I spent part of May and most of June in the UK, catching up with family and friends. The weather was pretty wonderful for the first couple of weeks and unusually the late May bank holiday weekend was hot and sunny.
I took the opportunity to watch my son playing cricket for our local village team, it felt so quintessentially English
I also had the pleasure of meeting up with my 'soon to be' 18 year old god daughter in London. We were lucky to see this amazing floral display outside the National Museum, 27,000 fresh cut flowers were used to recreated a Dutch floral masterpiece.
A few days later it was my mother's 90th birthday, an occasion I definitely wanted to be back in the UK for and although she wasn't well enough to go out our family enjoyed celebrating quietly at home with her
My sister's and I spent many hours over the following few weeks clearing and sorting through the family home, prior to it being sold. It was hard work physically and emotionally but we had fun reminiscing over photographs and family possessions we remembered from our childhood.
Living now in Asia I was fascinated to find an album of photographs my father had taken whilst he was a young Naval Doctor aboard the Troopship Empire Orwell. The album dated 1952 states it left Southampton on 19th November and called at Port Said, Aden, Colombo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Pusan ( now called Busan in South Korea) and Kure (Hiroshima prefecture, Japan)
Below are the photos my father took in Singapore, most of which I could work out where they are, below the Singapore River and godowns
Raffles Hotel
The building below is now the Asian Civilisation Museum and Cavenagh Bridge
Taken looking across the Padang towards the Victoria Theatre ( now concert hall) and Memorial Hall, City Hall, Parliament House (now National Art Gallery) and the Singapore Cricket Club
Commercial Square (now Raffles Place ) with Chartered Bank on left, Robinson's store on right
The Fullerton building on the right
Chinatown has changed a bit but the method of hanging out the washing is still used today
As far as I know no kampongs (Malay word for village) like this still exist in Singapore, sadly
Whilst in the UK I was lucky enough to have time to catch up with some good friends, including some from the yard where I had kept my horse; Flash, before we came to Singapore. I had the pleasure of a enjoying a lovely long ride on him again, it was just wonderful to be riding in the cool fresh air and in open countryside again-a real tonic
After three weeks Papa T joined me in the UK and together with BT and HT went up to Wembley for a long awaited event-seeing Coldplay. The concert was fabulous-my photos do not do it justice at all!
We also took the opportunity to take a long weekend break to have time together as a family, just the four of us. We had planned this some months ago and wanted to go somewhere that none of us had been to before.This was quite a tough task as we all are fortunate enough to have travelled a fair bit but finally we picked Lisbon in Portugal and we were so pleased we had as it was delightful
Pretty tiled streets, trams, & tuk tuks, beautiful old buildings and lovely views
many of the houses are covered in tiles as well
The 'Elevador de Santa Justa', built at the turn of the 20th century, the architect was apprenticed to Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, the similarity in style is immediately apparent
with amazing views of the town and surrounding hills
The Se, the city's cathedral built for the first bishop of Lisbon, the English crusader Gilbert of Hastings, a funny coincidence as Hastings is a nearby seaside town to our UK home
Castelo de Sao Jorge
We took the train to the nearby seaside town of Caiscais, a pretty place. There was a group of musicians and dancers in a small square
We enjoyed a delicious seafood lunch overlooking the bay
and then wandered around the streets
our trip to Lisbon coincided with the Euro football 2016 and Papa T & HT were keen to watch some of the games, in Caiscais they found the match (I forget which) being shown at O'Neill's, possibly the prettiest Irish bar I've seen
Back in Lisbon that evening again the boys watched the next football match, BT and I went off exploring and came across this shop devoted to the sale of sardines, one of Portugal's major exports of course, who would have thought there were so many different varieties?
Many of the Lisbon streets are very steep and some have their own little funiculars like this one
and as the light faded the narrow streets filled with locals chatting and eating together, what a lovely place to live
We returned to the UK for a few more days of catching up with family and friends and then the day before we had to return to Singapore it was the Referendum. We were able to cast our vote at our local polling station and like many stayed up late to see the result which appeared at 1am to be for the UK to remain in the EU. We woke up to the surprising result that the majority had voted for the UK to leave the EU. I went to to the airport feeling like we were leaving the UK at a momentous time, time will tell what the effect of this vote will be.
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