Some more books I have read

'You Can Heal Your Life' by Louise L. Hay

A re-reading of one of the self-help books I found useful in my twenties, along with Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway and one or two others. Hay’s book is wackier than Susan Jeffers’ (the gist of FtFaDIA is essentially "stop dithering and get on with it”) but I still think it has some merits.

You Can Heal Your Life was first published in 1984, and in the UK in 1988. It was an extension of an earlier self-published pamphlet called Heal Your Body. Hay’s philosophy is that we are each responsible for all of our experiences, and that our thoughts create our future. She takes this to rather an extreme IMO. But I still think there’s some value in this view if you don’t go overboard. Evidently, Hay was influenced by “New Thought”, as clearly were a number of other self-help authors that I read in the nineties (haven’t read many since then). Hay was a member of the Church of Religious Science – no idea what that is/was but it sounds suitably Californian.

The book is about the mental patterns that, Hay claims, cause disease (which she hyphenates as dis-ease). “We create every so-called “illness” in our body.” The most controversial thing, undoubtedly, is Hay’s claim that your own thoughts cause any disease you get, and that you equally can “think” yourself cured of any disease. More generally and usefully, Hay encourages readers to look at each of the problems in their lives and consider what kinds of thoughts they’re having that would create them.

A lot of it’s good. I do believe that we have choices about the thoughts we think, and it doesn’t seem too far-fetched to me to accept that our subconscious mind might be affected by what we habitually think. Ideas that I have found useful include the notion that it’s counter-productive to criticise yourself, and the idea that it’s true if you believe it to be true: this can work both ways, in retaining negative beliefs that we’ve internalized ("Usually, what we believe is only someone else's opinion we have incorporated into our belief systems") and in implanting new, positive beliefs. I have found that there’s some value in positive affirmations, however cheesy they may appear.

I have found the ‘How to Change’ and ‘Daily Work’ chapters useful to refer back to (albeit that I don’t think I’m going to be singing affirmations any time soon). There’s some good stuff in the What Do We Do Now? Chapter about being willing to change. All the chapters in Part 2 ‘A Session with Louise’ contain exercises to work through, mainly in the form of questions to ask yourself; I didn’t bother working through these on this occasion but I think I did the first time I read the book.

Ideas I’m not so sure about, to put it mildly: the idea that we ‘decide’ to incarnate on this planet at a particular point in time and space in order to learn particular lessons. A less fringe idea, but one I also wasn’t totally sure about, is Hay's claim that any problem her clients come to her with can be reduced to needing to work on loving the self. I can imagine that as a client I might struggle a bit to get on board with that – though that’s not to say that she’s wrong. She repeats this idea a lot: “As I have said before, no matter what the problem, the main issue to work on is LOVING THE SELF.” “From the way I look at life, if there is any problem, then this [a lack of self-love] has to be true”. It’s rather difficult to reduce all of life’s problems to this. I dunno. Maybe. She seems to be acknowledging in the second statement that her conclusion that every problem is due to a lack of self-love is a fallout of the way she looks at life.

One chapter of the book, headed 'The List', is a list of conditions with what Hay claims are probable mental causes, plus new thought patterns that can be adopted to cure these conditions. This list apparently first appeared in Heal Your Body. This, and the preceding chapter 'The Body', seems the most “out there” section of the book – most of You Can Heal Your Life is focused on positive thinking to improve your life generally, rather than specifically on curing diseases; as such I assume it was a broadening of the scope of Heal Your Body. Such controversy as surrounded Louise Hay seems to have resulted from her message being interpreted as saying that sick people have brought it on themselves – victim-blaming, if you will – which I agree is a possible, but somewhat over-literal, interpretation. I’d see her approach as more about enabling people to take and feel some control over their circumstances. (Also, judging by her short bio at the end of the book, might her strategy have served to help her cope with what must have been the powerlessness of her early life and the abuse she suffered?)

If you don’t take 'The List' too seriously, it’s quite amusing. Baldness as due to a tense scalp? It also seems quite a claim that female baldness has increased since women entered the business world. Influenza due to a belief in statistics? If you suffer with the unpleasant-sounding Mucus Colon, it could be due to "wallowing in the gummed mire of the past". And here’s a tip to bear in mind during an attack of rabies: affirm “I am surrounded and indwelled with peace”. Worth a try, I guess.

To finish on a quote from Louise:

The anus is as beautiful as the ear.

That quote's not relevant to anything, but it always makes me snigger childishly.

'84K' by Claire North

Dystopian novel. Helen’s choice for our April Book Group read. It’s set in England and uses lots of familiar place names, notably place names along the Grand Union Canal. But it’s not the England we know. Society has broken down a bit. Actually a lot. Human rights have been abolished. People can be sent to the ‘patty line’, which is not a good place.

The central character is a man called Theo Miller, who works at the Criminal Audit Office working out the cost of crimes. People who’ve committed crimes have to pay an indemnity. Something called the Company is in charge – well, the government is still notionally in charge, but it’s become inextricably bound up with the Company.

Theo Miller’s name is not really Theo Miller. I think his real name is mentioned once in the book, but I’ve forgotten what it was and have no hope of finding the page again. The real Theo Miller was a fellow student at Oxford, who was killed in a ridiculous shootout with one Phillip Arnslade, now the government minister for fiscal efficiency. Arnslade’s best friend Simon Fardell seems to be de facto CEO of the Company.

Theo encounters an old flame, Dani Cumali, who asks him to trace a Lucy Cumali, now possibly known as Lucy Rainbow Princess, through his job at the Ministry. Later, Dani tells him that Lucy is his daughter. Later again, Dani is murdered, apparently a hit job, ordered because of something that Dani discovered while working at the Ministry of Civic Responsibility. Theo becomes focused on avenging Dani’s murder and finding Lucy. He travels to his hometown of Shawford, which has fallen into decay since its sponsor Budgetfood pulled out. A young woman who knew Dani meets him there and gives him a memory stick contain incriminating information. He is beaten up by various people (this is a recurring theme throughout the book).

Theo suspects Arnslade of ordering mass murder and ruining the country. He travels to Arnslade’s family home and rescues his mother Helen, who has been drugged and kept captive after Phillip discovered she was secretly filming him and Fardell talking about wrong stuff they were doing. They go on the run, and reach Newton Bridge, where they meet Bess, the “queen of the patties” and various other outlaws. They publish the contents of the memory stick online, and broadcast video of Helen reading out the names of the believed victims of state murder.

