London, you blew my mind baby.

Everyone knows London rocks but in the most perfect of summer weather in July, it was going off like a frog in a sock. I have rarely experienced such joie de vivre and atmospheric buzz in a city. It was contagious.

The city was spectacularly described in the sunlight – bright and blue by day, soft and golden in the long, light evenings. And it was  heaving with people.  And squirrels.

Packed full of tourists (of course) but the bright young London things were out in droves too. It was a people-watcher’s dream.

I was last in London some 25 years ago. I was all of 11 and I flew over on my own (WHAT were my parents thinking?) to spend a month staying with my beloved cousin, aunt and uncle over Christmas.

It was a complete revelation for me, a bush-raised child, and I fell utterly and irrevocably in love. So much so that when I returned I couldn’t even read the glossy brochures I had brought back as souvenirs; it was too painful to be so very far away. This was back in the olden days when long-distance phone calls cost a bomb and  snail mail was the only other alternative.

The first thing I noticed about London, even at that tender age, was the way in which each and every atom of it seemed to exude its history. It felt so wonderfully old.  London’s history sang me a siren song and I absorbed it, if not the details then the atmosphere it created,  into my pores. I used to bore my cousin silly crapping on about how beautiful a small stone shop on the high street was. Or a street lamp (which was no doubt reproduction but that didn’t detract from its magic on a misty night).  I couldn’t get enough.

My aunt and uncle introduced me to Indian food, Tetley’s tea, washing your hair in the bath, Selfridges, The Body Shop and Aled Jones singing “Walking on the Air” on Christmas Eve as we peered out the tiny casement window from my cousin’s bedroom watching fat, sparkling snowflakes slowly blanket the backyard. We had prayed fervently for snow and when it arrived, I had my first travelling “moment”.

My aunt and uncle owned a fine china shop literally just around the corner from Covent Garden. My cousin and I would spend countless hours walking around the cobbled streets and covered markets, sniffing Body Shop products ( it had just opened), looking with longing in shop windows at cute fimo bear brooches (it was the 80s and we were young) and trying to scrounge enough pence together for a bag  o’ crisps (we were pre-teens and we were ravenous).

Then, exhausted and freezing, we would go back to the shop and curl up in its toasty-warm bowels  below the showroom floor and snooze on vast squeaky clouds of packing peanuts.

All of these memories came flooding back as I walked around London. I even managed to find my way from Covent Garden market to where my aunt and uncle’s shop was. It’s now a bodybuilding supplement shop. Not quite as atmospheric.

The heat wave made everyone crazy – in a good way. It was such a pleasure to see people dipping their feet in fountains and spilling out of quaint pubs, chatting to friends and enjoying a drink in the golden twilight at 10pm.

There were so many highlights on this trip. It was all one big highlight really. The Tower of London blew my mind (especially in light of watching The Tudors and reading Wolf Hall). Traitors’ Gate with the murky Thames seeping in underneath and the fierce – looking portcullis ready to slam shut behind as a prisoner was rowed inside was particular moving.

Poor Anne Boleyn. Poor all Henry VIII’s wives.

This is Boudica. We are obsessed with her at our house. She wouldn’t have stood for any of  Henry’s shite.

There are no words for just how incredible the British Museum is. As a language-lover, the Rosetta Stone just blew me completely away. Not least because I hadn’t known it was even there and so just wandered up to it and read the plaque. When I realised what I was looking at, I nearly fell over with excitement. Nerd.

This is the bust of a statue of Ramses II that, among others, inspired Shelley’s “Ozymandias“. Yaaaah, no biggie.

These Roman helmets – one from a soldier and one a venatores (net-wielding gladiator) were particularly awesome. Even in Rome it’s rare to see such well-preserved specimens.

Another highlight for me was the National Gallery. It was just a 5 minute stroll from our fabulously situated hotel (the Sofitel St James). Whenever I had an hour or two to kill I would spend time just drifting from one spectacular work of art to another. Such a treat. I visited 5 times in 6 days. And I may or may not have shed a little tear over the sheer beauty of a painting and my good fortune to be viewing it in one of the National Gallery’s light-filled rooms. I spent a lot of time in front of this: the Hay Wain by Constable.

