Try Solomon time for lunch...

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. Here's how a wet March weekend turned into a Sol fest with authors Will Randall and Rosie Millard - plus the Pacific Islands Society of UK and Ireland. This post is by Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about books and blogs).   Pix show Afu, Sara and me (that's for you Jenny Wate!), and then a lunch group taken by Nell and her friend Fernanda. 


For reasons entirely due to Michael Tuhanuku of Honiara this song makes my family think of the humid, beautiful Solomons. So you can read this post listening to it if you want! It's Soul Sister by Train. 

SATURDAY: First organise a Pacific Special Book day and tempt some wonderful writers to give a talk in front of afficanados and islanders belonging to the Pacific Islands Society over in Earls Court, London. We were so lucky to get Will Randall who wrote the yet to be bettered book about the Solomons, Solomon Time. Years of teaching has left him an expert public speaker too. He gave a fabulous talk filled with humour and bon mots (well, he does live in France now).

Nell had been asked to talk a little about Solomon Islands Development Trust which does such important development education work - and both Sara and I worked for years ago. Mali (Sara's university student daughter) and Lola (mine) also gave a powerful advert about why the Tetepare Descendants Association needs support, making their respective mums proud. Then Rosie Millard read with pezzaz from her entertaining book Bonnes Vacances: a crazy family adventure in the French Territories which took her through the South Pacific via New Caledonia. Who would have thought this would spring so many tough questions, and none about trying to work and travel with four small children?

SUNDAY: If it's too carbon intensive - and expensive -to get ourselves back to the Solomons (15,000 miles away), then the answer is to tempt those people who love the Solomons around to your house. You do this by never mentioning we are vegetarian - instead we quickly become pescatarian when I'm thinking up a menu that is UK seasonal but includes fish (eventually settled on a cod-like white fleshed fish from Cornwall which the fishmonger said was called Poutin after what Posh Spice does. Name is still a mystery, but it does cook easily.

Result: lunch was enjoyed (I hope, I was too busy gossiping to notice how the food went down) by Afu, temporarily working here in an extremely high-powered job (she's meeting the Queen next week!), Sara and Peter who were part of the early team that helped allow people today call Tetepare "the largest uninhabited island in the Pacific" and provide an alternative to logging. Will joined us - and then there was Pete who has a chapter on the Solomons in his book, There's A Hippo in My Cistern which recounts his slight inept ability to cope with sleeping in a cave in Belona or master a bush knife or catch and gut a fish... And I've got Coconut Wireless, a whole novel about love, life and gossip based in Honiara (which you can download for FREE if you go to www.smashwords.com/books./view/29742  and use the code NP86T before 2 April) or just pay £1.92 off amazon.

Great Britain campaign for 2012

I love these ads, they seem to  pick out some British highlights.

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No, not with these ideas to get the world celebrating Great Britain 2012. This post is by Nicola Baird 


PM David Cameron (don't ya just want to sit him down and give him a fierce talking to?) went to New York in September, and while there found the time to launch a boost British trade campaign. I love these cheesy posters (see pix) and look forward to stumbling across them in mags and on billboards. It's a great reminder that we are lucky to live in a country (well countries) with such amazing history. And things to boast about - from the good looks of Henry VIII to the entrepreneurial genius of Richard Branson.


For the past month I've felt so homesick for my other country, Solomon Islands, and really don't know how to feel better - that place just gets under your skin. I asked a friend, who moved last year from Sao Paulo to London with his Brazilian wife, how he coped being back home seeing as he loves being an expat, and adores hotter weather and, dare I say it, the way they wear clothes in Brazil. 


But he was positively animated by the things that make London an exciting place to live - the history, the way the pubs were used by Dickens (admittedly not really a Londoner), and Pepys; the clues to the Fire of London or the blitz or the shrapnel marks on the V&A. He loves the food from all round the world. The vibe. The way the power is always on and the rubbish gets sorted into recycling. The multiculturalness of London got a big thumbs up too.


There's no reason for me to be in a giant sulk. With the internet you don't need to be at your cultural home to be working - if I really wanted to, I could be sitting in an office with the best view in the world (say, blue skies and an island not far off) plugged into broadband...(ah dream on).


