Eastnor Castle is the local stately home on the Herefordshire side of the hills (Madresfield Court is the equivalent on the Malvern side), and I live not far from the back gate of the Eastnor Estate – close enough to get annoyed by the loud music from the regular festivals they hold in the Deer […]
My sister very kindly renewed my Malvern Theatres membership for my birthday last month, so yesterday I took myself off to the matinee of this week’s production, Strictly Murder. It’s a thriller, set in rural France in the immediate run- up to the outbreak of WWII. Peter and Suzy are a British couple, living in […]
After another overnight ferry from Orkney to Aberdeen, a small group of us were transferred from the dock to Aberdeen airport to catch our flights home – I was booked onto an early afternoon Flybe flight to Birmingham. This was the Saturday that BA had its IT meltdown, and it was really interesting to watch […]
Although the focus of the trip was clearly on the prehistoric, and specifically neolithic, remains on both Shetland and Orkney, our tour leader was keen that the group should also get an understanding of more recent history. In particular, the sheltered anchorage at Scapa Flow, surrounded on all sides by the Orkney archipelago, was a […]
We caught the ferry from Shetland in the late afternoon of Day Three, had dinner on board, and disembarked in Orkney at around 11pm, getting to our hotel just before midnight. But we were all up bright and early the next day for the first of two days exploring the highlights of the Orkney Islands. […]
After the first overnight crossing, we arrived in Kirkwall, Shetland Islands at 07:00am, had breakfast on the ferry, then disembarked to start a two-day tour of the archaeological highlights of the islands. Mousa Broch is an iron age round-tower, from around 100BC, still surviving to nearly its full original height. You can see from the […]
I had a big birthday last week and was determined to spend it somewhere other than at work. Last year, I was running an equipment trial up at Durham University on the day of my birthday, and ended up buying a small iced cake from a bakery and taking that into the lab to share […]
I’ve been doing more tours of university physics departments, up and down the country. Last week it was UCL and Birmingham; this week saw two separate visits to Loughborough, as an industry guest presenter at a summer school on systems engineering for physicists. I could have done without making two separate trips there, but diary […]
Malvern Theatres has put on a few plays over the years from the Agatha Christie Theatre Company. They seem to have run out of Agatha Christies plays to produce, however (which surprises me somewhat as she wrote dozens of books), and have now metamorphosed into the Classic Thriller Theatre Company. Their first production in this reincarnation […]
Mullion is far too far away for me to consider driving myself there. It’s also rather difficult to get to by public transport. From Mullion, I caught a bus via Helston to Redruth (a journey of well over an hour, though the scenery was lovely and you get a good view over the hedges due […]
