Rutland

Normanton Church, Rutland

Yesterday was beautifully warm: the power of the sun seeping into our bones. We travelled a few miles to Rutland Water which is a big reservoir - constructed in the 1970's to serve the counties of The East Midlands. We parked near a village with a curious name - Edith Weston. Then we walked along the shore to Normanton Church.

This early nineteenth century church stands on an artificial peninsula. It was saved from the rising flood waters following a successful public campaign. Who says that protesting never changes a thing? They're so wrong.

Phoebe and Frances at Normanton Park Hotel

We carried on with our leisurely walk to the dam at the eastern end of Rutland Water and after turning back we stopped for lunch in the gardens of The Normanton Park Hotel. The setting was perfect but sadly the high cost of the sandwiches was not reflected in their quality. Even so they were good enough to eat. I felt sorry for the young waitress whose awkward gait spoke of hip problems.

Rutland Water from the south shore

We came home to rest and escape from the hot afternoon sun before returning to the village of  Hallaton to visit "The Fox Inn" for our evening meal. The place was not particularly busy but we had to wait forty five minutes for our chosen plates to arrive. The food was good but the wait was excruciating - especially with a baby in a high chair becoming tired and slightly fractious. Some people who arrived after us and ordered their food after us had eaten up and departed before our meals had even arrived. I hate that kind of thing in eateries.

The morning weather should be great again today with rain finally arriving in the early afternoon to bring an end to our mini-heatwave. Ah well. It was smashing while it lasted.

Churchgate, Hallaton last evening

Leicestershire

They say that our mini-heatwave will only last for one more day. I am sorry that I have not been visiting other people's blogs very much nor responding to comments as usual. There just hasn't been the time. I am writing this at 6am before going back to bed for another forty winks. Today we hope to visit Rutland Water - a vast reservoir in the heart of the smallest county.

Yesterday, we visited Foxton Locks on The Grand Union Canal. Constructed in the early nineteenth century, the ten locks form a  kind of staircase for narrow boats. Nowadays the traffic is all about leisure but once the locks were all about trade and commerce. The Grand Union Canal became a vital economic artery long before the railways.

At Foxton Locks

After Foxton Locks, Clint took us to Market Harborough where we mooched around in the sunshine, visited a few shops and had lunch in a Wetherspoons pub called "The Sugar Loaf" - named after the grocery store that once occupied the site. Apparently, it was where townsfolk bought their precious sweetener, scraped from hardened pinnacles of sugar. I never knew about this custom. Nowadays we take bags of refined sugar for granted but once the substance was both new and relatively expensive.

The Square, Market Harborough

After stocking up with provisions in the Sainsburys superstore, we headed back to Tugby. Before our evening meal, I  went for a short walk in nearby farmland to capture  a "Geograph" square I had previously missed. See the top picture. A farmer is harrowing a harvested wheatfield. It is, I think,  a quintessential image of rural England at the very end of summer as autumn gradually assumes its annual position.

Also seen yesterday - the butter cross (on the right) in the village of Hallaton

Launde

Launde Abbey was built for Thomas Cromwell before his execution

Yesterday, with Phoebe riding on her father's back in her brand new "Little Life"  back carrier, we undertook a country walk of some three miles after parking at Launde Abbey. We were on the eastern edge of Leicestershire and in fact strayed over into Rutland on the middle section of the walk.

The weather remained beautifully warm as we tramped along to Withcote before heading back south to Launde Abbey. This historical mansion was home to Gregory Cromwell, the son of Thomas Cromwell who was Henry VIII's right-hand man during the time of  The Dissolution of the Monasteries. Much of the stone came from the ruins of the original Launde Abbey - built some four hundred years earlier.

The place is now a Christian retreat and as God-fearing Christians we visited the Abbey's cafe where Stew and I had bacon. lettuce and tomato sandwiches and Frances ordered a cheese and onion panini. Shirley asked if they did "cheese salad" - meaning a cheese salad sandwich. In the event, the waitress brought an actual cheese salad on a big plate. So it goes. She only ate half of it.

