Saturday again already, goodness me the weeks are flying by. So what shall we do today? First off a quick walk around to the letting agents who rented us the flat we live in, to sign the new tenancy agreement and pay over our £90. That’s right £90pounds. That’s the fee for re doing the tenancy agreement. Well that would have taken them all of, let me see only a minute or two to create. Putting our names and the new amount of rent into a template and hitting the print button. Then inserting it into a window envelope so as not to waste precious time having to address it. Attaching two self-adhesive postage stamps and putting it in their out basket. My goodness that would have taken them a total of, let me see, maybe five minutes. Extrapolate that five minutes for £90 out for an hour and…. Well you get the picture I’m sure.
Here it seems as though everyone is clipping the ticket as much as they can. We read the other day about a chap who had parked in the wrong place for 5 minutes while unloading his car. He came back to it to discover that it was clamped. That ‘ll be £566 to take the clamp off, and another £300 to pay for the already ordered tow truck, oh and that’ll be £70 in parking fees thank you very much. And if we do take it away you will have to pay storage fees of, oh let me see, another £300 for us to keep it overnight.
Ok. Back to today.
It was raining when we came out of the letting agents so it was to be an inside activity day I think. Off down to the station and catch the train to Greenwich. The Maritime Museum there has recently re-opened. Still a tad wet when we got there, and feeling a little bit peckish we popped into the nearest eatery for a coffee, large fries and an apple pie each (no prizes for guessing the name of the store) Just around the corner is the market, which is inside so we had a bit of a wander around the stalls admiring handmade jewellery, cards, toys clothing and plenty of quirky art work.
The maritime museum has had quite a facelift. What was previously an open courtyard has been covered over to create a much more user friendly space and extended the exhibition area. There were static displays about early artic explorers, maritime trade routes, finding the Northwest Passage and many many more. Including the very jacket that Admiral Lord Nelson was wearing when he was fatally wounded at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.
The royal barge of Prince Frederick was built in 1730 and is in amazing condition. It was gilded with 9 carat gold and still shimmers as brightly as it did then. Royalty used it for excursion on the Thames, manned by 20 oarsmen. By the looks of the meagre seating in the small cabin there would not have been a lot of room considering the wide skits they wore back then. In 1849 the 20 metre vessel was cut into three to be stored in the Royal Boat house at Windsor for 100 years.
Had a quick visit to the archive library there too. My maternal Grandfather was a merchant seaman and I know little about his life at sea. Well I know more than I did when we first came over here. But that still doesn’t amount to much. In September 1917 he was a stoker on the Port Kembla when she struck a mine off Farewell Spit at the top of the South Island. The mines were laid by the German , the Regulus. There is more to the story, but I will save that for another day. I did learn one small new fact about the sinking though, and that was no ships papers survived.
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