Ooooh! Another Island

Another island to add to our list (a proper one this time):

Ven (or Hven in Danish and old Swedish) is a small island in the middle of the Öresund strait between Sweden and Denmark. We decided to go there for a day trip on our visit to Copenhagen, and had a lovely time.

It is a charming place, and well worth a visit on a sunny, early summer's day. But more importantly it was home to our favourite 16th century astronomer Tycho Brahe, and we had been wanting to visit there for a number of years.

There is more about Ven on our Virtual Tourist travel page, and you can see all our pictures here.

Dome there, done that - still stinks

In a vain attempt to find some redemption for the Millennium Dome I managed to persuade Dave to take a walk around the Greenwich Peninsular. It was a fantastically sunny day, so we felt that we had to do something "out", and I thought that it might be nice to see what they had done with the area around the Dome. Not such a good idea as it turned out. The Dome itself seems to have done absolutely nothing to contribute towards the regeneration of the area - if anything it is worse now, and it still stinks - literally. So bad you almost want to retch.

Walking along the Thames footpath around the outer circumference of the Dome is a pretty bleak, depressing and uninspiring experience. The Dome was intended to be an outwardly expressive, iconic "building", but the outside is mostly fenced-off. All you see when you walk around the perimeter are rubbish bins, vans, loading bays, crates, sheds, portaloos, stacks of various gear, general rubbish, and all sorts of other service paraphernalia. It is really sad and depressing that what what was originally a nice riverside general circulation area now resembles a trashed back alley. Even the former meridian plaza area, which I recall was quite nicely done for the original 2000 exhibition, is now just a trailer park for the cast and crew of the semi-permanent Afrika! show in it's tacky plastic tent alongside. Shame on you O2for allowing the Dome and its public spaces (both of which were paid for from public funds) to be so appalingly treated. I thought that the inside was pretty awful when we visited it last year (Blog: New tack and old chic), but this was worse.

Continuing our walk down the west side of the Greenwich Peninsular we were at least expecting to see some evidence of physical or economic regeneration - the "knock-on effect" that was the main point of building the Dome in the first place. But nothing. Just the same old decrepit and derelict industrial riverside that it was when I first walked along here 20 years ago.And some of those factories really stink. It is difficult, I know, as these places are presumably productive and provide employment, but there seems little prospect of renewal and regeneration while they continue to operate. And the millions of pounds of public money pumped into the Dome have clearly had no effect whatsoever.

It was with some relief that on contnuing on towards Greenwich proper we arrived at one of our favourite pubs (and one of Greenwich's better kept secrets) - The Cutty Sark - for a very welcome pint.

Not an island

Continuing the island theme, we have just spent the Christmas week in Swanage, on the Isle of Purbeck. This is, of course, not an island at all. Physically, it is very much a part of the mainland, although its particular geography means that there are only really two ways of getting to Purbeck, and one of them involves a ferry across the entrance to Poole Harbour.

Even better, this island has a steam railway! And a pretty impressive one at that. And the bus service was not that bad either. There are hourly buses from Poole/Wareham and Bournemouth. The latter using the Sandbanks-Shell Bay chain ferry.


Swanage is English seaside on a nice small, genteel scale. OK, it is not as up-market as St Ives, and it obviously has its fair share of chav youth, but it does pretty well for a small seaside town. In high season, I would imagine that it is pretty awful, but in Decenmber it was actually OK, and the weather was still good enough for us to have some fun on the beach. Good choice all round I'd say. Though it helped that we had pretty good weather most of the time.

Freecycle

I had been hanging on to a variety of computer gear for a while now (well, a few years actually) - an old PC with a defunct power supply, an unwanted surround-sound system, flatbed scanner that was not compatible with my current PC, and so on. I don't like to just throw-away things like that. It seems almost criminal to trash something that cost you £1,200 six years ago, and is still perfectly useable (with a bit of attention). And in any case, it is not that easy to get rid of bulky stuff when you live in a tower block - it just won't fit down the rubbish chute.

So, I had been hanging on to this stuff for quite a while, wondering what to do with it. I looked to see if there were any charity shops nearby that would come and collect. When I was a lad, people from voluntary organisations used to come around regularly collecting for "jumble sales". I myself used to do this for the cubs and scouts. But I have never encountered anything like that in the 23 years I have been living in London.

I assumed that there would be loads of local groups willing to take this stuff off my hands, but I could find nothing on the net. What I did find, however, was Freecycle. This is, effectively, a non-profit network of people who offload their unwanted stuff on each other. They use the Yahoo! Groups system to allow people to advertise stuff they don't want to people that might want or make use of it. For free. Members can also ask for stuff they are looking for.

I have to say that I was a bit dubious at first. But then I saw how much traffic there was in our own local area - the Lewisham Freecycle group has 5,688 members, and averages around 1,700 posts per month in it's group. So I decided to give it a try.

I was convinced that my pathetic collection of ancient and clapped-out computer hardware and software would not interest anybody. I was wrong. Within a few hours of posting my "OFFERED" items I received over 20 expressions of interest. I have to admit that I was a bit slow in following these up - partly because it was difficult to know where (or with whom) to start, and then I hadn't counted on the first few people I responded to ignoring my e-mails. But a week or so later my old PC and sound system have found a new home, the scanner is nearly gone, and there is actually someone who is interested in my carrier bag of old games CD-ROMs.

I am quite pleased with the outcome. Although it was slightly more of an effort to make the final arrangements than I had expected, it actually all worked well. I really don't like just throwing away perfectly good stuff just because I don't want or need it anymore, and Freecycle seems to be the answer. I'll certainly use it again.

Extremities

We have now travelled to the northern- and southernmost extremities of the UK rail network.

Two years ago we started our North Atlantic island-hopping trip by travelling by train from London to Thurso in the far North of the mainland Scotland - Britain's most northerly railway station. Today we returned from a pleasant break in St Ives, Cornwall, via Penzance - the most southerly station in the country. The two are some 600 miles (966km) apart as the crow flies, or 870 miles (1,400km) by train via London. 600 miles is about the same as the distance between London and Copenhagen, or Berlin, Prague, Milan, or Marseille.

We don't think of our country being that big. In fact, within Europe (excluding Russia), only Norway, Sweden and France have larger "tip-to-toe" dimensions (Norway being about 1,100 miles from far north to south, Sweden about 970 miles, and mainland France about 670 miles from Brittany to the Cote d'Azure). These days we sometimes think of ourselves as a small island off the coast of Europe, but we share latitude with 14 other EU countries, including the capitals of 12 of them (more than any other EU country).

On our 2005 North Atlantic trip we also visited the UK's most northerly inhabited place - Skaw, on the island of Unst in Shetland. A profoundly remote but attractive place, by surface transport you need to take three ferries to get there from mainland Britain. But it is worth the effort for the stunning coastal scenery, empty beaches, and the eerily deserted settlements on the surrounding hillsides.

Of course, having tested the limits of the rail network, and pushed on by road to the northernmost extent of the UK, we feel bound to do the same southwestwards - to the Scilly Isles. In fact, Andrew has been there once before, in the '70s, and still has clear memories of approaching the islands on the Penzance ferry, exploring Tresco Abbey gardens, and bumping into then Prime Minister Harold Wilson on the beach near St Mary's. Of course, the Scilly Isles will also be another addition to our islands collection, and we can get there by surface transport too. Although I think that we will have to arrange it so that we go at least one way by helicopter, as that is one of the few modes of transport that neither of us has experienced so far.