did my usual wet walk across Kensington Gardens, past Round Pond, the Albert Memorial, and the Royal Albert Hall. I checked out good old Imperial College, noting all the changes. Several shiny colourful buildings had appeared since my last inspection, and whole new enterprises started, like the Grantham Institute for Climate Change.

It was still raining, and the closed-for-the-holidays college hadn't presented any opportunities for sheltering or drying out (or lunching), so the next option was the museums. South Kensington's museums had never let me down. Warm, dry, interesting. I'd be able to while away several happy hours in the Science Museum, or the Natural History Museum. Or even the Victoria & Albert Museum. 

Alas, there were huge queues at the museums too. It was going to take me a couple of hours even to get into one and out of the wet! I concluded that my London day trip strategy was all wrong. Lots of people were in town town today. Maybe they were heading for the fireworks but had decided to make a whole day of it, and when it had rained they'd all hit on the museum idea, not just me. Forget this.

I headed off again, had a soggy lunch outside a Pret a Manger outlet, and then trudged off via Knightsbridge, towards the parks and Serpentines and things that lead you to eventually to Whitehall, Westminster, and the Embankment.

On the way, while passing Harrods in fact, I remembered Julian Assange and the Ecuadorian embassy. He's been holed up there for over a year, and by all accounts the UK government had spent a fortune on their efforts to block his movements and maybe arrest him if he set foot on the street. (They've spent $8 million  according to one recent report! http://rt.com/news/assange-cost-uk-8m-765/  )  Sure enough, there were FOUR police vehicles parked outside the embassy! Presumably this goes on around the clock, and has done for all this time. All ostensibly because the Swedish government wants to ask him whether he'd used a condom or not during his stay in Sweden.

In Whitehall I stumbled on the one saving grace of the day, the Churchill War Rooms, http://www.iwm.org.uk/visits/churchill-war-rooms  This is a museum consisting of the underground complex, under Whitehall, where Churchill and his World War 2 war cabinet largely ran the war from. You get to see the Cabinet room, communication rooms, private quarters, all kinds of dimly lit wonders. And it's all real. I used to tell people the only things Britain did well were the pubs and the TV. Then the TV went downhill, so it was just the pubs. Maybe WW2 nostalgia has risen to become the other thing they do well. Sad really, but it was indeed rather good.



When I eventually made it to the Embankment at Westminster at about 6 pm, the crowds were already building up alarmingly for the fireworks. I asked a volunteer whether there was an early show as well as the midnight one. (Sydney does two early shows now, as well as the big one.) No, they said, the midnight show's enough.They were beginning to barricade the viewing areas off, to limit the number of those entering, but also presumably preventing those there from escaping! I thought I'd better withdraw quickly, make my way back to Euston, and head back to Birmingham to watch the show on TV.