DOMESTICITY

DOMESTICITY IN LAIKA
What a life we have!
Here you see John serenading the washing, appreciating the light fitting and fixing Laika. John has taken no pictures showing me doing any work whatsoever but then there are no pictures of me lounging about in comfort either!

Leaving England

At last on the ferry.

Leaving England

Traditional photos leaving England by ferry with White cliffs behind.

HELL ON WHEELS

HELL ON WHEELS
Yes – we didn’t judge it finely enough. We ran out of time to pack up properly and ended up flinging everything in the van and driving off to Olney to await the arrival of the necessary papers to effect our departure. This is how Laika looked the first evening we spent in her. There she is parked at Olney on a freezing cold night.
Then we did manage to get things together a bit better and you can see us beginning to get ourselves sorted out and comfortable. Of course there were things that didn’t work and we had to head off to Flamstead to Matthew to get things ‘fixed’. Our last night at Maidenhead Laika got stuck in mud and had to be pulled free by tractor. At this stage we were doing rather well however – we were still talking to each other in a friendly fashion!

You can't have everything

We have now stayed at a number of campsites, presently in Krakow (choose your own spelling of the town name, the guide book I am currently using spells it 3 different ways, sometimes on the same page). The variety of Everything I was thinking of when substituting the above title for the "Hooray!!" it was to have been was the kind of everything that you hope for when entering a crockery washing area in a fresh campsite. What you hope for is that there will be hot as well as cold water, drains that allow the waste water to run away instead of welling up in all the other sinks (into which you have put your cleaned items, which are then submerged by the contents of the waste trap), draining boards rather than the ground over which the aforementioned errant waste water and sludge is about to run, lighting at night so you can see what you are washing, what you have washed twice and what you haven't washed at all and sinks that are not fitted so low that you scrape you head against the wall when bending low enough to reach the objects of your attention. You usually get most of the desiderata, but never all.

The jettisoned "Hooray" title was to have been apposite since I have now learned how to cut and paste in the new Word(TM). I found that cutting and pasting are apparently little-used commands (not surprising if they're so well hidden) in the new Word and are only to be found in an "Advanced" section of the menu. I must be getting really expert, I've never done anything before deserving of the description "Advanced". However, I am using Ruth's computer to write this piece and the elegantly crafted contributions I was going to insert are safely (and distantly)stored on my own computer. You can't have everything.

Another reason for the "Hooray" would have been that I managed to write this Post using a Polish menu which I actually couldn't understand but which I guessed from my memory of how the English menu used to look.

17h50 CET. Time for a drink, I think. Is it to be a can of Polish lager or a slug of the vodka I have just bought under the brand name of "Absolwent"? Does that mean that it has qualities flesh-stripping in their asperity or that drinking it will absolwe me of all gins?

Cheers,

John

Normalsky

John woke up miserably a few days ago and said 'When will things be normal in here?' meaning the Campin Car - so I gave him a normal Ruth bollocking, cooked a normal breakfast of german bread and ham, and we normally drove off to a new place we had never been before to where John got out a new phrase book and learnt a new language!