All of my bones ached today on account of spending the day walking around Bluewater shopping centre yesterday. Suzy and I didn’t do badly with our shopping. I got a few Christmas bits and pieces done and we both found some nice clothes. We were also both very smug about getting lunch before the crowds descended on the eateries and seating areas. We also made sure to stop for a rejuvenating coffee and cake break in the afternoon just before entering the temple of H&M. That plain ol’ cup of Joe up there, just waiting for a splash of milk is mine. The pile of froth and nonsense spilling onto the table is Suzy’s festive chai latte.

Though I didn’t come away with piles and piles of clothes like some people, H&M was good enough to me to provide me with a few bits of knitwear (which I didn’t particularly need, but which are pretty). I also now have a grey and black stripy top which made me feel like Mildred, the Worst Witch when I tried it on. That pleased me for some reason.

Another niceness from the day happened as I walked out of a shop and a little old lady walking by stopped to tell me what a little sweetheart I was and that I looked lovely. I thanked her and she asked me if I had a boyfriend. “No, I don’t”, I said. “Well, with a face like that you’ll get one” she said. I thanked her and she disappeared into the crowd. I don’t know who she was, but I think she should have some nice karma coming to her for that.

I’d had the back door open for a little while earlier this afternoon and he must have popped in for a nose around and not left before I shut the door again. I’ve had no sense of time this week, with no other people in the house to help frame the day, so I’m not sure how long he would have been in the house, but quite a while.

I grabbed my camera, of course, as is always the first step with such occasions and watched as the bird hopped and flew calmly here and there – disappearing from sight for a moment, leading me to fear that he’d flown upstairs, but then I found him again behind the sofa and soon after he spotted that the back door was open again and flew out into the garden.

His calmness was in such marked contrast to a blackbird who had flown into the house a few weeks ago. He’d flown in a panic onto the sofa, pooped a big blackberry poop on the oatmeal-coloured cushion, flew into the window, pooped another big blackberry poop on the window sill, making sure to flap some of it onto the beige carpet and generally got in a panic and made an arse of himself before I finally guided him out of the door again. He could learn a lot from the little blue tit who just calmly hopped around and waited until the magic doorway opened up once more.

Edited to add: Okay. Clearly this little bird had more of an adventure than I realised. I’ve just been upstairs to the den and found little tiny bird poops (why must birds eat berries?) on my window sill and carpet along with a small dusting of tiny blue tit feathers, matching the solitary feather on the back door mat. This suggests to me that the initial panic of “oh my God, I’m indoors!” occurred upstairs … but that window has been shut all day.

Somewhere out there is a blue tit with a very exciting story to tell. I just don’t know what it is.

This was our big day: lots of things to see and do in downtown Manhattan. We started by getting a cab to Ground Zero and the most helpful taxi driver of our trip took us to a convenient place to hop out and head to the observation walkway. To be honest Ground Zero is in a bit of in-between phase to people like us, paying our respects, but with no close bond to the event. It’s no longer a devastating hole in the ground, but neither is it yet a beautiful memorial site; it’s a building site. But it leaves quite an impression when you realise how the towers had stood so closely surrounded by other buildings.

We walked towards Battery Park, where we found The Sphere, a sculpture that had stood between the towers and had survived 9/11 with just a little damage. It now stands in the park, dents and holes included, with an eternal flame burning for the victims of the events of that day.

Our Downtown Day was important to me as we would be visiting places involved in the Emigrants books and Kristina musical that I have mentioned a few times before. I was standing in Battery Park – the one in the song! – imagining it teeming with people, some of them newly arrived to these shores, having spent months on the sea and then faced the trials of getting through the immigration centre on Ellis Island, which we would visit later in the day.

We joined the queue for the ferry to the Statue of Liberty at South Street and as we’d started our day a little later than planned, it was now the middle of the day and the hot sun was beating down on us. I kept thinking I should get the sun cream out of my bag, but then we’d make a little progress towards the bay and would need to move, or would perhaps catch a little shade from a tree and then the thought went again. And that’s the story of how I ended up with a half-brown/half-white chest for the summer.

