New Year - Update

I didn't manage to blog much last year - must try to do better this year .

I got Covid on my birthday and ended up having 2 weeks off work and am still not 100%, which is annoying.

I had a fairly low-key Christmas - I went to a candlelit Carol Concert at Wells Cathedral 

Wells Cathedral

Then my parents visited for a week for Christmas, which I enjoyed. 

Christmas Tree and Omra

We mostly had pretty grey and wet weather and as I had developed a cold the moment I finished work, and my Dad was also getting over one, we had a very un-energetic time, concentrating on eating, drinking, reading and watching TV.  Which is a pleasant way to spend a week in winter.

Gate - The Bishop's Eye, Wells

Swans on the moat 

We did drive over to Wells on the one day the sun came out. We had thought that we might go into the Bishop's Palace, but it turned out that the Bishop's Palace was closed for the Christmas Period, so we didn't!

The Bishop's Eye Gates

Even the gates from the marketplace to the palace were closed, save for a tiny postern gate, which is only around 5' high so everyone has to duck to get through!

Gatehouse, Bishop's Palace

We took advantage of the very brief period of sunshine and went for a very short walk round the moat, and also took the opportunity to heck out the second hand books in Oxfam. We only bought 5 books between the three of us, which is pretty good going for a  family visit to a book shop!

The New Year started with a lovely sunny day, so I went for a walk 

I had been expecting to spend the first few days of the New Year prepping for a court hearing, but I was, at the last minute, able to get it adjourned, which meant I could book a day off on 3rd January, and ease into the new year with a three day week. Which was nice. 

So, that pretty much brings me up to date. 

Devon - Walks and wildlife

I took a couple of days off in order to relax and to give myself a long weekend just after  my birthday, in mid-october

 I went to Devon, to visit my parents (Prior to the new lockdown starting, and we have formed a support bubble, so all allowed) 

The weather wasn't forecast to be great, but was pretty good when I arrived, so I suggested that we go out that afternoon and we went to the RHS Garden at Rosemoor, to look at all the autumn colours. There  are some formal gardens - the roses are past their best, but the new cool' ( water features, and plants in blues and purples and grey-greens) and 'hot' garden (reds, yellows and oranges) were looking good.

'Red Hot Pokers'

And in addition there is parkland and woodland, and the beginnings of an arboretum.

So of course there are lots of trees and bushes with wonderful foliage.

Acer leaves 

There is a small lake, surrounded by trees.

And    a little lake, and there's a hill with woods. And quite a lot of birds, most of  the ones I saw were robins. We finished up with the kitchen garden, full of ornamental cabbages, and herbs, 

We had a pleasant, if slightly grey and chilly walk.

Then the following day we went out again, this time to Heddon Valley / Heddonmouth, where we walked through the woods and dow to the sea, and saw a seal!

 We spent most of  Sunday indoors cooking stuff  and then eating them, then on Monday, when the weather was starting to deteriorate a bit, we went to Morte Pointe and went for a very windy, bracing walk along the cliffs, 

There were clear views across to Lundy, and we saw 4 or 5 seals; one out on the rocks, and the others swimming and hanging out in the sea nearby. Apparently they're there a lot.

They seem so much more exciting and strange, than seeing 'normal' wildlife like deer and foxes! 

It was wonderful to be able to spend a few days just relaxing, and spending time with family.

A Quiet Weekend

Life has been somewhat stressful recently, and in addition, I do not really approve of the heatwave we have been enduring (or enjoying, depending on your point of view),so I was glad to take a long weekend last week to visit my parents and catch up with some other family members.

Having arranged to spend the weekend at (near) the seaside, it was perhaps inevitable that the weather would break and that 3 out of the 4 days I was there would see torrential rain and passing thunderstorms, and the 4th, intermittent rain.

However, since I was mostly going in order to unwind a little, and see my family, that wasn't too much of an issue! 

My aunt and uncle live near my parents, and it just so happened that they, with both of my cousins on that side of the family, had rented a house on the beach, for a family holiday starting that weekend, so on the Sunday, we went over for lunch and to spend time with them.