A recurring theme throughout the book is a woman, Neila, who lives on a narrowboat called Hector and travels the canals. She takes Theo onto her boat after discovering him lying injured by the canal. This incident is never later returned to and it’s impossible to know at what point in the action it happened. A significant annoyance with 84K was the difficulty of keeping track of the order things happened in. It jumps about a lot – which isn’t so much a problem if it’s jumping about between different characters’ perspectives, or from e.g. a character in the present day to the same character’s childhood, but this jumps about between events that are presumably not all that far apart in time and that all centre the Theo Miller character. By two-thirds of the way through the book I’d given up on trying to keep track. At the beginning I had expected the Neila and narrowboat thread to anchor the book and be a constant through all the other events, but it didn’t end up doing this. These selected notes from my reading give a flavour of my general confusion over the order of events.

• p.264 I have no idea whether this is before or after he’s met Neila. 
• p.303 So annoying. Which city is burning FFS? 
• p.305 What was Newton Bridge? 
• p.306 Who is this man? 
• p.309 She better not have dropped his gun in the water.

There are some interesting ideas, but the whole thing is depressingly awful (dystopia is admittedly not my favourite) and there isn’t much of a ray of hope even at the end. The ending was a big disappointment, for me at least, as I had hoped that it would end with Neila and Theo going off on the narrowboat together. And I was sick of Lucy by the end. It was impossible to care about whether Theo found her or not. Theo betrays Bess, Bea, Corn and everyone at Newton Bridge – people who helped him and took risks for him – just for a girl he’s never met. Not even a girl, but the idea of a girl, as he doesn’t even know whether she’s still alive.

The rear of the cover drips with adjectives: “extraordinary”, “breathtaking”, absorbing and timely”, “captivating”. Hmm. Go figure. Ruth and I shared one copy of the book and found ourselves pushing the book onto each other in faux-selfless fashion "No, it's YOUR turn to read 84K", etc...

I was relieved to finish it and felt in the mood for a pleasurable palate-cleanser. Which leads me on to:

'The Notorious Lord' and 'One Night of Scandal' by Nicola Cornick

These are the first and second books in Nicola Cornick’s 'Bluestocking Brides' trilogy. I read and reviewed the last one, The Rake’s Mistress, here, not having realized it was the last part of a trilogy when I bought it. All three books are set in the early nineteenth century amid the threat of French invasion. The first two are set in the fictional ‘Midwinter’ villages of coastal Suffolk; the third is set partly in London and then back in Midwinter.

'The Notorious Lord'

Rachel Odell is 22 and has just moved to the Suffolk village of Midwinter Royal with her parents Sir Arthur and Lady Odell, a pair of renowned antiquarians. The Odells have taken a house there in order to spend the summer excavating an Anglo-Saxon burial ground. Also in Suffolk for the summer is Cory, Lord Newlyn, another antiquarian and a protégé of the Odells. Cory is ostensibly there to assist the Odells with the dig, but he has another motive, which is to help his friends the Kestrel brothers uncover the identity of a French spy who is believed to be working on the Suffolk coast.

The men’s attempt to discover the identity of a spy believed to be passing intelligence to the French forms a thread that runs through all three books. Justin Kestrel, the Duke, has been commissioned by the Foreign Office to uncover the spy. Evidence suggests that the Midwinter spy may be a woman, whose sex has helped her evade capture thus far. Given this, Lady Sally Saltire’s reading group, of which Rachel is a member, falls under their suspicion. Someone fires a shot at Cory as he is walking home one night; Cory fires back and injures his attacker. He and Richard Kestrel put in an appearance at the ladies’ reading group the following day – but two of the ladies have their arms bandaged. Who can it be?

The story of  The Notorious Lord centres on Cory and Rachel and their growing attraction to each other. They are both likeable young people with no obvious irritating qualities – a romance novel where both parties are quite likeable and reasonable people is pretty unusual so I quite appreciated this one. Rachel eventually realizes that she does like Cory as more than simply a friend, but doesn’t see how she can marry him when they want such different lifestyles: Cory is an explorer who is always off travelling in search of finds; Rachel, after a lifetime spent travelling abroad with her parents, wants nothing more than a quiet settled family life at home in England. Rachel is quite an appealing young woman and her reservations about marriage to Cory seem reasonable enough. After the usual declaration-of-passion-followed-by-declaration-that-it-can-never-work, the story ends with them both deciding that they can probably each compromise a bit for the other.

In all three books in the trilogy there’s an illicit night of passion between the two protagonists prior to marriage. Cory and Rachel’s occurs as a result of their both being stranded alone at her parents' house in a torrential rainstorm – both have gone down to the excavation site, worried about the site being flooded and the Odells’ work lost – and Rachel falls into a flooded barrow and is rescued by Cory. They make their way back to the house, get out of their wet clothes, and the inevitable happens.

By the end of the book, things aren’t much further on vis a vis identifying the French spy, beyond its being established that it’s not Rachel. But then this is only part 1 of 3.

 

Postscript: Lady Odell’s pregnancy? We already know that Sir Arthur Odell is in his fifties. Lavinia Odell is presented as a middle-aged woman, but presumably she must be a number of years younger than her husband – though presumably in her 40s given that she has a 20-something daughter. The pregnancy is clearly a device to explain the nomadic Odells’ otherwise surprising decision to stay on at Midwinter Royal. But still.

Postpostscript: The titles of these books are a bit random, and I’m guessing probably just assigned by the publisher. Cory is an affable chap and there’s nothing to suggest he’s particularly notorious. In a similar vein, Rebecca Raleigh is at no point Lucas Kestrel's mistress. Which leads us on to the middle book:

'One Night of Scandal'

Book 2 of the trilogy. It kicks off in September 1803, only three months after the start of the action in The Notorious Lord.

ONoS focuses on Deborah Stratton, a young widow who lives in the Midwinter villages with an older female companion. Deborah is the younger daughter of a Lord Walton of Bath. Deborah’s sister Olivia and her husband Ross, Viscount Marney, live at the nearby Midwinter Marney Hall. Deborah eloped with a Neil Stratton when she was 19, spent an unhappy five weeks with him before he went off on military duty and promptly died of a fever. We learn that the marriage was in fact bigamous, though Deborah was (obviously) not aware of this. Deborah’s father is putting pressure on her to return home to Bath; Deborah isn’t keen on this idea and is keen to stay living in Suffolk near her sister and well out of her father’s clutches. She comes up with the idea of advertising for a “biddable” gentleman to act as her temporary fiancé during a visit to her home in Bath for her brother’s upcoming wedding, with the idea that this will quieten her father’s attempts to pair her off.

