Italy: Trieste?

Every now and then I get the feeling I'd like to return to certain places which had made an impression on me, and see what I think of them now.   In one of these periods of musing the other day I wondered about returning to Trieste, that strange Austrian-style corner of Italy, which doesn't feel like Italy at all.   

What has stayed with me about Trieste was the strange atmosphere of the place, described by one of its chroniclers, Jan Morris, as  "The Capital of Nowhere."   It was once the third largest town in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and it is still a big city full of important buildings,  and yet the mood in the city was  curiously provincial and remote.    People there speak Italian, but when I was there the atmosphere stirred ancient memories of my childhood trips to Austria, which  (on my occasional visits from Germany) exuded an air of faded grandeur that strongly resembled Germany but didn't actually feel like it at all.   

The food certainly seemed more Germanic than Italian. There were quite a few humble little cafes, known as "Buffets" around the place, which were notable for selling almost nothing but meat and meat products, along with pretty good beer. 

Not that the picture above was taken in a Buffet.  No, that was home made produce in an Osteria, a kind of seasonal artisan farm restaurant to be found in the wild Carso countryside which overlooks the city.  They only open during certain times and you can find them by seeing the leafy branch they hang on their front door.    I don't really know anywhere other than Trieste which has anything similar,  nor did I find out how the places make a living if they are not open all the time. 

And by the way, what about these direction signs I snapped in the Carso? What language are they in? 

To reach the Carso it is best to take the Opicina Tramway, whose elderly trams transform themselves into cog railways halfway up a suburban hill, and continue on a steep hill climb.    Of course all the passengers take it for granted, but I found it a most peculiar experience. 

So I'd love to revisit Trieste, but I need more of a reason to go than things I have already noticed.    I guess I am afraid that in the years I have been away, Trieste might have changed into something more ordinary than it was, and if I want to experience that slightly other worldly atmosphere again, I should go soon.  Or I might be too late already.  I know that the large cruise liners which used to loom over Venice now often call there, and this giant influx of tourists has been followed by the inevitable growth of places selling tourist tat to the hordes.  What I read of Trieste now sounds far more slick than it was, with the kind of cool bars and foodie destinations you find everywhere from Amsterdam to New Zealand to Rome.  

Of course, the big sights of the city are still there:  the handsome old cathedral, and the unutterably romantic Miramar, overlooking the sea....here is the Miramar terrace on a stormy afternoon with flashes of sun.....

And the Castello di Duino is still going strong. It's one of the homes of the Thurn und Taxis aristocratic dynasty, some of whom were serving in the gift shop when I was there - I wonder if they still do. Duino overlooks the Gulf of Trieste, which was a luminous greenish blue when I visited, against which the Italian style tiled roofs flared like sunshine.   Here is a photo I took  among the rooftops, towards the outline of Croatia in the stormy distance.  

  

,... which gets me wondering what Croatia is like.   Perhaps I should go to Croatia instead. .....?

 

Spanish!

I've actually been to Spain twice in the few weeks since my last post.  When I wrote it, we were in Madrid with young S. who was taking some time off from his postgrad studies.   We'd all been to Madrid before, so we were skipping the big attractions like the Prado and royal palace, and walking round exploring instead. As usual, this threw up some unexpected things.      

On our first day,  after a home-style Peruvian breakfast in Mercado de Los Mostenses (a  non-touristy indoor market which turned out to be very near our apartment) we set off to find the main history museum of Madrid.   But long before we got there, we passed a large old  institutional building which seemed to be running an art show open to the public. 

The building was Madrid's School of Applied Arts, whose  name suggests it might teach students how to earn a practical living with art - (what perhaps used to be called "commercial art") by using craft skills.    I didn't discover if I was right, but we liked the place and were struck by some of the work which transformed well known pictures and sculptures in various ways. 

This, for instance, is Picasso's "Guernica" recreated in three dimensions, in wood.  I haven't a clue why it was done, but as soon as I saw it I was struck by the right hand half of the picture, which gave me more of a feeling of the horrible physical chaos and muddle of war than the original painting, which you can see here.   

There was some great student work on display, of which my favourite was a case containing portraits of ordinary people in the style of the Jim Henson's Muppets.  I loved the typically Muppety caricatures, kindly but lifelike, which ssomehow suggest how real people might move, behave and speak.  In fact, if I was to commission a portrait of myself, I might have it done in this style.

