Becoming a grandmother - in Japan

Day 1 with dad

So here I am in Osaka, Japan - a side trip from our busy schedule of being on holiday. I'm here because my fabulous son Ben and his lovely former partner Saho have just had a baby. 

And he changes nappies!

They've called him Zen, and at two weeks old he's living up to his name - as relaxed and gorgeous a little fella as any grandmother could want. Eating well, sleeping well, cheerful in between, and only mildly indignant when adequate sustenance isn't available Right Now. I couldn't be prouder of him and am so happy to be here, if only for a couple of weeks. 

Not asleep, of course, just resting my eyes

But perhaps even more so, I'm tremendously proud of Ben and Saho, who are wonderful parents, coming together in what could be a very difficult situation, to make it work for the happiness of their son. They are so young, and yet I see a maturity in both of them, as they work out how Ben can play a meaningful role in Zen's life, despite the difficulties and geographical distance. 

Today, Sept 4

I wish them strength and courage, patience and tolerance, the ability to forgive and the skill to overcome tough times. But most of all I wish them the joy with Zen that I've had with my own children. Love yous. Go well.

The National Trust, I forgive you. Bill should too

Sam at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent. Different bits of the property have been a Tudor pig farm, a stinking lock-up for French sailors during the Seven Years War (1756-63), a Victorian poor house and working farm, and most recently home to controversial bisexual novelist and poet Vita Sackville-West (a close friend and lover of Virginia Woolf) and her (also bisexual) diplomat husband Harold Nicolson. The couple restored the dilapidated house and added its wonderful gardens.

In his latest bestseller, The Road to Little Dribbling, American-turned-British travel writer Bill Bryson has a lot to say about The National Trust, much of it grumpy. While he loves the idea of a British charity charged with preserving places of historic interest or natural beauty, he whinges about the number of tearooms, gift shoppes, plant shoppes, paid carparks, and other ways of taking visitors’ money. 
Harrumphing makes entertaining reading and sells books, and to be honest I have always had a small core of anti-NT bitterness in my heart after the organisation pulled/burnt down the house where I spent my childhood holidays. OK, so some people thought it was a ugly green fire hazard in the middle of some of the most beautiful scenery in Wales. But I loved it passionately. 
Still, at 53, and after spending 10 days in the UK and visiting two fabulous National Trust properties, I reckon I am finally ready to forgive the organisation. I also reckon Bill Bryson is just being a tight bastard. You have to admit it - the National Trust is quite wonderful. And far from a rip-off.

Hinton Ampner House in Hampshire. You'd never know, but this building is actually little more than 50 years old, the previous property having been destroyed by fire and then lovingly rebuilt by its owner in the 1960s, before being donated to the National Trust.

For a start, once you’ve paid your £64 (NZ$115) annual membership fee, you get to visit more than 500 “properties” (300 houses, 250,000 acres of countryside and 775 miles of coastline) for free, and as many times as you like within the year. Pay another £7 and you can also take up to 10 children or grandchildren under 18, if you happen to find that many in your car. That would seem to me to be pretty good value for money.  
New Zealanders get it even cheaper, because Heritage NZ (annual membership $64, or £35) has a reciprocal arrangement with the National Trust. Maybe Bill Bryson should look at this loophole for his 2018 subscription. There might even be a better deal with the Conservation Co-operation Corporation of Kazakhstan that he could check out. 
And Bill, no one’s forcing you to have to have a cup of tea, buy a rose bush, or (mostly) even pay for parking. I spent a grand total of $0 during my two days out.
The National Trust’s slogan is “for ever, for everyone” and as we wandered around Hinton Ampner (Hampshire), and later Sissinghurst (Kent) there seemed to be far more visitors than I remembered, and a big range of ages. I was expecting retired baby boomers and tourists, but there were heaps of local families too. One young mum sitting on a bench in the garden sharing morning tea with twin babies and a toddler, said she came at least once a week - a chance to get out of the house.

My mother Heather in the gardens at Hinton Ampner House in Hampshire.

The statistics confirm the National Trust is growing apace. Membership hit two million in 1990, the year we moved to New Zealand, and was three million by 2003. It reached four million in 2011 and is now approaching five. That means almost one in 12 people in Britain are members. The properties have more than 20 million visitors a year, and 62,000 volunteers, my mother among them.

My mother (left) and another volunteer in the gardens at Hinton Ampner

A volunteer takes a break...

Actually sorry, cancel all that about phenomenal growth. Earlier this month, Britain’s conservative newspaper The Telegraph reported a “membership crisis” at the National Trust. Shock horror! What could have brought about this sorry state of affairs? It seems that as part of its Pride and Prejudice celebrations around the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the NT made a film “outing” a long-dead squire who left his home to the organisation. A “membership boycott” ensued, according to The Telegraph. Apparently 240 members (surely not 240!) cancelled their subscription and 10 volunteers refused to wear their gay pride badges. 
I suspect they were all Telegraph readers.

The main building at Sissinghurst

Pondering the Spanish work day

A long lazy (weekday) lunch with paella. A grim life

We had two glorious days staying in the mountains about an hour outside Granada - on the edge of the Sierra Nevada. A long-lost schoolfriend Sarah Benchley and her husband John moved up here from Granada to farm olives and almonds, and kindly offered to have us to stay. They have chickens and live largely off their own produce - veges, eggs, fruit, nuts etc - which they grow with the help of a series of international volunteers. These latter (while we were there it was two English chefs and a young Polish couple, an engineer and a lawyer) exchange five hours of work a day for full board and lodging. It seemed pretty idyllic to us - though I'm sure it has its downsides too, like relying on solar power and spring water, and being pretty isolated in winter.

