Nothing interesting to read here… 17-28th February

We’ve started to get pretty bored with our jobs here at the hotel. As nice as the hotel and surrounds are, our attention has shifted to the future. Maria is spending time at the British Library, and I’m starting to reel in as many contacts as I can to get a foot into the door of the industry over here. We therefore have our heads down, bottoms up, and are spending more time staring into computer screens than serving beers. So not a lot to report at the moment.

Fletch’s tips for new travellers

Always drink the cask ale that everyone else is drinking. If you drink a less popular ale, your pint may have been sitting in the line from the cellar to the tap for a couple of hours or more.

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Time for some hum drum... 8-16 February

Well things have basically quietened down for us now. We have settled into our respective roles at the hotel, Maria doing all the work, and me chatting to customers at the bar, and a routine is starting to emerge. We have two days off every week and those two days are now allegedly Wednesday and Thursday. We therefore plan to use these days to see what’s around the southern part of England.

The week was dominated with work as the roster changed such that we worked from Wednesday through till Tuesday. As a result of the renovations currently being done on the hotel, the power and hot water have been on and off in different parts of the hotel over the past week, and we have had workmen in the roof removing asbestos as well. The result is that various parts of the hotel have been off limits, including the laundry. We had to spend a night in one of the guest rooms (don’t all offer your condolences at once), as there is some weird pulsing noise in our bedroom stopping us from sleeping, and nobody can work out where its coming from.

Our only real excursion this week was yesterday, Thursday 16th. One of the hassles we have had starting work is getting a national insurance number (kind of like a tax file number and Medicare number rolled into one.) The boss told us to ring the Eastbourne office of social security, but it is almost impossible to get through. Either the line is engaged, or it just rings forever. We decided to give up ringing them and see what happened if we just turned up. At the last minute Maria decided to try them one last time before we left to at least get directions to the office. She miraculously managed to talk to a person, and found that we shouldn’t be going to the Eastbourne office from Wych Cross, we should be going to the Woking office. So he gave us the number of the Woking office and Maria tried to call them whilst I looked up Woking on our map. Maria failed to get onto Woking, which was a good thing as I found that Woking is in fact in Surrey, about 5 miles north of Guildford. Suffice it to say that we weren’t going to find it very easy to get to Woking on public transport. So Maria tried the Brighton office instead. When Maria rang the Brighton office, she got the same person answering the phone as when she had rung the Eastbourne office. So this seemingly omnipresent voice on the other end of the phone (the telecomnicon?) arranged a 3:10pm meeting for us at Brighton.

Armed with a stack of ID and some jaffa cakes, we found a transport solution that only required one bus and one train to get us to Brighton in about half an hour, and off we trudged for a day at the beach.

Brighton is demographically quite different from anywhere else I have been in the UK thus far. It is very much a university town, and university towns always have a certain feel about them. We took a stroll from the railway station down toward the beach, taking a quick diversion to make sure we knew where the social securities office was before going to the pier.

Apparently ‘beach’ has quite a different definition here. I can understand now why Churchill said ‘We will fight them on the beaches’. Anyone invading Brighton beach would become so depressed they would turn around and go home before they could reach for the Prozac. Brighton beach was cold, rocky, grey and horrible. On a serious note though, it suited me far more than the bright sun and sand of an Australian beach. ‘Why?’ you may ask. I need no justification for avoiding it! A quick walk down the pier, a few snaps with the camera, and into the fish and chip shop for lunch.

That was a mistake. Fish was evident, as were chips. One merely had to fight through two inches of solid batter to reach them. Ordering the large cod and large haddock was also a misjudgement. Indeed these fish must be man eaters in the wild. The fish were quite tasty, under all that batter, but Englishmen merely give you a look of blank incomprehension when you ask whether you can have fish without batter. Apparently they pull them out of the sea battered. Oh well.

Once we found the relative safety of the inside of the fish and chip shop, the sun mocked us by breaking through the clouds. I haven’t worn my sunglasses since we arrived in the UK, but I could have used them then.

After some brief shopping, we had our appointment at the social securities office. The staff there have quite a harried look about them, and become very friendly and helpful when they find that you aren’t a pregnant, teenage junky wanting to yell or cry at them. We should have our number in four to six weeks, and then the formalities of working in England are over for the time being.

We caught the train/bus home and that was our big day out for the week.

