The world from my window

Over on A Dorset Year , I'm enjoying the beauty in nature in a world gone mad. As my famous ancestor, Ernest Hemingway , would have noted, the sun also rises.  To read more, please visit A Dorset Year . That's about it. Love Maddie x

High up in Funchal, we saw the sled drivers playing cards before the crowds arrived. Their bags and straw boaters hung on the wall. For thirty euros, a couple could slide two kilometers down the hill in old, wicker toboggans. We'd got here by cable car, rising like something out of Where Eagles Dare from Madeira's capital. Up the top, the cart drivers lined up and rubbed their hands together when a tour party arrived.   A van arrived and toboggans were unloaded for yet another trip down the long slope. These rickety contraptions have been charging down the hill for years. Ernest Hemingway (or Uncle Ernie, to those of you who read my last blog post ) is reported in the Lonely Planet guidebook to have found the experience exhilarating. However, further reading suggests he never went on a sled at all, leaving that joy to his wife and the captain of the ship on which the Hemingways were cruising. Which makes me feel...

Thanks to my mother, I have a pretty good idea who's sitting up there in the branches of my family tree. Up until now, there's been nobody famous, although she discovered I am directly descended from a man who fought in the last battle on English soil, the Monmouth Rebellion, in 1685.  I'm rather proud of that, and the fact that he was on the ill-fated Rebel side. It's something I plan to explore further when I have more time. Mr Grigg thinks he has a link to Archie Leach, better known as that suave and most debonair of English-born actors, Cary Grant . He knows this because he found a Leach in his family tree who lived in Bristol, which was where Archie was born. I got very excited and suggested it could be the same family as Archie's. When Mr Grigg has more time, he's going to look into it further. In the meantime, I had nobody famous in my tree and always felt a little bit of a Billy No-Mates. And then, this week, I had a message via my Maddie Gri...