L'odour Fawley

It's a soft day, and the petrolchemical reek of the refinery, only three miles away from Netley as the oil-soaked seagull flies, was strong in the air this morning.

The Thing about Southampton

We had this truism in our family, that Southampton didn’t feel like a port. We said that it was a city that turned its back on the sea, and that from the city centre you could have been in any boring UK town, except for seeing the very occasional mast of a cruise liner between the insurance office towers. The docks themselves were hidden away behind high gates and out of public access. When Sue first visited the city with me, she said the same thing; she’d expected ships and views of the sea, both things you get in Portsmouth and Plymouth. But it seemed as though the only way to see that Southampton was a port was to seek out a view, maybe by going all the way downtown and parking in windswept Mayflower Park. The nearest view of open seascape with a horizon and all was Christchurch, a good 30 miles away.

Living in Netley you realise that this is just a matter of perspective. Visiting Southampton from Chandlers Ford you go straight down the Avenue into the City Centre, down the middle of the peninsula between the rivers Test and Itchen on which the shopping centre and central business district stand. You do your shopping and go back out North the same way, going nowhere near the water. To be fair, Southampton is an inland port; it’s geographical position at the head of Southampton Water (Phillip Hoare's 'Gynaecologist’s Finger’), itself a branch off of the Solent, means it’s a good 15 – 20 miles from the open sea.

The beach is directly across the road from us at Marina View. I can get up in the morning and take my coffee over to it and watch the ships come and go. Three times an hour the fast catamaran ferry to Cowes on the Isle or Wight goes past, a noisy, busy bugger. Up by the Point is likely to be one of the Wallanius Willemson car transporter ships, great square ‘Lego blocks’ of things, or tugs may be shepherding a huge container ship up to the container port. Then there’s the QE2 leaving for her fortieth anniversary cruise a couple of weeks back with a huge firework display. There’s our mystery hovercraft. We heard it several times before seeing it, then I caught a glimpse as it disappeared down the beach. Early the next morning it was pulled up on the mud, a little one about the size of a truck and painted in battleship grey, with the driver (driver?) making adjustments. There’s a Rupert story a lot like this, with Rupert and his mates observing the coming and goings of a mystery helicopter and its mysterious boiler-suited mechanic/pilot…

All through the night you can hear the engines of ships going up and down Southampton Water. Our drive to work takes us first along Weston Shore. Phillip Hoare calls the shore a ‘grey parody’ of a place. While he may have a point, it certainly doesn’t feel like that on a sunny Sunday Morning, with children playing in the ‘pirate galleon’ playground, families out strolling, swarms of joggers, and usually a hot debate going on at the judging of the weekly sea-angling competition. One morning last week Sue spotted something triangular offshore, and although I was negotiating the traffic calming and only got a very quick look, it certainly did look like a dorsal fin, moving down the Water with the falling tide…

In the morning commute we have the choice of three bridges; getting to work definitely involves taking water into account. Moving upriver there’s

• the Itchen Bridge. Definitely the quickest route to my work at Avenue Campus and my usual route home, however toll charges mount up if used twice daily. Plastered with ‘Are you feeling suicidal or depressed?’ notices from the Samaritans, so presumably has become popular with jumpers. Good view into the city from the top as you come back down, but high parapets mean you can’t see much from a car; much better crossed by bus. Awareness of water rating: 6.0.
  
• Northam Bridge. Next one up, and a mucky part of town. What has happened to the old TV studios, and where is Christopher Peacock speaking to us from now? (Yes, really, the same TV presenter as when I was a kid is still on whatever the ITV Channel is now called. Whither those curly locks and winsome boyish charms my Dad found so very infuriating?). Although I come home this way sometimes, we’re yet to try it as a route into work; I suspect it would be a bad move, but who knows? Awareness of water rating: 4.5. Awareness of scrap yards and general industrial decay rating: 7.5.
  
• Cobden Bridge. Takes you straight into the bottom end of Portswood and the main University campus, but involves negotiating some nasty traffic whichever way approached. The Itchen is still tidal here, but feels a lot tamer and more like an inland river than an estuary, with yachts and houseboats but no sign of the full scale ships found downriver. Awareness of water rating: 9.0.

So there you go. Maybe Southampton’s not all that bad a place to live after all, especially if you like water and watching boats, and from the Netley/Spike Island direction, you definitely know it’s a port.

The Grey Lady explained

Netley’s resident ghost is said to have been a nurse at the Military Hospital who fell in love with a patient. One day she gave him either the wrong medicine or an overdose of the correct one, and the soldier died. Driven to distraction, she ran to the top of one of the Hospital’s gothic towers (who knows, maybe the one that’s the sole remaining piece of the hospital still standing), and threw herself from the top.

