Holiday 2015: outside Worcester

As well as all the time we spent in Worcester itself, we did several days out into the surrounding area. One day we went to Hereford on the train. We had also intended to stop off at Great Malvern on the way back as the surroundings are gorgeous, but it was raining hard so we changed our minds!

Hereford Cathedral was, of course, an obligatory visit for us. Another beautiful cathedral, this one very quiet and not overly-touristy. I had visited last year for a conference so had a sneak preview. We also went in the Magna Carta exhibition, saw Mappa Mundi and the chained library. Hereford is quite small, but we enjoyed a cup of tea in a church café in the centre, and I also found a small yarn and fabric shop! I'm going to talk about holiday purchases in another post...

One day out was to a National Trust property, the Brockhampton estate. This includes a medieval (late 14th century) manor house, now with plenty of rooms open to see, plus acres of traditionally farmed land and woodland. The house itself is surrounded by a moat and beautiful gardens, and only survived because it is at the bottom of the hill, and the owners that wanted a bigger, more modern, house, decided to build it at the top!

Great Hall with huge fireplace. It was very quiet when we went round (the advantage of holidaying a week after half term), so we almost had the place to ourselves.

The rooms were dressed to represent different periods in the house's history. This was in the living room, and I liked the sewing machine and associated equipment around it.

In the grounds there is a ruined chapel, once used as the chapel for the house until a church was built.

Another day we went to a (very) different National Trust property, Croome, which was the first landscape garden designed by Capability Brown, and also a secret Second World War airbase. It was really interesting seeing what the NT had done there - the visitor centre by the car park, and café are housed in what was the hospital wing of the airbase, and there is an RAF Museum there too. A short walk up a track takes you into the Capability Brown landscape, now being restored. There are beautiful walks across the parkland, although it was almost too hot on the day we were there to do them.

The church (just visible in the distance) is now looked after by the Churches Conservation Trust.

The house itself is being restored, but you're allowed to wander around various bits of it, and see the work that is underway. You can also climb to the top of the scaffolding to the "Sky Café", but we decided against that as I'm not really into heights...

The borders are just being planted up, it's going to look fabulous in a year or two. This view of the church was on our walk back to the car park.

And, finally, we popped into Pershore to see what it was like. Pershore Abbey is quite fun. About two thirds of it was demolished at the Reformation (the building used to end where the iron gates are in the picture below), so all that is left is the quire, bought by the townspeople to be their church. They had to add some buttresses to it to stop it falling down after the nave was demolished.

It's still rather large and impressive looking inside!

Think that's all for now. I'll leave my update on craft purchases to another post!

Bridlington

Meet my Goddaughter! Isn't she cute? She has the grooviest hair I have ever seen. Better make sure my Godmotherly knitting is up to scratch as her Mum is a knitter too...

A few weeks ago the OH and I travelled up to Bridlington for the weekend for her baptism. It was a fun weekend, not only catching up with several old friends but we were at the seaside too, so it was like having a mini-break. Complete with B and B landlady from a comedy sketch.

It was a trifle windy, but I still felt it was important to have ice cream at the beach. I did manage to eat it before it blew away.

Although it looks like seagulls may be more of a problem than the wind.

See, it does look like proper seaside. There is sand, and blue sky and some sun.

And DONKEYS!

This was going to be a much longer post with a knitting update as well, but as it's a month since we went to Bridlington I thought I'd better get on with posting this!
So how about a couple of harbour shots to finish off?

And sunset over Bridlington.

Second honeymoon part 2

Well, after the horror that was the RSC, we had a better day on Wednesday, exploring Alcester, a small market town dating from Roman times, about 10 miles from Stratford. This had a lovely centre, with loads of independent shops,lots of bunting still up from their royal wedding street party, and plenty of reasonably priced places to have a meal.

