Over the years Bath Christmas Market has become a staple of mine and my friend’s annual Christmas outing. The atmosphere is always lovely and the stalls are genuinely full of beautiful unique products from local sellers. The centre of Bath is really taken over by the market but it’s also worth going into the brick and mortar shops as well because Bath is well known for its independent shops. Everywhere seems to get into the spirit with lovely decorations wherever you look.
In early October I headed to London to attend a couple of exhibitions, one of which was this exploration of the life of Ranjit Singh. I’m on the Wallace Collection‘s email list and it sounded like an interesting exhibition on a subject I know nothing about though I’m not sure I knew a great deal more than I did before. I’ve been to a few paid exhibitions at the Wallace Collection now and while they have interesting items on display I never feel they go into a great deal of depth about the subject matter. Still, I did learn more while researching this post so I suppose that’s something!
In mid November Nottingham, like many places in the UK, had its first snow of the season. We’d been expecting it but the amount certainly took people by surprise, myself included. It was perfect snow for going on a walk, compact and not slippery or icy. Since snow always helps get me in the Christmas mood I thought I’d share some photos of the snow, plus some of the Christmas markets/events I’ve attended so far this year.
Cambridge is full of small museums tucked away in university departments. I managed to tick off quite a few on my last visit to Cambridge but there were still some I wanted to visit which included the Museum of Classical Archaeology. Hidden away in the Faculty of Classics and up a short staircase (there is a lift available) the museum is free and contains over 450 plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculpture.
Like a lot of people I was gripped by the Paris Olympics and Paralympics over the summer – watching sports I’ve never even heard of is always compelling. When I was planning my trip to Cambridge I noted that the Fitzwilliam was putting on an exhibition about the previous Paris Olympics that took place in 1924. The exhibition was free/pay what you wish.
Last week I headed down to London for a couple of days to attend two exhibitions, the first of which was the Van Gogh exhibition at the National Gallery. Van Gogh is one of my favourite painters so when I saw the announcement I knew that I would be attending. The exhibition is being billed as a once in a century event and it was easy to see why, there are paintings on loan from galleries as far away as the United States and Japan and some that are in private collections and rarely ever seen in public. There were also paintings that are displayed together again for the first time since Van Gogh painted them.
Situated next to the entrance to the driveway down to Gedling House is the entrance to Gedling House Woods which I decided to visit after I’d been around the house. It was quite busy with dog walkers in the meadows area but I chose to follow the path through the woods and had them pretty much to myself, other than the squirrels.
I went to school in Gedling, right next to Gedling House, and so the building has always been a source of fascination – the house and grounds were naturally out of bounds for the pupils. One weekend in mid-September it was opened to the public for free as part of the Heritage Open Days and I jumped at the chance to have a look around. Built in 1790 as a home for a wealthy Nottingham banker it is now a Buddhist meditation centre.
A couple of weeks ago I headed out to Newark to find all the decorated book benches as part of an art trail by Newark Creates and Wild in Art. Many of you may be familiar with Wild in Art sculptures that pop up all over the country, and even as far away as Sydney and Sao Paulo. The last ones in Nottingham were the robins in 2018. You could pick up a free map from either the Palace Theatre, Newark Bus Station or download from the website. I was using a downloadable map on my phone until I fortuitously bumped into one of the people who’d organised the trail wrapping up some media interviews and she gave me a paper map. The trail finished on 5 September (this is one of a series of posts I had planned to put up before the event I was writing about finished but which got delayed due to a family medical emergency).
Every so often I do a post about the birds and animals I’ve photographed in the garden. We’ve had quite a few interesting visitors that I haven’t managed to photograph or that we’ve only caught on our nature camera overnight such as cats, hedgehogs, foxes and once quite memorably a badger but there are others that stuck around long enough for me to grab my camera. One such creature was this rat which had taken a liking to the seeds I put out for the birds (I moved the bird feeder around and took a break from re-filling it and this worked for a little while). [Since starting to write this post I found the rat dead in our garden – RIP].
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