We spent more than an hour and a half to get less than 200 metres into the hot tent that was the last security stop before the ferry. Musicians entertained us while we waited, hoping to elicit a dollar or two for their performances and a guy with water to sell was advertising his wares at the top of his voice. “Ice cold water! Is anyone thoisty?”. Before we’d gone far down the line a guy with a steel drum asked where we were from. “England” we replied and were promptly treated to a rendition of the Eastenders theme tune Caribbean style. Further down the line the other steel drum player asked for home countries and this time we were treated to a far more dignified tune – the national anthem. “Give my regards to the Queen!” he called. “We will!” we assured him. Meanwhile the acrobat who had been doing gymnastics had disappeared, leading Suzy to wonder whether perhaps he was now inside the black box on which he had been performing.

We were still queueing in the sun, but the end, or at least, the security tent, was in sight. We were at the water now, with the smart architecture of Pier A and the American Merchant Mariners’ Memorial. The merchant seaman in the water wasn’t submerged, so we could see why the one on the pier was reaching down. I imagine it might be quite eery when the tide covers the guy in the water.

And look, here’s the Statue of Liberty in sight at last!

Oh, I kid.

The tree was mightily depleted of branches and then with the arrival of bad weather no more work was done. The lumberjacks’ ropes remained looped around the highest thick branches, still attached and waiting, we assumed, for finer weather, when the lopping would resume.

Rather than waiting for the finer weather though, the tree ninja returned in the rain and mist today to carry on. The noise of the chainsaw alerted me to his presence across the road and I went to the window to watch him cut more off the tree. He’d slice through the trunk halfway and then do the same from the other direction.

Then he’d lever off the chunk he’d cut

and see if he could hit anyone below.

Then he’d clamber about a bit more and give Dad a birthday heart attack

before sizing up the next piece to be lopped off – all the while standing at well above rooftop height, strung to a branch of an apparently dead or dying oak tree.

And then there was the tense moment where he seemed to have cut off his own head.

But he’s a lumberjack – and he’s okay.

Boom boom.

Ordinarily catching the bus from our hotel to the jeweller’s would have been a piece of cake, but it just so happened that the road was being dug up and so the bus no longer came to the end of the hotel’s road. We got directions from the hotel receptionist and headed off through the country lanes, pulling our cases behind us. We admired the beautiful Jersey cows – who stood when Suzy mooed them the instruction to do so over the hedge – and when we realised that we’d been walking far too long with no sign of the windmill in which Katherine Best was housed, Lauren got (better) directions from a lady pushing a beautiful old-fashioned pram.

Suzy and I were lagging a way behind Lauren and Dave because my legs had decided to play up and hurt like hell. I was concentrating on walking and cursing my joints when a car horn sounded behind us. I looked round and the girl I’d seen at the airport when I arrived pulled up next to me. I crossed the empty road to talk to her and her friend, whom she was taking back to the airport.

Caroline had actually come out to look for me at the airport, but we’d already got straight into a taxi and gone. And now we’d met in the middle of nowhere thanks to us being sent down the wrong road by our hotel receptionist. I wish I’d had longer to talk to them, but before we’d had a chance to swap much more than our names all the traffic in Jersey – including a tractor for extra dramatic effect – had piled up in both directions wanting for me to get my backside out of the way. We said goodbye, making promises to connect on Facebook – and indeed Annie was waiting in my inbox when I got home.

Eventually we found Katherine Best and I knocked back a couple of painkillers and sat outside in the sunshine with Dave recovering from the walk while Lauren and Suzy perused the jewellery. The grey clouds disappeared for a while and revealed a blue, blue sky and as I looked up at the great sails of the windmill against the blue I wondered if I’d find the energy to get up and take a picture of it before the clouds came over again. Didn’t happen unfortunately, as you can see!

Lauren and Dave had walked miles across the island and we all had a rest and replenished our sugar levels while we decided where to go for dinner. As our respective energy levels returned we decided to walk across the beach to The Beach House restaurant.

It was about 3/4 of a mile across St. Auben’s Bay and Ouaisne Bay and we took it at a leisurely pace, walking through the surf and enjoying the sunshine. I took some photos as we went and Suzy did her best to help me get the horizons straight.

I also saw my first sun dog in the sky and funnily enough Dad and Mum saw one the same day on their holiday in La Rochelle. I wasn’t even 100% sure at the time that it was a sun dog. I’d read the term somewhere, but hadn’t been sure to what phenomenon it had been attached.