We ate elderflower jelly on a deck chair in St James Park, and browsed through the beautiful farmers’ market just off Marylebone High Street. We spent lots of time in the oldest bookshop in London where I bought Sophia an Enid Blyton book (she is obsessed with Ms Blyton at the mo) Paddington Bear for Olive Enid Blyton used to read excerpts from her books to children at the store so that all felt very fitting. We also loved this beautiful bookshop in Marylebone.

It was in Marylebone I spied this beautiful private garden. I wanted to jump the fence and roll on the grass.  I restrained myself. Much to my handsome husband’s relief.

I loved the soft, green grass of England so much I took photos of patches of grass. Just an ordinary patch of grass. About 3 times. You know, I do nothing to dispel my husband’s fears that I am insane in the membrane. In the best possible way.

The food scene in London is phenomenal at the moment. Utterly amazing. Highlights of our dinners out were here, here and here.  For quick lunches on the go during the day, I became obsessed with Itsu. Healthy, utterly delicious food. I so deeply wish we had a chain like this in Melbourne.

I had some boxes I wanted to tick this trip, among which: climb a country stile, have kippers and a  hot, strong cup of tea for breakfast, stroll through extra green and pleasant bits of the land, eat great Indian food, eat great British food, have a Pimms in the English summer sun. I ticked all those boxes and more. It really was an extraordinary trip.

Can’t believe it’s taken me so long to get this posted that I am about to embark on my next trip…

The Roman baths at Bath

I totally nerded out in Bath. My great love for and obsession with all things Roman (including my first born child!) is well-documented.  So I was in heaven.

We had the most fleeting of visits – really just enough to do the Roman baths –  but driving in and catching the train out also gave me a sense of the beautiful Georgian terracing the town is famous for.

Because Sophia was born in Rome I always feel the need to buy her anything even vaguely Rome-related.

So I was in heaven in the gift shop here – replica coins, bracelets, necklaces (above – love their simple elegance), spoons and soap. Yes, now you too can smell like a Roman. A heady scent of horse shit and blood in the dust. Actually, it’s lavender.

These ruins are so spectacular and the display that forms part of the site is a collection of the most fascinating things discovered on the site. Including the complete skeleton of an inhabitant and a perfectly preserved original lead pipe that still carries the waters around the complex and looks as though it was laid last year, not 2000 years ago.

This is me, lovin’ it. Holding a gun.  Oh no, hang on, it’s an audio guide. That’s a relief.

A blissful walk and Blenheim Palace: Day 2 in the Cotswolds

Day 2 of our brief sojourn in the Cotswolds began at 4.30am. Thanks jet lag.

Luckily, it gets light not much after that on a summer’s morning in the Northern Hemisphere so at an unholy hour in the am, we were walking through meadows of dew-spangled grass and picturesque country lanes.

Sigh.

We walked from Upper Slaughter (don’t forget your Penelope Keith accents please) to Lower Slaughter and on to Bourton-on-the-Water.

How’s this for a quintessentially bucolic English scene:

This route, part of the famous Wardens Way track, is usually chockers with ramblers in summer but the fact we got away so early meant we didn’t see a soul.

Except this duck on a wall.  A duck. On a  wall.  You can tell by the look on his face he knows he’s been sprung doing something unorthodox. A bit un-ducky.

What a privilege to have these places basically to ourselves; quiet little pockets of sun-dappled bliss.

The next shot is one of my favourite photos from our trip. It was not only a perfect moment in time but faithfully captures the play of shadow and early morning summer light among the greenery and honey-coloured stone of the caskets and headstones. A melancholy subject perhaps, but a romantic one too I think. Romantic in a 19th century English novel kind of way. And we all know how suggestible I am.

Which is why I teared up when, as I stopped to take this photo, the bell in the adjacent church began to toll.

The sound reverberated in the silence and then faded away leaving nothing but the birds twittering.

Sigh.

On our way back we came across this little girl fishing for minnows. Well, I don’t know what she was fishing for but she was barefoot and innocent in a babbling brook on a summer morning and my overactive imagination wanted her to be fishing for minnows. Because it sounds like the thing a small English lass might do in such circumstances. At least in all the books I read as a kid.

Sigh.

We were back at Lords of the Manor for a full English breakfast by 9am that included local black pudding. LOVE black pudding. I know pig’s blood ‘aint for everyone but it is for me. And again, it just felt so perfectly right; so perfectly English and with a cup of tea and a piece of toast so perfectly sustaining

My feet were KILLING me and I just wanted to lie down and sleep for 10 hours but handsome husband pressed me onwards – and I’m so glad he did.

