Saturday - Something new something old

I seem to have got lucky with the weather and avoided the rain!

I started off trying to get into the last two Rutland churches on the list.

776 St John North Luffenham






777 St Peter & St Paul Langham







I saw a sign for Exton. The church is in a small village and down the end of a private road. I've been before but thought it was worth showing you.











I've been to Belton Hall many times but I can take photos inside now so....

I was surprised to find these guys in the car park!


















I had a nice vegetable soup and then went to the house.




















A nice walk around the lake was called for as I had to find space for a lump of chocky cake didn't I :D







Very pleasant day!

No Surprises

Well I'm about to go on holiday.

It's 4 nights near Rutland Water (but I doubt I'll do much birding!) and then 4 nights near Shipton On Stour (the North Cotswolds). For the second part young Trish is joining me - I'm in the nice hotel she's in a B&B :D I have wifi and she doesn't - EVIL LAUGH. I'll have to keep her away from the cakes.

Yes OC pics will be uploaded for at least part of the trip. AND YES THE CAMERA IS PACKED.

I hope to show you some new places or at least places I've not been to for a while.

What's in a county

The Royal Mail is about to remove counties from their Postal Address File. The Royal Mail says you can still write the county in the address but you don't have.

This is bound to, and indeed is, going to upset some people. I imagine the residents of Rutland will get a bit narked.

Personally I'm not sure why people get quite so upset about counties. Lets be honest for most people a county is just somewhere we pay our rates. Oh we tell people we are proud of being from somewhere but in most cases its snob value. Croydon Surrey sounds better than Croydon South London.

When Middlesex was dismantled there was a bit of an uproar, in this instance no one is proposing dismantling anything. The Mail just think that they don't need counties to get a letter somewhere - post code is more useful.

Of course places move all the time along county boarders. Just this morning I was looking up Stanford Hall in my 1000 best British Houses and was surprised to see it in Leicestershire when the church which is next door was listed in the 1000 best Churches under Northamptonshire.

I once lived somewhere where my postal address was Hertfordshire but I was actually paying my rates to Epping Forest Council in Essex (and that was my voting constituency) and I was still in Essex.

Having said that there is one time I absolutely get behind my county and that is when Essex play Cricket!

The Normans are coming

I get a bit frustrated by the freeview history channel Yesterday. When it does factual history programmes they tend to be about the Sixties or more typically World War II and .... THE NAZIS - imgagine Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes saying it.

Yes alright its very important but there is more to History than that. The sixties isn't important just overrated - well I was born in the sixties so it had some importance.

The BBC have a more encompassing view of history and tonight there is part of what looks like a promising season of programmes on The Normans (BBC2 9pm with an accompanying programme on BBC4).

It won't just centre on the Battle of Hastings but look at the Saxon Culture at that time (probably little known by many of us) an the impact the Normans had on Europe.

The way we "holidayed"

There is a piece on the BBC website today about the art of attracting UK holiday makers.

It's interesting how our taste in holidays has changed and indeed what we did. Before the emergence of the car and the cheap air package holidays you went to a "destination resort", its why the likes of Blackpool, Great Yarmouth and Eastbourne grew up. Go to Eastbourne today and you see the number of large and rather grand hotels.

You went to the seaside stayed in an appalling b&b, you were kicked out of your room and were only allowed back for meals. It seems bizarre now but Bill Bryson's description of Mrs Smegma in Notes from a Small Island was true even in the 1970's.

The thing was you spent all of your week in the town, wandering along the promenade, listening to band concerts at the band stand. You would hire a deck chair for the day. Some people still do it today.

The other thing you did was go to a holiday camp.

Of course the emergence of the car and especially the package holiday destroyed many of these resorts and few (if any?) are thriving today. Some are incredibly tatty (newquay) others have a sort of gentility (Eastbourne). Today the holiday camps seem to be places to go to get drunk, some like Warners have reinvented themselves as ADULT ONLY. Not adult content just no kids.

The other thing that destroyed some resorts were the Beeching Act (reform of the railways) of the 1960's - for instance many Devon & Cornwall seaside towns lost their station and many tourists.

I have done a few of these holidays when I was a lad. I've stayed in some tatty guest houses where the food was truly awful, and I've been to Warners at Corton (when it was a proper holiday camp) and Pontins Camber Sands.

We went to Corton quite a lot when I was very young. I remember it with affection (because it had loads of US comics) but when I returned I thought it was a dump.

Another mainstay of the British Seaside holiday was the end of the pier show or the seaside theatre. Some very famous TV acts did the seaside circuit. When I was about 6 we saw Mike & Bernie Winters (who at the time were huge) and I got their autograph.

The shows still go on but I guess the stars are less stellar these days.

I'm not certain when we stopped going to these types of holiday. I guess we became better off and did other things.

You will notice I seldom stay in seaside towns but I do like the odd trip to the likes of Eastbourne for the nostalgia

We've entered the 21st century!

I have mentioned a few times my irritation with not being able to get a signal for digital radio well as I've said I can get classic FM and I've been listening to it around 10pm - lovely relaxation before going to sleep.

Well for some reason I tried one of the presets for the BBC stations and .... I got national BBC stations!! I can now listen to the excellent world service!!

Cambridge University Botanical Gardens

I've been meaning to go to the Cambridge University Botanical Gardens for ages and so today was the day. Now the gardens were at times lovely but one or two beds really were poor.