John & Carol Curd

OK, so we’re not actually on Madeira to dance the lambada. We are actually here with Explore! to walk, amongst other things, some of the famous levadas. Levadas are irrigation channels but more of these later. Madeira is essentially a large, formerly volcanic mountain and the main “other thing” that we are targeting is the high ground (~1800m/5500ft) in the centre. Explore! runs small group holidays, some cultural, some more active, and this is our sixth with them.

Our group on this trip is 14 strong, plus the leader, Donal, who unsurprisingly hails from the Emerald Isle. As well as trying to get our ears tuned in to Portuguese for our first time – it sounded to us a bit like Spanish with a Russian accent – we had to tune our ears in to Donal’s lilting brogue. Yesterday, we became convinced he was telling us that, at some time in its early history, Madeira had been invaded by parrots until we finally realized he was saying pirates. Duh!

Today we were heading out to the eastern point of the island for what seemed like a modest limb loosening walk of 4½mls/7kms. Actually, I suspect that relatively gentle start is designed mostly for the tour leader, giving them a chance to assess the abilities of their new set of charges. To get to our start point at São Laurenço, we drove past Madeira’s other engineering highlight (other than its levadas): the airport runway extension which is a large flyover (no pun intended) supported on huge concrete pillars. They are clearly very proud of their runway, on Madeira.

This walk was a there-and-back affair, winding its way in an undulating fashion through an almost desert-type landscape with the Atlantic Ocean on both sides – more dramatic than picturesque. I personally find rocks a little on the dull side, preferring animate objects, but for those with the correct interest I’m sure the geology would prove fascinating. Courtesy of Donal’s instruction, I now know that things called intrusions exist in formerly volcanic regions. An example is shown in the picture on the right; just to the left of centre (Natalie Imbruglia?) are a couple of lighter strata stretching vertically from the shore to the top of the cliff.

We didn’t give Donal any concerns, everyone making it to the easternmost tip of Madeira without mishap where most of us chose to scale the 200m highpoint for the view (or just because it was there) before settling down to a packed lunch. There was also a wildlife highlight for those of us who prefer nature with a pulse. At our lunch spot a few LBJs (Little Brown Jobs) were hopping and flittering about. They looked a bit like Spotted Flycatchers but were more strongly flecked and behaving very differently. The birds turned out to be Berthelot’s Pipits (Anthus berthelotii), according to an information board (and Donal). They are resident to the Canary Islands and Madeira. Well done Carol for snagging a recognisable shot.

Chalk up a new one for our bird page – eventually.

We returned to our transport and noticed we had happily missed a rain shower as we were driven to Santana on the north side of the island for our second night followed by our first encounter with a levada the next day.

[Here's a link to a Google Earth plot of this walk. You'll need to save it to your computer before opening it up in Google Earth.]

4:40 AM is not a very friendly time for check-in desks to open at London’s Heathrow airport. I started investigating my travel options and discovered, according to one friendly parking service lady, that “they” had only recently begun opening check-in desks before 5:00 AM and that, consequently, their regular shuttle bus services and didn’t begin before 5:00 AM. Neither did the “meet and greet” services, effectively valet parking where one drives to the terminal and is met by a man who zooms off to undeclared destinations with ones car, begin until 5:00 AM. So, we seem to have adjusted early morning flight times without adjusting the support services. Sound familiar? Regular long-term parking still works but you have to summon the bus rather than having a regular circuit being performed. We opted for a taxi, which was to be £65.00 plus, of course, a decent tip for the poor sleep-deprived driver.

3:30 AM is not a very friendly time for a taxi to come calling. [Ed: it’s about an hour’s ride from home to Heathrow, to be safe.] An hour or so earlier and it would be worth toughing it out by staying up and not bothering with bed. Naturally, going to bed early doesn’t work ‘cos you just lie there awake until you’d normally have hit the sack. So, bed it was with our beauty sleep rudely curtailed at 2:40 AM by a very gentle alarm courtesy of Nokia.

All our bags were packed and ready to go …

[Ed: O Hell, did you have to?]

… and, sure enough, our sleep-deprived driver arrived on the dot of 3:30 AM to collect his two sleep-deprived but excited passengers, one of whom almost left his bag in the porch, complete with dancing shoes. Dancing shoes? Yes, well, Carol did say we were off to Madeira to do the levadas. Dreadful Portuguese puns aside, mercifully the driver was awake enough to notice and retrieved my bag for me.

