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A Funeral Followed by Humiliation...

24/2/2016

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I have just returned from a two-day visit to Kent. The reason for the trip was the funeral of my cousin Pat Spall (a McEvoy on her mother's side). Pat was one of the kindest and most sensible of my relatives. For the last twenty years or so she lived in Hadlow, a village a few miles from Tonbridge where she worked until a few months ago in the tourist information centre in Tonbridge Castle. The funeral was held at Tunbridge Wells Crematorium, with a reception at the Hadlow Manor Hotel. Her family from Canada were there, so I saw some younger relatives I had not met before. The most recent photo I have of Pat was taken at my birthday party on the Ipswich waterfront four and a half years ago. Pat is in the front row on the left. 
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  I stayed at the Premier Inn on the south side of Tonbridge for the two days I was in Kent and to my surprise I managed the drive from Ipswich without a hitch, despite having to cross from Essex to Kent via the dreaded Dartford Crossing. There were no delays and I did not get lost.  If only the return trip today had been so smooth... 
  There were severe delays on the Dartford Crossing Driving north, and the busy traffic slowed to a standstill. As happens sometimes when traffic goes fast and then slows, my car stalled. And then it wouldn't start again. Nothing. I was in the middle lane and the traffic started moving again, and soon was going very fast. Juggernauts wizzed either side of me but my little Hyundai i10 stayed put. Someone stopped behind me and I explained the position. We rang the police and before driving off he told me to get out of the car or I would be killed. The trouble was, I would also be killed if I stepped out of the car. The police told me the motorway patrol had been called and would be along shortly, though shortly was twenty minutes. Eventually they arrived and the traffic behind me was halted. I had brought the M25 to a standstill. The two helpful ladies towed me to the hard shoulder and I was left there to wait for the AA roadside rescue, though I was told they might take an hour. At least they could open the motorway again! In the event two very nice lads arrived after forty minutes and managed to start the car, but suggested I might like them to take me to get a new battery. So they loaded my car onto their pick-up and took me to a Halfords in Dartford. 
   I was pleasantly surprised at how helpful everyone was. The motorway patrol ladies, the roadside rescue lads and Halfords people were all absolutely charming, though I suspect there were a few chuckles once they left me. There must have been some fuming delayed drivers too, and who can blame them? For those unfamiliar with the Dartford Crossing here's a photo. It's the most important crossing over the Thames east of London. Southbound is by bridge, northbound by tunnel.

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  Of all the places for my car to conk out (something it has never done before) this was just about the last place on earth anyone would want it to. It could not have happened in any of the sleepy roads in Suffolk, it had to be here! It was the most dangerous and (perhaps worse) the most disruptive and embarrassing spot  it could have chosen. I could have kept all this to myself, of course, but blogs are not just about triumphs, they should be about humiliations too. 
  Still, I did manage to have a lovely cup of tea and some excellent granola cheesecake in a café next to Halfords while they were sorting out my car, so the day was not all doom and gloom.

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Amazon Countdown Deal...Hurry, hurry!

4/2/2016

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The Ceramic Cottage is the subject of a countdown deal on Amazon's UK site from 5th to 11th February 2016! It starts of at less than half price then rises by the end of the week to is normal price of £1.99. There will be a similar countdown deal on their US site the following week.
For details of the novel click onto
The Ceramic Cottage
link at the top of the page (just above the picture of a very handsome guy with the pipe).  

Enough of book promotion. No doubt you are on tenterhooks  waiting for the answer to the question in my last blog post. Who are the couple getting married in this photo? Maria and Georg von Trapp, of course (the real ones). 

  Interesting that the film, TV and most stage versions of their story don't show Captain von Trapp with a moustache. Perhaps that's because they were out of fashion for much of the post-war period (which may have been to do with the bad press Hitler gave them). Certainly, for a long time it was mainly villains who had moustaches, though oddly this never applied to beards. My dad stolidly kept his moustache for all his adult life, from the late 1920s through to the 1990s. I tried one a couple of times, but discovered that I was always unsuccessful in job and college interviews when I had one but always sailed through when I was clean-shaven. Having just discovered a couple of old photos of myself from around that time I can see why. 
  Which of these would you be most likely to buy a used car from?


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  One of the problems of having a blog and website is deciding whether to put something in the blog or on one of the website pages. Technically they are all part of the same site, and it's easy enough to look at other pages by just clicking onto them. Yet oddly I find that on some days the number of visitors to the site is the same as the number of pages visited. Do people not know there is more to see just by clicking on one of the pages along the top? Of course, some may just be looking for the latest blog update, but I do sometimes update other pages too, eg The Ceramic Cottage or History and Literary Stuff. Feel free to wander, though I grant a couple of pages are still very much in their early stages.
 
 

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    Paul Williams's (McEvoy Williams) Blog.  General stuff about History, Literature, family and Ipswich.

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