However it seems Cameron is keen for 2012 to turn Britain into a honeypot. If nothing else there will be 17,000 competitors and officials at the Olympics. It feels churlish not to try and support him, it is after all supposed to be a pleasure to show people around your home. Besides, time's moved on (and we've had this amazing hot start to autumn with blue skies and climate changing temperatures) so I'm feeling better. Ready to look forward to planning for 2012. Here's some dates for the diary:


2012 dates 
2-5 June The Queen's Diamond Jubilee Weekend 
27 July-12 August the Olympics
29 August-9 September, the Paralympics

Using locals to speak a new language

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. This post is by Nicola Baird 


What's the easiest way to learn a language? I reckon it's necessary to listen very hard to become fluent, and then to try the words and phrases, day after day. I think it is much easier if you can let your subconscious - that bit of your brain that demands habit (mine likes coffee when I wake up) -  kick in. But I don't find learning languages very easy.


"Quel'qu'n"  this may not be spelt right, but I distinctly remember learning the phrase "is anyone in there" after staying for a couple of nights in a Paris apartment with a French family. Because the apartment was crowded there was a serious danger of walking into someone using the bathroom, so the phrase took on ridiculous importance.


In the same way hearing "mira" being repeatedly said by a babysitter dandling my baby daughter helped me learn the Spanish word for look.


Now that my 13 year old has learnt a second language (due to travelling out of the UK all summer, shh not to mention much about this on this blog and besides it was a one-off, and it's Solomon Islands pijin which very few people speak in the UK) I'm trying to encourage her to use the same listen and try techniques to get herself a Spanish GCSE. She actually made the fluent breakthrough after six weeks in the Solomons, and then one rainy day spent making baskets and toys out of coconut leaves (see pic above). And if you ever want to visit that place (the largest uninhabited island in the Pacific), know as Tetepare, see the info here.


Spanish is a fab language, I wish I spoke it. But my efforts over the years mostly in the UK - evening classes, tapes, plus short visits (pre-children & pre-blogging days) to Mexico and also Spain - have probably helped. But my know-how is very weak, so I cannot help my daughter build up her Spanish voccab, essential to get that GCSE which will give her a ticket to uni...


But there's a clever trick you can do too, whatever language you want to speak - use visitors to the UK.


Here in London there are loads of Spanish speakers so I've arranged for Lola to meet up with a Chilean family and help mum cook supper for the two boys one evening after school. 


Hopefully she'll hear phrases like "is anyone in the loo"  or "would you like some more" (all in Spanish!) that will never leave her brain. Actually I'd like to learn like this, but would prefer to go to a tapas bar, so somehow haven't got around to sorting out my language needs. 


If anyone's got any ideas about non-classroom ways of learning a language at home please share them here... Thanks.

Sport binds us?

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK.

In a series of lighthearted emails back in January 2010 the excellent head at Woodford International School in Honiara, Solomon Islands said my little Brit daughters could only attend his school (for a week) if our whole family promised not to support New Zealand's 2011 Rugby World Cup bid.

Well, that seemed like a nobrainer.

I've never enjoyed rugby (or to be honest understood the scoring). If he wanted me to cheer for Oz's side (the one that hasn't won the rugby world cup for years...) then I was happy to do so.

But it's 9 September 2011 today and the Rugby World Cup has started - with New Zealand the hosts until 23 October. The host nation are apparently favourites, and haven't won top honours) (the Webb Ellis trophy since the inaugural game in 1987. This seems to be an advantage, they've certainly played the first half of their first game rather finely. But don't worry Greg, I was just looking at the Tonga team's red strip, and then couldn't resist watching both teams doing their fierce Polynesian war dances before the game kicked off.

And thanks to Greg I've realised that there are seven weeks of sport to enjoy and lots of the teams are from a long, long way away. I'm especially looking forward to the Fiji v Namibia game on Saturday (watch it on ITV 1, 4.30pm).

The picture above is more relevant than it might seem, it's a Pijin-language slogan Tshirt meaning we can do it together (tugetha iumi save duim) - which I took at Honiara's Lime Lounge during an annual award ceremony for Courageous Women. The Solomon Islands award was won by a woman who'd done a huge amount of surveying to discover that more than 60 per cent of women aged 15-49 had experienced domestic violence. This is a very high rate, and besides Papua New Guinea, one of the highest in the Pacific region. It's also shocking - it's dads, uncles, step fathers, grandparents, brothers and cousins who are hurting their wantoks (relations).

Scary jobs
I've been sniffing around the internet finding out more about this and discovered a just published Amnesty International report that surveyed Solomon Islands women collecting water in an area of Honiara that is off-grid (actually it's off-grid for about 90 per cent of houses). During the day only two men went to the water pipe, everyone else was female. When the women were asked why the men weren't helping the answer was "They are playing sport or drinking kwaso (a potent homebrew)." Here is the Solomon Star link.