With Heathrow just beginning to wake-up, check-in was a breeze. Luck continued when we were handed an exit row and, with the TAP plane only about 50% full, we had a very comfortable 3hr 15min flight to Funchal, Madeira, where we were greeted by Donal, our tour leader, and sunshine. Funchal is pretty much an amphitheatre of buildings clinging to a steep, curved mountainside surrounding  a harbour where cruise ships frequently call. Actually, Madeira being little more than a 50-mile wide collection of volcanic mountains, all it’s settlements are really amphitheatres of buildings clinging to steep mountainsides.

Madeira is on the same time zone as the UK [Ed: sensible people.] so we were settled in our hotel room by 11:30 AM in plenty of time to try something local for lunch. We found an appealing restaurant with street tables and I couldn’t resist what is apparently a popular Portuguese rendition of salt cod called Bacalhau a Brás. Not being keen on salt cod, Carol chose some very tasty grilled squid and, since the home team had named their beer Coral, Carol also fancied a glass with her name on it, albeit misspelled. I kept her company. Well, you can’t let a lady drink alone. And very good it all was, too.

You may notice the patterning on the street in the above picture. Most of the streets and paths/sidewalks in Funchal sport patterns made from a mosaic of black and white tile pieces. As far as I could tell, the pattern in each street was also unique. Laying the mosaics must have been very painstaking work but it was well worth it and makes for an attractive finish. Being a quiet Sunday, I managed a snag a sample picture of one of the more ornate side streets, unimpeded by pedestrians or cars attempting to flatten tourists standing in the middle of the road and armed with snappy cameras.

An enjoyable if painfully early start. The walking begins tomorrow.

Sorting out pictures from summer trips can be a useful pastime for otherwise dull winter days and evenings. In that respect, it is a benefit to have the task to do. The downside is that remembering detail from summer trips that seem such distant memories can be a bit of trial. Critters that you thought you had identified become once again unknown and you can’t quite place exactly where you shot a particular scene. It’s even worse when there’re two photographers’ collections to be merged. Determination eventually gets the job done, though. Our general insects page has finally been updated with some of our newly made n-legged friends. Here’s a couple of colourful characters to act as ambassadors that will, hopefully, whet your appetite to look further.

Quite why a family of creatures would be tagged Froghoppers I find a little strange but here is one. They are apparently generally dull, brownish in colouration, but we stumbled across what appears to be the only brightly coloured example in Chinery’s Insects of Britain and Western Europe. I say “we” but it’s actually hawk-eyes Carol who normally spots these things. This little chap was enjoying some fine weather beside Le Loir at Luché-Pringé. Cute, don’t you think? Well, I’d call it cute; in fact, I have done. If you want to be formal, call it Cercopis vulnerata.

Maintaining the colourful theme but, I suspect, venturing into the realms of the decidedly less cute for some, particularly some members of the fairer sex, is this rather startling spider rejoicing in the name of Argiope bruennichi. Here are shots of it showing both topside and underside. The underside also shows it wrapping up its lunch which has been caught in the web. The web itself is quite interesting; that white zig-zag construction of silk is called a “vertical stabilimentum”, according to Chinery, and is typical of the species. Quite an engineer, it seems.

A little less colourful, perhaps, but no less interesting IMHO is this Scorpion Fly (Panorpa). I should say these Scorpion flies, I suppose, because there’s no guarantee that these two individuals are of the same species, there being about 30 difficult to separate species in Europe. The wing markings look the same to me, though. It’s the male, regrettably rather unnaturally positioned on the stark white side of our caravan, that clearly shows why they are so named, with a fearsome looking upturned tail, just like that of a scorpion. The more naturally posed female looks a little less like a scorpion hybrid.

Dogged determination gets the job done in the end.

We’ve been travelling to the Marais Poitevin, a.k.a. La Venise Verte, a few kilometres inland from La Rochelle, for many years. We used to stay at a very pleasant campsite in Damvix; we even became recognised by and struck up a sort of friendship with the campsite owner, Didier. [Ed: what a comfortable sounding name Didier is – were I French, I’d quite like to be a Didier. Or Jean-Paul. Or maybe Etienne. Anyway …] Didier even bought us a drink once when we stumbled across La Fête de la Musique on one visit. Charming!