The beach is one which we as a family have been going to for years, and the house was literally right on the beach, so we were able to sit out on the patio looking out over the beach, and enjoying fizz and food, and retreat inside every time it started to rain! 

Which was handy.

The younger members of the party (aged 3 to 14) braved the sea and did some body boarding while a rotating selection of parents and cousins supervised them, and the older members of the party paddled and chatted , and a good time was had by all.

The rest of the weekend was very low key, and restful, which was good . I did a lot of very undemanding reading, a little baking, and some high quality lazing around!

And of course, as I drove home, the sun came out again!

Christmas

If you were celebrating, I hope you had a good Christmas and if you weren't, I hope you had a couple of nice, relaxed days! 

I have been visiting my parents, which is nice. This year, it's just the three of us, which has meant a quiet, low key time, with lots of nice food and relaxation, just what I needed after a stressful couple months!.

I've enjoyed looking out at snow showers, from the warmth and shelter of the house, and have also enjoyed watching the birds on the feeders.

The feeders were attracting the starlings this morning,after I refilled them. Mostly, however, we are seeing goldfinches, sparrows, blue tits, and chaffinches. And also the occasional coaltit, great tits,and greenfinches. 

If we are lucky, the sun may come out tomorrow in which case a walk by the sea may be in order!

The Mikado

As well as our trip to Muchelney, my parents and I also took a trip to the theatre, to see a production of Gilbert and Sullivan's 'The Mikado'.

I like Gilbert and Sullivan, and while I had some reservations about this production (it is an all-male version, and I was doubtful about whether that would really work)

Alan Richardson, Richard Russell Edwards,
James Jukes, Ben Vivian-Jones, Richard Munday

It was a lot of fun. The production is done as a dream sequence. One of the campers is seen being teased by others, then falling asleep, after which the opera itself begins...

This allows for the everything to be done with no additional scene changes and very limited costuming.

The singing was excellent; very impressive to have all the female roles sung in the correct key etc, despite being sung by men. Katisha ( Alex Weatherill) has a particularly fine voice, as did Yum Yum (Alan Richardson).

Ko Ko's 'As someday it may happen'  song (I've got a little list')  had been updated but other than that there was very little in the libretto which was changed.

It's very entertaining, although even having seen it, I'm still not convinced that a mixed production would not have been at least as good, or better, but still fun!

The production is on tour until July. Details here.

Muchelney Abbey and Church: A Grand Day Out

My parents were visiting for a couple of days after Easter, so when it came a nice day, we decided to go out, and to visit Muchelney Abbey and Church.

Mulcheney was one of the villages which suffered particularly badly in the flooding in 2012 and 2014, so I became used to seeing it on the news, but I have not ever had reason to visit. However, having recently joined English Heritage, we looked around to see what sites there were locally we might be able to visit, and decided on Muchelney.

Muchelney Abbey and Abbot's House

Muchelney Abbey was originally an Anglo-Saxon Abbey, (There is, apparently, a record of a grant of land by Cynewulf, in 762,  then later (in the 10th C) it was re-founded as  a Benedictine Abbey, before being dissolved under Henry VIII in 1538. It was never as powerful or well known as Glastonbury, but was pretty wealthy, and was responsible for draining much of the surrounding moors for farmland.

The majority of the buildings, including the Abbey church, were demolished after the abbey was dissolved, and a lot of the stone reused for building elsewhere. However, the Abbot's House (built in the late 15th / early 16th Century) survived, as did a small portion of the cloisters and parts of the kitchens, and a separate 'reredorter' (the monk's lavatories) also survives.

The Abbot's 'Great Chamber' 

 I enjoyed seeing the Abbot's House. There is a set of 3 or 4 rooms; the 'Great Chamber', where important guests would have been entertained, and which has a wonderful carved mantelpiece, with two slightly improbable looking lions above it. 

The wooden settles are 19th C. but incorporate some medieval panelling.

