Rosemary L

March, 2006

Again Rosemary sent an attractive Christmas card showing details of her garden shiny with frost. Her Christmas letter expanded the information she had earlier sent in an e-mail. Here's part of the e-mail message:

"Your email and path to cyberspace arrived just as we were getting ready to return to Malaika for the last leg of our summer cruise. Although I had a brief peep at the web site, it was very brief and I therefore put off responding till I had had time to explore and enjoy further.

We actually got back in early October but to mountains of new or just unanswered post, the garden crying out for attention, fruit needing picking and then making into jelly or some other concoction. You may therefore understand that it has taken me a while to get down to going on line and enjoying some more news and dealing with your letter.

We have had a good summer and I am delighted to report that my back troubles now seem behind me and it is lovely just to do things and not have to wonder whether I will make it!

We had ten weeks or so on the boat: the first part was in the early summer, when we did the Thames ring again but making a detour onto the river Lee, passing the place where the Olympic Village will be, up to Hertford and then up its tributary, the Stort, to Bishop's Stortford. We locked onto the Thames at Limehouse, so went up under Tower Bridge and past the Tower, the Houses of Parliament et al. to Teddington, where the river ceases to be tidal, and then up to Oxford. The second leg in late summer was up to the Shropshire Union and then the Llangollen Canal to Llangollen. We continued up to Ellesmere Port on the Mersey estuary, before returning to base. We had twelve lots of visitors on the first trip and three lots of staying visitors on the second, as well as the odd day visitor, so we had a very sociable time.

Other highlights have been a two week trip to India in Feb/March with Brian and a few days in Paris, doing the Art Galleries and gardens with my friend, who went to Verona with me. Anyway more of all this anon (reminds me I also got to a play at the Globe just after the 7/7 bomb attack) - for the moment I must do something about supper."

September, 2005

Rosemary is someone who puts a lot of time and effort into creating original Christmas cards. I look forward to receiving them and obviously her house and garden lend themselves to the lights and decorations of that season. Keep them coming, Rosemary.

In July of 2003, Rosemary wrote, “ I have been hoping to find something out about Elisabeth Oakley. All the old Solicitors' Directories I have managed to look in have shown no reference to Elisabeth and I have gone back to the early nineties. . . So I am beginning to wonder whether I was imagining seeing her in London. I am wondering whether I can make any enquiries at the law Society but I'm not sure it would help.

I have had a very busy year. At the beginning of February I went to Alpe D'Huez skiing: it was a bit of a mixed bag because of the weather—huge amounts of snow—and some old and some more recent injuries, but at least I proved I could still do it and we did have some sunshine as well. At the beginning of March we went to China. Brian had always wanted to sail up the Yangtze River and as the Three Georges area was due to be flooded this summer, under the Three Georges Dam Project, we decided to pull it to the top of the list. As well a three-day trip up the gorges in warm sunny weather, we went to Beijing and to Chien to see the Terracotta warriors and before leaving Beijing, we had a brief trip to the Great Wall, which we saw in light snow! All in all it was a very interesting trip and I certainly feel more interest and understanding of the country and its people.

Then there was the boat Spring repaint (we had a week of wonderful weather before Easter and completed the work in record time), then, after Easter, a shake down cruise to Coventry with old sailing friends; we moored in the middle of the city and walked to the cathedral and had a rewarding time looking at the building and its many chapels. I love the glass and there is a wonderful atmosphere but I still don't like Graham Sutherland's tapestry. Spring is always a lovely time on the canals with the lambs and baby ducklings—there were some very small ones—and we were reasonably lucky with the weather.

The 10th of May saw us on our way to Cornwall: friends Brian had made working on the Thames and who had been on Malaika our first two years, invited us to join them at Minack, where they were renting part of Minack House, in the grounds of which the Minack theatre was built. On the 1st of June we left to start our summer cruise - this year almost two and a half months non stop save for only two very brief visits home to satisfy insurance requirements. If you add to this trying to get the garden into shape and one’s affairs generally in order and also finish the computer course I had been doing over the winter, it meant that a number of things just didn't get done!

Shortly after leaving work, I had joined the Aylesbury Vale branch of NADFAS—the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts. People I met there introduced me to a government sponsored Computer Course run by City and Guilds— the particular centre being in Marlow. As well as the core subject of IT Principles, which is compulsory, I did Desk Top Publishing and Internet: because of various blips in their organisation, I had to do the last module, Internet, in about one month flat in May. All in all it made for a very hectic spring and early summer. Anyway I have passed all three modules, so can forget about it for the time being.

This year's cruise is the northern canals. We travelled north up the North Oxford, the Coventry and the Trent and Mersey. We then had a new diversion, the Macclesfield, which lived up to its reputation as a delightful canal, and then the peak Forest Canal, which is a bit like a rural backwater but very attractive. The canal was only reopened last year and goes from Manchester to Huddersfield and includes the Standege tunnel, the longest and deepest on the network. You go through on a British Waterways boat and the narrow boats get towed behind. It was quite and experience. Malaika got a little scratched but not too badly. The eastern side is just one lock after another, so I walked virtually the whole way down into Huddersfield! Fortunately the weather was nice so it was very pleasant. We were planning to come back over the Rochdale Canal, another newly reopened one, but unfortunately they have been plagued with gate failures this summer and it was closed, so we had to make a detour and pick up the Leeds and Liverpool, going west to Wigan. The Leeds and Liverpool is a very interesting canal with some unusual locks (several locks are combined in one staircase, so that the top gate of one lock is the bottom gate of the next going up hill and vice versa going down; there are two rise, three rise and at Bingley even a five rise lock). There is also some very scenic countryside, as it skirts the southern part of the Yorkshire Dales.

We then set out to do the L and L from west to east, which is the way we originally planned to do it. From Leeds, we went east and then up the River Ouse to York and onwards to Rippon, our most northerly point.”

Rosemary’s 2003 Christmas letter was lovely: she expanded on the China trip and included some photos, which I can’t reproduce here. I include just one paragraph to illustrate that Rosemary too would make a great travel writer: “The highlight of the Yangtze cruise has to have been our trip along one of the side gorges, the Shenong Stream. Early morning muster for transfer to a ferry and then peapod boats—long and thin like peapods, canoes might be the nearest comparison—without engines. We were eight to a boat and hauled up the stream by four Chinese men in trunks and tee shirts roped to the tow rope; they variously scrambled along the shore, waded through the ice cold water or leaped on board, when neither was possible, and used iron tipped poles. This Gorge had steep, almost vertical sides, softened by some greenery and was very narrow and scenic, much more as I had imagined the Yangtze to be but on a smaller scale. In places the towing team had to drag the boats over the shingle—the water level was so low. Once we turned, we shot like a cork out of a bottle.”

In the last couple of years, Rosemary had made a couple of trips to Italy: one to Rome “not Brian’s idea of a holiday but it gave me the opportunity to rediscover “my classical past” and explore Roman Rome.” In 2004, Rosemary went with a friend to Verona and indulged in her love of opera, architecture—and food and wine.

The 2004 Christmas newsletter was again full of interesting sagas of canals and waterways. Rosemary also mentioned that she had kept up her Practicing Certificate and had been doing some part time work. Unfortunately severe pain alerted Rosemary to some physical problems and “a day trip home from Lancashire to see my osteopath revealed three misaligned discs and a lesion and a torsion in my sacroiliac joint. The condition has improved but is not beaten yet.”

Hope the news is better and that there has been the opportunity for more travel. Keep us informed.