Trip oop north #1

Can someone please explain where on earth 2/3rds of September just disappeared off to?! This has been one very mad month. Between August and September I've had three incomplete weeks at work, thanks to taking a Friday and the Tuesday after the bank holiday to go to Greenbelt, then the week after I spent three days oop north at a conference for work. Then I had a WHOLE FIVE DAYS (shock horror) at work, then we set off on holiday. So some of the time has been a little bitty. The weekends have been mad. I got back from the conference at 10pm on the Friday, then lurched straight off to the church open day on the Saturday (having baked some chocolate brownies to sell on the Fair trade stall in the meantime), then hurtled straight into the church patronal festival the next morning, then off to knitting group for the afternoon. Gardening has got a bit behind as I haven't been at home to do any.

Fortunately I got the OH's jumper finished in time for his birthday.

 He has got a head really.

 I'm rather pleased with it, and I love the pattern - very easy to follow and well-written, and easy to adapt to particular quirks so I altered the length of the body and sleeves to his preferences.

And sewed a label in the back.

The slow cooker has come in very handy (again). This is lamb casserole.

The conference (held in Durham, with a trip to Newcastle) was most impressive. We stayed in Collingwood at Durham University. Halls of residence have moved on a bit since my day, not only was my room en suite, but it even came complete with its own recycling crate, and a little shelf with aerial socket to put a TV on! Back in my student days in the Dark Ages you had to carry your recycling all the way to the supermarket car park to find a recycling bin. And whilst I did have a TV in my room at university, it had to sit on a wobbly little table supplied by me, with a wobbly aerial sat on top of it.

Most impressively, the halls also had a "green" policy, with loads of stuff about reducing energy use, the food miles of the food served up in the dining hall (very tasty it was too) and even the conference packs provided in the rooms were all fair trade! Apparently there is some kind of competition between the colleges about which has the lowest carbon emissions.

 We had various talks during the days at the conferences, plus a reception at the Oriental Museum one night. This is the sort of place where I'd love to spend more time looking round, and I'd recommend a visit if you're in the area.

and a reception at the Botanic Gardens another night. Again, I'd have loved to have seen more of this than I did, the bit I saw looked beautiful.

One morning we took a trip up to Newcastle on a bus, to visit Seven Stories - the centre for children's literature. This is one of the coolest places I've ever been, and there was plenty on the, er, seven storeys, of the building to keep adults and children alike entertained (don't worry, there is a lift). The exhibitions managed to combine interesting stuff for older people (like me), with more kid-friendly stuff, and there is a massive creating space for children at the bottom storey, as well as the biggest selection of children's books in the bookshop that I've ever seen in one place. I loved the exhibition about Puffin books, and found displays from some of my childhood favourites.

Plus, they had a display about what happens to their book collections when they arrive on site, which included something that I think should go into my job description:

See, I'm an expert and a bit like a detective!

It was also fun driving around Newcastle on the bus, and admiring the views.

including a glimpse of the Angel of the North as we approached the city.

On the final day of the conference we got to visit the new exhibition space at Palace Green (the university special collections library), where there was a display of Treasures of the University. I also trotted off for a quick trip into the cathedral.

It was a great trip, I only wish I'd had more time to visit places in Durham - I did return to Newcastle with the OH this week whilst we were on holiday, more in a future blog post!

Bank holidays # one

The last few weeks have been a bit stressful as I have acquired a new job! I won't be leaving my current job and starting the new one until July, but I put my application in in March and went to a rather stressful interview (including having to give a presentation!), got offered the job the next day, then had to wait ages for paperwork to come through to confirm it. Anyway, I am really excited about it, although July feels like a very long way off still. The good news too is that it's a longer commute as I'll be heading into London every morning, which means more time on the train to knit or read.

Thankfully our bank holidays have been piling up in this country, and some time to relax was just what I needed after all that. Last weekend we had Good Friday and Easter Monday off work, and this weekend we have Friday off for the royal wedding, and Monday off because it's May Day. I could get used to 3 or 4 day weeks at work...

We put the Easter weekend holidays to good use. On the Monday we paid a visit to a National Trust property,  Clandon Park, near Guildford. This is the side of the house, I tried taking a picture of the front, but there were too many cars parked there, which looked a bit incongruous!