In the meantime, she keeps running into Richard Kestrel, the second of the Kestrel brothers of nearby Kestrel Court. Richard and Deborah had fallen out some time previously when he asked her to be his mistress. When Deborah puts a vaguely-worded ad in the Suffolk Chronicle for a gentleman’s “assistance”, Richard, predictably, responds to it, having guessed it was her and having, highly presumptuously, got the innkeeper to bin the other applications. Stuff happens, involving the two having spirited conversations and, intermittently, passionately kissing.

Richard and Deborah are less likeable than Cory and Rachel of The Notorious Lord. Richard is an arrogant and seemingly somewhat embittered man; Deborah is ditsy and irritatingly oblivious to (or careless of) the reputational trouble her behaviour could land her in. The 'night of scandal' of the title is a night that Richard and Deborah spend at a hunting lodge on the Kestrel estate. (And I realise romance novels tend to expect heroines to be “an untried innocent in the ways of love” but as DS has been married it’s not quite plausible that she is one such.)

Richard and Deborah’s bantering/bickering with each other is frankly tedious; their conversation on the beach where Richard tells her the detail around his naval discharge, and Deborah tells him about her marriage to Neil, was the first readable bit. The background conversations are more interesting: those between Deb and her companion Mrs Aintree, Deb and her sister Olivia, Richard and Ross, Richard and Justin, Ross and Olivia Marney. The Marneys are a more appealing couple than Richard and Deborah and the lotion mix up towards the end of the book, which results in them clearing the air and reconciling, is genuinely amusing.

Spy-related events in this book involve: Richard gives Deborah, as a gift, a book of seventeenth-century poetry. At Lady Sally’s reading group, where the same volume is being discussed, Deborah’s copy is accidentally switched for someone else’s. The switched copy is found to contain a sheet of paper with a coded message written on it. Richard initially angrily questions Deborah, but swiftly concludes that she is telling the truth when she says she has never seen it before (the cattier reader might be mildly surprised that Deborah is able to find the way out of her own house, never mind operate as an undercover agent). Examining the piece of paper later, the Kestrel brothers conclude that the spy is using a pictorial code. Later, at the Custom House auction in Woodbridge, Deborah accidentally bids for some engraved glasses, resulting in the long-suffering Ross Marney having to purchase them, to the annoyance of Sir John Norton, another local gentleman who was also bidding on them and seems particularly keen to acquire them. The glasses are engraved with the same symbols as were on the piece of paper in Deborah’s book. Shortly afterwards, Marney Hall is ransacked and the engraved glass vases are stolen. The book's absurd climax features the spies knocking Richard and Deborah over the head and tying them up, which gives Richard an opportunity to propose to Deborah.

Richard Kestrel’s history is quite interesting; he is a darker character than either Cory Newlyn or his younger brother Lucas, the heroes of the other two books in the trilogy. Richard’s father had him down for the priesthood; Richard didn’t like that idea and joined the Navy instead. He was injured and discharged from active naval service. During Richard’s invalided-out period his father had his naval commission cancelled and Richard fell into a dissolute life of drinking and women, until his elder brother Justin inherited the dukedom and threatened to cut Richard off unless he started leading a productive life. This led to Richard getting his naval commission back and taking up work for the Admiralty. This story thread led me to ponder more generally the limited work options open to younger brothers of the gentleman class: not having estates to manage, some light research suggests that the only career options open to them were to join either the armed forces or the priesthood, as by some sleight of hand these were not counted as regular employment. If you either didn’t fancy them or managed to mess them up, it’s not clear what you would have done – did you officially lose your status as a gentleman?

   

For a trilogy of romance novels these are remarkably engaging little books, probably because in addition to the standard romance stuff there’s the spy storyline that straddles all three, and quite a number of the characters appear in more than one of the trilogy. All three end with an Epilogue involving a conversation between the Duke of Kestrel and Lady Sally Saltire, old flames who have kept up a flirtatious friendship since the death of Sally’s husband. At the end of The Notorious Lord, Sally bets the Duke that Richard Kestrel and Deborah Stratton will be married within three months. This does happen, and at the close of One Night of Scandal Sally collects on her debt by asking Justin to attend a ball in honour of a watercolour calendar she is auctioning – which he was intending to do anyway. They enter another wager, that Justin’s other brother Lucas will be next to fall in love – which leads in to the action of The Rake’s Mistress. In the Epilogue to the final book, the two finally stop playing around and declare their feelings for each other.

Nespresso dabblings

As previously mentioned, Premier Inn’s enhanced ‘Premier Plus’ rooms come with, among other things, a Nespresso machine plus a selection of three or four coffee pods. Pod coffee machines have never been things I've particularly coveted, though I can certainly see their usefulness in a household where one person likes black and hot, someone else favours cappuccino etc. They must also be a lot less messy than more purist methods of coffee-making. Partly also because my kitchen has next to no spare counter space, I’ve stuck for years now with making coffee in a cafetière (aka ‘French press’ in the States, I believe) and have developed a preference for the full-bodied coffee that they produce.

A percolator

In conversation with Mum and Dad the other day about coffee-drinking in their young day, Mum remembered her mother favouring the instant coffee brand Maxwell House. I think we had various brands at home when I was a teenager; I can't remember whether Mum had a favoured brand but I think I remember Gold Blend featuring. Mum also tells me that years ago people used to make coffee from ‘Camp’ coffee, which I have only ever used for cooking and in iced coffee. I asked Mum and Dad about coffee percolators, as I’ve come across these in books (references to "getting the perk going"), but they didn’t remember either of their mums using them. The Wikipedia page note that percolators lost popularity to what it calls “drip-brew” coffeemakers – this might be either an obsolete and/or an American term but it seems to include coffee made with filter papers, which I remember Mum switching over to from instant, probably in the second half of the 80s. I think it took me a short while to get used to the taste of ground coffee after being used to drinking mugs of Nescafé or similar, and I remember thinking initially that it tasted like you would imagine iron filings taste, but I did develop a taste for it reasonably rapidly and nowadays can barely tolerate the taste of instant coffee.

