On Christmas Day, all of the museums and most of the sites were closed – the drawback of going on holiday over Christmas in a Christian country! The group went for a long and rather tiring walk around Thessaloniki – we visited a few historically interesting very early Byzantine churches in the morning, nipping into […]
I really ought to know better than to state publicly that the mice are dead – and in the case of the one above the larder, very obviously dead. At 11pm last night, just as I was trying to get to sleep, I heard the unmistakable patter of tiny feet in the cavity wall behind […]
Last week, Malvern Theatres was showing a new play, The Duck House, starring Ben Miller, prior to it transferring to the West End. I wasn’t originally planning on going to see it – it’s a farce, and I don’t normally bother with those. Christopher really wasn’t at all keen on farces, finding them very silly, […]
I’ve still got a stinking cold, and I’m finding the current Bidding Season at work very tiring, so I could really do with a run of early nights. But there was a show on at Malvern Theatre last night that I was determined to get to see, totally regardless of how grotty I was feeling. […]
I didn’t quite finish the story of my trip to Bristol to go glassblowing. The course was just one day, from 10:30 to 16:00 with an hour for lunch. I could get home to Malvern on the train relatively easily afterwards, but if I’d tried to do a return trip on the day, it would […]
The Director of the business stream I work for wanted to thank his staff for the efforts we’ve put in over the past year, so invited his entire extended team, and their partners and children, to a “Mediaeval Family Fun Day” at Warwick Castle. All in all, several hundred of us took him up on […]
I got home from work today to find a parcel waiting for me. It was the glasses I’d blown on Saturday, all very well wrapped up in bubble-wrap and packed in newspaper. They’d done a very good job of parcelling them up. And here they are! Proof that I’ve got years of training and apprenticeship […]
I mentioned a few months ago that I thought it might be interesting to have a go at making hand-made glasses. Glass blowing is something I’ve wanted to do, at the back of my mind, for several years now, but Chris wasn’t particularly interested so I didn’t take it any further. But for the last […]
I’ve been doing some more cooking from Jamie’s Fifteen Minute Meals. I don’t like the way that in many recipes he gets a lot of flavour in a very short cooking time by using lots of chilli – I can’t stand the stuff! But if one carefully reads the list of ingredients, his book contains […]
I had a rather stressful, but ultimately successful day on Wednesday. For several years now (ever since Chris died, in fact) my home IT system has been getting gradually more and more ropey and unsupportable. It didn’t help that he set the network up in a way that made sense to him at the time, […]
