Canicrossing

And that's Skip just in front - "a bit of a help at times!"

And here she is doing well in the Mynnydd Myfyr hill race at Trefonen on a lovely Sunday morning. Vicky was first in her age category and won a marvellous cake! I made the error of faffing around at the venue before the race and completely missed the start - I eventually got over the start line about a minute or so after everyone else - still I did have fun overtaking over half of the field and still won a bottle of plonk despite my silly mistake.

Shouldn't ease off should I!

I should really try to lean forwards instead of backwards when running downhill. However on this occasion we were just about to hit the finishing line at Southwick Country Park parkrun in Wiltshire - the young guy ahead of me had just gone hurtling past me and I just knew I wasn't going to beat him. If I'd known I was going to finish a mere five seconds outside the V65 record then I might have pushed it. But we had a wedding coming up later in the day and I must have been saving myself (ha ha!) It was quite a wedding as well, the weather held and everyone had a great time!

A banqueting hall not a chippie!

Here's a church. Well it was a church, or to be more precise it was a basilica, the Corpus Christi Basilica in Miles Platting, an inner city area of Manchester. The slums are long gone, the large congregation, largely of Irish descent, is long gone and the impressive building is now the Usmania Centre, a banqueting suite specialising in wedding parties, many of them Asian. The eminent architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner noted that it was "large with pale sandstone dressings, in the Italian Romanesque style."and it's good to see that the building has been preserved. What intrigues me is that the basilica was the home of the Norbertines who had a priory at the back of the church. The Norbertines were followers of St Norbert who founded the order in 1160 in Belgium. And who is England's favourite Norbert? Why, World Cup winning footballer Nobby Stiles of course. And where was he from? He was born in Collyhurst which is next door to Miles Platting. I knew that Nobby was a Catholic and I like to think that his parents attended this church and, impressed with the saintliness of St Norbert, or maybe just the unusual name, decided to endow their son with the name Norbert (when did they realise that it would be forever Nobby?)

As a footnote to this last story - another footballing Norbert was Nobby Lawton, a former Manchester United youngster who captained Preston North End when, despite dominating the game, they lost to West Ham in the 1964 FA cup final, Lawton was considered to be man of the match. And he was born in Newton Heath which is also next door to Miles Platting!

Yummy

All my favourites!

Thought I'd post a selection of recent photos that we took down under - this is from the kitchen wall of a very nice motel that we stayed at in Rotorua. This place, The Malfroy Motel, was run by a Chinese family and at the back of the motel they had a hot pool fed straight from their own hot spring - full of nice minerals it was, so a very good relaxing soak for our aching limbs was called for. (Note for those who are puzzled with the first item - Kimchi is a fermented Korean dish that we never quite got round to sampling.)

All good stuff!

However what we did try (well Vicky did) was something called Emma Datshi, from a Nepalese street food merchant in Christchurch - this is the national dish of Bhutan and is apparently made using Yak's milk! I did a mountain race in Dunedin two days later - maybe I should have had some of this tasty grub as well. Christchurch had a strange feel to it - well the city centre did! It's still not recovered from the earthquakes of a few years ago and the middle of town is full of building projects and car parks on land that clearly had been cleared of demolished buildings. There's some controversy about what to do with the ruined cathedral which sits behind rather unattractive fences - do they repair, rebuild or knock it down - nobody seemed to know.

Invisible chair?

And here's a bit of levitation on the streets of Brisbane! I dropped a couple of dollars in the hat and he/she gestured me over and gave me a fortune cookie (nothing to eat for me though - I just got the slip of paper with a motto on it - mine said: "You will own a brand new sports car soon.") So that was goodbye to Brisbane for another year or two - it's a lovely city with a mix of very friendly people originating from all over the world. It can be quite hot and humid in midsummer but the beer is nearly as good as that in New Zealand and the pies are nearly as good as Kiwi pies. The Lions' supporters are bound to be enjoying themselves right now whatever the results.