Anyway, back to Premier Inn’s Nespresso machines. PI have recently put up the costs of their breakfasts, from £9.99 to £10.99, and as with all “all you can eat” pricing, they’re only decent value if you put away a large amount of food, and while I don’t consider I exactly eat like a bird, I’m not going to pile my plate high with all the options on the hot buffet. Given this, the last few times I’ve stayed in MK I’ve dabbled in Greggs breakfast rolls. I’ve never been much of a customer of Greggs, though I realise they’re very popular, and I can’t imagine myself ever ordering takeaway breakfast at home, but in a hotel room they certainly have their uses. At the Willen Lake hotel I have to get delivery, which reduces, though doesn’t obliterate, the price saving, but at the city centre hotels I can walk to Greggs and pick up, making the whole thing total £2.50-£3. Bargain.

Flakey (flaky?) goodness

Flakey goodness via JustEat

So given this, on my last few 'Premier Plus' bookings in MK I’ve been attempting to work out how to get a cup of coffee out of the Nespresso machines. This isn’t essential, as I always take my mini-cafetière and a supply of coffee with me, but I thought I should get with the modern way and know how to use them. They seem to be mainly Nespresso Essenza Mini machines – I have no idea where these sit in Nespresso’s range or indeed how may different types of machine they make. Anyway, it hasn’t entirely gone well. On the first occasion, the machine was blocked with used pods, which I did manage to empty out, but then couldn’t slot the bits back together.

Deconstructed Nespresso machine

Return to the trusty cafetière

On the second, things advanced slightly as I did manage to get the machine to dispense a tiny amount of coffee. It was quite decent coffee, but the machine staunchly refused to dispense more than a couple of centimetres worth.

The jar labelled 'Goose Fat' in the picture above contains coffee. I used to keep a cunning little plastic tub for this purpose, but Ruth ruined it by putting some sort of homemade Cajun spice blend in it.

On my stay last week, I had a bit more success and got a full mug of coffee, but then pushed my luck and tried to get a second; something clearly went wrong with the placing of the pod, as it disappeared into the bowels of the machine and the machine dispensed me a mug of frothy hot water. Admittedly I am not the handiest person out there but the placing of the pods does seem to me to be a lot more hit and miss than it ought to be – it surely can’t depend on inserting and placing them at precisely the right angle or the machine throws a strop.

The more successful cup last week

So although I can see the appeal, based on experience so far I’m not sure I’m going to be buying one – I’m probably safer sticking to my jug and plunger.

My cafetières

Postscript: I seem to have bookmarked this 10-year-old BBC article titled ‘Why do Britons drink so much instant coffee?’. I’m a bit staggered that instant coffee still accounted for 77% of the coffee bought in the UK for home drinking. Having said that, I have met a number of work colleagues who say they drink instant because it’s easier and quicker – given the availability and ease of use of cafetières, that never seems convincing to me. About all you can say for instant is that it’s less messy. According to the BBC piece, we've got the Americans to blame for it.

Thenford Gardens

Saturday 27 April

No idea how Ruth found out about this garden but she booked tickets at the beginning of April for one of its Open Days. It’s a 70-acre garden and arboretum privately owned by Michael Heseltine and his wife, but open to the public on selected dates throughout the year.

At the time she booked, I just heard ‘Oxfordshire’, assumed it wouldn’t be too long a drive and resolved to check the location later. In fact it was over an hour’s drive as it’s up near Banbury, off junction 11 of the M40 and a turning off the A422 near Farthinghoe. We did manage to take the route they recommend into Thenford, through Middleton Cheney, and not the one that Google Maps tried to take me, up a single track road (the horror).

The Heseltines have owned the house and garden since the mid-1970s and have evidently overseen an orgy of restoration and new planting and landscaping. We had a pleasant walk around over a couple of hours, with a stop for tea and cake in the middle. Posting photos on the internet is apparently discouraged, so I’ve restricted myself to a few views of things already shown on their website.

Me with the Minotaur

The walled garden

The Rill

One of the medieval fish ponds

We returned to the visitor area at the end of our visit, me to use the toilets and Ruth to ask a question of the book/postcard lady about the medieval fish ponds. As we came back through the tea room, Lord H was standing in the tea area speaking to punters. We feebly chickened out of speaking to him, though we had been a bit intrigued to ask about the massive bust of Lenin in his sculpture garden.

The massive Lenin

By one of the medieval fish ponds we saw a darling little baby moorhen (or poss coot) running down the bank into the water after its mother. This made me think that I've missed out on seeing many adorably tiny baby waterfowl this year. Have I just missed them? There are generally loads of goslings near the Thames at Christchurch Meadows. Hopefully it's just that I've been unobservant or not there at the right time rather than there having been a gosling drought this year.

Premier Inn vs. Travelodge?

Travelodge v Premier Inn: battle of the budget hotels

I swear I read this Times article a lot more recently than two years ago. But given how time apparently starts to gallop in middle age, who knows. I have a Times subscription so I’ve no idea if it’s paywalled. A recent stay in a Travelodge after a gap of a few years brought it to mind.

The Travelodge logo

The Travelodge reviewer in the Times article stayed in a ‘Super’ room at the Travelodge London City, itself billed as a ‘flagship’ Travelodge. The Travelodge PLUS programme, of which the London City hotel is evidently part, was launched in 2018 and features the Super Room category and a new Bar Café concept. I’ve never stayed in one. Unless there are a lot of them, they’re a bit of a suspect comparison – it would be fairer to compare a “regular” Travelodge with a regular PI.

The Premier Inn logo

The Premier Inn reviewer in the article stayed at the Worcester City Centre branch (one that Ruth and I have stayed in; it overlooks the cricket ground), and notes the addition of Premier Plus rooms, as well as the chain's London-based ‘Hub by Premier Inn’ outlets (I stayed in one of these in 2021 - unbelievably tiny room but nice and amazingly high-tech bed). Premier Inns are slightly more expensive than Travelodges and generally have a dining option, whether this is an integrated restaurant or an arrangement with a pub/restaurant next door. Travelodges were originally on A-roads or motorways, and therefore pretty much always had a Little Chef or a motorway service station next door, so I guess the ‘dining option’ thing was kind of catered for; the newer ones in town centres don't have dining options, or at least I didn't think they did, but the introduction of the Bar Cafés in some is presumably an attempt to be more competitive with PI.

