I moved over to hosted blogs a few years ago.  I thought it was a good move.  And it was ok, until recently, when I discovered I had white pages.  I rolled back to when it was all working, but my hosting company was less than helpful – basically, they wanted me to pay more money to them.  Not happening.  So, here I am, back on WordPress.org.

I’ve transferred all my blog posts over (I will probably have to do this with another one, too), so everything from now on.

© Susan Shirley November 2018

Having a drink recently with some colleagues, we got to talking out the ‘old money’ – LSD. Pounds, shillings and pence. Of course, my colleagues laughed when I referred to it as LSD; they were younger than I and were thinking of something else.

The UK changed from LSD to decimal currency on 15 February 1971. I was struggling to remember the origins of the old coinage. I remember ha’pennies and my Mum used to talk about farthings. And, of course, there is the brides’ rhyme for their wedding day:

Something old, something new
Something borrowed, something blue
Silver sixpence in your shoe

We had LSD in this country since the Norman Conquest, but it was Henry II who introduced the system we had up until 1971. We called it LSD because the pound (L or £) was derived from the word Libra, a Roman unit of weight. The s was a shilling, denoted /- (the slash is also known as a solidus). The d was for the pennies, from a Roman coin called the denarius.

When Henry II introduced this system, it was based on Troy weights, an old system of weighing precious metals. A penny was one pennyweight of silver, and 240 pennyweights of silver. Thus, there were 20 shillings to the pound, and 12 pence to the shilling, 240 pence to the pound, but it didn’t stop there, as in most currencies, there were other coins, and some of them had nicknames:

Farthings (a corruption of “fourthings” – a quarter of a penny)
Ha’pennies (a corruption of “half pennies”)
Threepenny bits (three pence. I was rather fond of these 12 sided coins with a portcullis on one side)
A groat (Fourpence)
A tanner (a six penny piece)

A shilling was also known as a “bob” (has anyone heard of “bob a job week?”)
Florin (two shillings)
Half a crown (two shillings and six pence)
A crown (five shillings)
A 10 shilling note, before that a half Sovereign coin.
£1 was called a Sovereign aka a “quid.”
A Guinea (£1 1/- or £1 and 1 shilling, it was called a Guinea because it was originally a gold coin, made from gold from the Guinea coast)

Even when we changed to decimal currency, we still had nicknames, some of which had been around since LSD:

Currency Nickname Cockney Rhyming Slang
6d tanner Tartan Banner
£1 nicker
£5 fiver Lady Godiva
£10 tenner Paul McKenna or Ayrton Senna
£25 pony
£50 Half a ton
£100 Ton
£500 a monkey
£1000 a grand

Adding up in the old currency was fun – you had to add the penny’s column in 12s, the shillings column in 20s. I am sure it improved our maths. Will we revert to LSD after Brexit? I doubt it. It would be an added complication. Alas, I fear, libra and denarius, as well as shillings, are lost to us forever.

© Susan Shirley 2018

We flew up from San Francisco to arrive in New York in the middle of a freak heat wave.  The average temperature in New York in May is around 61^oF (16^oC), although the locals told us it had been much colder than that the week before.  It was 95^oF during our stay.  We arrived at JFK at about 20.00, too late to realise how hot it was during the day.  We collected our bags, and got a cab straight to our hotel.  The system at JFK is, in my opinion, better than at Heathrow.  Slicker and quicker.  You check in with the agent, get the cab they assign you and off you trot.

We hadn’t been able to get into the hotel I’d wanted, in East 42^nd, so we’d been booked into our hotel very close to Times Square, in West 40^th.  The Distrikt Hotel is quite modern, the reception staff were huge fun and very helpful, and there was a birthday cupcake and birthday card in our room.  I’d recommend it.  Funny thing was that in our first trip in the lift, we met another English woman staying there on business.  We unpacked and generally sorted ourselves out, and went to the bar.

We had already booked a trip to Liberty Island for the next day, fortunately not too early in the morning.  We took the Subway to Battery Park, picked up our tickets and then joined the very long queue.  Security here was better than at the airport, the searches were very thorough, which is why there was such a long queue.