As it was the Christmas holidays, the college had classes for both adults and young kids, which I was also a bit baffled by.  Perhaps local people would have known immediately what this crowd was doing with their green faces and Santa hats (several had top hats, which I didn't manage to photograph) ...maybe they were being elves?  (But do elves wear black berets?)  If you are Spanish, maybe you could let me know what it could be all about. 

I was last in Madrid about twelve years ago, and one thing I noticed was how much more seafood is now offered by restaurants and shops.   That is because I am unfortunately allergic to seafood.  I found it a problem when I couldn't find a single ready meal in the supermarket that didn't contain seafood,  and when we went to the family run local restaurants across the road,  every single dish included seafood. T and S. both like seafood, and additionally S. is a big fan of meat which T and I are not, as we like healthy salads best but S. isn't very keen on those  ..... well, anyway the point of  this is that it was surprisingly difficult to find somewhere we ALL wanted to eat.  So one of my big discoveries in Madrid was a chain called Honest Greens, which is now to be found in several European cities.  It does modern healthy food in a stylish environment at reasonable prices and we ALL felt happy with the choices it offered!  

As Christmas was coming up, we really enjoyed the lights. The big department store, El Corte Inglés,  had a remarkable front facade of yellow and white light outlining the Three Kings, and, at the back, a construction which they bring out every Christmas called Cortylandia.      This is a giant automaton sporting rabbits and birds and elves, which changes colour and plays music.  My picture shows it "asleep" and bathed in blue light, but at specified hours it all comes to life, colours sweep over it and it plays loud carols and other music. It's not Disneyland, but it's apparently an institution in Madrid and so we rather liked joining the crowds of families with their churros and chocolate in the evening to watch it do its stuff.

We sought out a few of Madrid's quirkier attractions, such as the museum of metro trains which you can visit free of charge in a dedicated section of Chamartin underground station.    My favourite was a magnificently restored 1920s model, which ran on a narrow gauge line.  Some of these trains remained in service till the 1980s, and must have become rather shabby in the end,  so it was good to see  this perfectly restored example.   

Look at the ornate brass, the little lights, the glossiness and glassiness, the elegant fawn seats and the little oval signs intended for advertising, not to mention the  instruction "No se debe escupir" which means "Do not Spit" - a reminder to passengers to behave appropriately too!  

 Just before Christmas, S. headed home to England, and we continued to Fuengirola, a cheerful Andalucian seaside resort where family and friends often congregate. Fuengirola has lots and lots of very good restaurants and it's nice that the local council works hard to create a pleasant, relaxing atmosphere in the town.  So, for example, the park-like space in front of the town hall was decorated with big Christmas lights and constructions which earlier in the evening attracted lots of families with small children. 

The town museum hosted a stylish display of belenes, or Spanish Christmas crib scenes.   These belenes usually depict a whole village, with everyone going about their daily lives and being taken by surprise by the birth of Christ, and all the angels, camels, jewels, kings and associated miracles.  

Baby Jesus took centre place at the exhibition entrance, and you could visit several rooms filled with belenes in different styles. 

This model is very realistic, showing a Middle Eastern village where everyone is buying and selling and going about their daily lives - even the lottery vendor, who you see in the foreground with all his tickets, and the donkey taking a well earned rest by a palm tree.   Other parts of the model showed Roman soldiers, and all the remarkable visitors gathered at the tumbledown stable where Mary and Joseph sat with baby Jesus.  

That model could hardly be more different from the one shown below, which was made by local primary school children.  I was delighted with it; everyone looks so cheerful, and do you like the toilet roll pig in its sty at the back? 

Another of my favourite belens was crocheted, and represented modern Fuengirola, with pizza sellers, holidaymakers, angels and dancers in traditional costumes (below right of the picture.)

  We stayed in an apartment overlooking the main square, which always had something going on - carols, traditional singers or bands. And, with our friends, we attended Christmas Mass in a small tiled church,tucked away in a shopping centre. (It seems the centre was built by an Irish developer who always put churches in his shopping developments. )  The service was sincere and touching, attended both by English speaking Catholics and the congregation of a South American church. So it was a very happy and pleasant Christmas.  

