Bridgwater

I’ve always thought of Bridgwater as rather a dump. Useful for shopping but still a dump. There are few nice places to eat and even fewer decent shops, unless you count superstores – there are plenty of them. Last Thursday I went there to meet the Girl who was arriving by coach. A very delayed coach because it was Eastertime and the roads were busy. So I parked the car at Asda next to the coach station and did some shopping and found a new smoke alarm without trying. And managed to buy yet another lightbulb that didn’t fit the lamp it was meant for. Excellent.

When she texted that they were going to be even more delayed, I went for a bit of a walk and found that there are some bits of Bridgwater, that when photographed – if you Photoshop out the plastic bags blowing in the wind and crop judiciously – can look quite appealing.

But for the most part, I feel sorry for this erstwhile historic centre, market town and port, for having been cut up by roads that split its heart.

So that now we drive around the centre from one ugly retail park to another and miss the only architecture worth looking at and the town centre that has so much history nearby, but is now neglected and showing signs of dereliction.

 I’m probably being unfair in many ways. I know Bridgwater has a vibrant annual carnival and has one of the south west’s best motorcycle dealerships. I’m sure there are people who love living here and many parts that I haven’t seen. So, if this offends, I’m sorry, but it’s what I see when I come here.

 

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Cafe and cocktails in Oxford

I said I’d do a separate post about the cafe we went to while we were in Oxford in my last post.

Despite it’s traditional English exterior, the Grand Cafe struck me as fundamentally un-English, although it was serving creams teas and the like. There was something about the unhurried nature of the service (one poor waitress – they were terribly understaffed on the day we were there), the elegance of the surroundings, the lack of muzak and the hence conducive atmosphere, and the slightly dishevelled nature of it all, that called to mind Viennese cafes in which you can while away the afternoon, without being harried for your next order, or chased away by crowds of pushy shoppers with packaged sandwiches. From seven o’clock, they do inexpensive cocktails. Go there, if you can.

As an aside I have to say that while my new Panasonic LX-5 is slightly driving me mad with not having a viewfinder – I just can’t really adjust to having a slightly second-hand view of things, compared to a DSLR – I totally love its ability to take pictures in low light. I’m only pointing and shooting at the moment in order to get used to its capabilities. It also helps that I love grainy pictures, I suppose.

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Oxford on a relatively dry day in winter

Last week, or it might have been the week before – I lost track over Christmas – the Girl and I went to Oxford. She had the loan of a car for a few days and, having passed her test over a year ago but not having driven much, she wanted to do a longer drive.

On the way, we left the motorway at the first exit and, as we were driving along a very unremarkable road, spotted this house with a model shark crashing through its roof. It’s quite famous and I’d seen pictures before, but it was still fun to see it unexpectedly. The Girl, who’d never heard of it, thought it was pretty cool. I expect the neighbours have got used to it now but there were a lot of objections when it first went up.

We both work at universities in London, so we should have known that anything to do with Oxford University was likely to be mainly CLOSED during the vacation. Nevertheless, we managed to dawdle our way around town quite successfully as it wasn’t raining. We did have to go inside a few times though.

This is a rather wonderful shop called Objects of Use, which sells rather old fashioned household items. I’m a fan of the kind of wood and natural fibre washing up brushes we used to have at home when I was growing up. They’re cheap, totally recyclable, and have heads that can be replaced, so I happily bought two and some spare heads for under a fiver.

To anyone who has attended a campus university, as both of us did, the idea of a university whose colleges and libraries fill a town amongst normal dwellings and businesses is quite odd. I loved my campus being self-contained. However, it does make for a beautiful city in Oxford.

It has been raining in the UK more or less constantly for what seems like months. Evidence was everywhere with flooded roads, allotments, cricket pitches and the River Cherwell being close to bursting its banks by the Botanical Garden. You wouldn’t want to punt in this weather.

Met Office records show that 2012 was ‘the second wettest year since records began’ (their records arbitrarily start in 1910 – records have actually been kept since the 1700s apparently). As someone remarked on Twitter, that is such a very British statistic.

Finally, cold and tired, we stopped for tea and scones at the lovely Grand Cafe, which has been the site of a coffee shop since 1650, before heading home. More about that in another post.

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Out and about in Barford Park

Inspired by today’s crisp wintry weather, I made a little detour on the way to buying a Christmas tree through Barford Park, two miles away. It’s only small, as grand houses go, but very pretty and retains a few good old features.