Just before we reached the far side of the bay I found a sweet little footprint in the sand. I put my own print next to it and Suzy put hers next to mine.

We washed the sand off our feet and headed into The Beach House restaurant and took a nice table by the window, overlooking the bay we’d just crossed.

Before we ordered I headed to the loo. The lock was very stiff when I locked it and I wondered whether it had been a good idea to shut the door. When I came to leave the bathroom I learned that, no, it had not been a good idea. The little silver knob would not turn. I grabbed some toilet paper to see if I could get a better grip. Nope. I thumped on the door. Nothing. So as I was in a disabled loo, I pulled on the emergency cord. Nothing. The pull cord didn’t work and the alarm light didn’t come on. So I went back to thumping on the door. Unfortunately the loos were down a corridor away from the main restaurant, but soon I heard a little kid’s voice and thumped on the door again. His mother called, “Are you locked in?” and when I confirmed I was she grabbed a knife and opened the door from the outside. I returned to my table and told of my adventure. Lauren said that she’d noticed I had been gone too long, but her delightful husband had warned against knocking on the door in case I was just doing a number two. He’s a doll.

When the waiter came along I told him that I’d been locked in the loo and another patron had had to rescue me. He agreed that “yeah, that lock’s really stiff, isn’t it?” I’ve since emailed the restaurant about the lock and received a very speedy response from the manager to say that he had checked the alarm himself and had asked maintenance to change the lock. I’m quite judgmental of accessible toilets. There seems to be no standardisation as far as their construction is concerned. Some have alarm cords and alarm strips that run all the way around the bottom of the wall. Others have tied the alarm cord up, I imagine because it got in someone’s way. Standing I’m about the same height as someone in a wheelchair, but I can’t ever be sure I’m going to be able to see into the mirror. I’ve been in many loos where the mirror is way up high on the wall. But then there was the loo I used at the airport when we returned from Jersey, where the mirror was fine and then I had to bend down to use the hand dryer!

But enough about toilets. The food at The Beach House was great and I had a delicious cheeseburger and chips. We watched the tide come creeping up the beach and the sun set in a blaze of orange over the horizon. When we’d eaten our fill we had a taxi called for us to take us back to the hotel. A chatty blonde lady picked us up and it turned out that she’d driven Helen and Steve to their posh hotel the evening before. We were coming to the conclusion that there were only about 3 taxi drivers on the whole island. We got home safely – though there was one point where we were nearly driven into a wall as our driver was concentrated on fishing about in her top for the back of her earring that had fallen off – and collapsed in our respective beds. It’s all that sea air that tires you out. That and kilometre of war tunnels, the million steps down to the beach and the three quarters of a mile across two sandy bays.

The day after the wedding, Lauren and Dave set off to walk, I don’t know, miles and Suzy and I took a taxi to the Jersey War Tunnels. Of course, Jersey being the small island it is, we ran into our breakfast neighbours in the foyer of visitors’ centre.

The war tunnels are a partially completed network of tunnels used by the occupying German forces in World War II. The tunnels were built as an ammunition store and later converted into an underground hospital complex. They were constructed by a mix of forced labourers, POWs and volunteers (who “enjoyed” far better conditions than the other labourers).

The tunnels are now home to a large exhibition about the occupation of Jersey during the war and Suzy and I took the audio tour through the hillside. Even with incomplete tunnels still visible and the odd footprint here and there in the concrete, it was still hard to fathom that the tunnels really had been used by the German soldiers during the war, that we were walking where they had once walked. The occupying force on Jersey surrendered the day after D Day, but one thing the audio tour brought to our attention was a flight of steps to be used as an escape had the tunnels been invaded. They were unbelievably steep, impossible to descend without falling and even ascending would have been tricky.

While outside the summer sun was still shining, it was only about 17ºC in the tunnels. You needed to be dressed for it and though I was my feet were cold by the end. Suzy was in shorts and flip flops however and thus felt the cold that much sooner than me.

By the time we had worked our way through the tunnels and considered the tough decisions the audio tour posed us along the way – do you flee the island or stay? Do you resist the occupation? – we were ready for lunch and were pleased to fill up on toasted cheese sandwiches and Ribena for me and a panini and a pot of tea for shivering Suzy in the sun-filled café … where we saw Helen’s brother-in-law and his family.