All good things come to an end and Didier retired, surrendering the campsite to new ownership. However, a mere 2 mls/3.5 kms down the road is Arçais where our friends Mike and Linda live. It’s great to visit them and share a little vino, paella, Thai food and so on. Arçais also has a campsite; it’s a little more rough and ready than the one at Damvix but pleasant enough, nonetheless. It’s also has the distinct advantage of being with crawling distance of Mike and Linda. For the last couple of years, we’ve made this our base in the Marais Poitevin.

Another advantage is that our favourite pitch is surrounded by a very productive, when it’s flowering, privet hedge. Fortunately it flowers in late May which is when we are most likely to be there. The trick is to get there before M. le gardien gets out his hedge trimmer and massacres all the highly aromatic privet flowers. Then it is like a very powerful magnetic to a mass of passing wildlife and it is at its most productive, for a nature watcher. In 2010, I saw my first Large Copper butterfly feasting on the privet flowers, and very thrilling it was, too.

2011 seemed to be the year of the beetle. Many, though not all, were found in our favourite privet hedge. M. le gardien  was champing at the bit to cut the hedge back but we got there in time. Leading the band on stage in a rather flashy metallic green suit was Rose Chafer (Cetonia aurata). Catch that in a super-trooper spotlight and the audience could well be dazzled – we certainly were. You can spot the leaders a mile off, can’t you?

On supporting vocals and giving a little bass gravitas to the whole proceedings, was Oxythyrea funesta. I’m afraid the audience is just going to have to learn to deal with the scientific binomial name which could be shortened to O. funesta, there being no common English term that we’ve found so far.

The flashy git on lead guitar just has to have been the strikingly-marked Plagionotus arcuatus. No hiding backstage out of the spotlight for him, with his bright yellow striped suit. Another one with no readily pronounceable English name, either, so just go ahead and scream, girls.

The beetle intended to be the original drummer was to have been the rather subdued Agapanthia villosoviridescens (far left).  However, a  bunch of screaming females was never going to get their collective tongues around a name that complicated – heck, I can’t pronounce it either before or after a drink. So, I’m afraid poor old A. villosoviridescens was seen as something of a hindrance to stardom and a new drummer was hired with the much more approachable handle of Capricorn Beetle (Cerambyx scopolii, in formal circles – near left). Good set of drum sticks!

Of course, no tour can be staged without a considerable amount of support in the background. These guys in the fancy striped suits weren’t actually in the back ground, but they were on the grounds of Linda’s allotment, a.k.a. the farm. In England, these would start alarm bells ringing and be a cause for great concern. Pretty though they may be, they are a pair of incredibly destructive Colorado Beetles (Leptinotarsa decemlineata) – and they appear to be mating. Yikes!

Stay in France, guys. Please don’t come on tour in the good ol’ UK.

In Nouvelle Année, Nouveau Guide des Papillons, I introduced my speculative purchase of a French field guide to butterflies. I had wanted to replace my aging Collins Field Guide to the Butterflies of Britain and Europe for some time and my decision to “go French” was based largely on v. disappointing reports of that publication’s latest incarnation, the Collins Butterfly Guide. Just check out a few of these reviews and you’ll see what I mean. The main problem seems to be errors in some distribution maps. A contact on iSpot spoke well of the French publication so I went French. OK, so, the French can be a bit of a challenge and there are no English common Names for the species, of course. Instead, the French vernacular names are used. Naturally, the scientific/binomial names are included and my basic plan was to resort to these, then cross-check for the English name.

Yesterday, I tried my plan for the first time in vengeance. I have a couple of dubiously identified Fritillaries and wanted to see what I could decide using the wonderful illustrations of Mr Lewington in the French book. I thought I had a photo of a Knapweed Fritillary so I looked up the scientific name in my old English Field Guide: Melitaea phoebe. Off to the new French publication’s index for Melitaea phoebe. It listed three Melitaea species but none of them were phoebe. There were several Mellicta species (also Fritillaries) but none of them were phoebe either. I’d fallen at the first hurdle.

On the good ol’ InterWeb, I eventually found a French butterfly website talking about a Cinclidia phoebe. Arghh! Back to the French index and, sure enough, there was Cinclidia phoebe and it was, indeed, the Knapweed Fritillary, or Mélitée des centaurées, as the French prefer to call it.