Detail of a sculpture in the grounds of Launde Abbey

Soon afterwards, Stewart headed back to Sheffield for three days of work. He will return on Thursday night. 

Loddington Church - with the professor crouched to the left

Late yesterday afternoon, Clint kindly transported me to the tiny village of Loddington with its remote church dedicated to St Michael and All Angels. There I met a fellow in a red T-shirt. He was sitting patiently painting a watercolour in his little art book and he kindly showed me several of his other paintings. Turns out he was a retired professor of history from The University of Leicester. It also turns out that ten years ago he nearly died following a road collision in East Yorkshire that was not his fault. He was hit by a nineteen year old carpet fitter who had just been to the pub and was travelling far too fast in a company van. The professor spent a month in hospital as his bones mended.

We conversed for half an hour and I could have easily talked with him for hours. It was nice to meet someone like that.  We connected,  far from the madding crowd, in the rural heart of Leicestershire and then said our goodbyes.

Rambling

 

A  window in St John the Baptist Church, Goadby

All is well here in the heart of Leicestershire. It is 6.50 am on Monday morning and I am here at the dining table with the twelfth century tower of St Thomas a Becket church staring down at me from across our neighbours' garden.

Saturday was a grey overcast day though dry and warm enough. We headed up to Melton Mowbray for a look round and lunch before moving on to Oakham which is the capital of England's smallest county - Rutland. Rutland's motto is "Multum in Parvo" which means "Much in Little". We mooched around and eventually drifted over to The Grainstore Brewery near the railway station for liquid refreshment.

Famous pork pie shop in Melton Mowbray

The Castle Hall at Oakham - a Norman building

In the evening , after a homemade spaghetti bolognaise, we watched "Baby Driver" courtesy of Netflix. There were a lot of cars chasing around and crashing into each other as police sirens screamed. To me it was all unbelievable silliness that I felt pretty detached from. Not my kind of film at all.

On Sunday, summer returned. Stewart and I  set off from the house for a long circular walk that took in the villages of Rolleston and Goadby. We were both wishing that we had worn shorts as the morning's thermometer rose. We rambled over rolling agricultural land noticing that some crops had already been harvested while others waited.

Lone swan at Rolleston

Rolleston is what is known as an "estate village", dominated by Rolleston Hall. There pheasants dashed about ignorant of the fact that they will soon be blasted to bits by rich people with guns. They call it sport but I call it cruelty. Meanwhile a lone swan floated serenely upon the lake.

Goadby was a delightful, well-heeled settlement with a lovely little church dedicated to St John the Baptist. We went inside and felt its peace. I prayed for the pheasants.

We had to chop a mile or so off our walk in order to get back to Tugby in good time for Sunday lunch which was booked for one o'clock  at "The Fox and Hounds". And what a delightful lunch it was too - all homemade with a medley of vegetables, luscious slices of shin of beef and excellent Yorkshire puddings that suggested the chef must have been trained in Yorkshire! When the landlord asked if we had enjoyed our meal I said, "That's the best Sunday dinner I have had in a long time" and I meant it.

Later we watched England's football team beat Andorra by four goals to nil and for tea we had wedges of Melton Mowbray pork pie with salad, olive bread and creamy Stilton cheese produced here in Leicestershire.

What a grand day Sunday September 5th was - a simple day to remember sweetly when life was good. With the weather set fair for the next three days, it seems we have accidentally picked a lovely week.

The church behind our house in Tugby - dedicated to St Thomas a Becket

Tugby

Well here we are in Las Vegas Tugby for our holiday away from home. Tugby is  a small village in Leicestershire some twelve miles east of the city of Leicester. See the middle house in the picture. That is where we are staying. It is called Chestnut Cottage and it is nice, clean, well-maintained  and spacious. Behind our rental home is the Norman tower of St Thomas a Becket Church. The cottage on the left was once the village smithy where the blacksmith worked on farm implements, horseshoes, hinges and general wrought ironwork.