Bed at the Hub by Premier Inn London Soho

Since the advent of Premier Inns I rarely stay in Travelodges, as they now seem slightly shabby in comparison. However, I do have a nostalgic fondness for the earlier days of Travelodges and can still remember how lovely, clean and modern they seemed when I first stayed in them.

History and ownership

Travelodge has had a chequered ownership. It was originally owned by Trusthouse Forte, then bought by Granada in the 1990s. Ownership passed to Compass Group in 2001, then to Permira in 2003, and then to Dubai International Capital, a UAE-based company, in 2006. Since 2012 it’s been owned by Goldman Sachs and various hedge funds. Premier Inn has always been owned by Whitbread, though it’s only been called that since 2007; Whitbread established it as “Travel Inn” in 1987.

The excellent Motorway Services Online has some interesting stuff on the history of Travelodge. They were originally Forte Travelodge and I remember them forming part of Forte’s comfortingly reassuring collection of graded hotels, with Travelodge being the most basic, then Posthouse, Crest and Grand, in order of splendour. I never stayed in a Grand; I did stay in a Crest once, in Exeter, and I remember staying in at least a couple of Posthouses. Travelodge grew out of Little Chef Lodge, which MSO notes was the UK’s first budget hotel chain; this was owned by Forte and became Forte Travelodge in 1988, merging with a US-brand TraveLodge. MSO note that "many Forte Travelodge customers were 'trading up' from the less desirable accommodation they would normally stay in".

Me outside a Forte Posthouse in Hampstead in 1995

Prior to the more recent Travelodge PLUS upgrade, an earlier modernisation programme completed in late 2015 which gave Travelodges a makeover from their original branding. My extended Travelodge stay in 2014 - see below - was during the modernisation period, as some of the hotels I stayed at had been modernised (Old Stratford, MK Central) while others (Buckingham, Marston Moretaine, Shenley Church End) hadn’t.

My early Travelodge forays

I first came across Travelodges in the early 1990s when I was in my early twenties and they seemed to me an absolutely wonderful alternative to the B&Bs or cheap hotels which were my alternatives at the time. Then, they seemed to be mainly beside dual carriageways; they seem to have moved more into city centres since. I may be being over-nostalgic but I have more of a fondness for the roadside motel-ethos of the original type.

I think I first stayed in a Travelodge with Ray in 1992 – we had been part of an organized 18 Plus holiday to the Haven park at Caister, but made our escape after a couple of nights (I’d been the previous year, and rapidly realized that once had been enough) and went to visit Cambridge. We phoned the nearest Travelodge – on an A-road somewhere on the outskirts of the city, from memory – and as I recall were disappointed to find it booked up for that night. It had availability the following night, so we booked it, and sucked up staying in a cheap B&B that night, which, true to its type, had a shaky-looking shower in the corner of the room (presumably thereby enabling it to claim ensuite facilities) and various handwritten notices stuck around the room. The only one I remember was telling us not to throw condoms down the toilet, but there were probably others telling us not to speak, leave our pants on the floor, etc.

Ray and I were sufficiently taken with Travelodges to subsequently take a whole week’s holiday travelling around the country and staying in different ones. I can’t find any photographs from this trip, though it seems unlikely that I didn’t take any as I did own a camera at the time. Who knows. I can’t definitively remember all the hotels we stayed in, though I think we started the trip by driving up the A1 to Scotch Corner and staying in the Travelodge there, before working our way back down the country.

The Travelodge Year

Much more recently, I found myself unexpectedly staying in Travelodges for a good portion of 2014, following the burglary at my first rented MK flat around the end of 2013. Because of the burglary I didn’t initially feel inclined to rent another flat and dithered a bit about what to do. My head of unit at the time did not like staff working from home (oh, sweet irony) meaning that my modest request to work from home one day a week on a temporary basis to save on hotel bills met with a “No”. I think originally I only intended the Travelodge arrangement to be for a month or so, but it stretched to most of the year until I cracked and took out my tenancy at Wolverton Park in early 2015.

Although the Travelodge thing was OK initially, it rapidly became fairly depressing, in part because in order to make the four nights a week thing affordable, I was often obliged to stay at the OK but moderately drab pre-refurb Buckingham hotel, which still had old style branding, chunky grey CRT TVs and an offputtingly musty smell in more than one of the ground floor rooms. Also, I think that regular existence in hotel rooms, as opposed to the odd stay as I do now, can give you a sense of a little too much anonymity. The post-refurb Old Stratford hotel was much nicer and I did book in there as often as I could. The also-post-refurb MK Central hotel near the railway station was generally more expensive and I only stayed there for the odd night.

A room at the Buckingham Travelodge in March 2014

A room at the MK Central Travelodge, also in March 2014

Although I’m being a bit rude about the Buckingham hotel – it was the one I stayed in most and I was moderately depressed for much of the time - I did encounter a couple of worse ones. I ruled out the Shenley Church End establishment early on after only a couple of stays. That was a dreary former Innkeepers Lodge that hadn’t then even been updated to Travelodge’s old branding, never mind their new branding – the rooms didn’t seem Travelodgey, too much dark wood and I have a feeling they might even have had actual keys to the doors. I remember on one of the stays being given a room that didn’t lock and having to go back to reception to say “um, no” – it can’t have been fully booked (perhaps unsurprisingly) so they did re-allocate me to a different one. (On the other hand, they did at least have modern-style TVs in the rooms, which I had forgotten until I revisited the photo below.) Judging by their current entry on Travelodge's website, the hotel has now been refurbed. Sadly too late to rescue it in my eyes though. My good opinion, once lost, is lost forever.¹

The Travelodge Shenley Church End

A room at the Travelodge Shenley Church End in February 2014

I also once stayed in the Marston Moretaine hotel just off the A421 on the east side of MK, which was also pretty awful - I was initially given a room that stank of cigarette smoke, despite the hotel’s allegedly no-smoking policy, and I remember leading the guy on reception through the equally faggy-smelling corridor to my room so that he could smell it. I think he said something non-committal, but did give me a different room at a fresher end of the building. The one upside of the MM hotel was that at the time it still had a Little Chef next door, as these opened early and gave you somewhere to get breakfast (something that was a challenge all the way through the Travelodge Year). I remember having a quite OK cafetiere of coffee and some passable French toast.

View from my room at the Travelodge Marston Moretaine in June 2014

The LC has presumably gone now, as I think they all have. I do remember Little Chefs quite fondly; they were OK. I remember having a number of their “Early Starter” breakfasts in younger years. Strangely enough there was a piece on the BBC News website about them only this week.