The lane from Four Forks goes straight through the grounds and past the house, and I would have loved to have gone for a proper walk along the public footpath. But as it was, I just briefly wandered up and down the road and tried out the new camera a bit.

Around the back of the house, among other farm buildings, I spotted an outbuilding sitting in the traditional manner on straddle stones.

These were used historically to prevent vermin getting into grain stores and barns. You can see how the horizontally lying stones would make it difficult enough for them to give up and go elsewhere.

I rather wish Spring Cottage and its outbuildings were on straddle stones – the cats and I have dealt with four dead mice today, about which I have very mixed feelings. I don’t want to kill them unnecessarily but, when they come in from the cold, they chew up the lagging around the pipes in the loft to make nests, which once led to a burst pipe.

Just down the lane, there’s a lovely old gate that must have survived a century or more.

And the trees are just magnificent, silhouetted against the bright blue sky.

The front of the house has views over the park across a ha-ha to keep the animals out of the gardens, and the back of the house is surrounded by an extremely well fortified wall, which I can only hope hides a marvellous kitchen garden.

I’ve never felt envious of those who live in such places until today. Perhaps it’s something to do with its relatively smallish scale or perhaps it was just that it was such a lovely day at long last.

On the photographic front, I’m not that keen on the camera yet. Without a viewfinder, I’m finding I have to take so many more pictures just to get a few that are acceptable. However, I hope I’ll get better at this with more practice.

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Satellite view

This picture shows in spectacular clarity the way that our cities and countryside can look from space. London is the very light area on the right, Bristol the largest light area on the coast to its left, with South Wales hanging over the inflowing Bristol Channel like a repeated strings of fairy lights. Almost immediately below the droopiest bit of Wales there on the other side of the water are the Quantock Hills, and Spring Cottage is about 12 miles inland from the coast. The very dark area to the left of the belt of lights going south, which is basically the M5 corridor, is Exmoor at the top and Dartmoor further south.

As you can probably tell, I could look at this for hours. This picture was taken by the NASA Suomi-NPP satellite on 27th March this year. You can find the image, along with many others, online.

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Decrepitude

Lest anyone think that I am living the dream, here is a part of it that is more nightmare.

This is one of the walls the so-called wash house at the cottage. Built at the same time as the main house around 1800, it was probably exactly that – somewhere the washing could be done, separate but not that far from the fireplace in the cottage where the water would have been heated. The cottage itself had no bathroom or kitchen at that time – they were additions in the late 1960s. Yes, that late. It was also in 1962 that electricity first came to the cottage. That probably sounds like a long time ago but that’s during my childhood, so it doesn’t seem so to me.

I often wonder about the lives of the people who have lived here over the last couple of hundred years – I have their names and should find out more about them. In the twentieth century, they were mostly older couples and widowed single people, in the nineteenth, families with children and even a lodger who was a weaver – nearby Spaxton used to be a centre for cloth manufacture way back. With no shops for two and a half miles, they probably made their own bread and got their eggs, milk and meat from the farm down the lane. They definitely will have grown their own vegetables. They would have had to walk everywhere, for the cottage is relatively remote and there isn’t space to keep a horse, although there’s a barn over the lane that might have been rented for that purpose.

I don’t feel very driven to repair this wall. It’s not doing anyone any harm and it has a kind of beauty about it; the wash house being built into the hill behind. I like the link with the past that being able to see under the very twentieth-century rendering allows. Although a bit of the ceiling did fall down the other week. Must get that fixed.

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Cheddar – not so gorgeous

On Sunday we went to Cheddar. I asked the GPS app on my phone for the quickest route, yet we wound our way there through unnecessarily circuitous lanes. Pretty though.

It probably wasn’t slower than taking the motorway but it certainly made my passengers, Nurse J and Mrs Honeytree, feel car sick. They argued about who should sit in the front seat: but unlike children, their arguments went: “No, no, I’m fine in the back, you stay there.” “No, I insist that we swap, you’ve been in the back long enough.” Until I finally stopped the car and said: “Swap.”

When we finally got there we sought out some lunch at a little cafe that was decorated in twee, vintage style with all manner of old bits and pieces, board games, kitchenalia and pictures. We sat under a shelf of royal memorabilia, presided over by a plate decorated with Charles and Diana’s engagement picture. Not a good omen.

We ordered: Nurse J, some fizzy mineral water; Mrs Honeytree, some vegetable soup; and I, a jacket potato with baked beans. The phone rang: a crisis with some offspring and Mrs H went outside to deal with it. The food arrived, and got cold. It wasn’t very nice. My beans were small and salty. Who would have thought you could get sub standard baked beans? But you can.