Lion (from the carving above the fireplace in the Abbot's Great Chamber

There are also some smaller rooms, including one which still has traces of the original wall paintings, and a very nice barrel vaulted ceiling.

Painted room

After visiting the internal rooms we also wandered around the ruins a little, then visited the Parish Church, next door to the Abbey.

From the outside, the church seems fairly ordinary, however, inside, it is a different story! 

When the Abbey was dissolved, some of the medieval tiles from the Abbey church were removed and re-used in the parish church, where they remain. And were decked with coloured light from the sunlight shining though the stained glass windows, when we visited.

Even more spectacular is the ceiling of the nave, in the church.

It is painted with wonderful, Jacobean angels and cherubim.

The ceiling was apparently painted in the early 17thC and is very unusual, both simply by having survived the Puritans, and based on the style - some of the angels are very feminine, which is unusual, and several are bare-breasted, it is believed that this is intended to symbolise  innocence and purity.

It is stunning, and such an unusual thing to find in an English church (and because this is the Parish Church, and not part of the Abbey, it isn't mentioned in the English Heritage information about the Abbey)

It was fascinating.

We were not able to visit the Priest's House, originally built for the priest of the Parish Church in 1308 and almost unchanged since the early 17th C; it is now owned by the National Trust but is only open 2 days a week, and this wasn't one of them. It looks very pretty from the outside, though! 

It was a grand day out!

(complete photoset on Flickr )

Happy Holidays!

I had a lovely, low-key  Christmas Day with my  sister, her partner and our parents , and got some lovely gifts, including the new, illustrated versions of 'American Gods' and 'Anansi Boys'.

Also aquired some fancy fruity gin, and LOTS of chocolates!

More relatives today and tomorrow, and then some time with some old friends.

I hope your holiday season is full of love and happiness.

In which I relax a bit

Happily I now have some time off work, and while I've not booked a formal holiday, I had arranged to visit my parents (all planned before their emergency visit to me to hold my hand when I came out of hospital) 

It's been very pleasant.

The weather has been changeable, but when you are mostly just relaxing and hanging out that isn't a major issue.

My mum and I went shopping and found a couple of pairs of shoes and some shirts,  at the local outlet 'village', which was good. (I don't enjoy shopping, so getting my mum to come with me, and finding stuff which is both suitable and reduced, is a big plus for me!) 

Then we met up with my aunt and uncle, and my 2nd cousin who is visiting them while she gets over a fall, and spent an evening with them, with a meal out at a local thai restaurant. Which was very nice.

We then had a full day when the weather was supposed to be good, so we went out for the day to visit Hartland Abbey, which is about an hour's drive from my parent's house,on the coast.

The original abbey has (apart from a few walls and doorways in the basement) mostly gone, but there is a rather nice house, some walled gardens, and a pleasant walk through the woods to the coast.

The place was originally an Abbey, founded in 1157. It was reportedly the last Abbey in England to be dissolved by Henry VIII, and on dissolution he gave the Abbey to one William Abbot, his sergeant of the wine cellar at Hampton Court. The house has never been sold, since, it has always passed down within the same family (several times through marriage in the female line, hence the current occupants are  called Stucley, not Abbot!)

Hartland Abbey

Much of the house is relatively modern, but rather nice for all that! 

We started by walking from the house down to the sea (about 1 mile). The walk was a pleasant one, gently down hill and mostly through woods.

At the end, there is a cottage (Blackpool Mill Cottage) which looks oddly familiar....

It was used as Barton Cottage in the BBCs adaptation of 'Sense and Sensibility', and more recently featured in 'The Night Manager'.  There was however however no sign of Jonathan Pine / Tom Hiddleston or of Mr Willoughby!

Just beyond the cottage is a tiny cliff and steps down to a small, pebbly beach.

We enjoyed sitting in the sunshine looking out over the sea while we ate our picnic lunch, and did go down onto the beach on order to look at the sea properly (I never feel I have been to the sea properly unless I am close enough to be able to paddle should I feel the urge to do so!) 