Liberty Island has a varied and interesting history.  It was renamed as such in 1956, by an act of Congress although it has had several names over the centuries.  As far back as the mid 17^th century, the waters in Upper New York Bay were home to Oyster beds which became a major food source for immigrant Dutch Settlers who named it Great Oyster Island.

In 1664, the Dutch surrendered to the British, the island became British and was eventually sold to Isaac Bedloe in 1667, thus becoming Bedloe’s Island.  Having been a private island for rental and a smallpox quarantine, it later became a sanctuary for loyalist during the American Revolutionary War.

In the 19^th century, it became home to Fort Wood, and was chosen to be the home for what it is now best known for, the Statue of Liberty, in the 1880s.  The Statue of Liberty was a gift to the people of America by the people of France, something to do with solidarity after the revolutions in both countries.  The sculptor, Frederic Bartholdi, modelled the statue on his mother.

https://www.nps.gov/stli/index.htm

I’m not sure why I should have been surprised, but I was, to learn (a) that the statue is hollow and (b) that the copper is only about the thickness of a one cent coin.  As well as the Statue of Liberty, there is a museum on the island, and a number of other smaller statues.

When we’d finished, we took the subway back to Times Square and went back to the hotel.  Dinner was a local Chinese, followed by an early night, ready for the next day.

© Susan Shirley 2018

We arrived in San Francisco late, and reached our hotel at about midnight, shattered.  We later discovered that our hotel was quite a way outside of the city centre, a bus ride away.

The hotel reception area was an eclectic mix of artefacts from different countries – Thailand, China, Africa are my best guesses.  It was roomy and the reception clerks were humorous and made us feel at home straight away.  Our room was nowhere near as big as the rooms we’d become accustomed to, although it was clean and had everything we needed, including a coffee machine.  It had a fan but didn’t need the air con we’d had in Nawleans and Memphis (mind you, we hadn’t needed that so much there either). More importantly, they had “happy half hour” in reception between 5.30pm and 6pm every night, where all guests were given free drinks and live music was provided.  Very civilised.

We found out from some other guests that rooms here were $200 a night (we had no idea of room prices because it was all part of a package for us) and, having spoken to some young Irish girls who told us how expensive it was to live in SanFran (even more expensive than London) I began to warm to the area in which I was staying.

We didn’t have to rush too much on our first day, we only had to pick up our pre-paid tickets for the hop-on-hop-off bus tour.

“We need to turn right out of the hotel,” I said, “Then right again down here.”

I didn’t have my customary compass with me, so how the hell I thought I knew which direction I thought I was walking is anybody’s guess.  We walked for about an hour, and, having walked past more homeless people than  I ever see in London (I later discovered that San Francisco has a huge homeless problem) we ended up in an area that looked very prosperous but had very few pedestrians.  This was not where we were supposed to be.

Eventually, we found someone to ask, who told us we were nearer to the Bay Area than the Fisherman’s Wharf area we wanted. Still, it was good exercise.  We found an Irish pub where we stopped for a very late breakfast, and where we met a couple of lovely Irish girls, the ones I mentioned above.  When they told us how much they had to pay in rent, I nearly had a heart attack!  This made London positively cheap.

We ended up getting a cab the rest of the way, to Fisherman’s Wharf, picked up our tickets and did our first tour around the city centre.  The heart of San Francisco is pretty much like any other city centre, all the usual designer stores – Ferragamo, Herrera, Tiffany, etc, although, of course, without our English only stores such as John Lewis.

Our cab driver didn’t disappoint us with regard to the hills that made the car chase in Bullitt famous.  There were occasions when I was convinced that we were going to roll backwards, and on more than one occasion during our stay, I thanked the law of gravity.  In fact, I had to remind myself of it, it seemed impossible that we wouldn’t just fall off the Earth, some of the hills were so steep.  If I’d stayed in San Francisco, I’d have lost pounds, just walking up and down.

Later, we found the tour shop in Columbus Avenue, where we exchanged our voucher for our 48-hour hop-on-hop-off tour bus passes.  It just past 15.00 by now, so we decided on the downtown tour that day, before heading back to our hotel for the free drinks reception.