View from the farm: Not a house in sight.

The work day at the farm, with its seriously extended break during the middle part of the day surprised and enchanted us, as we'd never encountered it before, even in other hot countries. Work stopped at 12.30pm and didn't start up again until 6.30, with final knock-off at 8.30pm. Over the afternoon period there was preparation and eating of a leisurely lunch (the main meal of the day), a swim, a bit of TV watching, sometimes a siesta.

And while a six-hour afternoon break is a reflection of the volunteers' short working day, we discovered having a 2-3-hour lunch break is normal in Spain. The average Spaniard starts work somewhere between 9 and 10am, has a coffee mid morning and then breaks at 2pm for a long lunch, resuming work 2-3 hours later and continuing until 8pm, or even later. Dinner happens very late; bed even later - going to sleep at midnight on a working day isn't unusual.
I suspect this works brilliantly in rural farming areas, particularly in summer, where people can nip home for lunch and a sleep and avoid toiling in the fields in the heat of the day. But it seems a bit crazy in an air-conditioned city environment, where it just means a long, disjointed working day, people spending up to 13 hours a day away from home, and serious problems with children and parents spending time together after school.
More than three years ago, a Spanish parliamentary commission recommended moving to a more normal  9-5 day, but so far only the Catalonia region, in the north-east of the country is even close to making any changes. A deal between trade unions, some employers, educators and social campaigners announced earlier this year aimed at introducing a more "flexible and productive" regime by 2025.
The rest of Spain may follow.
I sort of hope my friend Sarah does not.

Making mohitos for an evening aperitivo required taking a drink bottle of ice from the solar-powered freezer, taking off the plastic, wrapping it in a towel and bashing it with a rolling pin.  Then you had to go looking by the stream for mint. No nipping down to the supermarket.

(Photo courtesy of Sarah's Facebook page)

A day at the museum

"Look! Here we have a very tiny sheep sitting on my book."

I'm ashamed to admit I didn’t go to the famous Prado art museum in Madrid. The queues were long, and the days were hot and... no excuse really. But round the corner is the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, which has a measly 1600 artworks in its collection, and was started as the private collection of the wealthy and wonderfully named Heinrich Freiherr Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kászon et Impérfalva (try getting that on your arrivals card).

The paintings were originally housed at the family estate in Lugano, Italy, but in 1988 the city council there refused the family planning permission for an extension. So Heinrich’s son moved the whole lot to Madrid, whose city government cheerfully provided a gallery.

More fool Lugano - it missed out on a collection which offers highlights of European painters and painting styles spanning 700 or so years. You move chronologically, starting with the 13th-15th century - mostly Italian, mostly religious - and ending with works from the 20th century.

Here are some things that caught my eye:

Baby man Jesus: The oldest painting in the museum is a Virgin and child dating from around 1270 and attributed to an artist rather oddly called the Master of the Magdalen. But it was his depiction of the Christ child as a rather ugly, balding, middle aged man that caught my eye. Bizarre.

The museum notes don’t shed any light, but looking it up afterwards, I discovered it wasn't that painters in the Middle Ages were just hopeless at drawing babies, they meant to make Jesus look like that. Art historian Matthew Averett says medieval artists subscribed to the concept of "homunculus" (little man) - the belief that Jesus was born "perfectly formed and unchanged”. It was only during the Renaissance that artists moved to draw the chubby-cheeked cherubic faces that are more recognisable as babies.

Below, another strange man-Jesus from the Thyssen... And one more baby-like, but where I just couldn't work out where that breast is coming from...

"You just watch your step old man."

Perspective: another wonderfully noticeable thing in the medieval pictures was the random sizes of people and objects. Check this picture of John the Baptist, who is proud to point out the tiny sheep lying on his book.

Check out also the tiny man standing on the ground between the two St Johns. Apparently this is the donor - the guy who commissioned Spanish artist Joan (the Catalan version of John, not a woman artist, perish the thought) Mates to paint the work in 1410. In this case, his miniature size indicates his relative lack of importance (as an earthly mortal) in relation to the godly stature of the two saints. Still, he couldn’t resist being in the picture.

Bored angel: I loved this picture, of St Matthew writing his Gospel - exceedingly slowly, if the expression of the angel is anything to go by. “OMG, he’s sharpening his quill again! Just get on with it, dude. I’ve got to get it to the printer by close of play today.”

My favourite: This painting (below) - Portrait of Giovanna degli Albizzi Tornabuoni by Domenico Ghirlandaio - is, according to the museum spiel, “a fine example of fifteenth-century Florentine portraiture... [where] body proportions were idealised while faces left devoid of expression were expected to convey character.” Not only is she totally beautiful, but apparently it’s a posthumous portrait. Tornabuoni died in childbirth in 1488, aged 20, but the painting was done two years later. Maybe there’s a logical explanation (like she’d been painted before); otherwise, in a pre-photograph world, how did the artist know what she’d looked like?

Favourite Trompe-l'œil: This is a painting, not two statues. Even looking at the real thing it was hard to believe. So clever!

By the time I got to the final rooms I was befuddled. I swanned past Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky , barely looking. Save them for another day.

But I did like this Armchair no 2 (Domenico Gnoli, 1967) - perhaps because that’s where I quite fancied being by then. Though in the end, meeting up with Geoff and Sam in a pavement cafe for a glass of wine and some tapas served quite as well.