Catching Up With Wimborne

Today I saw that the tree outside my window is starting to go yellow, and I am way behind. I meant to blog  about staying with our inlaws in Dorset. It was one of our best trips for ages, the weather was great and it was such a restful and carefree time - so it really deserves a post. 

Our inlaws live in Wimborne, a small country town which feels dominated by its large and imposing minster church, as you see.   Click here if you'd like to read more about Wimborne Minster.

Wimborne's a good place to shop, a good mix of locals and independents, including a bookshop and a record shop - the latter a real rarity these days. I specially liked the greengrocer in the square, too.

Our inlaws have a season ticket to Wimborne's Priest's House museum, one of the oldest buildings in town, so of course they took us there.   At one stage in its varied career, part of the Priest's House became a  "Miss Havisham" style Victorian stationers which was boarded up complete with all its stock in 1872 and only rediscovered decades later. There's a display in one of the rooms showing part of the stationer's as it was when open - except that all the shutters were closed and the room was lit only by lamplight.  Spooky!

Other rooms in the rambling old house show it in other periods. I fell in love with these painted cloth walls of the 17th century room. A cheaper alternative to tapestries, they were insulation for chilly rooms. If I ever have time, I'd like to do something like this myself. It's better than wallpaper because you can unroll the fabric and put it away for a while when you are tired of it.



Outside, there's a long, well stocked garden,  tended by local volunteers, with lawns, fruit trees, shrubs, flowers and plants, all centred on a first class tea room.

As I mentioned in this recent  post, we visited the National Trust's Kingston Lacy House, and on another day we packed a picnic and headed for the Blue Pool, near Wareham.

Decades ago, it was a clay pit, and its bright turquoise waters seem un-English somehow.  The once-industrial area has now reverted to nature and has been unobtrusively laid out with woodland paths, benches, etc. as well as plenty of places to scramble over hills and down dales.  Just the place for kids, of course.  We liked the cafe, designed in appealingly retro fifties style with turquoise touches to match the water, and enjoyed the little museum. There was also a large display of teddy bears, known as the Wareham Bears. Bears are not my cup of tea to be honest, but it was ingenious and the bear-loving visitors were entranced.

We spent most of the day at Blue Pool idling about, sitting around, talking and looking at the wildlife. At one point, we were joined for about half an hour by this robin which clearly had nothing else to do either...

We were also lucky enough to see a decorative dragonfly laying her eggs on a tree stump

Back in Wimborne, there was a small drama, with a chip pan fire not far from our inlaws' house.  Nobody was hurt, and normally I wouldn't have taken much notice, but one of their sons  happens to be a fireman, so we were able to see him and his colleagues at work.   I am only posting the picture because the affected place was insured and all was well - but it was impressive to see how well organised the firemen were, even for a small incident like this.

By the way, several of them told us they'd never have chip pans in their own homes!

We had a meal at the Anchor at Shapwick, a pub which seemed very popular and was quite hard to get in, even midweek.  Prices weren't high, and the food was good, so I recommend it if you are ever in the Wimborne area.

I also discovered rose lemonade. It is weird stuff, tasting of a mixture of lemons and roses - but it's perfect on a hot day.

This week I had a 2 hour interview about Lewis Carroll with CBC Toronto,  As I was a  journalist for many years, I still can't get over the slightly weird feeling of being on the other side of the mike, but the CBC interviewer, Cindy Bisaillon, was such a professional that it all seemed easy and fun.  There is talk of another translation of "The Mystery of Lewis Carroll" happening, so I'll be keeping my fingers crossed about that. 

At home, we had a house guest who is nuts about folk music and he introduced us to a whole new world which I will try to blog about soon.  We did some boat work, and since it was a real indian summer day today, it was a total pleasure to do it, even though some of it did involve emptying out bucketloads of bilge water and feeling like the Sorcerer's Apprentice.  

But the sun was shining down, swans were floating by and there were nice little boats all around, so who could really complain?

Do You Want to Be A Travel Writer?

This is Kingston Lacy, a National Trust house in Dorset. I was exploring it a couple of weeks ago (and yes, the sky really was that blue), when I saw a familiar face. A colleague was spending the morning there in preparation for a lecture he was due to give to an upscale tour group learning about English country houses. A nice job.  Two weeks of staying in fancy hotels, eating lovely dinners and giving lectures to very, very clever and knowledgable people.  He loved it, but said,  "it's not travel writing. That's the way of the world these days."