We then went a couple of miles out of Alcester, to Coughton Court, another National Trust property. It has been the home of the same family since the 15th century and was at the centre of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. The Throckmorten family who live there were prominent in Tudor times, then fell out of favour as they were Catholics - if you climb up to the tower in the house you can still see a priest hole where a Catholic priest would have been hidden if the Protestants had come hunting during the years of Catholic persecution. Later on, in the 18th and 19th century the family were prominent in Catholic emancipation, and one of them became the first Catholic MP. There are also two churches in the grounds, the original one that became Church of England at the Reformation, and a Catholic one, built in 1855, once it was possible to worship freely. If you climbed on up the tower past the priest hole you could also stand on the tower roof for views over the property!

Thursday was spent exploring first Baddesley Clinton, a National Trust property north of Warwick. This one dates from the 13th century and has a moat and even more priest holes than Coughton Court. Plus some beautifully laid out grounds and a (small) lake.

And second, Packwood House, only a couple of miles from Baddesley, and a completely bonkers historic house - basically a 16th century house extensively modified in the early 20th century to make it look more, erm, Tudor. The owner then gave it to the National Trust so that it would stay just like that. This one was fun as we were allowed to take photos (without flash) inside the house.

And the gardens here were incredibly. A set of massive yew trees, known as the "Sermon on the Mount", beautiful flowers and yet another lake to walk round. Unfortunately they'd had a power cut so we had to go back to Baddesley to have a cup of tea(!).

 We finished off Thursday with dinner with a friend over near Solihull.

Friday was our last day, and more of a pottering around kind of day. I spent most of the morning at Stratford knitting group - a nice friendly group that meets in a café near Shakespeare's birthplace. One of their members who I also "know" from Archers Listeners got in touch after hearing about our dreadful RSC experience and invited me along (good thing I took the laptop on holiday, and whinged about the RSC online!), but I would highly recommend looking in advance for local knitting groups if you're going on holiday somewhere - nice people to meet, yarn shop recommendations, local recommendations, the chance to pretend you're not really a tourist but are hanging out with the locals...

We then went over to Leamington Spa to have some lunch in the Royal Pump Rooms, then wandered over to find Web of Wool, which I'd visited on last year's holiday. One sad knitter had to stand outside a very shut shop - although obviously someone was expecting to be there that day as there was a pint of milk on the doorstep!

And after picking up a leaflet at Leamington tourist information, we decided to spend the afternoon at Ryton Organic Gardens, a short drive away. These were really cool, the headquarters of Garden Organic, whose catalogue I get, but I'd never thought of them having an actual place you could visit. They had some cool interactive displays, giant plastic vegetables to stand next to (!) and beautiful gardens to wander around. I liked playing with the compost bins...

And that was pretty much the end of the holiday. Except, I saw this in a shop window in Stratford:

And wondered who on earth would be making the most of their summer by... doing the ironing?!

Bank holidays # three

We didn't do as much this bank holiday weekend. For a start, it was shorter (only three days, unlike four last time round. Humph), and we're going on holiday soon, so there wasn't quite such an urge to go out and see things. We had a nice time though, pottering around the garden (update coming soon with Garden at the Beginning of June), some reading (update coming soon), a bit of wandering round Staines, and a visit to Weybridge and Walton-on-Thames. Neither was wildly exciting (!) although I liked Fabric Warehouse at Weybridge and there was a nice church to wander round. Of course, as is usual with bank holiday Mondays, most places were shut. Including the tile shop where we'd wanted to go and choose tiles for the downstairs loo.

I've got a couple more blanket squares done, which  means I'm up to date (I think?) with where I should be on the KnitALong. This is the May square, which I've done partly in Jamieson & Smith Shetland Aran, which I ran out of near the end, so the rest is in North Ronaldsay wool, purchased several years ago from the Woolclip in Cumbria.

and I used the rest of the ball of North Ronaldsay for the April square. This one hasn't been blocked yet!

I also got started on the jumper for the OH. It's the Neck-down pullover by Diane Soucy, and so far I'm really pleased with the pattern. The yarn I'm using is Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran, which, as always, is nice and smooth and squooshy to knit with. And it's going really fast - I've already knitted up 3 balls so only 9 left to go. Considerably faster than knitting with 4ply.