We decided to eat in the hotel that night and didn’t go out again.  I think Kate and I were both surprised at how variable the TV coverage was in each of our hotels.  Of course, we had expected local news, but thus far, national news coverage had been minimal, and the selection of channels was pretty limited.  (On the day we left, we discovered that one of our favourites, NCIS, was showing at 07.00 so we watched that rather than the news.)

Day two in San Francisco meant an early start to get our boat to Alcatraz.  It’s a bit of a must-do in San Francisco although before I got there I had mixed feelings about it.  It’s just over a mile from the mainland, and our guides explained that the prisoners had been transported, shackled at the ankles, on a train.  The train carriage was taken to the island so that they didn’t have to de-train the prisoners until they arrived on the island.  They gave them warm showers on Alcatraz because they didn’t want them to get used to being in cold water lest they get the idea that they should try swimming to escape.

There was a volunteer tour guide who talked us through the first couple of stages up on the island, which had started its life as a military base, but had become a military prison almost immediately and had later become the federal penitentiary for which it is now famous.  At the cell blocks, we were given audio headsets, with our guides ex-prison guards, occasionally interspersed with comments from prisoners.

The main prison blocks, B and C, were grim, the cells being only 5’ by 9’ with a small sink (cold water only), and bed and a toilet.  In D block, segregation, the cells were a bit bigger, but inmates were confined to their cells 24 hours per day, with only one visit to the recreation yard per week.

However, it was when we got to solitary confinement that the conditions became really bad.  Although the cells were inside and undercover, you could feel the wind blowing in from outside.  It must have been horrendous in the winter months, even though this part of the world doesn’t have the harsh winters of other parts of the USA.  It was pretty cold on the day we visited.

Further along in this block were cells referred to as “The Hole.”  When prisoners who had behaved even more badly were put in there, they were kept in darkness – according to the audio, once acclimatised, it was possible to see a little light, but still, I imagine that would have had a rather salutary effect.

I hadn’t realised before going to Alcatraz that there had been a rather nasty escape attempt in 1946 in which one of the inmates somehow managed to get into the gun cage and get hold of all the firearms there.  A siege followed, which lasted for two days, during which time two prison guards were killed.

There were significantly more escape attempts than I’d realised, some of which were partially successful, in as much as the men got off the island, but it seems they were all recaptured.

Alcatraz done, we travelled back to San Francisco and got a trolley bus back to our hotel.  For $2.50 each, we had tickets that we could use for us to two and a half hours, plus a good sightseeing tour of the City.

The following day, we did our mammoth bus tour around the city.  It was a shame that this was to be our last day here, we were just getting to know our way around.   We went back to the hotel to prepare for the Big Apple.

© Susan Shirley 2017

We had the morning to ourselves before our trip out to a plantation.  Neither Kate nor I had been sleeping very well – we couldn’t seem to get the temperature right in the room, and we spent half the night being too cold, the other half being too hot.  We were waking early every morning too, so we got up early, went out for breakfast (same place as the day before).  This time I tried the cheese grits with my omelette, which were far tastier than the ones I’d had at Maison Dupuy.

We dozed a bit on the way to the Oak Alley Plantation.  It was a lovely venue, although I can understand why the original owner’s wife, Celina, preferred to be in New Orleans. The plantation was owned by Jacques and Celina Roman, although Jacques was not the original owner, his brother-in-law was.  They decided to do a swap of plantations in 1837.

The plantation is named after the path (alley) leading up to the front of the house which is bordered on each side by Southern Oak Trees (nothing like our English Oaks).  It was originally named the Bon Sejour plantation, and grew sugar cane.

One of the things that struck me was the slave quarters.  I have no axe to grind about the Americans and slavery – the Brits were guilty of it too, as well as many other nations, and it’s as bad whoever does it.  It’s just that they had names of some of the slaves who had lived here, and they told the story of slaves by name as you walked around the slave quarters.  It was incredibly moving.  As in sickening. We walked around the slave quarters, reading about the lives of the slaves and seeing the conditions in which they lived.  Grim.

Life was a little easier for the house slaves and I know that, had I been a slave there, I’d have been a field slave (way too gobby to be a house slave).  Some of the house slaves were relegated to field slaves, some were promoted to house slaves.  It almost seemed that, as a slave, you were cast aside like an old sock when you got too old to do your job, or something else went wrong.

