I was woken up very suddenly at 05:15 one morning last week by a klaxon going off, very loudly indeed. It wasn’t the smoke alarm, as that makes a different sort of beep, which meant it had to be the burglar alarm. Which was very odd, as I was sure I hadn’t actually set it […]
I’ve not been to the theatre for a while – they didn’t have anything particularly interesting on over the summer. But now that the schools have gone back, and the autumn season at the theatre has started, there’s a few things coming up that look interesting. Last week’s offering was Private Lives by Noël Coward. […]
There was an unusual air of excitement and activity around British Camp this lunch-time. I read in the local paper on Friday that the Tour of Britain cycle race would be passing through, and using the steep climb up to British Camp for the “King of the Mountains”. Well, the Malvern Hills hardly count as […]
One of the more unusual attractions I came across was Exeter’s Underground Passages. They were built from about 1450 onward to bring clean drinking water from natural springs outside the walled city, through lead pipes into the heart of the city. The pipes sometimes leaked and repairs to buried pipes could only be carried out […]
Exeter’s not a particularly photogenic city. What the Luftwaffe didn’t flatten during the War, the town planners demolished in the 50s and 60s and replaced with some truly horrible modern monstrosities. But there was enough to look at to keep me interested for a weekend. The river-side docks have clearly had a lot of investment […]
When I went to Penzance in May, I stopped overnight in Exeter on the way home, simply to break the journey since Penzance is such an awkward long trip especially by public transport. I picked the hotel in Exeter on the basis of convenience and price (or as work would put it, “value for money”), […]
Every year Peter, Christopher’s step-father, has a holiday with friends in Wales, which pretty much involves him driving right past my door. So every year we try to meet up for a pub lunch on either his way there or home again. The last couple of years he’s been coming past Malvern on a weekday, […]
I’m doing a lot of liaison work at the moment with various universities, and needed to catch up with what’s going on with the physics departments at Glasgow and Strathclyde. That involved an overnight trip to Glasgow, catching the early flight on Monday morning, two days of highly academic meetings and laboratory visits, then the […]
Christopher ‘s stepfather, Peter, has sent me the latest annual update on “Christopher’s Tree”, which is on Woodland Trust land near to where he grew up in Kent. We had problems in getting the photo to me, as my mailbox was too full to accept a full-sized image and I still don’t know the password […]
I didn’t get my accustomed lie-in on Saturday, as the carpenter was here at 09:00 sharp to fit the missing pane of glass and to take the crooked door back to his workshop for some TLC. It’s now been re-shaped and re-hung straight, repairing the list that has crept in over the past hundred or […]