Knitting group is always dangerous for new patterns and at the meeting last week Wannaknit was giving away some she didn't want any more. I picked up this one, which uses Patons Fusion (bizarrely Ravelry says this yarn is discontinued, yet I can find it for sale on several websites with no mention of that?!). Anyway, I thought it would be a good jumper to have around in summer, to pull on in the evening when it's a bit cooler. The official yarn is an acrylic/rayon mix so I may attempt to sub with something a bit more natural...

And this jumper in Sirdar Peru. OK, so I am unlikely ever to be seen outside in snow leaning against a tree whilst wearing sunglasses, but I like the jumper. I can't find the pattern on Ravelry, but I often find that the patterns you get on British pattern leaflets don't seem to appear on there, or else hardly anyone has made one and posted it on Ravelry. Apparently the yarn for this is discontinued too, although this time I found this on a website and it doesn't say it on Ravelry!

And I like She's Electric in the Knitty surprises too. Of course, I'll never have time for half of this!

I've been trying out new things in the kitchen too. Last weekend I roasted a chicken for the first time. It was deeply traumatic, once I realised that the thing actually resembled a dead thing when I got it out of the packaging (yes, I know it's a dead thing, but most lumps of meat look fairly anonymous, whereas chickens have legs and wings and bones and stuff). So I cautiously bunged it into the roasting tin. It came out OK but that left me with the problem of how to remove the legs from the body. This involved bones and I was far too squeamish. The OH doesn't like chicken legs anyway, so I just left them attached and ended up making soup from what was left on the carcass including the legs the next day. I did however, also produce a chicken pasta bake that I was rather proud of. Recipe adapted from this one on All Recipes.co.uk

And this is a carrot and mushroom lasagne, from a recipe from Riverford veg boxes.

Well, I think that's all for now. I have various posts planned about gardening and books so watch this space!

Catching up on some knitting

As promised, I have been busily knitting away, trying to get caught up with things that were meant to happen ages ago. This is the January square from the knit-a-block-a-month group. So only about 6 weeks late... This is almost exactly 50g of aran weight Pure Hebridean wool from my stash.

And I finally finished my Out of Town in London Fog socks, from Iron Knitter, which were meant to be finished in, er, September. So that's only 6 months late...
The yarn is Trekking Pro Natura, which is 25% bamboo, 75% wool. It's quite harsh to knit with, which I think is partly why it took me so long to get on with it, but I've worn the socks once and washed them and am pleasantly surprised by how soft they feel now. They were comfy to wear too. I also like the longer legs, done for the competition, but actually very useful when wearing them at work as they come up well above the top of my work boots!

The reason why I haven't had as much time to blog last week, apart from the usual inconveniences of going to work/creating meals/attempting to grow plants etc etc was my church's Read-the-whole-Bible-in-a-week week. Reading from the King James version (more usually known as the Authorised Version over here, except everyone seems to have adopted "King James" this year) as it's the 400th anniversary of its publication this year (and don't I know it, not only am I doing it at church, it's also taking over my life at work at the moment too).

So, yes, we (well, about 200 people) read the Bible in a week:

I did the material for the display screen on the right. It's about the history of the KJV translation and Bibles in general. The two chunks I read out were Galatians and John 1. This isn't my actual church - I'm in a three church parish so the event was at one of the other churches.

It was kind of fun, a different sort of listening, where the sound just washes over you. Very peaceful and meditative. I got a lot of knitting done at the same time. And having people there all day every day with the heating on meant that, for once, it was nice and warm at church.

And, it was combined with Fairtrade Fortnight, so on the last day we had a Big Brew coffee morning day, with CAKE and a Fairtrade stall. And then at the end of the Bible reading champagne to celebrate finishing.

As all of this was also combined with five days at work, producing CAKE for the CAKE stall, and all the normal life stuff by the end of the week I was absolutely exhausted and totally ready to collapse in a heap.
Except I couldn't because by then it was Monday and time to go back to work again for more King James Bible stuff...