When we got back to England after our trip, it was mid afternoon, but the sky was dark. Most of the landscape was shrouded by freezing grey fog and I swear the railway stop lights were the only bit of real colour to be seen amidst the ocean of chilly greyness - trees, grass, houses... even the train was decorated in shades of grey.  

As we trundled off slowly to London, T. looked out of the window at the uninspiring scene and said, "I wish we could go back to Spain."  And I agreed with him so much that when we got home I spent an evening researching the cheapest possible break to Malaga and booked it for the beginning of February.    

We are now back from that break, and it's still cold and pretty grey in England, but I feel sustained by that extra shot of Southern Spanishness.  Malaga is an ancient, historically fascinating and very cultured city, with dozens of museums.  We know it well, so spent a lot of time just strolling, or sitting in the sun.  These pictures show what it was like, and it honestly felt as if we'd taken a bit of time travel straight through to summer! 

Where would YOU choose to go to get away from a dismal winter?

Feliz Navidad! Merry Christmas!

Blogger barely works on my phone, but I wanted to wish you   Merry Christmas from Madrid!   It's very cheerful with the street packed with people...

So let me just wish you very  happy holidays, and I will post more when i'm back.  Meanwhile, here (I hope) is a popular little  Spanish Christmas carol!  

Vienna - an Archduchess, a Funfair, a Populist and some Art.

Our trip to Vienna was great.  We were travelling with S, our oldest grandson, and staying in a curious and slightly decrepit apartment in a posh street of mansions rather like these.  

One day the owners of this apartment will probably spend a fortune modernising it and turning it into something sleek and conventional. But we liked the faded, almost romantic atmosphere of its big, high rooms, dusty staircase and warren of tiny offices on the other floors.

Young S. discovered that it had had once been the home of the Archduchess Elisabeth Maria Henrietta, daughter of Prince Rudolf, who was all set to inherit the throne of the Habsburg Empire.   

Unfortunately Prince Rudolf died when the archduchess was young,  in an apparent suicide pact with his mistress,  so she never had the chance be the daughter of an Emperor.  It seemed she didn't want to be one,  anyway, and her subsequent life took some sensational twists and turns. But more of that later.....  

Each day we'd descend the stone spiral back staircase, go through the arched entrance hall with its huge lantern hanging overhead, and out of  the heavy double doors to explore Vienna.  

We liked the Prater, Vienna's vintage amusement park, which over the years has accumulated acres of wooded grounds traversed by a miniature diesel-engined railroad, a running track, many 1970s-looking animatronic rides, a virtual reality parlour, terrifying looking chair swings, and a model railway layout  of Vienna which shows the city both by night and by day.   Plus, of course, all the usual fairground attractions like dodgems and a ferris wheel - the Prater's wheel featured in the 1949 film, The Third Man (click here for the scene).  I guess this, below, is supposed to be the wild west - at present those galloping horses are about to run right into a gate. 

Below, I was completely fooled by a mirror maze bathed in lurid multi coloured light, sometimes green, sometimes red and sometimes blue.  Perhaps I've had a sheltered life but I hadn't been in one of these things before. 

There was also an excellent display of award winning Austrian photographs, with each photo blown up large and displayed all around the park.     The one below specially caught my eye. It is entitled "Old Franz's 85th birthday" and I love this loden-clad old man, complete with gun, exchanging a kiss with his wife.  

   

The Prater couldn't be more different from the   "Kunstkammer" where we went the following day. This suite of galleries occupies one floor of Vienna's main art museum, the vast Kunst Historisches Museum, and comprises 20 giant rooms packed with unimaginably valuable items collected by generations of Habsburg emperors and their families.  

 I don't want to disrespect Britain's Crown Jewels or anything,  but if you really want to see the world's most skilled craftsmanship in porcelain, gold, silver and precious stones, in the shape of countless ornaments, decorations, salvers, plates, dishes, goblets, table settings,  automata, devotional items and more, then this place should be at the top of your list.

It's impossible to convey the enormous scale of the display, but here are a few of the items which caught my eye.  They include three of the many automata - ornaments that move or perform in some way.    This ship, a gilded banqueting table centrepiece, will roll across the table firing cannons as the crew move to music.

Here is a company of gold and enamelled musicians promenading on an ebony balcony.  

