Category Archives: General

General

Beyond the Sea with the Basingstoke Tappers

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Last night we had our now traditional late July trip down to Basingstoke to see the annual Basingstoke Tappers show with our friends Catherine on stage, and her husband Phil hard at work keeping the whole show running smoothly as stage manager.

In pre-publicity the show, Beyond the Sea, had been subtitled ‘Cruising with the Tappers’ – but the theme had broadened somewhat giving pretty much of a world cruise, taking in places including London, Paris, Russia and Cuba to name a few.

After a break last year, the Chosen Few Big Band were back, and certainly earned their keep playing for every other number. It certainly seems to be more flexible in terms of routines to have a live band, as they can include short reprises to cover clearing the stage – something that is difficult to do with pre-recorded tracks, quite apart from the experience for the participants of working with live music. There were also a good number of contributions from Tappers regular Steve Pert, who took plenty of advantage of having the big band around to do some of the standards. Alongside Steve there was a new face for the shows in the form of Trisha Bassett an Ascot based singer. One of the dancers, Francesca McMahon also showed how far she has come since she sang for the first time in one of the earlier shows, performing a version of Midnight at the Oasis.

One of Steve’s numbers that caught Beth by surprise was when he performed Jump. Beth has only ever come across the original Van Halen version, whereas with a big band, Steve did the Paul Anka version, which like the whole album – Rock Swings – is quite a surprise when you’ve only ever heard the original.

Being the fifteenth year of the Tappers show, the Friday night performance was graced with the presence of the Mayor of Basingstoke, and there was a chance to reminisce over some of the past shows, and even a return to the amazing basketball routine from last year (and again nobody dropped the ball this time around either). What is a testament to the people in the company was when towards the end the members came forward grouped by how long they had been part of the company – although there was a good crowd of newbies, the majority have been dancing with the company for ten to fifteen years.

Certainly it was as entertaining as ever, mixing good music, cute moments with the real little ones, and even the odd quirky moments – the two penguins in the decidedly tropical Under the Sea I guess must have been on holiday!

‘The Chosen Few’ jazz orchestra @ the Tappers ’07 show originally uploaded by Tahbepet.

General, Pictures

Dan and Jas Get Married

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The Bride and Groom

This time last week, we were both sat in a school hall in Hayes celebrating the marriage of my cousin Daniel to his long-time girlfriend Jas. They had both been and the same university studying medicine and ended up as junior Doctor’s in Basingstoke. The issue though was that Jas is Sikh, and Daniel most definitely isn’t, so there was certainly of goings on in the background to get to last Sunday. All credit to Dan he agreed to the full Sikh wedding – which as you can see from the picture included growing a beard – and everything seemed to go pretty well okay.

Unfortunately, with an important service at St James, and Carolyn my fellow Churchwarden away I missed the actual wedding ceremony, but Beth went along to that, and I arrived in time for the reception. Not ever having been to a Sikh wedding before I can’t comment on quite where the schedule differed from normal, but when it came to speeches only my Uncle, Dan’s father, Daniel and the best man made speeches, when you’d usually expect the Father of the Bride to give a speech. We also had several hours of disco between the starter and main course with the meal, but perhaps that is because apparently at a traditional Sikh wedding the host have little idea who is ultimately going to be there.

The invitation we got to the wedding was addressed to myself and Beth – usually the way it works, however when my Uncle was confirming numbers he found that he had no details of replies for the other half of the guest list, and discovered that they had, as is traditional gone to the head of each family, and as is traditional nobody had RSVP’d. My uncle was also warned that they had gone to the households, so they could reasonably expect almost anybody in the family to turn up. It may well be for some other unrelated reason, but if you don’t know how many guests will be there, having the main meal relatively late in proceedings gives you some opportunity to feed everybody.

Having said that, having the disco part way through does cause problems, particularly for people who don’t like the noise – and despite the fact we were seated on the opposite side of the hall from the disco it was still really loud. Incidentally, the people providing the disco had a decidedly odd name – Massacre Sounds – considering the meaning of the word usually relates to some sort of mass killing, it seems a weird name, all sorts of wrong connotations when you’re marketing to events like weddings and other parties!

Anyway, we had a good time, and the Bride and Groom certainly seemed to enjoy themselves which is the main thing. I’ve posted a selection of our pictures from the day, which include a chance to see the spectacular (and apparently rather heavy) dress, and my brother trying to hide the other three cans behind his back as he heads back to the table!

A couple of miscellaneous points to mention. Curious discovery of the day is that Beth is now related by marriage to one of the other teachers at her school. Beth met up with her at the ceremony and found out that Jas’s grandfather and he colleagues grandfather were brothers – not quite sure what the relationship is actually titled. The other point came up from the Best Man’s speech, with the revelation of the day being that Dan was in fact a former trainspotter – sadly led astray by my brother, who thanks to the fact that he did it with his best mate, probably won’t have to contend with that being highlighted on his wedding day!

Current Affairs, General

All Home and Safe

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Baird Road

Well we’re both home, and as of about 9:30pm tonight we managed to get the cars back too. Beth also managed to make it a short walk from home, but on the wrong side of this flood across the edge of the army base. At this point she just parked up and waded out. We then walked back down a couple of hours later to take a look to find this guy who had made it almost all the way through – it was over Beth’s knees wading through, so most of the onlookers thought he was lucky to have made it that far. Another car later on that had a go barely made it in before the car packed up – unfortunately that car had two mothers and toddlers and they were trying to get to the hospital. Luckily another car that was there helping out a friend who had also got stuck gave them a lift on to the hospital.