While I was staying at the Buckingham Travelodge, the former Little Chef building was boarded up the entire time (probably adding to the faintly depressing air) but has now been freshened up into a Starbucks. I don’t particularly like Starbucks but much better to have the building back in use.

Some 'just add water' fodder, of the type I was often reduced to during the Travelodge Year:

More disturbingly, I also found this picture from 2014, with what looks like a Travelodgey backdrop. I don't remember often drinking über-budget wine, but perhaps I did.

Recent post-COVID times and Premier Inn use

Since working from home, moving back to Reading and the opening up of society again, I have been travelling up to MK every 2-3 weeks to spend a couple of days working on campus, to remind myself that I do actually have an employer (not that the regular Teams meetings and pay packet aren’t also a reminder of this, but you know).

Requiring overnight accommodation for a night every two weeks, as opposed to four nights a week, obviously affords much more choice of where you stay, with the result that I’ve been opting for Premier Inns pretty much every time. Milton Keynes has at least four Premier Inns which, if you book them a reasonable distance ahead and on the right night of the week (Tuesday: not great; Thursday: great) are very reasonable. I’m often able to book a “Premier Plus” room for only around the £60 mark. As the Times piece says, this gets you complimentary “Ultimate” Wifi (though actually PI’s free wifi is not too bad), an armchair with a footstool, a mini-fridge containing bottled water, a Nespresso machine and a piece of artwork with an artists’s label (albeit the one in the photo below was called 'Untitled'²). You do also, as Liz Edwards says in the Times article above, get to approach them down a better-smelling corridor, with a DIFFERENT CARPET from the regular room corridor. Perhaps it’s sprayed with special “posh corridor” smell.

Here are some soothing pictures of a Premier Plus room I stayed in recently at Milton Keynes' Willen Lake hotel.

'Untitled' by Gemma

Extra large shower

As a footnote, having said that thing about opting for PIs almost every time: with an eye to economy I have once tried out the Travelodge at the MK Hub (OK, but a yucky carpet), and a few weeks ago elected to return to the MK Central Travelodge, as I’d thought this one was quite an OK one during my Travelodge Year. It is indeed OK, but not as nice as a PI. I booked something called a “Standard Plus” room, thinking this might be comparable to the PI “Premier Plus” offering, but on arrival the room looked exactly as I remember them looking when I’d last stayed there 10 years previously. I did take in that there was a coffee machine and quite a selection of tea/coffee/hot chocolate options. On checking out the following morning, I asked the woman at the reception desk (it was staffed, unlike when I’d arrived when I’d had to wait quite a while for anyone to come along and check me in) what exactly it was that had made my room Standard Plus. Her response: “It’s got a coffee machine in it. And hot chocolate.” I made an unconvincing appreciative noise and thanked her, but I think she then lobbed at my retreating back “And a new chair!”. I was sceptical on this last point as the small chair in the corner of the room was the style that had been put in at the time of Travelodge’s refurb in the 2010s, but wasn't going to argue.

The Standard Plus tray of stuff

¹ Acknowledgement: Mr Darcy
² Why do artists do this? If you're going to go to the effort of painting something, might as well title it while you're at it.

More Hidden London

Saturday 3 February

Following last October’s Euston tour, I offered to treat Ray to a ticket to another one of the tours as a birthday present. Ray is cursed by having been born on Boxing Day and therefore doomed to a lifetime of birthday sidelining due to everyone being too exhausted/bloated to celebrate it much. I’ve always tried to make some effort to acknowledge his birthday but was ashamed to realise that I don’t think I’ve bought him a birthday present the past few years, so decided to redress the balance.

This tour was titled “Charing Cross: Access All Areas”. Its focus is the disused Jubilee Line areas at Charing Cross, plus the construction tunnel that runs under Trafalgar Square. We took the Elizabeth Line (useful service, this) from Reading to Tottenham Court Road and then walked down to Charing Cross. We had a bit of time to kill before our slot for the tour, so wandered briefly into Victoria Embankment Gardens. Amazing to think that this gateway was once actually at the water’s edge.

Gateway that used to mark the north bank of the Thames

Charing Cross was formerly, but is no longer, on the Jubilee Line; today it’s on the Bakerloo and Northern lines only (both older than the Jubilee). Several different underground stations seem to have been called Charing Cross: Strand (Northern line) and Trafagar Square (Bakerloo line) were combined when the Jubilee Line opened in 1979 and renamed Charing Cross, while the original Charing Cross tube station was renamed Embankment in 1976.

Original route of the Jubilee Line

The original Jubilee Line opened in 1979 and ran between Stanmore in the north to Charing Cross in the south, as per this from the closed area we visited at Charing Cross. Evidently it was actually supposed to have opened in 1977 to coincide with the Queen’s Silver Jubilee but overran by two years – according to our tour guide, this was due to a cock up in the construction of the new escalators at Charing Cross (which, ironically, were destined only to be in use for 20 years). (The Jubilee Line was originally going to be called the Fleet Line, but was renamed in honour of the Jubilee. One hopes that the impact of this patriotic gesture hadn't worn off a bit by the time the line eventually opened.)

The Jubilee Line extension opened in 1999, providing a connection through to the redeveloped London Docklands. The extension was started from Green Park, the last but one station on the original Jubilee Line, and bypassed Charing Cross. The reason for abandoning Charing Cross was something to do with tunnel alignment and avoiding twisty-turny bends under the Thames. This useful image that I nicked from the internet shows the current Jubilee Line; the new stations are to the right of Green Park.

The lead tour guide proved to be the same exuberant young chap from the Euston tour, though he split the talking with an assistant guide on this occasion. We started off by going down the stairs to the tube station concourse at CC. After another exciting being-led-through-usually-locked-doors moment, we found ourselves at the top of a set of escalators. We walked down these (they’re switched off now) into what was the Jubilee Line area.

The escalator we'd just walked down

The disused Jubilee Line area at Charing Cross

Although the Jubilee Line at Charing Cross is no longer on the live Tube network, its tunnels are still used for storing trains and its escalators and platforms are hired by TV and film companies. We paused in the above hall area to watch some video footage of various TV shows: I can’t remember all of them but they included an episode of Spooks I think, plus something showing Matt Damon running through a crowd (The Bourne Ultimatum?) plus the James Bond film Skyfall, in which Daniel Craig (or possibly his stunt double) slides down an escalator in pursuit of a baddie. Evidently the disused platforms and other areas get customised to represent whichever tube station is required for the production, as with the faked Circle and District Line sign below. The (empty) train in the platform picture had just pulled in when we got there; I think the guide said that the old platforms and tunnels are still used as holding bays for TfL stock.