Inside was perfect for a visit on a hot day. Cool, light and airy. The rooms are huge, the biggest being the Marble Hall (with the side of the OH in for scale):

 This was the only room where photography is allowed. The other rooms aren't so high, but are equally imposing. And afterwards walking through the grounds, we found a field of daffodils that must have looked amazing about 6 weeks ago.

After Clandon we travelled on to do some exploring in Guildford. Of course, being a bank holiday the tourist information centre and the museum were shut, but we did climb up to have a look at the keep (all that remains of Guildford castle, and now surrounded by park).

and found the river Wey, slightly prosaically hidden behind Debenhams.

On the Saturday we paid a very hot and sticky visit to the garden centre to get stocked up with compost and plants. I would recommend not visiting a garden centre on Easter Saturday as about a million other people had had the same idea and we had to queue for ages to pay.

So we finally escaped, with the boot full of compost.

And the gap between the front and back seats stuffed with plants.

I'll be posting more about the garden soon when I do a gardening post for the 1st of the month.

I have been beavering away doing some knitting, but haven't any photos yet to show. Oh and the OH got me an Easter egg:

The next few months promise to be fairly hectic. I've got a couple of big projects to finish off at work before I leave, plus some reading and preparation to do ready for starting the new job. But, of course, there's still another 3 bank holiday days still to go...

Italy

I had a tough 24 hours in Italy with work last week. After the trauma of an 8.05am flight from Gatwick (which meant getting up at 4.30, and catching a train at 5.25. Ouch) to Pisa and then two different trains, I arrived in Lucca a bit too early so was told to go and sit in the square and get a coffee whilst I waited. This, of course, was extremely challenging and tough. I sat in this square, the Piazza Napoleone:

in the sunshine, with my knitting, and drank cappuccinos for an hour and a half. Once the work was finished (which took 40 minutes, although it could have taken a lot longer if something had gone wrong), I wandered off to find my hotel and do some exploring.

I stayed in the luxurious Palazzo Alexander, where my single room was bigger than my flat back at home. Still, I managed to cope with the size of it.

And I did some exploring. Lucca has the most amazing city walls, which still encircle the old city. You can walk round the top of them, where there's a wide tree-lined path for cyclists and pedestrians. I even found a restaurant on top of the walls, where you could buy cappuccinos and knit(anyone spot a theme developing here?).

Lucca Cathedral, like every British cathedral I've ever been anywhere near, had lots of scaffolding and noisy building work taking place. Bizarrely they also had electric candles you could light at one point (instead of the real candles I've encountered at every other cathedral I've visited). Screwing a fake candle into a stand just doesn't feel the same as lighting a real candle.

But I think what I liked best were the winding streets. Within the walls it's an almost car-free area so the streets bustle with pedestrians and cyclists. I only spotted two chain stores in my whole time in Italy (a McDonalds at Pisa Centrale railway station, and an Accessorize in Lucca), everything else was small, individual shops just begging to be explored. There were wonderful food shops with all sorts of bread and vegetables (and some had meat but I avoided those!). No sign of any yarn shops, but I did discover a wonderful fabric shop with vast quantities of fabric inside. I was very very tempted to buy some, but it wasn't really very practical due to lack of storage at home at the moment.

Possibly the most amusing thing (apart from the electric candles) was the advertising at Pisa airport. Which was really doing its best to promote Yorkshire as the best tourist destination:


So, a pretty good trip. I think next time I'd make it a bit longer though...

Oh, and I didn't manage to get my knitting needles onto the plane. :-(

A post about my weekend in Bristol, including the Get Knitted workshop will appear soon(ish).

Lent 2

These are the activities from the last couple of weeks of Love Life Live Lent:


• Make a list of things you want to say sorry to God for, say sorry, then throw the list away.

Haven't got round to this one yet.

• Buy a coffee and give it to someone on the way to work.

This one seems to be aimed at commuters & I don't pass anywhere to buy a coffee on the way to work. So I made coffee for my colleagues instead.

• Do a chore or errand for a member of your household.

I got round the lack of anyone else in the household problem by offering to help people out with a few things. So far, I've babysat a museum for part of my lunchbreak, went out at lunch to buy chocolate for a colleague, and out another time to buy teabags for another colleague!

