A Blink And Six Weeks Have Gone
It’s been a while since I’ve done a piece on Medium. After the barrage of posts following the trip to Budapest and then Bodiam and Brightling straight after, there has been nothing. And it has been six weeks. It isn’t as if we haven’t been doing things or going to interesting places. I’ve hit a malaise and haven’t converted days out into photo packed articles (and there has been lots of photos taken). I’ve done a couple of match reports and rants on my own website’s blog.
https://onetruekev.co.uk/Mutterings/
And it’s not like I haven’t had the time to write, no, just a severe lack of inclination, and I’ve slipped out of the daily writing habit. So, this is a, ease back in, catch up, cover all piece.
Thursday 31st March. The last event of the Crawley Wordfest was the comedy night. Not in the library this year, but at the Charis Centre. Nice food available, and the best line up at a Wordfest comedy night yet, headlined by Nathan Caton. A good night and well worth the very reasonable cost of the ticket.
Friday 1st April. Dinner and drinks in London for Lianne’s fortieth birthday at the famous Hippodrome Casino in its swanky restaurant. The company and the evening itself was great. But the restaurant was taking the April Fool’s Day thing far too seriously. I can’t remember what I ordered for starter and desert but suffice to say Pac-Man would have only moved one dot for each. What really sticks in the mind is the main course. Advertised as lamb on pita bread with yoghurt and garnish, it did tick all of those boxes, but the miniscule size of the actual edible food was the issue. Six small pieces of lamb less than you’d get on a basic supermarket lamb chop, each on a sliver of pita bread, not even half a pita.
It arrived in a dark wood cigar box, which had some greenery sticking out the side. When opened there was the whole thing swamped by more rosemary than I’d seen in one place. In fact, the only way there could have been more rosemary was if we’d gone back to the eighties and Rosemary Conley was filming one of her exercise videos next to our table.
Unfortunately, it just proves that you can’t have swanky, without it containing wanky.
We stayed overnight in London on the edge of Marylebone village, which gave us an opportunity to go into the wonderland that is Daunt Bookshop. It is a wonder both for the vast selection of books, and it looks like it came straight out of a movie set. It’s the first place I’ve seen selling the whole collection of Pevsner’s, and so I bought the Leicestershire and West Sussex ones without having to resort to giving money to the evil empire of Amazon.
Sunday 3rd April. Simple Minds fortieth anniversary tour at the Brighton Centre. Nearly two years to the day after it was originally scheduled for, and rearranged three times due to Covid protocols, we finally get there. They have no support act, but who needs one when they can do two sets and an encore of songs we know and do nearly three hours’ worth of show. Only two of the original line up remain, and Jim Kerr now looks like he’s a morphing of Ally McCoist and John Higgins, but he knows how to do a show.
It was another wonderful night. And seeing the queues for getting out of the car parks around Brighton we were glad to be staying over. We’d been given a nice upgrade to a room with a balcony overlooking Brighton beach and what is left of the west pier.
It would appear that it was quite windy overnight judging by the state of the house that landed on the beach overnight.
The following weekend should have seen us off to Leicester to catch up with old friends, to see Paul Weller at De Montfort Hall, and a Van Gogh immersive experience in the medieval All Saints church. None of which happened due to me coming down with some non-Covid lurgy.
It was Easter weekend before I was out again. We took Helen’s mum to the Firle Country show. Which was just like a massive open air garden centre with street food in some posh bloke’s garden. But with it being Easter Sunday, it would have been the only garden centre type of event open in the country due to the Sunday trading laws.
Firle Place is a privately run stately home not far from Lewes in East Sussex. It isn’t usually open to the public in April, but with the show on in the grounds, it was open to those at the show for half price. And so, I took advantage of this.
The Gages who own the house have ended up with a large collection of pottery and furniture that they have inherited through marriage, it includes pieces from two former Prime Ministers — Lord Palmerston and Viscount Melbourne.