This large gold bell-tower automaton was based on the stage scenery of a play once attended by the emperor. 

I was also impressed by a very large calculator, made in 1727 which is supposedly for land surveying, although I doubt it made many surveying trips outside. 

This tiny object, known as a "prayer nut" (it's about the size of a walnut in its shell), is hang on a rosary.  I have enlarged it considerably because the carving is too small to be seen properly, at least by me.  I can't think how any one ever created it by hand. 

And here is a tantalus, a vessel for alcoholic drink, dressed up as a seated man literally wearing a table of food.  

 

 I can't vouch for the number of galleries, because I only managed to get through six of them, and that's because we only saw them towards the end of the day. Most of the time we'd been looking at paintings, followed by a pit stop snack in the museum cafe served by waiters (below)  It's not quite as pricey as it looks, which is good because I didn't spot anywhere else to eat. 

For me, the Dutch and Flemish paintings were the main attraction, particularly several big canvases by Bruegel the Elder, (b. 1589).  I visited them years ago and had been so frustrated because  they're so intricate that printed reproductions don't fully resolve the fine detail, and yet the canvases are too large to examine closely on the wall.   Last time I went without a camera,  but this time I managed to capture sections which are easily missed even in large reproductions. 

What makes them so interesting is that Bruegel was a painter of peasant life, which mostly went unrecorded simply because nobody in those days was very interested in what peasants did.   It's such a window into the past.   Here's a fraction of a canvas portraying peasant games, pastimes and other leisure activities. You can see how old ladies sit companionably together outside the church, drunks sprawl on the benches outside the inn. A couple of people are fighting, and something is happening that looks like a conga.  Some folk play a game involving tossing balls into holes in the ground, while a boy in a chair tries to beat off his friends running around him and teasing him.  There may be some sort of small religious procession in the foreground, and I think that boys in the distance are lining up to jump over a broom. Even further away,  a bonfire is under construction.   

You might have to search the whole painting (below) before you spot the location of all this activity,  though.  

I was sorry to miss the other 15 or so galleries of the Kunstkammer, (not to mention at least another whole floor of the museum), but actually the Kunst Historisches Museum is a bit overwhelming and I felt more at home in the  Wien Museum,   which is near the Charles Church, not far away. 

Unusually for Vienna, the Wien Museum it is free to enter, so you can drop in when it suits you, and, in my view, better appreciate what it has to say. It is a modern museum which explains the city's story with the help of objects - paintings, posters, books, furniture and so on.    I was struck by a painting celebrating Vienna's first ever municipal gas supply. It's reasonably competent art, but the interest lies in its story. It was commissioned by a deeply controversial man, Karl Lueger, who was mayor of Vienna between 1897 and 1910, and was in the habit of hiring artists to paint pictures that promoted himself. 

This picture is large, and divided into three parts... It's big and hard to photograph but this is an overview, showing the period "before the arrival of town gas" to the left, "after town gas" to the right and, in the middle, two symbolic female figures. 

In "Before,"  (below) Vienna is made ugly by its coal-gas factories and charcoal production.   Both the rich and poor struggle in this dirty place to see their way through smog, crowds, animals and piles of goods.  They are illuminated only by the inefficient, "fish tail"  burners  of the time, which were dim, and stank, and flickered so maddeningly that they made people ill. 

The next detail (below) shows two female symbolic figures  The top one represents Vienna,  carrying a new gas lamp like a sceptre.   Below her dainty feet crouches Britannia, representing the British company that previously supplied gas to the city. She is utterly wretched, crouching humiliated in the dirt with her primitive streetlamp smashed, and her dirty old gas pipe cracked.  

To the right, rich men and clergy stroll along outside the cathedral, and beneath them, Vienna's magnificent, then-modern town hall (built 1872-83) looms over a well tended park, bright with modern gas lighting and packed with the rich bourgeois. 

You will observe Karl Lueger, flatteringly portrayed as more handsome than he appears in photos, lifting his silk hat graciously.   Those shown around him appear to have been painted from life, and may have been local dignitaries.  But the ones I couldn't take my eyes off were the three women so prominently shown in front of him.  

 Leuger took care to be seen with women supporters.  Although they couldn't vote, he calculated that women could influence their husbands and children to elect  him, and like many populists of the time, he enjoyed an ardent  female fanbase of women who needed somewhere to direct their emotions.   They were  known at the time as "Lueger's Amazons"  (female warriors).   

