My study day finished at 16:30, which was too late to head back all the way to Malvern that evening, especially as I was travelling by train. So I had planned to stay overnight in Colchester, and make my escape straight after breakfast the next morning. However, I found the study day so interesting, with […]
Talking of staycations, I’ve recently returned from a long weekend in Colchester. It’s not somewhere that would normally be top of my list of places to visit – it’s a rather tired garrison town in Essex, a good five hour journey from Malvern. However, my favourite holiday company, Andante, were running one of their Study […]
Christopher’s stepfather, Peter, has recently sent me a photo of “Christopher’s Tree” at his local woodland trust. It’s looking very healthy. I’ve not been able to get down to see it myself, so it’s really good to have photographic evidence of how well it’s doing.
Looks like I’ve successfully managed to update WordPress this time. Phew! Now I’ll have to wait and see if it is any more stable than the previous version. I find these things surprisingly stressful. Possibly because this is actually Christopher’s blog, not mine. I feel like I’m the caretaker of it for him, and so […]
I’ve been having problems with my blog for ages – the appearance keeps resetting to the default blue background, and I have to keep on manually changing it back. I hoped that upgrading WordPress to the latest version would help, but that meant waiting for my web host to upgrade the underlying database engine. It’s […]
My sister and brother-in-law have rented a cottage in the Forest of Dean for a short holiday. Since they were actually on the same side of the country as me, for once, it made sense to meet up. They asked me to recommend somewhere to visit on the Herefordshire/Gloucestershire side of Malvern, as that would […]
My mother gave me another pottery commission recently, possibly the most challenging one yet. She has a small glass bottle of olive oil which she and my father use to dress salads, but of course it drips a bit. Its not very practical putting it on a saucer, as the centre of gravity is in […]
One day of the holiday was spent exploring some of the numerous “bastide towns”, or fortified villages of the area. They were fought over and changed hands regularly during the Hundred Years’ War, and are a remnant from the time in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when the Plantagenet kings of England also ruled all […]
Carcassonne itself was a bit of a disappointment when we went there on the last day of the holiday. For a start, it was almost impossible to photograph. It’s a walled citadel, up on a small hill, but it was very difficult to find a spot from which to take a picture of the whole […]
The holiday was based in the city (well, largish town) of Albi, about an hour north of Toulouse. It has a UNESCO world-heritage listed historic centre, with the biggest brick-built cathedral in the world. It was an absolute monster of a building, and dominated the countryside for miles around. That was rather the point – […]