I contacted a very helpful man on one of the French butterfly websites (Butterflies of France) about the naming. He had not heard of Cinclidia but found it (on the InterWeb, of course) “in a historic context”. He also went on, very helpfully, to confirm my suspected id.

Scientific names are supposed to help cross language boundaries and ensure that we are all talking about the same thing. That only works if we all use the same name. Variable scientific names get us nowhere, it seems to me. I seem to have a more modern book but not the most recent names. Even the main name in France is Melitaea phoebe.

Oh, and just to add insult to injury, inside the front cover of my new French publication I spotted this:

L’édition originale Anglaise a paru chez HarperCollins Publishers sous le titre: Collins Field Guide of Butterflies of Britain and Europe.

Marvelous!

At least the distribution maps are corrected, though.

As a purist, I was a relatively late convert to digital photography. I soldiered on with V-E-R-Y S-L-O-W Fuji Velvia slide film (nominally 50 ASA but more like 40 ASA in reality) for ages before finally converting to digital in 2008. Consequently, I now possess a couple of book shelves full of slide storage boxes. Each one holds 10 slide carriers with a capacity of 50 slides each so – running out of fingers and toes – 500 slides. I have 15 such boxes so – more stress for the fingers and toes – something approaching 7500 slides. Most of them are rubbish, of course, but it’s history. However, it’s also the ultimate backup.

Ultimate, that is, as long as you can run a decent film scanner. About 8 years ago I had my first, much loved Fuji Filmscan 200 when I upgraded my PC to my only very recently superseded Sony Vaio laptop running XP. The outgoing machine ran Windows ‘98. I connected my scanner. Nothing, nada, nichts. It wouldn’t work. Nor would it ever because nobody had written drivers for it beyond Windows ‘98. I now possessed a Fuji boat anchor 200. I bought my current Minolta Dimage scan 5400 and plugged it in via the handy (and faster than USB 1) FireWire (IEEE 1394) connector. I could scan again and with far superior results. Great!

As and when I could be bothered to invest the time and effort, I would scan in some slides until I had enough to almost fill a CD, then release valuable hard drive space by burning a back-up disk. It was laborious, each slide taking upwards of two minutes. (I was selective – I did NOT do them all).

When I moved to digital, CDs were pretty much useless; each image being about 12Mb, I needed DVD capacity. The process however, remained the same: upload instead of scan, save the images on the hard drive until I had a DVD’s worth, burn my back-up disk and release space on the hard drive.

I recently finally replaced my Sony Vaio with a splendid new Dell XPS 8300, a machine with a 1.5Tb hard drive. This is way more than enough to hold all our current CDs and DVDs of photos put together. I began reading the disks back in. Oddly, the reading process for a CD seems considerably slower and noisier [ ] than for a DVD, despite the reduced capacity. I can only assume that the DVD drive has trouble with older technology. Weird! However, I finally arrived at France 2008, my first disk from a digital snapping trip: “Cyclic Redundancy Check” was the unwelcome message that greeted me. A what?! The file names supposedly on the disk were listed but, try as I might, I couldn’t read them in. I tried the old machine in case it was some incompatibility with the DVD drive unit: “Cyclic Redundancy Check”. I tried my Dell Inspiron craptop [now seemingly a laptop once again courtesy of a new hard drive]: “Cyclic Redundancy Check”. Oh bother, or words to that effect!

My cunning scheme had now failed – being a digital set of images that I’d deleted from my hard drive, there being no slides available to rescan and my “back-up” being useless, I’d lost a set of photographs. Everything I read said that some recovery can be attempted from a CRC failure on a hard drive but not on a optical storage device. We did find a piece of software called CD Recovery Toolbox which claimed to be able to perform some level of recovery from a bad CD, though, so I tried it in desperation. After 12 hours running it was 50% of the way through the disk and all the most recent images that it claimed to have recovered were useless. Not its fault, I’m sure – the recording was just rubbish.

All was not lost – some photos had apparently been faithfully recorded and were recovered, though my ancient laptop with Ubuntu did it in less than an hour under my manual control. It wouldn’t, of course, recover any .bmp files ‘cos they are Windows only. Anyway, I have some images back but it’s a lesson learned. One back-up ain’t enough for anything critical.

Oh yes, and once again I can’t run my film scanner on the new machine straight away because the new machine doesn’t have a FireWire connection. Must go and buy another USB cable.

