Days like these

February.  When sometimes the sun is bright and the sky so blue it’s hard to imagine it’s still wintry out there.  Until I jump in my car to go to work and feel thankful for heated seats!

Maybe this was really, really the very last time there in the Warehouse?  Ever since Christmas, I’ve thought that but yet again on Friday morning, I found myself parking in the old place and going up with the tin box of a lift (the flooring gave up the ghost months ago and was removed, but no replacement was fitted!)  Our meeting was a really productive one, fuelled by flat whites from the coffee shop across the way and great team work with colleagues.  Can you imagine the popcorn wasn’t opened at all?

Saturday morning, we decided to hit the Mall and get the last bits and pieces to finish Edward’s room off.  Oh, and it seemed a good time to buy a replacement camera too   My current “handbag camera” still works just fine, but a couple of small bits have fallen off it (probably because it spends most of its time rolling around in the bottom of my handbag?)  One missing piece is the thumb grip and without it, my thumb often strays to the video button – very irritating.  With this year’s adventure on the horizon, I thought it a good time to get used to the new model and have been taking photographs here and there since I took it out of the box.

It has wifi and transferring photos from camera to tablet and PC is very easy indeed.  So of course, I had to practice with this picture of the other really exciting shopping we did.

I tried a close up of the rug we chose.  It’s thick and very chunky and looks really good in situ, thankfully.  Isn’t it hard to choose these things?

Whilst I fiddled about, my hero fitted the poles and we unpacked the newly made curtains to hang on them.  Suddenly, what had been a small boy’s bedroom became a cool, contemporary space in which to read and relax.

 

Of course, it’ll always be our boy’s room, though, won’t it?

Oh, and arriving home from shopping,we found a note from the postman to say he’d left a parcel by the back door.  There, on the step, was a brown paper parcel tied up with string and sealing wax.  Whatever could it be?  The answer was a cute bear addition to the family, sent by sweet friends who had found him in the Grand Hotel and thought he needed a new home.

He was a good and patient model too.

Little books and sock puppets

My work takes me to a variety of places and this was my second visit to Wrexham in a couple of months.  On this occasion, I was teaching another workshop for Voluntary Arts, specifically for the organisation BAWSO, doing what I can to encourage and enable some of the women taking part in one of their projects to get together and organise creative groups to sit and share their skills with one another.

Of course, not everyone had a good command of English and at times, it wasn’t easy to discuss the benefits of getting together around a table to learn something new.  Can you imagine how to communicate the concept of learning styles with limited English language skills?  I found myself thinking fast on my feet at times, wondering how on earth I was going to manage the day when I was struggling to get any response at all from the women who sat there in front of me.  I had failed to consider the impact of communication difficulties: that someone who doesn’t feel confident to speak is unlikely to participate much at all.  I needed to find some common ground.

“Do you cook?”

Nods all round.  Phew!

From that slow start and with the support of a colleague, gradually a kind of conversation began.  Where would I start if I wanted to make a new dish?  A cook book!  What if it didn’t taste good?  Where could I go for help?  Ask a friend!  How could I learn to do it better?  She could show me! 

Of course, you recognised that as a discussion of visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learning styles, didn’t you?!  Well…of sorts, but all agreed, the best way to learn any skill was by having someone show us how, by having a go ourselves and maybe by making mistakes.  And everyone agreed, we learned a lot of these skills from our mothers.

Time to practise what we preached then and get on with it.  My colleague taught half of the women to make a sock puppet with felt hair and googly eyes.  In no time at all, the atmosphere lightened and people began to chat, to smile and laugh and slowly we won their trust.

Meanwhile, I taught the other half of the group how to make a small book.  You know, the one I did ages ago for the WI and uploaded here.  After a bit of lunch, each group showed the other how to make what they just learned.

Whilst they did, the extraordinarily well behaved children made their own entertainment!

Though it was a really tiring day, the results were terrific and I think everyone had a great time.  They left with at least two ideas for things they could teach to their friends and had some fun at the same time.