One of the disused platforms. Train not in passenger use

The escalator used in Skyfall

Ah, British Rail

Fake Circle and District Line sign

For the next bit of the tour, we were taken into the construction tunnel that was dug in the 1970s to carry away spoil from the alterations to Charing Cross to accommodate the new Jubilee Line. According to the tour booklet, this was to allow the spoil to be loaded onto trucks in a quieter location rather than cluttering up the Strand. The tunnel goes right under Trafalgar Square, with a bend in the middle to avoid the foundations of Nelson’s Column. The unloading site was where the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery now is, and the last part of the tunnel has been blocked up and backfilled (bit of a shame - would have provided lots of material for an art heist movie).

The bend in the construction tunnel to avoid Nelson's Column

The blocked-off end of the tunnel

The last thing we were taken to see was the Craven Street ventilation shaft, built at the time of the Jubilee Line's construction to allow heat to escape from the tunnels. For this, we were issued with specially-reinforced caps as we had to duck under some low bars to get to it. According to the tour booklet, it’s almost as tall as Nelson’s column. Afterwards we walked round into Craven Street to identify the outside of the building that houses it.

In my reinforced cap

Looking up the ventilation shaft

The exterior of the Craven Street ventilation shaft

After the tour, we walked up through Bloomsbury to King's Cross and had a nice lunch at the Kimchee.

More books I have read

'The Night Tiger' by Yangzse Choo

Semi-mystical story set in 1930s Malaya (as ‘twas then). There are two protagonists: Ren, an 11-year-old orphan employed as a houseboy, and Ji Lin, a young woman in her late teens apprenticed to a dressmaker. They do not know each other but from the start are obviously on paths that will lead them to meet each other at some point.

The story centres around a severed human finger, its origins and a quest to reunite it with its owner. The detached finger belonged to a Dr Macfarlane, Ren’s employer. When Macfarlane is dying he asks Ren to find his finger and reunite him with it before 49 days have passed. The body must be made whole again before this deadline, or Macfarlane’s soul will be doomed never to find peace. After Macfarlane dies, and following his instructions, Ren travels to the home of William Acton, a surgeon and friend of Macfarlane’s, bearing a note vouching for Ren and asking Acton to take him on as a houseboy, which he does. It later transpires that Macfarlane lost his finger during a hunting trip with Acton, who donated the finger as a specimen to the hospital where he works.

Ji Lin is doing a secret second job as a dance hall hostess, to pay off the debts her mother has run up playing mahjong. Ji Lin comes into possession of the severed finger from a punter at the dance hall, who dies shortly afterwards. She is later approached by another man at the dance hall, who asks if she knows where the finger is and claims that it’s a family heirloom of his and the first man stole it from him. Later, Ji Lin helps her stepbrother Shin, a medical student, to tidy the pathology storeroom at the hospital where he is working over the summer, and they discover a lot of specimen fingers are missing.

This book was a perfectly enjoyable read but I think I lost the plot a bit (Reese Witherspoon informed me on the back cover that I wouldn’t be able to put it down, but I’m not sure I’d go that far). It was a bit hard to keep track of who had stolen the finger from whom/where. Ren and Ji Lin keep having very similar dreams involving Ren’s twin brother Yi, who died three years earlier. There are five bearers of Chinese names that form some sort of set corresponding to the five Confucian Virtues: Yi (righteousness), Ren (benevolence), Ji Lin (‘ji’ meaning wisdom), Shin (‘xin’ meaning faithfulness) and a mystery fifth element, Li (meaning ritual or order), whose bearer is not identified until late on. Several different people are doing wrong things: turns out Yi has been causing bad things to happen to his brother in the hope that Ren will join him in death; an orderly at the hospital is selling body parts as good luck charms; and a third person is able to bring about other's deaths through force of will. That's quite a talent.

The story makes reference throughout to the legend of the ‘weretiger’, a tiger who can assume human form (or was it the other way around?). The finger is rumoured to have been a weretiger’s finger. There are hints dropped throughout that Dr Macfarlane was a weretiger, but the story stops short of confirming the legend as reality - it does state that prior to his death Dr Macfarlane had been thought to have been losing his mind a bit. This blog post discusses weretigers and mentions Choo's novel under 'The Weretiger in Modern Media'.

'Deep Country' by Neil Ansell

Neil Ansell’s story of his five-year tenancy of a remote cottage in the Welsh mountains. Mum passed this on to me. I’m not as interested as I probably should be in extended descriptions of wildlife and scenery, but was reasonably interested in why Ansell had made this decision and how he had managed to live. As it turns out, it’s never made clear why Ansell moved to such a remote place, but he refers to “having burned what few bridges I had left”. While reading the book I kept expecting that at some point he would explain what he meant and what had led him to choose such a lifestyle, but in fact he never shares what took him to the cottage. Evidently he knows the owners of the estate that the cottage is on, and took over its tenancy from some friends of his who had decided it was a tad too primitive for them. Prior to Ansell’s occupation, the cottage had last been lived in full-time over 40 years previously. He apparently moved in with only a bag of clothes, wanting to “know how lightly I could tread on the earth”.

The cottage seems to have had pretty much no modern facilities, being without electricity, gas, running water or plumbing. He doesn’t go into detail on how he coped with the last, but refers to bathing in local rivers. It seemed incredible that he decided to do without a cooker: he declined to buy the previous tenants’ two-ring cooker, on the grounds that he didn’t want to lug gas bottles up the hillside and instead elected to cook over the fire – I was amazed that he'd managed to successfully cook anything by this method, though I realise that people must have done so in the past. Also incredibly, he managed without a car, relying on hitch-hiking for local travel, and indeed also to get to the cottage in the first place. I had no idea anyone still hitch-hiked.

Ansell is incredibly self-sufficient, living in primitive and isolated (by UK standards) conditions. He seems to have been able to turn his hand to all manner of practical tasks, to the extent that I suspected he must have had some previous experience of backwoodsmanship. He earns occasional money doing chainsaw jobs in the woods, and also did some work (voluntary, I assume) for a local field centre, monitoring bird boxes and the like. He picks mushrooms – he does note that he knows his way around mushrooms – and preserves them in vinegar and herbs. He makes jam, from what I can’t remember. One winter he was snowed in for six weeks, and evidently managed. I was amazed at how well he must have stocked up if, as he relates, he didn’t need to immediately rush to town to buy anything when the thaw came.