 In those days, a celibate man was admired, and so Lueger remained unmarried and said he was devoting himself to his work.   (After his death his mistress published a candid memoir which revealed  a different side of him, however. How shocked those respectable Amazons might have been if they had known!)

Are these three ladies members of his tribe of "Amazons"?    When I first saw them I certainly felt uncomfortable.   The rich, well dressed one on the left has the cold stare of a wicked queen, the one in the middle is wearing a creature on her head resembling a cross between a bird of prey and a stealth missile,  and the one on the right ....well.... I dunno.  I just wouldn't like to meet any of them on a dark night, well-illuminated or not. 

Leuger laid the foundations for Vienna's excellent infrastructure, which has stood the city in good stead.  But antisemitism, misogyny and hate were the tools he used to gain support.  He told the usual far right story of "we're in a mess because of .... [insert name of scapegoats]" which speaks to the most primitive human emotions, and usually works, however illogical the reasoning that is offered to support it.    

 In fact, the Emperor of Austria, Franz Joseph, personally loathed Leuger, disapproving so strongly of his divisive approach that he refused three times to confirm him as Vienna's mayor. Still, 

 when the Emperor was finally persuaded to give way, Leuger was elected with a huge majority, so cultivating the ladies obviously paid off.   Perhaps they didn't believe they themselves were included in the women whose fault things were. 

The museum also displays a beautiful ceremonial chair (above) that Lueger designed for himself. The craftsmen who made it hid a note inside the chair's structure which was only discovered a hundred years later,  when it needed to be conserved.  The note said how much they hated him.  These days in the city's Lueger Square, his statue is regularly defaced, and nobody is quite sure what to do with it.  

Lueger died in 1910, and then there was the First World War.  After that, Vienna became extremely left wing: the period is called "Red Vienna" and all kinds of social innovations were made which further improved the infrastructure.   You can sometimes spot artwork around the city that comes from this period, like this Communist style mural of happy healthy children on a block of flats.

 

Vienna is famous for its coffee and cream cakes, and many of the traditional coffee shops attract long queues of tourists. They have prices to match and rude or indifferent service. We didn't eat out much, but did visit the Cafe Central, because that is not only historic but also has a good reputation, which we found it lived up to.  

On one cold and blustery day we lunched in its glassed-over courtyard,several stories high with a slightly  Palm Court atmosphere. Here, a kind and friendly waiter helped to make our meal really cosy and congenial - and the cakes were great! 

We also loved The Third Man Museum.  You have to plan carefully to be able to visit, as it is only open for a few hours once a week,  but it's  run by real hardcore fans of The Third Man film, who have funded the whole thing themselves. They have spared no time and expense in putting together one of the very best private collections of film memorabilia and Viennese wartime history that I have ever seen.  Throughout the museum  you can find videos of relevant interviews they have conducted, and visits they have taken to pursue aspects of "Third Man" lore. (Who knew that Osaka Central railway station played the "Third Man" theme to announce the departure of the day's last train?) 

I was enchanted by a 1980s interview with the man who had played five-year-old "Little Hans" in the film. ( You'll find him in picture No. 47 on the Third Man page here)  

He was likeable, genial and full of amusing anecdotes, and pointed out that the half-ruined Vienna tof the film was just a playground to him in those days.

The museum has a section full of memorabilia of this curious post war period when the bomb-shattered city was divided into "zones" run by Britain, the US and Russia.  Everything from care packages to military memos and American soldiers' letters home showed the human side of this curious historical interlude. 

We visited many other things in Vienna, including the personal railway station built for the last emperor. It was built by Otto Wagner, a groundbreaking architect of the late 19th and early 20th century who deserved to be world famous but unluckily made little impact outside Vienna.  Even here, not much of his work has survived, and this is one of very few buildings that still exists relatively unaltered. 

He had the difficult task of building something incredibly imperial on a budget, so the decoration on the waiting room (for instance)  is only woven into fabric instead of inlaid in wood as one might expect.  This octagonal room features a magnificent painting showing an eagle's eye view of the city, but because of poor old Otto Wagner's bad luck, even this little gem narrowly escaped permanent disfigurement, and was restored only in this century.