We then walked back up to go round the house. They don't allow photos inside, but it is quite nice, and obviously still lived in (In the library, there are lots of lovely leather bound books and comfortable-looking chairs, and there is also a large TV and a practical looking drinks tray!).

Down in the basement there are several small exhibitions - one about the 17th C Stukeley who was an antiquarian and who studied the stone circles at Stonehenge and Avebury (and sought to prevent their destruction) and others about various martial Stucleys and Stukeleys, and a very small one devoted to the various times when the house, grounds or estate have been used as locations for film and television.

As well as 'Sense and Sensibility' and 'The Night Manager' they have had visits from 'Top Gear' (dropping caravan over the cliffs) and filming for 'The Shell Seekers', and early version of 'Treasure Island' and  others.

We finished our visit with another short walk to the walled gardens -  a mixture of flower and kitchen gardens.

I think that the flower gardens were perhaps past their best , but still very nice - lots of fuchsias, and lots of bees and butterflies - I counted 4 different varieties of bumble bee on one plant!

We finished up by driving a little further down the coast to Hartland Quay.There is no longer a quay there, but there are some rather nice views! (and a pub, which we didn't go into!) 

It was all very pleasant, and I was particularly pleased that I was able to walk to the sea and back, and to and around the gardens, without feeling completely shattered, so I am obviously very nearly back to normal, now!

Easter Weekend

A bit of a belated blog, as I've been under the weather since I returned home, but I'm starting to feel more human again now!

We had a 4 day weekend for Easter, and I decided I needed a relaxing time, so I spent the weekend in Devon, at my parents' home.

It didn't start too well, as apparently the entire population of Britain decided to spend the long weekend in Devon, so the drive down was slow, dark and windy, finishing with following a very nervous caravan-driver, who did't get above 25 mph.!

However, once I arrived,things improved. Living alone as I do, it is always nice to be a guest and to have someone else doing the cooking!

Friday was forecast to have the best weather of the long weekend, so we decided to make the most of it. 

We went to Heddon Valley, and took a 6 mile circular walk to Woody Bay, where the outward leg is mainly along the coast, with spectacular views, and the return leg slightly inland, among woods and gorse.

It was a beautiful bright, sunny day. In fact, so sunny that we even spotted a rather lovely little lizard. 

(I assume it is a Common Lizard, as apparently the only other sort you get in this country are Sand Lizards, which are extremely rare, so it's unlikely to be one of them!)

The trees were still mainly bare, but looked wonderful in the sunshine! 
And we felt we had earned the ice creams we indulged in at the end of the walk!

On the way home we did a detour to Coombe Martin in order for me to go and look at the sea close up (I decided not to paddle. It was a sunny day, but it's still only March!)

Saturday was extremely wet, so we stayed home, and indulged in the traditional family pastime of being sociable by all sitting silently in the same room while we read! And eating, obviously. 

Sunday was  supposed to be wet with sunny intervals, but turned out instead to be sunny with showers, so we were able to go out again - this time to Baggy Point.

Although it wasn't as wet as predicted, it was *very* windy  

It's a shame we hadn't thought to bring a kite!

We started with a steep climb up the hill, then a walk along the cliff path. The wind meant that the waves were big, and even up on the cliff there was lots of salty spray.

 And, of course, at the point when we were furthest from the car (or indeed any other sort of shelter!) the sky turned grey and the heavens opened.

The rain was icy cold and this was the point at which I realised that *my* waterproofs were still in the back of *my* car, back at the house... So I got rather damp. But we huddled in a slightly sheltered dip in the ground and ate mini easter eggs until the worst of the rain passed. And then walked back briskly enough to stay warm and start to dry off!

Then, after a quick picnic in the car, looking out over the sea (except for when we had another shower, when it felt more like being under the sea, watching the water sleet down the windows) we walked down to the shore for a short stroll along the beach, which was looking beautiful, particularly when the sun came out.

It was a lovely, relaxing weekend. I had an equally slow journey home on Monday. (And then immediately came down with a nasty bug, which rather took the shine off the following week, but perhaps it would have been worse had I not just had such a relaxing weekend!