There’s a LOT of detail about birds and bird behaviour, which was quite interesting though the extended descriptions didn’t always hold my attention very well. I’m not all that knowledgeable about birds so kept having to Google images of the creatures Ansell was describing, as well as e.g. the relative size of a goshawk vs. a thrush. There’s additionally other, furrier, wildlife: foxes, polecats, stoats, hares.

He’s not overly heavy on the introspection, but of the snowy winter just mentioned, he notes “it felt liberating to wake in the morning and know that today there was no chance whatsoever that I would see anyone, nor tomorrow either”. There are some interesting reflections on thinking you know yourself and discovering that there is, perhaps, no fixed self. It’s certainly an amazing amount of time to have spent alone – he occasionally meets local farmers/farmworkers during daylight hours, but relates spending most evenings staring into the flames of his fire.

Ansell lived in the cottage for five years. In the latter stages of his time there he developed what sounds like a pretty serious thyroid condition, involving hospital treatment, and reluctantly has a phone installed as a consequence. It’s not clear though that even this illness was what made him revert to living in a town. As he relates it, after five years, he felt he had to move back to ‘normal life’ if he was ever going to, or he would end up staying at the cottage permanently.

‘Deep Country’ was published in 2011. In this Guardian piece from the same year, Ansell expands a bit on his life prior to moving to the cottage and on his reasons for leaving it.

'Solitaire' by Alice Oseman

Alice Oseman is my OU colleague Guy’s niece, and secured a six-figure publishing deal for Solitaire when she was still a teenager. I wouldn’t usually put Young Adult fiction on our book group list, but I was quite curious to see what sort of book a publisher buys from a teenager. (Guy actually recommended Alice’s later novel Loveless in preference, but I’d already put Solitaire on our list by then.)

The story: Victoria ‘Tori’ Spring is in Year 12 at Harvey Greene Grammar School for Girls, or ‘Higgs’. There’s also a boys’ grammar school in the town, which Tori’s brother Charlie and his boyfriend Nick attend. ‘Higgs’ accepts boys into the sixth form, so some boys have transferred over, including Tori’s primary school friend Lucas Ryan, and one Michael Holden, with whom Tori becomes friends, albeit she seems unwilling to think of it in those terms.

‘Solitaire’ – or rather Solitaire.co.uk – is a blog which is initially blank but then messages start appearing on it. It comes to the school’s attention when its creators start playing music over the school tannoy, putting posters up around the school and hijacking the school's computer systems. As the messages progress, Michael observes to Tori that they seem to be particularly relevant to her. Things eventually turn sinister at a house party, when a post appears on Solitaire inciting the partygoers to beat up one of the Year 12 boys present. Bothered by this, Tori decides that she must stop Solitaire.

Tori’s brother Charlie, who is in Year 11, has had various issues including an eating disorder, obsessive-compulsive behaviour and self-harming. A couple of the others expressed reservations about the relative ages of Charlie and Nick, in that Charlie is only 15. I can’t say that aspect of their relationship bothered me overly, or indeed had even occurred to me (they’re only one school year apart, for God’s sake – it’s not as though Nick’s 35) but other aspects of it didn’t seem entirely healthy, namely the degree to which Nick seems to be expected to look after Charlie and the pressure put on him; Tori’s blaming of Nick after Charlie’s brief relapse seems entirely unfair. (Slight sidebar: this might be my age showing but a world in which the school rugby captain can have a boyfriend, and this not be worthy of remark, seems like Utopia to me. Is this really how it is in schools these days? Or was this slightly rose-tinted thinking on Oseman’s part?)

Tori thinks her classmates are all soulless conformist idiots and that she’s miserable because she has some sort of deep insight that her parents and friends lack (actually, in fairness the latter part isn't stated explicitly, but you get the strong impression that that's her view). She appears to be in a bit of a down phase of recent-ish onset: her grades have slipped since entering the sixth form, perhaps due to some sort of fallout from her brother’s problems; perhaps due to difficulties with her friendship group, albeit that her ill-feeling towards her best friend Becky is pretty transparently due to envy of Becky’s social standing. Becky is evidently still fond of Tori, as evidenced by the final storyline where she runs to the school still in her pyjamas to try to rescue Tori from whatever it is she’s planning to do. Despite studying A-level English Literature Tori hates books and doesn’t read them, because none of it is real – though she loves films, which she admits herself is illogical. (At one point I found myself thinking, in grandma fashion, that she’d probably be happier during the day if she didn’t stay up all night watching films.) 

I thought Solitaire was an OK read. I didn’t hate it, and it was quite interesting to get a taste of the sort of thing that the modern teenager might read. An important message seems to be Tori’s discovery that everyone’s a bit miserable really, or certainly a lot of people of her age. There was plenty that was irritating about Tori, but that’s not to say she’s an atypical portrayal of a teenager - she's probably pretty spot on. And I did keep trying to bear in mind that I’m hardly this book’s target audience.

Oh, and I've never read The Catcher in the Rye, so have no idea whether the comparisons are remotely justified.

Postscript: Solitaire was first published in 2014. The first thing you encounter on opening the edition I read was an author’s note from Alice Oseman dated 2020, urging her readers to ‘Please read safely and responsibly’. At this, I muttered that reading is not meant to be a “safe” endeavour – it’s meant to expose you to new ideas and sometimes to scary or unpleasant things. The note appears directed at readers who are fans of Oseman’s more recent graphic novel series Heartstopper, which has been picked up by Netflix. It sounds rather as though she has made some edits to Solitaire for her Heartstopper audience – are they younger? I don’t know.

Postpostscript: do UK secondary schools now have tannoys? I mean, they might do for all I know. V. American. Also, it's a bit odd that the term ‘sixth form’ is even still used given the switch some while back to American naming of school years – I mean, it made sense in my day when the last two, non-compulsory, years of secondary school WERE actually the lower and upper sixth, but less so now that they’re termed Years 12 and 13. (As far as I can gather the UK has still stopped short of adopting the US terms for the final four years of secondary (high) school (freshman, sophomore, junior, senior) but perhaps it’s only a matter of time.)