So far, so depressing. And on a gorgeous, sunny day as well. Then we went for a stroll around Cheddar, which was mostly road. OK. This is not the village’s fault, after all – it is in a gorge, so it can’t be spread out. But it seemed to be full of tawdry little shops selling souvenirs and even the ‘official’ Cheddar cheese shop was rather disappointing. All the cheese sealed in plastic like at a supermarket and the tasting of the many varieties carefully controlled by an officious little man, who would spear a tiny cube on request from a covered stainless steel bowl, so you couldn’t even see why you would want to try one type rather than another.

What we wanted was something more like the stuff on the left below. What we got was a whole shop full of the stuff on the right. And about seventy labels warning about ‘Health and Safety’ regulations. Lovely. And so they lost our custom.

I tried to stay positive. The complaints of the others were getting to me. I felt responsible for bringing them to this horrible place by way of a journey that had made them feel ill. No, I insisted, it was lovely, cheese was fine sold like this. As a penance, I started getting a sore throat.

We decided quickly to leave and drove up through the gorge, marvelling at the 1950s buildings constructed right into the foot of the cliffs at the bottom. Marvelling, that is, at the planning regulations that allowed such despoilment of a beautiful natural feature. Further up, the gorge got less built up and more beautiful. Climbers abseiled down into groups of admiring observers. Sunlight began to filter into the scenery and eventually we emerged at the top into a completely different landscape from the one we had left behind below.

As I was driving, I couldn’t take any pictures of Cheddar Gorge itself, which is pretty impressive. Next time, I will have to stop and do so. If there is a next time.

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Glorious

What’s better than good friends, good weather and good exercise?

The views up at Will’s Neck, the Quantocks’ highest point (about 15 minutes’ drive from Spring Cottage) were fabulous at the weekend. As clear as clear can be. When it’s like this, you can see Exmoor to the south and the Bristol Channel and the Welsh coast to the north.

Apparently Will’s Neck is a Marilyn or a type of ‘relative hill’. I find this hilarious.

I don’t know why more people don’t come up here, although I’m glad that they don’t. Even on such a lovely day we only passed about ten people all morning.

It isn’t always like this at an altitude of 1,261 ft (384 m) – for reference, Spring Cottage itself is at 210 m (I talked a lot of rubbish about this to my friend at the weekend and got my Imperial and metric measurements completely confused). It’s often shrouded in low cloud and drizzle up here, and it can be very windy, like the last time I was up here, when it was possible to believe that you were completely lost. And not everyone was having good weather either, as we could see in the distance below.

I took these pictures with my phone, which is rather unpredictable. I’ve kind of given up taking my DSLR out with me these days, particularly when I go to places I’ve been before. Perhaps it’s time for a smaller camera?

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Silver lining

After such a miserably wet day, yesterday evening turned out quite nice, so when I saw deer up in the field, I grabbed the camera and my keys and dashed out to photograph them.

I’m so glad I did.

The light was gorgeous and it completely made me remember what a glorious place this is.

And why I am here.

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Pottering about

A couple of weeks ago, the Girl bought herself a bicycle on Ebay, so we travelled down to Merriott this weekend to pick it up. Coincidentally, this was where I first found a cottage that I fell in love with, so it was an opportunity to revisit where we might have ended up. We picked up her bike, so she was very happy. I was decidedly pleased too because, although I’d been very disappointed when my reasonable offer on the tiny thatched cottage was rejected, I knew immediately on coming back, that it had been for the best not to offer more but to let it go. Merriott is a nice place but neither the house nor the location compares to Spring Cottage in the slightest. So, no regrets.

On the way back home, we dropped in at nearby Barrington Court, a National Trust property that I’ve been meaning to visit for some time because they are currently hosting the Antony Gormley Field for the British Isles exhibit, which has been travelling the country since 1993. I love Antony Gormley’s work and was particularly interested to see this because  it involves 40,000 clay figures and I was once a bit of an amateur potter. I was looking forward to sticking my nose into one of the empty Tudor rooms, looking at the thousands of curious, nostril-like figures, and smelling the clay.

The figures above made by visitors to Barrington are not part of the project, except in as much as the exhibit’s figures were all made by school children and other volunteers, and the project is intended to be inspirational. (Photographing the exhibition wasn’t allowed.) These were drying outside in an old stable block and hadn’t been fired yet.