What a hard life, they even had the women slaves digging for the levees, and other hard field work, although even working in the house would not have been easy in those days.  At least outside you’d get a bit of fresh(ish) air.

The climate in Louisiana is generally humid (seems we were very lucky during our stay, it was not even as humid as London in the height of summer) which must have been awful for anybody working in the fields.  Although it was a beautiful location, I was quite pleased to get back to New Orleans and away from the harsh realities of what life had been like for some people.

A complete change of tack, we tried a different restaurant when we got back, which was quite pleasant.  Kate had a salad for her dinner, which turned out to be a plate of lettuce with chicken.  Not quite what I had imagined although I discovered during our stay that is what passes for a salad in most of the States.  To the extent that there were adverts on the TV in New York advertising salads with other salads vegetables as though it was a real novelty.  Which it clearly was.  I had another local dish with beans and a special request for grilled – not breaded, fried – chicken.

We found a supermarket on the corner of Bourbon Street where we bought a bottle of Californian Champagne to take back to our hotel room, to assist with the packing for the next part of our trip.  (Apologies to the champagne region of France, but that is what it said on the bottle, and it was very palatable.  I suspect, although I didn’t check, that it was made from Chardonnay grapes too.)  Somehow, packing wasn’t quite so hard after that.

We had enjoyed our stay at Maison Dupuy and were now ready for the next part of our journey.

© Susan Shirley 2017

We ventured out of the restaurant for breakfast on our second day.  Although we didn’t know it at the time of booking, nor did we realise it when we first arrived, Rue Toulouse was in a very handy position – we could walk straight up to the Grayline tours leaving point and the Mississippi, past several bars and restaurants.  It was a win-win.

After our chat to Cathy the day before, Kate and I had decided on a trip to the Louisiana swamp and bayou.  It was a half day tour, which suited us as we had plans for the evening.

It was one of the best tours I have ever done.  We were bussed to the bayou, waited for our captain and boarded our luxury yacht.  Just kidding, it was a custom-built swamp boat; a flat-bottomed boat, not dissimilar to the one in the link:

https://img.grouponcdn.com/deal/vBVuYbhbNYaSqH95KSY1rk/cajun_pride_tours-700×420/v1/c700x420.jpg

Our skipper was very knowledgeable, although I suppose they all are, otherwise they wouldn’t be doing that job, would they?  He started the tour with the usual health and safety announcements:

“if you drop your camera, tough, we won’t be going back for it.  Keep your arms inside the boat, some of these alligators are big enough to jump up to the job of the boat and if your arm is sticking out, it’ll eat it.”

Right then.

The bayou is surrounded by cypress trees and is basically a series of slow-moving streams or wetlands, often tidal.  Our skipper told us that there had been a bit of a flood a couple of days before, so the water was colder than usual.  I found that strangely comforting when a 12 feet long alligator started swimming around.

It wasn’t just alligators that we saw, there were some beautiful plants and birds, and soft-shelled turtles and opossum – the captain threw marshmallows to them when we saw them on the river bank.

It was the alligator that made it though.  Although we saw a few baby ‘gators, this big old boy kept swimming around us.  He’d swim for a few of the marshmallows, but didn’t really want to play.  Probably too cold.  I couldn’t help but see the similarities to the human skeleton as he was swimming around though.  I almost had a film script…

That evening, we went on a river trip on board the Mississippi Steam Boat Natchez, the last remaining genuine steamboat on the river.  (Yes, there are others that appear to be, but the Natchez is the only one that is a genuine steamboat.)

The current Natchez is the ninth to bear that name, and there is a whole history to it, but that’s a story for another day.  We didn’t have dinner on board, I’m a fussy eater.  Just drinks, a bit of dancing and enjoying the ride up and down the river.  The jazz band was called The Steamboat Stompers.  I’ve done some of those Thames river boat cruises, but being on a boat on the Mighty Mississippi was different again.  It is a huge river and quite amazing to see the factories, and so on, along the river banks.

We were glad to only have a short journey home after our boat trip.  We needed to be ready for the following day.

© Susan Shirley 2017