We live in a perverse country. I’d never really recovered from the disturbing discovery that Leeds Castle is in Kent. Today, I could have been forgiven for thinking that February 1st was actually April 1st. Carol announced that she would like to forego her normal Wednesday conserving the local countryside with the Greensand Trust in favour of a trip to Anglesey Abbey, attracted by their so-called Snowdrop Festival. To the uninitiated (i.e. me) it sounded like a daunting trip but, somehow, Anglesey Abbey has ended up in the middle of Cambridgeshire. There’s another one for which I’m going to require more than a little recovery time. [Aside: I wonder if it was built by the chap who built Leeds castle in Kent?]

A well as being a brilliantly sunny day, it was a bone-achingly cold day. Much as I may not have been able to concentrate or operate the camera properly, I do prefer bright and cold to the more usual nondescript, drab grey alternative. Being a heathen (i.e. not a National Trust member), we had to pay for me to get frozen but, though the over-hyped snowdrops were something a disappointment – the expected carpets of white never revealed themselves – the winter garden was quite interesting, even for one who prefers their nature to have a pulse. The winter garden has quite an assembly of plants that provide colour without their leaves. In fact, I suspect that the leaves might actually detract from the display.

To give them the benefit of the doubt, there is a guided walk to see snow drops which, we think, goes to other areas of the gardens where they may well be carpets of white. I’ll never know – I wasn’t prepared to hang around until 2:00 PM t find out. My toes were beginning to feel as frostbitten as this leaf looks.

However, snowdrops there were, even if in relatively modest clumps. It is, I imagine from the festival dates, still early in the season. Neither of us seemed too sorry to climb back into the car to warm up, though.

Doubtless we’ve been spending too much time in the south of France.

I can never think about moths without thinking of Jethro Tull – track 4 on Heavy Horses: Moths, which has a line including, “… the first moths of summer…”. I’ve put it on now.

One of these characters certainly was from summer – July in southern France, though it does occur in England. Since I am self-confessed moth numbskull, I resorted to iSpot for identification help. Little did I suspect the interesting debate that would ensue. First of all, here is my subject. I performed my usual rudimentary attempt at identification and came up with Copper Underwing as a suspicion. What I didn’t spot right beside Copper Underwing, was Svensson’s Copper Underwing. The two are, it seems, v. difficult to distinguish in the field and, I’d suggest, pretty much impossible from a simple photograph. Furthermore, the reliability of some of the so-called distinguishing features, is disputed. The problem is, perhaps, best illustrated by giving a flavour of the experts’ comments:

A very complex debate, with some stating no characteristics distinguish these reliably, only genital. If you are going to try and come up with an ID, … it’s necessary to look at ALL the published characteristics to come to a decision taking everything into account, including fore-wing, hind-wing, palps, etc…

Examination of the underside of the hind-wing on a fresh specimen is I think currently regarded as the only valid way to separate them. If it is not fresh then dissection may be required.. [Ed: ]

I believe some say that even hind-wing (both upper and underside) are invalid ways of separation; however I haven’t done any research or seen any sort of proof.

I think the situation is if it has the features of Svensson’s (copper extending up the underside of the hindwing) it is one. If it has the features of Copper Underwing, then dissection is probably necessary. . [Ed: ]

There are a few species (e.g. November moths) where you can extrude the relevant features (on a male at least) on an anesthetized specimen and do it with a hand lens.

You get the idea – certainty appears to require the killing of the hapless creature or, at the very least, anaesthetizing it to drag its genitalia about, I presume with tweezers or the like. No thanks! I’d much rather see it in all its incognito glory. poor old Copper Underwings! I will be satisfied to refer to this as a [Svensson’s] Copper Underwing. I’m also happy to think that I got the right [aggregate] identification.

Specimen number two is more recent and decidedly nothing to do with summer. Last week it flew into our kitchen and took a shine to the shiny white door of our dishwasher. Regrettably it wasn’t any more adept at emptying it than are we. Once again, I was fighting with Townsend, Waring and Lewington to come up with a likely identification and, once again, here’s the subject of my intrigue. After a couple of “probably not”s, I thought I had it: a Spring Usher but there were words in the book that were clearly not designed to inspire confidence:

… Variable, but with wavy outer cross-line and curved inner one, sometimes forming edges of pale central band. May also be dark brown and almost or entirely uniform. …

This much variability is a real pain for an amateur moth numbskull; I needed iSpot again to help. It seems I was right, though. Another all-too-rare moth feather in my cap. [The female, BTW, is flightless – not a wing in sight.]