As they gathered their things together at the end of the afternoon, one or two of them came and said thank you.  It was clear they were proud of what they’d made and the women who waved goodbye as they left, smiling and relaxed confirmed what many of us know already.

I can’t begin to tell you how much I learned as well.

Sunshine in February

The low temperatures of the last few days have made us appreciate some time at home and after our boiler suddenly stopped listening to the thermostat controller and decided to stay on overdrive for a couple of days, we found ourselves a little too cosy and warm here.  After a couple of days on manual (ie hero control) the engineer sorted it by fitting a new Hive controller.  Once the novelty of being able to control the heating from a distance has worn off, I think it’s going to be great!

We have been on a little adventure in the meantime, though, as my work took me to Wrexham again yesterday.  My hero offered chauffeur services too, so we splashed out on a night at the Premier Inn and took the opportunity to enjoy the winter sunshine by exploring a couple of places on the way.

The last time we were in the area we had visited the Chirk aquaduct but a few days afterwards, we realised that we’d missed the chance to see another similarly breathtaking example of engineering, the Pontcysyllte aquaduct.  No, we had no idea how to say it either, and we are not alone it seems – help is at hand here.   We left the car in the car park at the Trevor basin where a fleet of holiday boats were being spring cleaned ready for the new season.

Setting out onto the pathway, we realised how deceptive that bright sunshine is, because it was bitterly cold up there.  Difficult to see, too, because the low winter sun was quite blinding when walking towards it.

With just a narrow pathway by the side of the canal, it was important to watch our step, too!

So we walked to a point just under half way, gazed over the beautiful landscape, marvelled – and shivered – at the view directly down from this great height, and turned around to walk back.

Sadly, no boats moving around at this time of the year, but at least there were not many other visitors.  I wouldn’t really want to be passing too many folks walking across here because there’s not much room!  What a relief it was to walk with our backs to the sun again, too.

We felt that we’d like to get a good view of the aquaduct from down below, to get a bit more of an overview and some idea of the size of the masterpiece.  Seeing a small white van crossing a bridge down there, we decided to aim for that small road and see if we could find a place to stop down there and look back.

Back in the Trevor Basin, we took a look at some of those holiday boats, some of which are available for daily hire to groups of up to ten people.  Maybe …or maybe not!

Driving across the tiny bridge down in the valley, then, we looked back to where we had been standing less than an hour ago.  We marvelled at the courage, imagination and engineering skills of Thomas Telford once again.

We got out of the car to take another photo from the same place as the person who made the video about the aquaduct on YouTube.  It’s difficult to get a feel of the magnitude of the aquaduct from any one spot but having been up there and down here, we were ready to move on.  It was way too lovely an afternoon to spend indoors though, so we got out the National Trust cards, perused the app on our phones and decided to drop into Erddig.  We spotted that the Wolfs Den was closed and also that the restaurant was being refurbished but neither of those worried us too much.

“Great timing!” said the woman on the welcome desk as we showed our cards, “you’ve just made it in time for the last fireside chat of the day”.  We followed another couple through into the yard to the “meeting spot” and looked forward to sitting and listening to some stories by the fire.  It seemed like a good way to begin our visit because actually, we knew nothing about Erddig at all.

As we stood waiting, the other couple wandered off, leaving the pair of us wondering if we were in the right place or whether we should have gone to the front door.  A clue to what made Erddig special was on the wall beside us – photographs of servants in “Downton Abbey” style, alongside a poem about one of them written by the master of the house.  Since no-one had come to meet us, we decided to follow our noses and see what’s what and as we did, we came face to face with about half a dozen people coming out of a side door.  “Hello, you must have come for a fireside chat?  Come on in”.

We had no choice really.  Two volunteer guides and a member of staff stood in an empty space, formerly a dairy, we were told.  A small fire burned in the hearth as one of them went off to look for any other punters as we learned that this was it.  The House was closed and all there was to do here was to sit and listen to some information about the place and the people who lived there.  Of course, we listened politely and expressed our appreciation, but dear me, that’s half an hour of our lives we won’t get back!  Sadly, Erddig appears to be an interesting place, but the National Trust did us no favours by not making it quite clear at any stage that there was such a limited offering that day.  Our membership meant we hadn’t paid for tickets: if we had, then we’d have been there a little longer, having a rather different conversation.