Oh,  I'll just tell you a little more about the Archduchess who had once lived in our accommodation. Poor woman, her family was about as dysfunctional as a family could be, and she was not an easy person herself.  During her tempestuous life, she shot a love rival, who later died, employed armed guards to ensure she had custody of her children, and became such an ardent socialist that she took her son out of school and set him to work in a factory. Her biography on Wikipedia reads like part of the synopsis of a family saga about the Habsburgs.  It is interesting, but we were glad that she didn't live in the house any more! 

Near Shrewsbury

 I went to Shrewsbury in Shropshire a few weeks ago, a nice old city full of half timbered buildings of all sizes and with plenty of interesting things to see.  We liked the huge medieval church of St. Mary in the centre of town, open to all to explore,  and busy with exhibitions and special events.   It has a big shady churchyard  excellent cafe, and all its fixtures and fittings are being preserved.  Of all those fine fittings, it was this huge yellow clock from 1747 that appealed to me most.  It was probably intended for use in the service quarters of the church, (now the cafe), but I think it is so elegant and simple.  I think I might like to decorate one of my rooms in this appealing colour scheme of yellow and gold.

 

Shropshire adjoins several different counties, and since we are not often in that part of the world it seemed like a good idea to explore the area a bit.  In a drive that took us into neighbouring Worcestershire, we passed a sort of castle by the side of the road.  It looked to be a  gatehouse and lodge of some old mansion, likely built in the same castle-like style. 

I couldn't find any castles on the satellite map, but since a little sign stood nearby indicating that a public right of way went through the gate, we parked and walked right in to explore.

 After a couple of hundred feet it felt as if we'd entered another realm. It was wonderful.  Acres of crops full of wild flowers stretched out on either side, and no sound but the distant lowing of cattle and hundreds of birds.  It was like a nature reserve, with every hedge and field full of variety and different from the last one.  We couldn't believe it. 

   But, as the cynics say, there is a worm in every bud, and as we got back to the car I noticed a house opposite had a big sign in its window proclaiming "NO QUARRY!"  So when we returned to our Airbnb, I checked up and learned that the land'had once been the grounds of a stately home known as Lea Castle..   Here's a photograph of Lea Castle taken about 100 years ago. 

It seems that so many of Britain's country houses, it fell on hard times and was demolished, and after a while a villagey little care centre for people with learning difficulties was built in one bit of the land .  That has now gone, and there's also a small private housing estate on another bit of the land, though we didn't see it.  All we saw was a riding stables and the farm - all that unspoiled and curiously old fashioned farmland full of heartsease and St. Johns Wort and poppies and broom,  skylarks and a huge colony of rooks. 

Anyway, the quarry.   It seems the farm's owner (opposed by his environmentalist son, apparently) is determined to turn the whole place into a huge quarry which would tear up the whole lot up to extract  sand and gravel for construction. That would mean noise, pollution and constant heavy traffic transporting the sand and gravel.   Many local people think it will be far too near schools and residential buildings to be safe, and earlier this year they  took the developers to court to stop the scheme.   They won, but, predictably, the developer appealed.  When you consider how much money is to be made, the cost of prolonging a court battle must be negligible to a big company, I guess. .

It isn't fair, but the local people have to muster again for another fight.  Read about their campaign  here,  They're fundraising like crazy, seeking volunteer advisors with planning and legal expertise and organising public events. It's like David against Goliath, but I've contributed to their appeal.    I wondered if they could try and get the place designated as a nature reserve, but I don't know if that would be possible. . 

Another day I went from Shrewsbury into South Staffordshire to see the extraordinary rock houses at Kinver Edge, now in the care of the National Trust.  With views over the surrounding wooded hills, these unusual cottages were created a long time ago (nobody knows exactly when) when people burrowed into a bluff of red sandstone called Holy Austen Rock, near the interesting village of Kinver. Some of the dwellings were inhabited until well into the 20th century, and it is said that they were considered rather desirable by many people - at least, tcompared with the draughty ramshackle old cottages where most poor people lived a century and more ago.   But times change, and the houses had been abandoned for years when the Trust took them over. 

  Here's the path from the rock houses down to the village. 

Below, the large tree conceals quite a lot of the site, which is bigger than it looks here. It is built on  three levels, although only a few of the dwellings have been restored or re-purposed so far. 

