I had a really enjoyable day off on Friday, meeting up with one of my oldest friends for lunch. I first met P when I was seven, when my family moved into the house three doors down from her. We’ve remained in contact ever since, though of latter years it’s been more by email and […]
Hook was a convenient place to meet, and relatively straightforward to drive home from. But it is not particularly easy to get to from Malvern by train – you have to change at Reading and Basingstoke. The trains aren’t running to a full timetable yet, the changes are awkward, and it is actually impossible to […]
Like all “non-essential” customer-facing businesses, Eastnor Pottery was closed to the public for the duration of the lockdown. I’ve been keeping an eye on their website and was very pleased to see that they re-opened a couple of weeks ago, in line with the general relaxing of the lockdown restrictions. I contacted Jon the Potter […]
In the afternoon, we moved on from the shops of Stratford to the Three Way House Hotel in Mickleton, the home of the Pudding Club. As usual, we started the evening with a bottle of wine, before moving to the lounge for the Main Event. This year we were pleasantly surprised when the expected complementary […]
I’ve been so busy lately, that it had pretty much slipped my mind that it was time for the annual Pudding Club outing, and its associated retail extravaganza. Fortunately my ex-colleague who organises our participation in the event sent me an email saying I’d be picked up from home at 09:15 last Saturday. It was […]
I’ve been travelling a lot for work over the past two weeks. Nowhere glamorous though – an overnight in Salisbury, followed by a week in Portsmouth, then a trip to the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. It is technically possible to do the Glasgow trip in one day, flying from Birmingham, but it’s a very […]
About a year ago, I went to a performance at Malvern Theatres of The Classic Rock Show – a group of musicians who performed a set covering literally an A to Z of rock from AC/DC to ZZ Top. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, so when I saw that they were […]
About forty years ago, I went to stay with my grandparents on my own for a week. There wasn’t a great deal to do there in the evenings, but I found a shelf of children’s books in the dining room which I think must originally have belonged to my aunt. I was a voracious reader, […]
I’ve been doing quite a lot of work with Birmingham University over the last few years, and yesterday I was invited to a conference & workshop held at a hotel that’s part of the university, to launch the next phase of the big project they’re working on. The meeting was very interesting, with several excellent […]
About fifty of us from work attended an annual technical away-day last week, with a day of presentations, strategy updates and workshops, all based at a hotel near Cirencester. For the last few years, the organisers have tried to lighten the event by including a trip to an engineering-related attraction in the locality. Last year […]