A warm hotel room and a hot drink suddenly seemed very tempting indeed!

A morning out

The weather appeared to be set fair for the day and with neither of us committed to anything today, we decided we’d put the National Trust cards to good use and visit Lacock Abbey. 

We rather liked the sound of this outdoor exhibition, thinking (hoping) it might be rather similar in tone to the marvellous Fresh Air shows we love to visit in Quenington, near Cirencester.  Anyway, a morning out in the fresh air sounded good after a few days indoors.

Whilst my hero sorted out the parking, I did a quick spell check on the information board.  Oh, National Trust, how could you describe Lacock as a “traditional medieval village layed out in a square” ?  

Moving right along…

A surprisingly large number of people were around considering the house was closed today and January wouldn’t normally be the choice month to visit a garden.  The exhibition appears to have attracted interest and though we’d have liked to have had the place to ourselves, we soon shook off the crowd!

The twelve exhibits were spread around the fairly large gardens, all easily accessible from a gravel path which was showing signs of fairly heavy wear in places.  The National Trust do seem to have hit the spot with this exhibition, for sure.

We thought it was the larger, more striking exhibits which worked best.  Those which caught our eye from a distance and invited a closer look.

Some smaller, more dangly things had mirrored surfaces which glinted in the light as they twirled in the breeze.

But other, smaller, more traditional painted glass works didn’t seem to work quite so well in this setting, we thought, especially since there were other, more successful dangly things in trees.

The magpie in me was immediately drawn to these colourful pieces, especially when I realised what happened when they turned around slightly.

I rather liked these panels, too and could see why they’d been chosen for some of the exhibition’s publicity shots.  I was pleased to see something a little different and more imaginative, too.

But my favourites were the two lotus flowers, standing on either side of the front steps

Each about a metre in diameter, the glorious blue of the surface lifted the spirit on a winter day.  Had they fitted in my bag, I’d have been very tempted…

Though the exhibition was the main attraction and clearly, what had taken us to Lacock in the first place, other small features caught our eye, including this little quiz in the botanic garden.

And though we passed a couple of cats mooching about by the pathway, neither was quite so placid as this one.

We had enjoyed wandering around the Abbey, admired the beautiful vaulted ceilings and learned something new in the bakery.

Apotropaic marks.

I think we earned our lunch at the Red Lion, then.  Very good it was too!

Saturday

It was a beautiful morning to potter around Cirencester and shop local.  I had a few things on a list; we needed to buy meat, vegetables and stuff for the weekend and neither of us felt much like going further afield.  We were out early in the dazzling sunshine, noting the vast difference in temperature between the shops in the sun and those in the shade.

It was especially noticeable in the Market Place, where the stallholders in the Farmers’ Market were cloaked in deep shade until almost lunchtime.

When I get the chance, I love to shop like this; to visit the greengrocer, the butcher and the baker.  It’s fun to chat with each of them and of course, to observe our fellow customers.

 

Like the chap in front of us in the greengrocer who wanted to know the source of the dates on sale before buying them.  “Tunisia” appeared to be an acceptable answer…so off he popped and filled a bag.  We’d have liked to know more about his reasoning but of course, we’re English and wouldn’t dream of asking!  We were buying root vegetables to put in the pot with the rather tempting shin beef we’d just bought, imagining a spot of comfort food for supper tonight.

Who can resist bringing home a little Spring sunshine?  They won’t last very long but for a few days, the kitchen windowsill is a little brighter and the sweet scent makes washing up that bit more pleasant.

Wrapped up warm and with beef stew and dumplings on our mind then, It’s hard to imagine that just a year ago today, we were boarding our lovely cruise ship to set off on an exciting adventure having just enjoyed a few sunny days with our sweet friends in Florida.  We have to wait a little longer for our 2015 adventure, but looking up to the blue sky in Cirencester, it reminded me of those palm-tree fringed skies even if we are wearing several more layers of clothes today than we were this time  last year!