Today Wednesday 23 May I turn 80 and come Sunday 3 June I am travelling overseas again. This time to England and meeting up with my daughter Jane and husband Gary who would have left New Zealand on 1 June. We are spending the first week in a Cornwall cottage at Flushing, just across the bay from Falmouth. After this, we head for Oxford and meeting up with Brian and Jan Coulter and spending some time on a narrowboat cruising the Oxford Canal. After this Jane, Gary, Brian and Jan go across to France while I head for Cambridge to spend a week at a readers desk in the archives of Scott Polar Research Institute. This time I shall be experiencing a Cambridge summer. A change from my previous visits which had all been in the winter. I can remember walking from my hotel to SPRI in temperatures around zero, with all the puddles on the footpath frozen solid and thinking this was good conditioning for a study of old Antarctic diaries.
On the way to and from England, I will be spending two days in Singapore. A place I've not visited since the early 1990s. On the outward stopover, I am staying in Orchard Road while on the way back I'll be in the Raffles Hotel area--not at Raffles. I picked this area and selected a hotel close to the Funan Centre, a large multi-storey building housing hundreds of computer shops. Unfortunately after booking the hotel I discovered the Funan Centre has closed down for two years while the building has an upgrade. However, there are plenty of other places of interest handy. Finally, flying back and arriving home in Palmerston North on 7 July.