Blenheim Castle, some 30 miles away, was spectacular. It was worth the trip if for no other reason than to hear that Capability Brown designed the gardens. I so wish I could have another kid just to name him or her Capability.

Here’s a bit of Capability’s handiwork with the impossibly picturesque lake in the distance. Note the perfect, fluffy clouds please.

Winston Churchill was born here (and was the current Duke’s Godfather). These are his medals. Extraordinary if you think about it.

Selfie at Blenheim Palace? Don’t mind if we do.

Next: Lords of the Manor in Upper Slaughter. If you please.

An idyllic weekend in the Cotswolds complete with English summer fete

A few Saturdays ago I was somewhat shocked to find myself sipping Pimms by a stream in the sunshine in the English countryside.  Shocked because I felt as though I had left Melbourne just a few hours before and yet here I was; ensconced in a vignette of Cotswold life so achingly beautiful and perfect and seemingly quintessential that I truly felt as though I had stumbled onto a movie set.

It had been, in fact, some 35 hours earlier that we had left Melbourne for this most green and pleasant of lands . But long-haul flights do funny things to your perception of time. Cocooned in the warmth and half-light of an aeroplane cabin dimmed for sleep, time seems to compress as you fly from afternoon into an ocean-crossing night that stretches for 20 odd hours.

The trip started brilliantly before we had even touched down. The sun was rising just as we flew in to land at Heathrow. Out of the window the first thing that came into view as we pierced  through the clouds was green farmland with the Thames, gleaming a dark olive in the weak dawn light, snaking in a thick band through the countryside.

I’m somewhat obsessed with rivers. Especially rivers so old and venerable as the Thames so it was miraculous for me to be able to follow this vast waterway virtually from its mouth, up through green fields until it glittered below in its familiar loop in the very centre of London itself. As the sun rose higher and gave bright colour to the landscape below, we cruised over Hyde Park and began to circle.

I literally had my nose pressed against the glass of the window as I drank in the scenes below me. Deeply green fields, mist lying in the lowest depressions and occasionally something truly spectacular like a castle with its own lake. A lake so large it had formed its own weather system and two small clouds were reflected in its mill pond-still surface. Or a small town with cathedral on a river, the white points of which reached skyward in gothic peaks.

But back to terra firma.

By 6am, my handsome husband and I were in our rental car and headed straight from Heathrow out into the English countryside.

By 7am the dulcet tones of our GPS had guided us to Bibury, a charming Cotswold village. We did a three hour loop walk through the town, the nearby woods and fields. It was utterly beautiful.

English countryside. There. is. nothing. like. it.

I confess that I cried. About 6 times. I was overwhelmed by the sheer beauty and a deep-seated sense of being so ridiculously fortunate.

Feeling pretty tired after that we decided to head for the place we were staying: Lords of the Manor in Upper Slaughter. When you are saying “Lords of the Manor in Upper Slaughter” you have to do so in a Penelope Keith-type accent. It’s the law.

On our way we saw a sign to the remains of a Roman villa from the 3rd century. We detoured. I was in heaven:  nerding out on Roman history in the middle of an Elysian setting.

Continuing on along tiny country lanes lined with stone walls and flower-filled hedgerows we arrived in Upper Slaughter.

It is a tiny little town.

As we turned into the main street  a sign read “Upper Slaughter summer fete – today 3-6pm.” I looked at Andrew in disbelief. It was too good to be true. “If there is British bunting and a church jumble sale, I will die” I said.

Then I died.

And then I died again because in addition to the above there were rubber duck races along the rush-lined stream, a Pimms stall AND Morris dancers.

So you’d forgive a lass for sitting in the sun with her Pimms and pinching herself. And you’d forgive her if she shed another little tear at the sheer perfection of it all.

The next afternoon we wandered down to the stream again. In Australia you would see the grass strewn with cigarette butts and crushed beer cans. Of course in Upper Slaughter, all that remained was this:

a neat pyramid of empty Pimms bottles.  LOVE.

I have a few more UK posts coming up. Stay tuned to see whether Loooords of the Manor was as frightfully as it sounds, a little more of the stunning Cotties plus a quick trip to Bath (where I again totally nerd out on all things Roman),  and then on to London.

But first, tomorrow I’ll be posting a quick craft tutorial. It’s been a long time between crafty drinks hasn’t it?