• Hold a fundraising tea break.

Not quite sure how I'll achieve this one? I did buy some books at work for a charity appeal for the local hospice. Can that count?

• Think of 3 blessings of the day and be thankful.

This was actually relatively easy, if rather thought-provoking. The day I did this was the day of the soup run in Slough, during which it poured with rain. It was easy afterwards to feel very thankful to return to my warm, dry flat with ample food to eat and plenty of clothes to wear.

• Today why not slow down and savour an experience, e.g. a meal, a piece of music, a few pages in a book.

This is Boulter's Lock on the Thames on the outskirts of Maidenhead. It's a beautiful spot for a Sunday afternoon walk in the March sunshine. We stopped to watch a boat going through the lock, and also had lunch on a terrace overlooking the river (which got rather cold after a while).

• Try to walk or cycle a route you would normally drive.

I couldn't do this this week as I was recuperating from a stomach bug, but next week it should be light enough for me to cycle to work on the cycle path. It doesn't have lighting, and I don't really want to cycle through Slough (can't think why...) which means waiting until there's enough daylight for the cyclepath.

• Half the world lives on £1.40 a day, can you?

No. I think it costs me at least £1 in petrol to get to work (see above, I suppose I could have cycled), plus I usually spend around £4 a day on food, so even when I cut that right back it is still very difficult. Plus it costs around £1 a day (averaged over the year) for electricity (no gas connection) for my flat. Rent works out at £19.56 a day and council tax at £2.40. Water works out at 43p a day. So it costs me £28.39 a day just to have a roof over my head, transport to work and food. No, I can't live on anything like £1.40 a day.

• Do a garden or neighbourhood tidy-up.

I've been trying to keep the communal bin area for my block of flats tidy. It tends to attract fly-tippers dumping stuff, and I hoped they'd be discouraged if there wasn't already piles of junk already dumped there. Plus the delightful man and his friends in the flat below have a tendency to leave beer cans all over the grass outside, so I've been collecting them up and putting them in the recycling bin. And feeling depressed that it's costing me £19.56 a day just to live here. But then I should count my blessings (see above) that there's a roof over my head...

• Limit yourself to only checking email or texts once today.

I suggested to my boss that I did this on a work day, but I don't think she was impressed. So I did it on a Saturday instead, but that was a bit of a cheat as I went into London for the day, with no email access!

• Buy something from a charity shop and reverse haggle.

I think this could be an interesting one to try. I haven't been near a charity shop for a while, but once I've cleared out some clothes (see Lent challenge somewhere above or maybe in previous Lent post?) I'll go to Oxfam!

• Offer to babysit for friends.

I've offered to babysit for a colleague, who has a really sweet daughter. These are the socks I knitted for her first birthday last year. Nothing actually arranged yet, but I did offer!

• Give someone an apple today.

I was all primed with an apple ready, but then I forgot about it! Oops.

• Why not use a "buy one get one free" and give one away?

Have yet to find a BOGOF offer that's both something I actually need and also something that I can imagine someone else wanting.

• Turn off the tap when brushing your teeth today

Easy peasy. Already do this one.

• Have coffee or lunch with someone you don't know well

Was a bit stumped with this one, as I wasn't sure where to find someone I don't know well to have lunch with. In the end several of us agreed to brave the (very intimidating) dining room at work on Friday and talk to some people we don't know. Unfortunately we'd forgotten that school finished for Easter on the Wednesday so the dining hall wasn't open on Friday.

• Defrost your fridge and then think about climate change.

Fridge defrosting now!


Haven't thought about climate change yet!

SNOW!!

If you live in a country that does snow properly (Switzerland, say, or Sweden, or maybe Canada) you're going to wonder what the fuss is about. But, yes, the UK has ground to a halt. We have the most snow we've had in 18 years, apparently. Boris thinks people are skiving off work (how are people supposed to get to work if the buses/trains aren't running?!).

I went to work. It took me an hour to drive 3 miles.


At work things were very pretty:

A small child belonging to someone or other even constructed a snowman:

But then the snow got heavier again and we decided to close up at 3 to go home before it got any worse!