Half Term Hols

are here again.

I've just had my Austrian friend staying for a few days, which meant that I did all the things in the locality that I like doing, but don't usually get round to. And just had to make pancakes, served as is traditional with lemon and sugar.

She's a serious singer and in lieu of any suitable concerts up London, we went to Choral Evensong in St Paul's Cathedral, one day, which was, well different. It was just the Choristers and Andrew Carwood. I quite like a bit of clipped English now and then and we got to sit in the Choir Stalls next to the Precentor (if that's what the man with the silver stick is called.)

As she comes from Graz but lives in Linz and mindful of some of the things you hear about Linz, though to be fair I've never witnessed, I asked her about the place. Where is the medieval bit (I've yet to find it), when did it get a university, that sort of thing. Bearing in mind Austrians are fiercely regional etc she said it was a Johnny come lately steel town which got a university in the 60s and that Upper Austrians were conceited and inept. Not all of cause, Bruckner springs to mind. We went to Mass once at the Augustinian monastery just down the Danube, the history of which relates the arrest of the Prior in the late 30s/40s...you know the rest.

Still her description put a gloss on that region. What do they make of SE England...?