Their wall of plates is especially impressive
and knocks Helen’s mum’s place into a cocked hat.
Following on from our visit to Bodiam Castle, we had joined the National Trust, and so the following Wednesday we took our temporary membership cards and went all of four miles up the road to Nymans.
I had walked through the woods before, but I’d not been to the house and gardens. As I will have mentioned several times in previous posts, I’m not a massive fan of gardens (or the countryside generally), but they were really quite impressive. Lovely trees in bloom
and lots of different flowers.
None of which I could tell you the name of.
The view out over the North Weald is spectacular. In the distance, with maximum zoom on the camera we can see this impressive looking crenelated tower.
Turns out, after some research and map reading when back at home, it is just a water tower.
The house at Nymans was bought by the Messel family in 1890, and over the next forty years the family set about transforming the large Victorian house that was there into a grand Elizabethan style mansion, both inside and out.
And to set out a wonderful array of gardens.
Then in 1947, disaster struck as a fire caught hold and burnt a lot of the house down. Some of the shell of the old house remains as a reminder of this.
But the surviving part of the house was lived in until the eighties by a descendent of the family which had married into the aristocracy over the years. It shows glimpses of what the original house would have been like.
There was a bit of a pause until last weekend where we put in a double header. Saturday night we were at the Hawth to see Nathan Caton (tickets bought on the back of the Wordfest comedy night). I’d definitely recommend watching him, he was really funny and engaging. It’s a shame he was only in the Studio, as he deserves to be playing to much bigger crowds. Supported by Dinesh Nathan who was quite good too, and not trying to trade on his brother’s name by dropping the “ranga”.
Then on Sunday we were National Trust-ing it up again with a trip to Chartwell; the house and estate bought and transformed by Winston Churchill in the 1920s, and his family home until his death in 1965.
The house and grounds have echoes of Nymans, with views out over the North Wealds (only Kent this time), a house modified by the owner, and extensive grounds and vast formal gardens laid out.
It is impressive and beautiful, and Chartwell has the bonus of not having been burnt down at all. It is also a lot older with parts dating back to Tudor times (and not just redesigned to look like it).
The house and outbuildings are maintained as they were when Churchill was alive, although some parts have been updated to act as a museum to him and his life. Giving all the positives of course, with only Gallipoli mentioned on the negative side.
It isn’t the most balanced picture. But it did show things of which I wasn’t really aware. Mainly the paintings he did. Hundreds of them. Everywhere. Especially in the studio building.
We would have quite happily taken the dining room in its restful greens
and the sun terrace to be part of wherever we lived.
By the time we were finished wandering around the house and grounds and having a bite to eat, and exiting through the gift shop (Guidebook, pen, and fridge magnet), it was too late to nip across to the nearby Quebec House, another National Trust property — that would have to wait for another day. But we did head onto the village of Godstone for a little wander about.
The A25 takes a torturous detour through the village, and we do a loop to find a parking space before starting to explore. It has a lovely green, lots of old houses and pubs. Lots of pubs.
We eventually find the footpath that will take us to the church. It is quite a trek away from the main village. Past a large fishing lake with a pair of Cranes in residence.
Before we see the back of what would have been the village school.
There are some more lovely old cottages here.
And the amazing looking old Almshouses which sit next to the church.
The church has a large churchyard with some impressive looking monuments in, but a church that sadly wasn’t open to enable us to have a look around inside.
In some ways the location of the church (and former school), half a mile away from the main village reminds me of Breedon-on-the-Hill in Leicestershire. It’s a mini pilgrimage to get to the church every Sunday.
And now I’m pretty much up to date, and I’ll try and keep on top of things having hopefully come out the other end of the writing malaise.
Check in on my other 2022 travels below
If you liked this post, follow me or get on my email list for future posts. Some may even be more enjoyable than this one.
And if you are not a member, consider subscribing to Medium to support my writing and discover lots of other great writers, posts, and articles, including those I have already published here.