Now, Spring Usher, I’m good and ready for you to do your work.

Possibly the last of my “New Year” posts. We’re a long way from our telephone exchange and have been suffering from a paltry 1.3Mb broadband speed for some time. Whilst investigating the supposed availability of fibre optic broadband services in our area, I questioned the reality of my supplier’s estimated speed: 9Mb. I questioned it, I explained, because they had originally estimated 3Mb for my copper connection and I was actually getting less than half that. They rummaged around  and eventually said, “our 3Mb estimate was based on ADSL2 which, it appears, you were never migrated to. And, yes, 9Mb is realistic for fibre.”

“Hmm, please migrate me to ADSL2, then“, I rejoined, based upon this being less upheaval [see below].

They did just that and, after the obligatory 1-2 week settling down period, I was getting a pretty consistent 2.3Mb download speed. Better – not great but better.

One of the things putting me off migrating to fibre had been the fact that, apparently, the fibre router needs to be connected into a master phone socket (which we didn’t have, anyway) rather than an extension socket, as in my current setup. For laptops on wi-fi, that’s no problem but my old desktop would become an effective boat anchor. It was with this in mind that, after much mulling over and fretting, I eventually ordered my new Dell XPS desktop complete with a wi-fi card, pretty much at the same time as I bit the bullet and ordered an upgrade to a fibre optic broadband connection. Brave boy!

This, of course, required a new router which PlusNet supplied as part of the 18-month contract. As well as coming with a BT OpenReach engineer to sort out the master socket issue, It came with what appeared to be comprehensive instructions about getting connected. Interesting reading: not only would Mr. OpenReach be fitting my master phone socket but he would also fit a fibre modem into which the router gets plugged. Both modem and router would need power. Two power sockets, yikes! It gets more and more difficult. Do I have two spare sockets near where a master phone socket should go? No, of course not.

Long story short, he turned up and, by running a cable round a couple of doorways, we found a suitable site with enough power points. He went to the road box to switch us over to fibre and returned to get the router bit done. No Internet connection. Internet at modem: OK. Internet at router: not OK. Much head scratching – “I’ve only ever fitted  BT Homehub, not one of these Netgear contraptions”. With a cheery, “you’ll have to call PlusNet”, he left.

To be fair, I knew the instructions mentioned connecting the router and making tea whilst waiting for 15 minutes for it to install itself. Mr. OpenReach had been a bit hasty. It did eventually come up … but, it came up with a different SSID from the documentation and unsecured. A swift phone call to PlusNet support soon had us in teh router configuration panels changing a few of the relevant settings. We were back on-line … and secured.

Out of evil curiosity, I went to www.mybroadbandspeed.com.uk and ran a test: 20Mb download, 1Mb upload. Completely unexpectedly, the service appeared to be twice as fast as the estimate. Intriguing.

I will keep my eye on it, we’re not that close to the box.

Yet another in the recent New Year series: a camera this time – for Carol. Her eyes were swayed by a relative giveaway price for a Canon EOS 550D on good ol’ Amazon. Her old 400D has stood her in good stead for a few years but neither of us was inclined towards the 600D with its fragile-looking articulated rear screen. So, a bargain basement price, one beating Warehouse Express (or WEX Photographic, as they now prefer), for an older model seemed quite appealing.

It arrived yesterday, on the same day as this brand spanking new desktop. It must have been delivery Wednesday, because my Amazon-supplied spindle of 25 DVD RWs arrived as well. 3 out of 3 – great!

Carol’s camera arrived by Home Delivery Network. There was a tracking number for the shipment and fascinating it proved to be, too. I couldn’t resist diagramming the camera’s journey on Google Maps and here it is, below. There are two flags on the map, the northernmost of which is Amazon’s warehouse at Ridgmont, Bedfordshire. The slightly more southerly flag is our house, also in Bedfordshire. The red line is the cameras journey calling in first at Newton Abbot, Devon, then Hitchin, Hertfordshire (still further away from us than it began), before pitching up chez nous.

Fascinating stuff, modern logistics. (There, I’ve always wanted to use that word properly.)