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Stayin’ alive
Life becomes more curious. We went to Primark last week, the store which prides itself on ethical trading which it defines as providing the best value for its customers but not at the expense of the people who make its products. Primark mainly sells clothes, but at low prices, and we went there as Kaelene wanted a pair of flat shoes. On arrival, the floor of the shoe department revealed that ethical practices may not be widely adopted by customers who appear to show not the slightest regard for anything at all. Many obviously feel free to try on footwear and other apparel and then simply discard items wherever they feel like. Discard may be an understatement, it looked more like the scene of a shoe fight; the floor was literally strewn with dozens and dozens of mismatched pairs of shoes, like stocktaking at The Warehouse in New Zealand, but on speed.
The shoe department is right next to the women’s lingerie department, with racks and racks of brassieres in all manner of ghastly colours. Shocking pink, lime green, canary yellow, turquoise, and mauve seem to be the fashion du jour . Bored, so rather than stick to shoes, Marty decided it would be more funto spend the afternoon encouraging young women to hurl unwanted or wrong-sized brassieres around the floor. Colourful, and entertaining.
As we hear reports of the weather getting colder in New Zealand, we are smug in the knowledge that it is spring in London, with predictions of a long, hot summer. The last few days have been so warm and sunny that we’ve all been gardening, or rather clearing out undergrowth both at the front and back of the Moodie estate. Their type of garden runs counter to all of Kaelene’s natural instincts, her view being that a natural looking, overgrown garden takes hours and hours of careful work and maintenance if it is to look the part. Being left untouched for three years does not quite achieve the desired result and has let the blackberry (or bramble as it is referred to here) gain the ascendency. A few more days and the garden should start to take shape, but already the freshly filled, squirrel and pigeon-proof bird feeders are attracting robins and other small birds back into the garden, and we’ve put out another feeder for the woodpeckers.
As an aside, it is good to note that, unlike the practice in Christchurch, the Greenford rubbish transfer station does not charge for the dumping of rubbish. Quite refreshing really.
Ealing is a very green and leafy part of London; we have what is called a nature reserve over the back fence, in reality a large tract of land protected from development and left in a natural state. At one end are allotments where locals tend their vegetable patches and the other end a huge park with sports grounds and large grassed areas. Through this runs the Brent River, a small stream along whose banks we have been walking in an effort to shake off the slabs of blue cheese and bread which have, without invitation, attached themselves like limpets to our hips and waists in recent weeks.
Pitshangar Village, the local shops at the end of Pitshangar Lane, is like an old-fashioned English village inside a vast city. It has an ironmonger, fishmonger, butcher and the Co-op grocer, a Polish bakery, betting shop and launderette, a couple of land agents and the local inn. Then there is the off-license bottle shop which always seems to have deals on New Zealand wines, at the moment, 40 percent off when buying six bottles and a very good special on Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc. The Polish shop assistant wears a bone carving from New Zealand, and we overheard a French customer telling her that the Lindauer Special Reserve is as good as any French champagne. Unable to restrain ourselves, we agreed.
The warm weather means that the lads have been out with the top down in the Mercedes, but Martin and Marty lament that their pulling power as a couple of aging playboys has been dampened significantly by the child restraints in the back seat.