What I wasn’t prepared for was how peculiar Barrington Court is. Two manor houses, both Tudor but built at different ends of the era, right bang next to each other, in completely different Tudor, styles and materials.

Best of all, empty of all furniture, Barrington Court didn’t seem to have any rooms or areas that were roped off to pique your curiosity and it was possible to wander up and down its several staircases at will, retrace your steps, and hang around for as long as you wanted, admiring the views, some ancient plumbing and beautiful Delft tiles. Much better for feeding the imagination than a whole load of room sets.

On the cricket pitch, next door, there was a match going on and it just seemed so remarkable that we’d gone straight into Summer from the seemingly endless Spring so quickly. And then I remembered, it’s taken about three months to get here.

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About half a tonne of earth

When I woke today, it was sunny but with rain in the air and huge looming black clouds, so I decided to make the best of the dry, even if it meant heading into the garden at 6.30. I wanted to work on my new vegetable beds.

I’ve been thinking about growing vegetables for a while and was finally inspired to get going by reading a Daily Telegraph article about Quickcrop, a young Irish company that supplies raised bed kits and seedling vegetable plants, which they know grow well. Although, doing some online research and a good nursery would have done just as well, I found their website very helpful, particularly to work out how many plants, and how much soil and manure was needed. Although the broccoli is planted too close together because there’s slightly less space than I should have had.

I thought I’d mix the topsoil with some farmyard manure myself, having spoken to the people at Triscombe Nurseries, rather than buy Quickcrop’s premix. It was quite a lot of effort to manhandle this much soil and manure back from the shop, and it took a surprisingly long time to rake it all about to break down all the lumps in the manure this morning. Manure is such a wonderful euphemism.

I did order the plant plugs from Quickcrop though, and they arrived yesterday packed in straw. Some of them looked a bit yellow as though they’d been in the dark for a just a while longer than they should have been but with the exception of one rocket seedling, I think they’ll recover.

For the beds, I thought I’d adapt some disused cold frames rather than build new raised beds. They’re set on concrete not earth but they’re still 14-16 inches deep, which is a reasonable depth to grow carrots, broccoli, spring onions, coriander, lettuce and rocket. All things that I eat often – I don’t want a glut. There’s a layer of gravel and built-in drainage already, so in theory these should work, although they may get waterlogged. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping it’s not a disaster.

Oh, and I’m looking forward to the carrots. They’re called ’round carrots’, which I thought nothing of when I ordered them. I mean, they’re all round, aren’t they? I’ve never seen a square or rhomboid carrot. Only, these are going to be spherical not long and round. Like golfballs, in other words. So I’m unexpectedly growing novelty veg now.

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An inheritance of colour

I took these photographs in the back garden around the herb plot. This is one of the times of the year when I am so grateful to my predecessor’s sense of garden design. The burgeoning leaves and flowers remind me every spring and summer that they were chosen complement each other, down to the tiny rock plant’s flowers.

I can only claim credit for the dwarfish lupin. Surely they’re meant to be taller than that? Oh, and the cat who is a delightful beigey shade called ‘lilac’.

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Real retro: my local

After a long, tiring day of strimming the banks at the back of the house, weeding, lugging around sacks of soil and manure, and putting up a reed-screen contraption thing to disguise the oil tank, I head off to the pub in the evening. I’ve stupidly forgotten to buy any food, even though I’ve been close to a supermarket earlier in the day. Sometimes life just feels too short for a huge shop and long queues.

I walk up the lane, taking real pleasure in one of the first good evenings in couple of weeks. I notice that a tree has come down up the road in the gales; its branches still stranded in limbo on top of the hedge on one side of the lane but its trunk now vanished, leaving a big, naked gap in the hedge on the other.

Swallows swoop, cows moo and lambs bleat. Somewhere, in the distance, quite far away, a dog barks. If you listen hard on a country evening, there’s always a dog barking somewhere.

One of the real blessings of living here is having a pub that does food within walking distance. It’s remarkable because there’s not much else within walking distance, unless you count fields and hedges. Well, there’s a letterbox, just past the farm, but it doesn’t do food.

I time it to arrive at the pub on the dot of seven – no ‘longer opening hours’ in this neck of the woods and I’m starving. I’ve been there waiting on the doorstep for them to open up before now.

Surprisingly, the pub is already heaving with people. Somerset time doesn’t always correspond to real time. Dave, the landlord, and Sue, who helps behind the bar but lives at the farm, are looking hot and bothered trying to keep up with the orders. The checked shirt and merino pullover crew are out in force. “There’ll be a bit of a wait,” says Dave. So I tuck myself into one of the few remaining seats – a chair by the fireside – with a pint of beer, The Guardian and my iPhone (they have free wifi intermittently when Dave forgets to turn off the router).