We’re no nearer to finding out why the house where our flat is was exorcised. It’s a very comfy and cosy little flat, and unlike some places we’ve lived, there’s a happy atmosphere to the place, despite it being down the road from notoriously haunted gothic Netley Abbey and surrounded by spooky owl-filled woods. On top of this, the hospital site is only at the other end of the village. I’m actually very, very sceptical about the supernatural these days, unlike Sue who watches all those ‘Most Haunted’ programmes on satellite TV all the time. However, I do think that in places where there’s been great suffering or misery, especially involving many people over many years, maybe some echo of that great anguish remains that we can sense. The hospital was a place where people went to be healed, but a lot of young lives would have ended there. The hospital also had it’s own asylum, ‘D Block’, when victims of shell shock were treaded with what sound like brutal methods.

The fact remains that our flat doesn’t fell the least bit creepy, as though any ghosts it may ever have contained have been laid to rest. So maybe that means the exorcism worked, then.

It’s nice to know it’s there (Ruff Ruff, Oink Oink)

“It’s nice to know its there” was the title of a song by Flanders and Swann, or more likely Instant Sunshine. Right this second, I can’t check as we’re still here in the no longer Broadbanded Broadbottom house and Sue is hogging bandwidth – OK, talking to her brother on the phone – and I’m writing this offline.

The song is about how, if you live in a city, you never actually visit the sights or tourist attractions; you might never go to the British Museum, or the Zoo, or watch the Changing of the Guard, but ‘It’s nice to know it’s there’. When I left London in… what, 1983?… I dashed around seeing things, of which all I remember is going up the Monument in the City. A year or so later our mid-30s boss in Athens, Madam Kiki (how we laughed when we first met Kiki, but Hector’s House hadn’t been on in Greece, and I digress, as ever) told us that despite living in the city all her life she’d never been up the Acropolis.

All of this is by way of explaining why with time tight over the weekend, we took time out to join the Chinese New Year celebrations in Manchester this afternoon; 15 years in Manchester, and we'd never been before. And jolly fun it was too, with huge crowds of people watching the Lion Dance (we got a really good view – pictures and video when I return to the land of USB-equipped PCs) great food on sale and a really nice atmosphere. We bought noodles, paper dragons and one of those arm-waving lucky cats you see in Chinese restaurants. From each of the many seriously up-market restaurants waiters run out throwing firecrackers, or doing their own mini Lion Dances.

I really did want to go this year, as not only is it likely to be the last opportunity to celebrate New Year in Manchester’s proper China Town, it’s also the end of my Chinese horoscope year, the Year of the Dog. I’ve actually managed to keep wearing the red thread I’ve had round my wrist for the past year (see CuL passim), which the student who originally tied it on told me was essential to keep bad luck away during my zodiac year. I did lose the original one, but there’s always a piece of magic Chinese thread around if you know where to look for it…

Home seriously discussing a year or so in China...

You can tell you're somewhere posh when...

To The Jolly Sailor for a late evening pint with Nigel.

They have a new pump on the bar. Yup; Pimms on tap.

Drove back to Broady last night - longest trip ever, it took nearly nine hours. Hopefully, a chance to use the ol' P75 to catch up on CuL from here.

Be still, my beating heart

And now, something more exciting than words can ever express.

A tongue twister

Yesterday I was chatting to Julie in e-Languages and explained that I was actually prioritising teaching and marking for the day, rather than working on the e-lang metadata project they've given me:

"I'm not having a metadata day today".

Try saying that with your teeth in.

A boyfriend for Paris Hilton

One of the few interesting things on the vastly dull drive we have to do regularly from North to South is the sign on the M40 which points to 'Historic Warwick'. This poetic coupling occasions discussions of other possibilitys; there's Boring Goring, as visited on Jem's parents' boat way back when - in fact that involved tying up at 'the boring mooring in Goring' - then there's Dull Hull and... er... er... that's about it.

So we play the 'Boyfriend for Paris Hilton' game. If she's named after a hotel, maybe she should go out with... Dudley Travelodge... Austin Howard-Johnsons and... er... that's about it for that one, too. But then we stopped at the services, and spotted.... Warwick Days Inn!

Purple Sprouting Brocolli is back on Salisbury Market

Which means it'll soon be a year since I moved down....

Great things, however, are happening in Broadbottom... (but I'm not tempting fate by talking about it just yet...)

Good e-Language conference here at the Uni last week, in which I participated, (or at least my Second Life avitar Django Cagney did). If nothing else I learnt about Folksonomies and tags. So now we know what the new Googlogger 'labels' thing is...

Which means it's a big 'hello' to anyone searching for Blog postings about Brocolli or Broadbottom....