Anyway, about 9pm another one of our neighbours came home and said that they had both come across the bridge at Barkham without too much problem, and offered to give us a lift to go and collect the cars. Although the flood on the edge of the base was still there – and even crossed back across the road further up, there was no water at all over the bridge. The rumour that the bridge had washed away also proved to be wrong thankfully. So by going the slightly scenic route we were able to collect both cars – although the various cars stuck in this particular flood were still stranded.

It looks like although the flood at the bridge looked considerably more spectacular – as it is a river anyway, the water was able to clear pretty quickly. Places like this where there isn’t usually a river, all the water has collected.

According to the weather forecast the rain has moved north, so we’re a good deal better off than some other places in the country where it has rained continuously all day. We’re also a lot better off than Windsor, Maidenhead and Thatcham, all of which have significant numbers of houses under water – as can be seen on this BBC News Report. Although it was frustrating struggling to get home, it was certainly a relief to get home to a dry house and our thoughts are certainly with those people around the area who haven’t been so lucky.

And apparently all of this is because the jetstream is running further south than usual…

Current Affairs, General

Getting Your Feet Wet

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Barkham Road

It’s all rather soggy around here…

The reason is that today we’ve had the equivalent of two months rainfall in about twenty-four hours – indeed most of it seems to have come in about two hours this morning. As a result all the drains are overflowing, and all the rivers have burst their banks.

At lunchtime we had news that the road had collapsed close to the entrance to the industrial estate on which my employer is based, as a result they took the decision to close the office, and sent us all home. The bottom of the road had a fountain of dirty water in the middle, and you could see the tarmac broken ahead, but luckily they were directing traffic around. However that wasn’t the worst of it.

The picture here is of the bridge over a little tributary of the River Loddon that I have to cross on my way home. As you can see, pretty well impassible, and apparently now the little bridge has collapsed under the weight of water (hopefully they’ll rebuild it wide enough for two cars to pass on it) rendering it impassible for a good deal of time to come.

After trying several other roads I eventually got closer to home by getting as far as Finchampstead, but again ran into problems with a couple of places close to the Reading training ground where the drains had blocked and water was knee deep. Eventually after several hours trying to find alternatives I parked up near the Hogwood Lane industrial estate and walked the last half mile or so.

At one point I bumped into a neighbour of ours, who had also spent about five hours driving around. He has just made it home, having found someone who opened the gate between the Hogwood Lane and Hogwood Farm industrial estates. Unfortunately that was just a one off – the gate was closed and locked immediately afterwards. Not sure how much luck Beth is going to have getting back from Wargrave…

General

A Brief Trip to Belgium

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Brasserie in Corsendonk

This week I had a brief visit to Belgium in order to attend a project kick-off meeting with one of our customers. Myself an a colleague took the Eurotunnel over on Wednesday, attended the kick-off meeting on the Thursday morning, and headed back home on Thursday evening. The travelling wasn’t too bad as it was motorway all the way, and aside from getting caught up in traffic around Antwerp both ways, it was fairly free moving.

The real treat of the trip though was the hotel. When the customer sent us a map to our hotel, it placed it somewhere in the centre of Out-Turnhout. However the confirmation from the hotel had a different address – Priorij Corsendonk or Corsendonk Priory. It turns out that the company that owns the hotel in town, also owns the old priory in the village of Corsendonk, which it now operates as a hotel and conference centre, and this is where we had actually been booked in.

After the several hours on the road driving the three hundred or so miles from home, the village of Corsendonk was delightful – with almost no traffic, and very peaceful. The village is small enough that the addresses in the village only have a number – the roads have no names, so the brasserie – Corsendonk Hof – where we had dinner was number 2, and the priory itself is number 5. The priory has been very tastefully restored, retaining a number of original buildings, but with some additional more modern blocks for accommodation. We had modern ‘monks rooms’ – read single rooms – in one of the new blocks, however we did go up to the main priory building for breakfast.

The hotel is in the Flemish part of Belgium, and whilst he doesn’t speak Dutch, the language in that region the colleague I was with spoke pretty good French, the other national language in Belgium – however it transpired that he spoke significantly better French than most of the people we met. In most cases they preferred to speak to us in English both in the hotel and on the customer site. As is common, there were points where the English translations were slightly strange, for example, what do you suppose is Turkey on Spies?

There was also a decidedly strange paragraph on noise nuisance in the hotel information…

The farmer across [the road from] the hotel possesses a cannon that starts working in case of thunder and hailstorm in order to protect his apple trees from hailstones and other unpleasant things that can occur during intense thunder showers. That is why it can happen that the cannon goes off at night. In case of other noise do not hesitate to notify the reception so that we can help wherever necessary.

Now I’m not quite sure whether cannon is a mistranslation or what – but having worked in the past on a project that managed to translate ‘Company’ as in corporation to the German word for ‘to keep somebody company’ – I know how easy it is to mis-translate one word and produce un-intentional hilarity for native speakers of whatever language it is. But then what do I know, maybe the farmer over the road really does have a proper cannon!

Having said that, we weren’t woken by the farmers cannon, and it certainly seemed like a nice spot either for a break, or for a conference. The hotel has an English website and you can find a few snaps in and around the priory in our photo galleries.