Happy New Year!

New Years was another mission down to London - Jonny (Boon) down at SPEC had organised a Cocktail ball (Hmm where did that idea come from?) as a fundraiser for World Youth Day... Very cool event as is standard for the NZ crew, despite the fact that Jonny and Mary-Grace were back in NZ for the couple of weeks prior to the actual event! (And they were the chief organisers...)

We made it to SPEC for chats with MG, followed by lunch with Beanie and Simon (above left) in a great wee pub in London-Colney, and then a brief kip in our room prior to picking up Bex and Melodie from the train station, then heading to mass at 7pm followed by the ball and some exceedingly good cocktails C/O Jonny. Excellent. After the ball (about 1.30am) we drove Bex and Melodie down to Heathrow and said farewell to those stoic travellers (they earn the title of stoic after yet another night spent sleeping at the airport... legends!...or just poor missionaries!!!) Then we made our way back to SPEC for the night by just after 3am. Great Bacon and Eggs for Breakfast the next morning with Jonny and we got on our way down to visit Kathy, Allan, Zoe and Emma...

New Years day we pretty much just relaxed with the Rollings family which was great, chatting, Allan cooked a great Salmon and champagne pasta for lunch and then when we were about to set off we were invited to stay the night. I'm not one to refuse such an offer so we had a glorious night's sleep in their exceedingly comfortable spare bed, before making our way off to Portsmouth for the day on the second. Portsmouth is home to a rather large Naval base and a whole host of naval museums etc. An all entry ticket is just 16 pound, a bargain, considering it lasts a year (so we can go back to see what we missed on the second...)

Highlights of the day... well more like everything we saw was interesting so i'm going to include it all... The Warrior was the first ever steel hull warship to be put into service in the british navy and was one of the first also to use coal fired steam engines... interestingly the engineers, grubby little buggers (literally) that they were, had a hard time convincing other more seasoned sailors who were masters of wind and sail... that they were sailors at all, despite the fact that this ship was something like 20-30knots faster than any of its rivals at full speed... or should i say full steam! The bulkheads were all divided from each other and it was said to be virtually unsinkeable... but then they said that about the titanic too, which was made just a couple of bays up the coast. Fairly robust wee warship though, would be happy to hide on the lower decks in a gun battle, very thick outer walls, would take a lot of gunpowder to whack a hole in it, and ,well, it's still here isn't it. Wouldn't want to be disciplined on it though - solitary confinement in an exceedingly confined space, on a rocking ship...uuugghhh! if only people could be dissuaded from defecting from other important societal institutions like marriage by such methods!

Next ship we looked around was the Victory, which was the one Lord Nelson was killed on in the early stages of the battle of Trafalgar. A really old style sailing warship with a max speed of only 13knots at full sail, but home to over 400 men at any one time. Sailors rolled up their hammocks and stowed them in special places around the edges of the ship where they acted as effective protection from musket shots, and could also be quickly tied at either end and hiffed to a man overboard to keep him afloat for half an hour or so... Unfortunately you weren't allowed to take photo's on board during the tour so the outside is all you get... So, turns out life was pretty hard on these trips, while the pleb sailors slept in hammocks packed in together like sardines, the head honchos got to sleep the night away in their coffins, which their wives decorated the interiors of with curtaining etc. In the event of their death, the gents were put in their beds, a cannon ball added, then the lid nailed on, before being turfed overboard. Nice. Though kinda macabre sleeping in a coffin, and worse still getting your wife to decorate it! Pretty dodgy food rations too - they got these dodgy biscuits, which we're told, the experienced sailors waited till after dark to eat, this was so that you couldn't see the maggots you were eating cos if you picked them out you simply got less protein intake. Very happy not to be a sailor right about now. They also had these rather cool/sick cannon balls which were basically lots of little cannon balls stuck together which effectively made the cannons into gigantic shotguns... did no damage at all to the ships, but were designed literally to rip human bodies apart. Pleasant these brits. The Brits could also fire each of their cannons every 90 seconds, it took the French up to 5 minutes to get their (cannon)balls away(mainly because they used longer fuses) - not very smart really - I guess the winning of that battle could easily be dubbed natural selection. But here's a story of tragic irony for you... Lord Nelson was the first dignitary ever to request that he not be biffed overboard, but taken home to be buried on british soil. So after he died, and the battle of Trafalgar was eventually won (by the British over the French) the doc had an interesting problem - it would take the crippled ship more than six weeks to reach an English port, by which time Lord Nelson would surely be a much less present chap to be around... so he used what he had, and pickled him... in expensive cognac no less... FRENCH cognac even. Classic. Though it worked... and Lord Nelson was finally laid to rest after a full state funeral with his body perfectly preserved. Pretty impressive ship though, loads more cool stuff I could mention, but you'll just have to visit it yourself...

Had a look at another ship after the Victory, the Mary-Rose who lay on the ocean floor for 500 years before being plucked out of the ocean... She was older than the Victory, though clearly not as clever a ship (hence her home on the bottom of the ocean for 500 years). She is now being sprayed with some high tech wax to preserve her for an eternity. Funny how we humans seek to make our creations everlasting i reckon... or perhaps wonderous how we try to refloat things that are already long since sunk? Anyway, just looks like a very wet shipwreck at the mo... might be worth a visit in 10 years to see the restored/finished product. After all, the guide did say that only about 25% of the Victory was the original ship (the rest had been replaced during the restoration process...)

Got to see an aircraft carrier too first docked in port (see pic) but then later, as we tucked into a well deserved pizza on the waterfront it went out to God knows where under escort. Looked pretty cool really. Don't know if i'd fancy landing on it though... runway's a bit short! Wandered through town to the Spinnaker tower and went up - the photo on the right is looking down through a glass floor we were standing on 105m above the ground... wee bit eerie that, i certainly wasn't as game as the four or five year old next to me that started jumping up and down too see if it would break... it didn't, but i got off pretty quick, just in case! I did want to make my 27th birthday!

Anyway no new years resolutions from me, i used to have this thing about each year being better than the one previous, but to be honest i think it would be hard to top the last 12 months for us, been to NZ, Australia, China, France, England, Ireland, Wales, Fiji and a wee transit in America, loads of holidays here there and everywhere, loads of adventures, loads of fun, helped create a new life... when I was 26... it was a very good year... Though if any year can do it, 2007 likely can - there will probably be more travel this year than last (we have pounds now, though admittedly not many, at the rate we spend them!), our new life, and member of our family will be arriving (God willing) in July, and there is much more we cannot yet see...

So here's to 2007 anyway - anything is possible, much is probable, abundance likely.

May God Bless us all.