Something is known of the residents and a few were photographed going about their lives. I snapped one print that I specially liked. It reminded me of the Hobbits, and I love the tin chimney sticking out of the rock! 

One of the cottages is now colonised by bats (it is a cave, after all). Not sure how they get in and out but obviously not through the front door... 

A couple of rooms in the restored cottages have been furnished to look as they did in the early 1900s.  Quite a snug home it must have been - well insulated by all the rock I think.  And that coal range would have been delightful on a lonely winter night. 

A teashop and a respectable Victorian villa are built into the rock face on the top level of the settlement so we bought some tea and sat in a delightful garden amidst the red rocks and looked at the view while we had it. 

And at that point in August, I stopped writing the post, so there it is.....    But I did go to other places and one that I look back on fondly was taking our second oldest grandson, A, to  a Museum of Science Fiction in a lovely little town. 

It's  Bromyard, in Herefordshire, not so very far from Shrewsbury in fact. The museum's housed in an ancient house-turned-shop plus a network of underground cellars at one end of the High Street.  

Bromyard is the sort of large village or small town where cosy British murder mysteries tend to be set .   It is peaceful and well kept, and with baskets of flowers everywhere including the porch of this old pub I snapped in the evening.

Young A. really likes the long running British TV series  "Dr. Who. "   So do his brother and his parents.  In fact, if you're British, you have likely grown up with this iconic programme - I certainly did.   

It revolves around a traveller in space and time called "Dr. Who" and his companion who is generally the opposite sex to the Doctor, though they don't have a romantic relationship.   Both Doctor and companion regenerate into completely different people from time to time and every new Doctor and companion have very distinct styles and personalities.   Their vehicle through time and space is a vintage police phone box called the Tardis, whose main characteristic is being  infinitely larger inside than it appears outside.  

As you've probably guessed, the programme ranges very widely through different adventure scenarios.   Various Doctors  have, for instance,  been captured by stone age people trying to rediscover the secret of fire,  and hung out with Vincent Van Gogh in 19th century France. They have been embroiled in a future war created by a sinister algorithm, met thriller-writer Agatha Christie at a murderous 1926 dinner party, and got mixed up in a war between the Rutans and Sontaran clone species.  Or hundreds of other things.    They encounter other time-and-space travellers regularly (few of them pleasant) and many ohers highly inventive and often creepy monsters and aliens. 

 Of all the aliens in the show, by far the best known are the  Daleks which appeared at the beginning of the first ever series.  You will spot a couple of Daleks in the 18th century bow windows of the museum, and here are some more.

The Daleks are a bit worrying if you're four years old but after being around for about sixty years  they've now acquired a place in British society like the Doctor's familiar old friends who just happen to enjoy acting tough.  Their gravelly  monotone voices and catchword "EX-TER-MIN-ATE!" are even more distinctive  than their appendages made out of sink plungers. In fact, they've become so familiar they sometimes make welcome appearances at village fetes, and are sometimes even seen participating in  morris dances.  (And if you can find more unthreatening things than morris dancing, I'd like to know).    But that's good.    At least it is as far as I am concerned. 

The museum has a wonderful collection of props and memorabilia, relying heavier on the earlier episodes than the later ones.  And there's a full sized Tardis in the front office which was used for filming. 

And was pleased  see that K-9, the lovable robot dog, was there in the flesh, so to speak. Here is a poster of K-9  at school. 

For me the museum was all about the atmosphere: very immersive with lighting and sound effects, and a  rambling layout thats' almost entirely underground.   It is so wonderfully idiosyncratic because it all belongs to just one family, I was told.

We all loved it and also liked Bromyard, which has a nice bakery, some old pubs, and lots of individually run, interesting shops.   Original paintings were displayed in the windows of many of the shops as part of an town art trail and when I wandered into Bromyard art studios and gallery I could see why. It is a lively place which runs low cost professionally taught art classes which were clearly very popular and some people were producing some amazing work. Some was on commission, some was for sale.  This picture particularly caught my eye. It is a large canvas of "Leda and the Swan"  and I really liked its feeling of movement and mystery. 

So those were my two most recent trips away from home. Unfortunately I've now done something to my right leg and now staying at home resting it and hoping that I'll be okay to go to Austria in a couple of weeks time. Fingers crossed!