I guess seven weeks of sport is good for nation building and bad for a lot of non-sport mad partners. Especially the ones collecting water (and in my London home that probably includes washing up duty).

Anyway, enjoy the games. And if you have to collect water, do so safely...

Moth collection

I've been travelling for the past three months - and I'm sorry to admit that this involved making nine flights. There is no defence other than I hadn't been on a plane for 10 years so had a few carbon credits in hand. PIc is of Nell, me, Lola and two Solomon Island guides - Ofani and David - who had just taken us for a very long walk to see this amazing map, the Kolombangara stone.

But now I'm back at home. The first thing I noticed was that the kitchen seemed to have shrunk after the experience of living without windows, or clutter, while we were in Solomon Islands for two months. The next was the plague of moths.

Confession#2
Clothes moths drive me crazy - they've followed me around London to a range of different houses and their caterpillars have destroyed far too many of my clothes. They chew rugs, carpets, dresses, silk, jumpers, curtains even. I'm told they can even take over sheeps' wool insulation. They get into the food jars, and once the kids were sent home from school with a vicious note from the lunch supervisor telling me not to send them to school with maggoty fruit bars. When I protested that these were moth larvaes the teachers were even less sympathetic.

The result is that I am willing to kill these poor moths, and do so with a pheremone trap, ie, it's laced to stop the male tineola bisseliella mate with the female.

Unlike most of the world's 160,000 moth species, clothes moths (tineola bisselliella) like dim light. As everyone knows, most moths are drawn to bright lights, so they've done a clever bit of adaptation. In fact I admit to freaking out, just once during our three month travels, and it was over moths chaotically fighting to kill themselves on the kerosene light. We had to leave at 5am, ie, it was going to be dark in the morning, and was already dark, so I had to pack. Easy! But the torrential rain seemed to make hanging around the kerosene light even more attractive to the moths. There were 100s, maybe more, anyway enough to darken the lamp and to reduce me to a weeping lump lying on the dark wooden floor of the very special eco-lodge, Imbu Rano, Kolombangara, Solomon Islands.

I literally couldn't see for moths. 

Moth worries aside Imbu Rano is the place to base yourself if you ever want to take a walk through montane rainforest on a dormant volcano (the equivalent in the UK would be wooded parts of the Malvern Hills, or imagine the woods on Arthur's Seat or the Lake District). The eco-lodge has the world's most lovely view, read more about it here. There are some good pix here too. And by the way we stayed two nights and moths weren't a problem on the first night - it must have been the weather or the moon, or some other natural phenomenon.

DIY moth removal
Finding moth pheremone refills for the plastic traps isn't easy. But at the fourth hardware shop I visited (ironically the one I first stumbled across moth traps) had some for sale. A pack of 10 refills is £17.50, or buy one for just £2.

"Are you selling a lot of these?" I asked, and got a laugh for a reply at SX Wallpapers, 113 Essex Road, London, N1.

"We've sold 3,000 refills this summer. I've been saying we could turn the upstairs into a moth refill showroom and show people how best to swat them!" he added.

I'm sharing this with you so you can keep your clothes in a decent state, ensuring you have a little more cash available for travel around Britain without a plane...

Mr Pip's rebellion

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell love to travel - sometimes this can be done by staying put and just reading... This post takes you to the South Pacific with the help of two writers - Charles Dickens and Lloyd Jones. It is by Nicola Baird (although the video isn't)

What a classic choice. Hugh Lawrie looks set to be Mr Pip in the film version of Lloyd Jones' amazing book of the same name - a modern retelling of Dickens' Great Expectations set in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea with a couple of moments in the Solomons and New Zealand. Filming is near Arawa (in Kieta village) from May - July.

I loved the book - in fact have just re-read it - and tried to tell the author this at a meet and greet author session organised by Borders before it closed down. But poor Lloyd Jones was unwell from the long New Zealand flight and failed to show. But here's a warning: it's not for sensitive souls - the Bougainville blockade of the 1990s and the cruelty meted out be the government's forces (redskins in the book) and the rebels was appalling. At least a generation of children lost their chance of education, many people died unnecessarily, not just from conflict but malaria.

Here's a short video of a young girl canoeing in a lookalike PNG village to the one Lloyd Jones imagined. I borrowed this from a blog called My Amazing Paradise.  Here's the video.