Across the road from us is the village's little primary school that serves  nearby villages as well as Tugby. Just down the street is "The Fox and Hounds" pub where we have reserved a table for Sunday lunch. The pub is only open from Wednesday to Sunday but at least this village still has a pub - unlike so many other English villages in which hundreds of pub landlords and landladies gave up the ghost long ago.

Frances, Stewart and Phoebe arrived a few hours before us because Nurse Shirley was working till six yesterday. We arrived here bang on eight o'clock last night to be greeted by the aromas of a lovely Moroccan meal  that Frances and Stew had prepared for us. Little Phoebe was refusing to settle down to sleep and there were tiny baby tears on her cheeks so we brought her down to watch us eat.

I am looking forward to walking some paths I have never walked before and visiting towns I do not know like Uppingham, Market Harborough, Oakham and somewhere I have been before - Melton Mowbray which is famous for its pork pies. Oh we will be grand here in Tugby. Unlike Las Vegas, there are no casinos or neon lights but there is a path that leads over the fields to Rolleston and I shall go there.

Hope

Of course William Jefferson Clinton, the 42nd president of America, was born in  a place called Hope in Arkansas. He was well aware of the poetic possibilities of that place name. In 1992 he said, "I still believe in a place called Hope".

Long term visitors to this blog may remember that there's another place called Hope in England. It sits in the centre of The Hope Valley - just five miles from this keyboard. I have often been there and I guess that I have walked every path in that green valley.

Yesterday, I was in Hope once more. I parked Clint near the village's little country station. It is on the line between Sheffield and Manchester. There were nine other cars parked there.

Soon I was heading up the valley side -  on my way to the hamlet of Aston - then up the narrow lane to Edge Farm where I paused upon a convenient memorial bench to look at the view while chomping on the juicy apple I had squeezed into my camera case.

Then more upward motion before turning down to Twitchill Farm. There I spotted a sign on the gate: "DO NOT  STOP IN THE FARMYARD". Of course I was on a public footpath so I made a point of stopping in the farmyard and checking out the three holiday cottages there.

Soon I was back in Hope walking by The River Noe - depleted by the dryness of this disappearing summer. The familiar grey canopy above had been prised open by sunshine and the world was now once again in technicolour. Let's hope that it stays that way for our cottage holiday in Leicestershire - beginning later today.

Nonsense

"Believe in yourself and follow your dreams!"..."You can be anything you want to be!"... These are expressions that always rankle with me. They are usually doled out by apparently "successful" people who by talent or good fortune happen to be walking in the limelight and seem to imagine that we can all go there if only we believe in ourselves. It is, in my view, utter nonsense.

"You can be what you want to be..." Okay then, what about someone with Down's Syndrome. Could he or she get to be  an astrophysicist? Could a person without legs get to be an Olympic long jumper?  And if everybody desperately wanted to be the prime minister of this fair kingdom how would that happen when at any time there can only be one vacancy?

If everybody got to be what they wanted to be, the world would be filled with pop singers, professional footballers, novelists, ballet dancers and film stars. We would all be living in mansions with swimming pools and remote control gateways through which we would swish by in Italian sportscars.

Who would sweep the streets? Who would pick the vegetables? Who would dig the drainage trenches? Who would clean aircraft cabins in the middle of the night? Who would nurse poorly patients in hospitals? Who would drive the buses and the trains and who would cut the grass? Who would service conveyor belts in factories or fix broken streetlights or bake bread or paint railings? Utter nonsense.

As I have been writing this, two women have appeared across the street in an old silver car. They have climbed out and got their stuff from the back - buckets and mops etcetera. They have come to clean Number 175 as they do every week. Do you think that this is what they wanted to be - domestic cleaners? But it's a job that needs doing. Somebody's got to do it and they are nobly earning cash to support their families instead of following their dreams. It's the same with the pair of helpers who every day visit housebound Eileen at Number 184. Being what they want to be? No way - but still fulfilling an important role in our society.

If you truly believe that we can all be what we want to be, please keep that trite opinion to yourself while the rest of us just get on with living, accepting the cards that have been dealt to us, trying to be happy.