Take care

Fletch’s tips for new travellers

The most popular beer here seems to be Fosters. Nobody has yet been able to tell me why…

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Goodbye Germany, hello England – 31st January to 7th February

We have been a little lax with writing the diary this week, blame it on the adjustment to a working life. Our last entry was from Germany, where we were enjoying the hospitality provided by our friends, the Jakobs. We spent a lovely final day with Gitte and Stefan on the 30th. They took us to Hanau to visit a palace, but it was closed. Instead, we cuddled up to some friendly (and sleepy) bronze lions and took a stroll around the palace gardens. We then went for a walk through the Staadtspark Wilhelmsbad, a veritable winter-playground of frozen lakes and creeks, windmills, and lookouts. We skidded along the frozen ice, walking out to a small island in the middle of the lake, upon which is a pyramid. Fletch declared it the best he had ever seen :) We had a lovely time strolling around the park, enjoying the crisp cold air and the lovely blue sky. Little did we know that this was the last sunshine we would see…


When we had exausted ourselves and Gitte’s dog, we went home. We all had an early start the next morning, us to England and Gitte & Stefan to work, so it was early to bed and early to rise. The 31st was a foggy and very cold day. We caught a train to Frankfurt’s main station and then a bus to the Hahn airport to catch our flight back to Stansted. It was mid-morning when we arrived at Hahn but the fog made everything quite dark. It was only beginning to lift when our plane took off three hours later.

When we arrived in London, it was mid-afternoon. We caught a bus into Oxford Street, where we had to attend to some banking matters. This achieved, we headed for Victoria Station to catch a train to our new home. Commuting via tube and train with backpacks during peak-hour is not an experience we would recommend. Our travel woes were compounded by line-failure near our destination, so we had to hop off the train and catch a bus to the station of East Grinstead, in West Sussex. From there we caught a taxi (having missed the last bus) to a small dot on the map that is known as Wych Cross. It is here, at a 17th century hotel, we will be living for the next few months.

Wych Cross is several miles inside the border of East Sussex and is in the middle of the Ashdown Forest. It is a junction on the A22 motorway and home only to a car-yard, a hotel, and a rose-shop. Oh, and a bus stop. This bus-stop will quickly become our lifeline with the outside world. The hotel is a lovely old building, complete with lovely old building pros and cons. The atmosphere gives an impression of a hunting lodge and has excellent heating but the plumbing leaves something to be desired. Our room is in the oldest part of the hotel and from the road looks quite charming. It is a comfortable space and we have our own en-suite bathroom. All staff rooms are along the road-side, this being the noisiest part of the hotel. However, having come from living on a main road in St. Lucia, the road here is positively peaceful.

Our first day at Wych Cross was taken up with settling in. We started work on our second day. I am working in the hotel’s restaurant and Fletch is manning the bar. At present, the hotel is a bit overstaffed, so our first days of work were very quiet. Several people are leaving around February 16th, so things should settle into a normal routine around then. Our working day is not overly strenuous. I do the breakfast shift, which lasts until 3pm, and Fletch does a split shift across lunch and dinner.

In our free time (Monday & Tuesday being our days off), we have taken a few walks around the neighbourhood. As I mentioned, Wych Cross is in the Ashdown Forest. As the area around Wych Cross is wooded, it took several days for us to discover that the title of forest is misleading: it is only called a forest because the royal family used to hunt there. It is an ‘Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty’, aka AONB (the Government’s acronym, not ours), consisting primarily of heathland. It is considered to be the best-preserved heathland in the southeast of England and is the source of some 80 miles of walking tracks. We need to get some maps of the walking paths (and the visitor centre is only open on the weekend, which we didn’t know), so we have thus far stuck a main path that goes through a nearby golf-course and past a llama farm. Today, however, we took the hotel-manager’s two golden Labradors for a walk: more precisely, they took us for a walk. They led us on a path through the woodland – we had no idea where we were but they did and an hour and half later we ended up back at the hotel.

The rest of our day today has been spent decorating our room. The interior is shabby, so we have been hanging bright calendars and the papyri we purchased in Egypt to try and cheer the room up. We’ve managed to get lots of colour on the walls: an alpine scene on one wall, a 1962 Morris Mini 850 in bright blue on the other. The camel that Fletch traded his watch for at Sinai is hanging on one of the other walls, exclaiming ‘Welcome to Egypt’, flanked by papyri. It’s a bit chaotic but does take attention away from the holes and cracks.

BTW, we celebrated our 1.5th anniversary today! We were going to shout ourselves a coffee in East Grinstead to celebrate, but we didn’t have enough money.

Fletch’s tips for new travellers

The Shandy is still a popular drink here in England, unlike Australia where it has fallen out of fashion. I have thus learnt a new thing!

Directions for making a Shandy:

Follow either of these two procedures to make the perfect Shandy

1 Fill glass to half full with lemonade. Top the glass with beer.

2 Fill the glass to half full with beer. Top with lemonade. Become overwhelmed with froth. Look awkward and embarrassed. Pour what is left of the concoction down the sink after much has already spilled on the floor. Get told off by manager for pouring beer down the sink. Use procedure 1. Then mop bar floor…

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