Thoughts on time

When I lived in the South Pacific (and Oz) I loved the way I was half a day in front of my homeland - and friends in the UK. Years later I loved seeing Christmas Island in Micronesia meeting the Millennium so many hours before our new year's eve parties kicked off! This post is by Nicola Baird (pix, top of my friend Hannah with Lola and Nell on the meridian line at Greenwich, and below, irresistible to bestride a 0 degrees longitude line.. one foot in the west, one in the east.)

There are fantastic books about time. Pip Pip (a sideways look at time) by Jay Griffiths, is a favourite.

In hospital over the Easter weekend a nurse administering asthma medicine to my 10 year old at around 3am got me thinking about it again. Time goes so fast, sometimes. That night Nell was being made better but the two hour gaps between each dose of medicine seemed to go rather faster than the time it took Nell to breathe in the 10 puffs or reliever... And look, already quarter of the year has passed, the tax year is over and summer's upon us. Blink and time rushes along.

Je ne regret rien
Obviously no point wishing to turn back the clock, but it was fun to finally find t-i-m-e to visit the Greenwich Meridian line and muse about humans' attempts to make time less painful by measuring it into 24 hour bite-sized chunks. Go see what I mean (and use the side gate if you want to avoid a rather hefty ticket price).

E-reading treat

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell love to travel, but want to find ways that are as low carbon as possible. This post is from Nicola Baird

Nearly 21 years ago I was living in the South Pacific. The pic on the left is me posing in a small Solomon Islands village, on the island of Makira, dressed up in frangipani lei (flower garland), tapa cloth (made from bark) and painted in tumeric. I was on a journalism trip for Solomon Islands Development Trust rather ruined by the villagers - unusually in this part of the Solomons all Polynesians - asking me not to reveal the detail of their astonishing tumeric harvest. And of course I didn't.

But during my two years as a VSO journalist trainer in the region I collected so many stories, ideas, experiences that had no choice but to merge, fizz and revamp them as a story which anyone could enjoy - and especially people who love to travel or who live in Solomon Islands.

Read Coconut Wireless
Hopefully this will tempt you to look at the new e-novel I've just published. It's called Coconut Wireless and is about life, love and gossip in the country's capital, Honiara. Enjoy downloading some free sample chapters by clicking here or buy for a couple of US dollars from Smashwords as a pdf here.

Half of any money generated by this book will be donated to projects supporting women and children in Solomon Islands.

Local news

Pete, Nicola, Lola (seen here publicising a plasticbagfreehighburybarn film show event) and Nell love travelling but like to do it in a way that keeps their carbon footprint low. So that's no planes, occasional trains, car club cars and enthusiastic biking when we cannot walk. This post is from Nicola

Just had a weekend staying or meeting up with friends who've left London. I wish they'd stayed put, but it was fun chatting as we rowed from the Bath Boating Station down the Avon. One week later the blisters are patching themselves up. The south west, it's a dangerous place...

Back home we have been busy in our street encouraging neighbours to plant up their tree pits with poppies, camomile and other native wild flower seeds. Lola, Nell and I clear up the pit - retching slightly as we flush dog poo down our loo, put the tossed cola cans into the recycling bins, dig up the current plants for green waste recycling and plop cigarette butts into the dustbin for landfill. I wanted to grow carrots but the dog poo really puts me off. This is a tame version of guerrila gardening, but I like the idea that my kids are already so used to community cheerleading. And it led to some interesting chat about the sunflowers and sweet corn I've seen growing on roundabouts in Nairobi, Honiara and here in London near Blackfriars Bridge.

So far nine of our street's trees are planted up by their nearest neighbours and adorned with a green ribbon to show there's big tree love out there.

Next project is to get clothes swapping going in our school. The plan is to get parents and carers to bring unwanted clothes for 0-11 year olds to the school one Friday. They can just give them, or take other items or give and take. It's a good idea but definitely a trial.

The swishes held for mums have been very successful but if we are ever to crack fast fashion then swapping clothes is a no brainer. The problem is that if parents have never been tempted by secondhand clothing, then they often feel ashamed to kit their children out in it. At least that's how my Somali, Bengali and Turkish friends put it. How different life is for Lola and Nell - really I'm surprised I didn't get pre-loved children given my enthusiasm for all things secondhand/vintage/freecycled etc.

