England

Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers at the National Gallery, London

Posted on October 17, 2024 by Louise Jayne

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.

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Gedling House Woods and Meadows Nature Reserves, Nottingham

Posted on October 10, 2024 by Louise Jayne

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.

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Gedling House, Nottingham

Posted on October 3, 2024 by Louise Jayne

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.

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Book Bench Trail, Newark

Posted on September 17, 2024 by Louise Jayne

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).

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Garden Visitors

Posted on September 12, 2024 by Louise Jayne

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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Murder by the Book at Cambridge University Library

Posted on September 10, 2024 by Louise Jayne

My main motivation for travelling to Cambridge in August was to attend the Murder by the Book exhibition at Cambridge University Library (I had intended to get this post up before it finished on August 24th but a family medical emergency – now largely resolved – impacted all my plans). I’d never been up to the part of Cambridge where the library is located before which is the main research library of the university. Designed by Giles Gilbert Scott (designer of the red telephone box among other things) it opened in 1934.

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Grand Safari Trail at the Grand Arcade Shopping Centre, Cambridge

Posted on August 23, 2024 by Louise Jayne

Recently I was in Cambridge for a couple of days to visit some museum exhibitions but I didn’t have any plans for after my arrival late in the afternoon of my first day in the city. A chance mention of this trail on social media lead me to head out to the Grand Arcade Shopping Centre in the middle of Cambridge to see it for myself. There are 13 animals to find that are made from tiny bricks (they are part of BrickLive and therefore, as they are keen to point out, NOT Lego). The exhibition ends on 27th August.

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Nottingham Carnival Parade

Posted on August 20, 2024 by Louise Jayne

On Sunday afternoon I headed out to the Victoria Embankment in Nottingham to watch the Nottingham Carnival Parade. In fact, because my bus dropped me off at one end of Wilford Grove I walked along to the end of that stretch of road as I knew that was part of the parade route, rather than heading closer to the river. It proved to be a pretty good spot and I got there early enough to be at the front with plenty of space around – it definitely got busier as time went on.

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Attenborough Nature Reserve – August 2024

Posted on August 15, 2024 by Louise Jayne

After putting in some long hours at work recently (the joys of being self-employed!) I decided to take a random day off to enjoy the sunshine and headed out to Attenborough Nature Reserve. I’ve been here before a number of times but this time I travelled there from Nottingham on the train (an all day ticket is £3.70 and the journey takes around 10 minutes). Attenborough is a tiny station with only two platforms but the nature reserve is well signposted from there and it only takes about 5-10 minutes walk through some streets lined with very beautiful houses to reach one of the entrances to the reserve.

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Cambridge Statues

Posted on July 2, 2024 by Louise Jayne

Cambridge is a city where interesting sculptures and statues are at every corner, some ancient and some significantly less so. This post is about some of the pieces that caught my eye starting with this one outside the Department of Engineering. Dating from 1967 it is called Construction in Aluminium and was made by Kenneth Martin. Apparently it represents a formula used in jet propulsion and is one of about 40 sculptures in Cambridge with the specific aim of bringing public spaces back to life after World War II.

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