Woke up at 6AM and wasted one and a half hours continually flicking through all 150 channels. I watched all the teleshopping channels. Nothing on but a weird black and white cold war film from Hollywood where the Communists were infiltrating the New York Docks. And were they bad guys. Real baddies. Awful crude film. Didnt watch it for long. Continued on flicking though. The Russian Channel was the only thing worth watching.
Blood Pressure 109/62 Pulse 64 Before we left Australia Jenny purchased a ticket online from English Heritage. They are much the same as The National Trust but not as big and seem to have lesser numbers but bigger buildings. Kenwood House where we went last week is one of their houses. Today we took advantage of the voucher and went to Eltham Palace. Its pronounced Elt - Ham. You don't pronounce the th. We will have to stop calling Eltham Eltham and start calling it Elt Ham. We took the Jubilee Line to North Greenwich. We then got the bus to Eltham. Quite a long journey. Through a number of suburbs. Eltham has quite a large shopping area but it retains something of a country village look. Mixture of types. A fair proportion of non Caucasian. We then had to walk to Eltham Palace. This was quite interesting. Very quickly we passed from village look to extremely well healed outer suburbia. Very attractive houses on large blocks. Something like Toorak. Eltham Palace has a history of 1000 years. It was first built in William the Conquerors time. It came into the Royal Family at some point and Henry V111 spent most of his life there up to the time he became King. After that he wanted a more grander and better located home so he moved to Hampton Park and never went back there. It fell into disrepair and was badly damaged during the Civil War when the Parliamentarians damaged it. As they did everywhere according to the rather unkind comments on the time line showing the history of the house. It even became a storage place for farm produce - hay etc after the restoration. Finally in the early 20th Century it was purchased by the Courtauld Family. We had lunch in the cafe. I had soup and Jenny had fish tart. When the food came Jenny felt the food had chicken in it and it was a pie not a tart. She went and told them and they provided her with what she was supposed to have. Because she had already tasted the pie I was able to have it for free. It was OK but not brilliant. They restored the Original Hall to its proper state. It is smaller than Westminster but has the same look. No doubt its authentic. They then built a large house attached to the Great Hall with the outside in the style of what it was previously. The interest in the house is that inside it is all Art Deco. There could not be a bigger difference between outside and inside. And I mean all Art Deco. Not a lot of rooms inside the shell but the rooms are all large. And they are all in the Art Deco style. Its a very comfortable and interesting house. It has all the modern amenities. Well before its time. Internal vacuum cleaning system for instance. Underfloor heating. Bathrooms attached to every bedroom. Large working kitchen attached to the dining Room. Large refrigeration area. In the basement there is a Billiard room and a Dark room because they were both keen photographers. But basically it is a 2 bedroom house with another 2 small bedrooms for visitors. There is a room in the basement where they accommodated important people during the war. This has been made up to look what it was like then. Camp stretchers etc. There are letters from grateful participants. Aparently it was quiet and people could concentrate on what they were doing. And of course everything was laid on because they produced all their own food. It is still more or less a working farm. There was not a large servants area as far as I could see. Maybe they came from the village. Of course the Courtaulds had servants. There is references to Mrs Courtauld writing notes to the cook suggesting some adjustments required to the cooking. They had a butler and valets etc. Cleaners etc. But apparently not footmen and housemaids etc. Where their quarters were is not obvious. Plenty of rooms for food preparation and other work. Maybe they stayed there. On the job. Walking back to the town to get the bus it started to rain. Jenny made the decision that we should keep walking and of course two buses went past when were were between bus stops. A lot of people were waiting when we finally got to our bus stop. The trip back to North Greenwich was eventful in that the bus was full for pretty well all the way. There was a heavy fall of rain. Hailstones even at one point. A woman with two children sitting in front of us - one well behaved and one well and truly not well behaved. Woman had the unattractive east end accent. Why do the English persist with accents? It stamps them at birth with a whole personality and way of life. A lot of non caucasian schoolchildren on the bus. Pretty well all non caucasian boys and girls. A lot of chatter. They go to school a fair way from home because they were on the bus for a fair stretch. Jenny wondered why there was not a suitable school closer to home. We passed through a mixture of industrial and domestic buildings. Some could almost be historic. No new development until you get near to Greenwich and then it happens with a vengeance. We came home on the Jubilee Line.
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