I don't usually write much here about the business of being a travel writer, although I see so many adverts for courses that promise to train people to be one.   Well, I am a travel writer, and I will explain part of the reason why I have been travelling less this summer, and will be travelling rather less in future, too.  I will be  It is not all bad news, but the business is changing.

I am lucky that editors want to use me and I am getting press trip invites  (lately to Sardinia, Northern Ireland, Turkey and Eastern Germany, though none of them hit the spot with me so I haven't accepted any.). And I have a couple of trips pencilled in for next year (notably Japan, with the book's new publication date)

Can't wait!  These pictures were taken in the depths of winter - bright, cold and beautiful.

But the hard fact is that even though we can still travel cheap or free and write about it, it has become difficult to make the same sort of money out of it as we once could. And making money - for everyone in business - is crucial.   As a kid, I used to wonder why Mum and Dad complained of being hard up when all they had to do was ask people in the bank for money.. And so it is with the freebies; they are not really free. Someone has to make money.

In the past, PRs could assess which publications got their clients the best ooverage and hence the most money. But blogging has confused the issue. These days, I sometimes feel that PRs and travel companies find blogs hard to evaluate.Some, of course are totally fabulous, but also utterly uncommercial, with hardly any readers.  Others, though full of sponsored trips, restaurant meals and overnight stays, are boring, and even if they have lots of page views, they lack reader reaction and involvement.    Neither type is an obvious winner from the travel company's point of view.

The most successful blogs either provide loads of useful information with a personal touch (like The Man In Seat 61) or very varied and personal, with polls, photos, trip descriptions and travel related issues all presented in a carefully structured magazine-like way. (see Andy Jarosz's fab "501 Places".)  But, even with an ideal blog, making money is not necessarily a piece of cake.

As Andy Jarosz says "No ads, no sponsored posts, no guest posts, no paid links."     . Hm.  So now you know, PRs....

Even if you own a great blog, making money from it can be hard work. Delightful though it may be to spend a week in Jordan or Portugal handed to you by a hopeful PR, it is not an automatic way to make money.   In fact, it's likely to cost you money - getting to the airport, buying yourself a coffee or a meal or two.   Really successful blog owners don't spend their whole lives travelling on freebies. They pop up all over the place too,  tweeting, pinteresting, facebooking.  They go on the radio and TV, they talk at conferences, libraries, women's institutes, community centres. They teach other people how to write about travel, and promote any other skills they might have - copywriting, teaching, lecturing..

On the other hand, though, they needn't work their way into that little closed world of editors and freelances in the way that used to be essential.   They can be their own people, do their own thing - and this is a big bonus.

So, you up and coming travel writers, the world is open to you. If I was starting out, I'd now be exploring all avenues for trips and sponsorship.  There are not many rules, nobody is entirely sure where they're headed, there are risks aplenty - but if you play it right, you could get to see places, meet people, build up your own networks, and maybe one day give up the day job - for a night and day job. :)

To get back to Kington Lacy.  My friend and I agreed that it is one of the nicest houses we know. Its main rooms all have very different atmospheres, and the attendants have many interesting stories to tell.  For instance, why are the enormous keys hung over the fireplace in the library (below)?    (Answer here)

The pink room below was charming.  Yes, it is cluttered, but the fashion a hundred years ago was for as many  tables, ornaments and plants as you could fit in.  I wonder how the ladies with their huge skirts managed to avoid demolishing the place. I am notoriously clumsy and tend to cannon into anything fragile within twenty feet.

I hope I would have managed not to destroy this beautiful table setting! . 

One huge and magnificent room was designed entirely to display Spanish paintings, with walls covered with tooled leather of the highest quality.

The kids were kept in the attics, as they so often were, along with the servants and mad relatives, I suppose. But these are very nice attic rooms, with sloping ceilings designed like a tent, with windows cunningly concealed behind the drapery.   

Outside, there are grounds and gardens, and some unusual oddities, like shepherd's huts and some adorable kune-kune piglets. 

The National Trust hasn't asked me to write this - in fact, they probably don't even know I visited, although  I have a NT press card which offers free entry to all their properties. It comes in so useful when you are looking for a nice tearoom, quite apart from the actual properties themselves.