New start

Pete, Nicola, Lola, 10, and Nell, 7, like travelling around Britain on public transport (don’t laugh). We spent three happy months exploring during summer of 2007 but now we’re home, you can still join us for the occasional sightseeing - plus tips on how to shrink your carbon footprint. This post is from Nicola

I’ve worked at Friends of the Earth for nine years (this is my desk after a serious clean up) and it seems like a blink. Working to magazine deadlines for Earthmatters (and all the others) is rather like being in the tropics – you just don’t feel time passing because of the lack of seasons.

When I lived in Solomon Islands (working as a magazine trainer at a development education NGO) I tried to notice time by noting when the mangoes were ripe or the flame trees blooming but it didn’t work. When I think back to Solo now, 16 years on, I just remember blue skies, blue sea, sweat, dust, magazine deadlines and friends.

Maybe I'll compress the whole Friends of the Earth experience similarly: stormy deadlines, sweat, paper, shut windows and friends.

But right now I'm remembering a really enjoyable goodbye pub drink plus some of the most perfect presents from my team, and ex-colleagues. These included a Baird poem; inventive vouchers from colleagues to cut my hair, photograph my pets and create a poster; and a Eurostar voucher for a great escape. An incredible, and lovely haul!

So here's a big thank you to Friends of the Earth - t h a n k y o u.

Do you speak another language?

Pete, Nicola, Lola, 10, and Nell, 7, like travelling around Britain on public transport (don’t laugh). We spent three happy months exploring during summer of 2007 but now we’re home, you can still join us for the occasional sightseeing - plus tips on how to shrink your carbon footprint. This post is from Nicola

At the school summer fair we had a storytelling tent for families to tell stories, or read stories or sing songs in their home language. A place to be proud of your mother tongue.

It would have been a runaway success if it had been too hot or too wet.

As it was the tent was host to nine different languages – Arabic, French, Hebrew, Nigerian (Hausa and Yaruba), Solomon Islands Pijin , Spanish (Castilian and Latin American) and Turkish - all enjoyed by children who wanted to chill out or simply listen. Watching the faces of the children hearing a home language in a public place was amazing. One little girl's grin was wider than the Cheshire cat's.

This pic is of our Yaruba reader sharing Heads, shoulders, knees and toes with her audience.

Things change

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of loads of countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or havaing to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood. This post is from Nicola who flew more than she should have done when she worked as a VSO (journalist trainer) in Solomon Islands between 1990-92...

Recently Lola and Nell helped convince our council to delay felling a lovely avenue of trees near where we live. These still may be felled but after the girls ran a campaign, gave out flyers and set up a tent HQ which was photographed for the local paper the trees have a reprieve until September 2007. Councils sometimes move fast, but nature is the winner when it comes to transformation. I've just been sent an email from a friend of a friend, Jan Pana, who has been trying to cope with the enormous changes that the April tsunami and subsequent earthquakes are doing to an area of Solomon Islands in the South Pacific known as Western Province.

Over to Jan: "For those of you who know the Solomons the affect of the recent quakes and tsunami have been devastating and having just seen Gizo and Munda I can say it's like watching thousands of years of geological change happening before yours eyes; reefs/islands, once well submerged, now 3-8 metres out of the water and islands in other areas now completely submerged. There has been terrible physical damage in Gizo, Simbo and Ranonnga and Rendova with many coastal villages destroyed but even more significant, long term, is the terrible fear people have that this will happen again as quakes of 5.1 are still occurring frequently. A lot of work needs to be done to help people overcome something that has no precedent in living memory."

Back in 1991 when I knew less about carbon footprints and the damage flying does to our atmosphere I flew over a brand new volcano. The volcano had sprouted over night in the middle of the Coral Sea and was only a short detour for the pilot flying out of Gizo back to the capital, Honiara. It was grey, huge and had a red fizzing core which spat out rocks as we flew over. That volcano's raw power was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen.

I am not sure how to help my friends in Western Province and the other Solomon Islanders.You can send donations to Solomon Islands Red Cross to help their immediate needs, but how can any human cope knowing that things they thought they took for granted - the view of an island say - may change at any jar of the Richter Scale? It must be so very scary.

Thank goodness climate change has not yet got to such a unbiddable state. We started it, we can help tackle it. My promise to myself today is not to push doing something about being more energy efficient to the back of my mind as I try and cope with family routines, work etc. No, today I will make sure I nag the council's planning department yet again about whether I can have permission to put solar panels (to heat water) on to the roof. But I bet I get destracted by the need to keep the trees...