While we waited for a taxi to take us to our next stop John rang from back on the mainland needing to know how I put together PDFs a certain way. Our cab turned up and I clambered in talking what must have sounded like a lot of nonsense about splitting and merging and placing.

We were headed to Reg’s Garden, which was marked on all the tourist maps. As we went along a coast road near our destination I spotted Lauren and Dave and called Lauren to let her know we were all headed in the same direction. The taxi driver knew where Reg’s Garden was, but had never been there in all his years on the island and thanked us for giving him a first when he dropped us off.

Reg’s Garden is the retirement project of Reg Langlois and he has opened his garden to the public free of charge, with donation buckets at hand for charity. There is a huge pond and waterfall, hundreds of flowers and shrubs, giant tortoises, an aviary and a (slightly odd) fairy garden. At the aviary we met a few waterfowl and a chick was running about loose. There was also Tutu, a cockatiel who said “hello” to you, but only once you’d turned your back on him.

After leaving the garden we spoke again to Lauren and Dave and arranged to meet them in St. Auben’s. Suzy asked a local guy for directions and we told to continue down the road, take a left and then head under an arch and down some steps. We followed his instructions, stopping only to admire the beautiful houses and photograph ourselves in a mirror. We found the arch and just as we were passing beneath it the guy appeared behind us in his car on the road, calling, “Yes, that’s right – down there!” What lay beyond the arch was a million steep steps down the hillside to the beach. We made it down them, making a mental note to order new knees and found Lauren and Dave in a café on the beach front.

I’d brought my mini Maglite out with me too. Though the display on the D80 lights up if you pull the on switch round beyond the on position, it still leaves the other buttons in the dark and without a torch you’re left fumbling about in the dark changing what you’ve just got perfectly set, instead of pressing the button you were actually aiming for.

I was quite content in the still darkness, watching the moon come and go and the stars start to appear in the summer night’s sky, when suddenly I heard a strange sneezy snuffle off to my right. I froze and stared wide-eyed ahead of me. Ok. I have a torch I can shine over in that direction, I thought, but I’m not sure I particularly want to, because, oh dear God, what if it’s a puma with a cold and it wants to eat me? After a little hesitation I pointed my torch in the direction of the sound and saw … a little hedgehog. Not a puma. He was making his way along the fence, noisily sniffing the ground and heading towards a puma another hedgehog in the corner of the garden.

I summoned Mum and Dad to see our nocturnal visitors and we watched them sniffing around in my dim torchlight. Not wanting to startle the creatures (the hedgehogs, not Mum and Dad) with my flash I settled for just a high ISO setting and torchlight. Sometimes you just have to enjoy something in the here and now and not worry about getting a perfect photographic record. After a while I ran back inside to grab my laptop to see if I could record their wonderfully loud snorting and snuffling. Unfortunately the laptop didn’t pick it up among all the general noise of the night, but I did get a couple of bits of video of them running about.

It occurs to me that I should have pointed them towards my vegetable patch, where I currently only have about 3 little weedy beetroot, slugs having methodically feasted on the leaves all along the row of beetroot I planted. I guess they’ll find their own way there soon enough.

Every year the War & Peace Show takes place at the nearby Beltring Hop Farm. Military vehicle enthusiasts come from all the over the country to display their vehicles, attend exhibitions and see famous guests such as Dame Vera Lynn and former cast members from Dad’s Army. Even if you don’t visit the show (and of course, being local, I never have) you still get a taste of the military and wartime vehicles as suddenly all kinds of jeeps and trucks are mingled in among the ordinary traffic as they go from camp site to supermarket to stock up on food for the week.

This year the Red Arrows made their debut at the event and performed a full 20 minute display. We were able to watch them zooming around from our garden and then one aeroplane came right over our house at the end.

I went to Tonbridge today and was accosted by a very nice Friends of the Earth man who talked to me about factory farming. He knelt down to talk to me on the wet pavement, which I found very chivalrous. He asked if it was ok to do so and I told him that he’d done absolutely the right thing. If you’re going to ask for my money for your charity, I’d much rather you did it at eye level. I had my camera in my bag, but unfortunately it didn’t occur to me to get a photo with him until I was quite a walk away from him and had already called for my lift home. So instead, here’s the puddle where I waited, reflecting the tree and the photographer just waiting for spring.