I sometimes struggle to explain the pub’s appeal but today I finally realise what it is. It’s that it’s an almost completely unreconstructed pub from the 1970s, all red patterned carpet, brown painted wood, horse brasses and ballads like Please release me always – always, without fail – playing softly in the background. No sawdust on floorboards and deafening conversation echoing around the place here. You get the drift?

Some of the customers haven’t changed either. Quite literally in the case of one of the elderly women sitting nearby, who is wearing an orange and brown flowered dress that she must have purchased over 30 years ago.

On quieter nights, when the customers all start chatting across the bar to each other, I’ve heard regulars say they’ve been coming here for 30 years and that neither the staff nor the menu has changed. It may not be very exciting but it’s good and reliable: scampi and chips, fish pie, cauliflower cheese, sausage and mash, steak and chips and so on. A bit of salad comes on the side of each of the oval plates, that can only be described as ‘garnish’. You aren’t expected to eat it because ‘five-a-day‘ hasn’t been invented yet. But, because I’m not quite a part of this time warp, I always do.

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Just a field

Across the road, there’s a field.

It looks like it’s just got grass and buttercups in it.

Until you start looking…

and then I found I couldn’t stop looking,

even at things I don’t like.

If anyone’s interested in huge pictures of wild flowers, the pictures enlarge when clicked and enlarge most in Firefox (on a Mac, at least). But then you’re probably not as obsessively interested in this field, as I have become.

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Gain and pain: a typical country weekend

At long last, the weather was fine and springlike this weekend, after about five weeks of grey skies and rain.

Saturday

I dropped by Nether Stowey car boot sale this morning – the first of the season – which was rather lame. A very poor turnout of sellers; about half as many as usual. I should think most people were so delighted to have some good weather for the first time in weeks, that they had other activities on their minds. I must keep going though as I’ve had such good things from there in the past: a huge fireguard, a tin bath, a great set of Hedgerow china for a song, and this Lloyd Loom linen basket/stool.

Entertainingly subtitled: ‘a Lusty product’.

I’ve finally done it up with some oil cloth from Norfolk Textiles (I’m obsessed with oilcloth) and some braid from V.V. Rouleaux and it now looks like this. I scrubbed it thoroughly but didn’t repaint it, as I wanted to keep its slightly worn appearance. But I find I neither like it particularly nor have any use for it, so I’ll probably give it away.

When I got back, I set to strimming the roadside banks, which is the perfect situation to encounter neighbours. (Round here anyone who lives within a half-mile radius is considered a neighbour as there’s no-one immediate.) I met two women passing today for the first time: one who lives in a house called Witches Barn (not sure about apostrophe) and the other, on horseback with two dogs running free (so brave, or perhaps, foolish), who is newer here than I am, which makes me feel better.

Having chatted with them, I thought, it really is a bit like The Archers, with local people being up in arms about a new anaerobic digester and various planning applications. “Where’s it all going to go?” One of them wanted to know. Where indeed? Into a big lagoon of slurry, possibly at the farm down the lane. Oh joy. It smells bad enough from time to time, as it is.

Then I lay about on the grass in the sun, listening to the birds and the tractor in the field next door, and weeded for hours and hours. Now I ache from bending and kneeling, as well as from wielding the strimmer.

Sunday

This morning I went riding: sunshine, swallows flying up high, the ground finally drying out after weeks of rain, sparrow fledglings chattering noisily in the bushes, carpets of bluebells in the woodland for as far as the eye could see, the countryside really starting to brighten as the trees thicken with leaves and rape fields come into flower. And, when we got to Cothelstone Hill, the sheer pleasure of a rare, clear, 360 degree view from the Seven Sisters. Fabulous.

It was all great until Marmalade – a rather inappropriately named black and white mare – got thoroughly fed up with me while we were trying to close a gate (easier said than done on horseback) and suddenly took off at speed straight into a tree branch that caught me on the head, back of the neck and shoulder. You’re taught to bend forward when encountering an overhanging object; if I hadn’t instinctively done that, I would have been thwacked straight in the face. Thank goodness for riding hats too, although the impact rammed mine down so hard that one my eyebrows feels bruised. Anyway, I’ll live.

I find myself thinking that this place is has marvellously healing powers for the weary mind and soul, if not the body.

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