Here is a brief photo-album-of-sorts of our trip, which like many things has had the rough edges gently bumped off in retrospect (four people in each other's company for three weeks, petty travel annoyances, lunatic weather, etc. etc. etc.) and can now only be described as wonderful.
We'd been planning for months, with everyone noting down places to visit on index cards, then laying out the cards in a sort of geographical order, and deciding what could fit where -- and, alas, what couldn't -- so that we ended up with an itinerary that was quite busy, but we saw a great deal of London and southern England, and widely-ranging things at that. It has not been a simple matter to winnow the photos down to a manageable number! but here is a "potted version" of our trip, and as it happens I am already planning additional posts specifically with photos of church needlework, and the British Museum's soi-disant "greatest hits", and of the garden at Sissinghurst -- and a completely separate blog for narrowboating is already in the works, so sure are David and I that we want to repeat the experience!
Wednesday, 21st : Windsor Castle.
We'd just missed the Changing of the Guard when we arrived, but managed to see the retiring parade through the streets. Needless to say, the band was excellent!
This was the bonus of bonuses --
Thursday, 22nd : Tower of London, Design Museum.
Friday, 23rd : Natural History Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum.
Two museums in one day is very ambitious when one of them is the V&A -- indeed, it would be impossible, I think, to do justice to the latter even in a full day itself!
Saturday, 24th : Hampton Court.
Bells on one of the grace-and-favour apartments, which I discovered later to my astonishment continued to be occupied in the 1950s (Mrs. Kingsley Foster and Lady Peake), and Mrs. Baily was still in residence at the time of the 1986 fire.
Sunday, 25th : British Museum, "The Play that Goes Wrong".
Buskers on a Jubilee Line train. We saw these fellows more than once -- they were playing "When the Saints Go Marching In".
One of my favorite little places in London, though alas it was not yet open when we passed by that morning.
One of the big draws for David was the chance to see this play in full, which he had previously seen only in an extremely-truncated version in the video below. The video is hilarious, but the full play is side-splittingly so, and numerous lines have now entered our family lexicon. ("She's having one of her episodes ...") Highly recommended! and the theatre itself is a treat as well.
Monday, 26th : Narrowboating.
Yes, you pilot the narrowboat yourself! Yes, you live aboard! Yes, you man the locks! Yes, it's really a lot of fun!
Tuesday, 27th : Narrowboating, Mary Arden's Farm.
The Palmer's Farm house. That rosebush is as vivid in real life, I assure you. This house was thought for decades to be the house of the Arden family, Shakespeare's maternal forebears, but it was discovered only in 2000 that it was actually the house of a neighbor, Adam Palmer, and the Arden farmhouse was the smaller and more modest house nearby.
Mary Arden's farm house, also known as Glebe Farm -- this is the house where Shakespeare's mother (properly Mary Shakespeare, of course) lived as a child. Because it had been thought for so long not to be the Ardens' home, it was "updated" in Victorian times, but the wider effect of the collection of buildings and land here is surely that of a working Tudor-era farm.
Coming through a lock, en route to Stratford from Wilmcote.
Oh my word, I laughed right out loud at the Play that Went Wrong. I wonder if there is a longer video of it?
Canals always look so marvellous but I have never been tempted to holiday on one.
Posted by: Toffeeapple | July 29, 2017 at 12:51 PM