I would stay and chat, but I moustache...

So this is what I've been up to for the past few weeks, among moving back into university and getting back into work, preparing for our college arts week! I am so damn excited about it (my job is producing a play and hosting a Mods and Rockers after-party, so much watching of Rookie's tutorials has been happening)Our logo is a moustache, which has been so much fun to work into everything! And one of the amazing committee people has put together this trailer. I am so in awe of people who can do that, and this is a thing of beauty. And therefore is a joy forever.
Oh and the feet in the puddle? That would be me..

If you are in England, and can get to Oxford fairly easily, have a glance at what we've got on! http://www.wegottickets.com/f/4307 I'll be ambling round with a huge grin and a camera most probably.

More Washington and New York to come, I promise

Summer Adventure # 4 ; Rococo Gardens

Note mother and father sneaking into the scene...

 

For our Bank Holiday outing, mum, dad and I visited the beautiful Rococo Gardens in Painswick. I remembered bits of this garden so vividly from various trips throughout childhood, so I knew that I just had to go back sometime soon. Obviously being a bank holiday during the summer it was fairly busy with families, but still seemed tranquil (and I did manage a few sneaky no-person shots) and it was actually lovely to see young children enjoying the garden and it's fantastic follies as I had. Plus there were some excellent views of the surrounding countryside and local Manor House, a woodland walk, a little cafe with delicious homemade cakes (me and mother shared a toffee tiffin and one of the best brownies I have had in a while; and that's saying something) fruit and veg patches, a lake....it's quite amazing what is crammed into this little jewel of a place! Plus there were a load of sculptures exhibited around the garden, some of which were pure genius so may have to post a few of my favourites from those!

Looking forward to the weekend, hopefully the weather's going to stay nice so I can keep the summer wardrobe going for as long as possible, and I'm going to a food festival with my lovely sister (and fellow blogger at Zenzeroni) in Bristol. Can't wait! I predict eating my weight in tasters and revelling in the gastro-nerdiness...

Wouldn't be a proper day out without a literary reference...

Painswick House

   

Blackberry horse goes a'blackberrying

Where is the summer going? There was me thinking I still had plenty of time to do all my various little summer projects, and now the blackberries are out. Well, sort of. Admittedly I did insist we headed out blackberrying a little too early, but what with the crazy weather we've been having the poor little bushes didn't know what to do with themselves. Big swollen black berries rubbed metaphorical shoulders with red ones, green ones and even the odd blossom. So it wasn't perhaps the best time to go, but we gathered enough between the four of us for a sizeable crumble, and a berry salad the next day. Plus had a gorgeous day out on a hill, and finally used my polaroid 300 instant, so i'll be using that a lot more soon hopefully...

It never fails to amuse me how my camera can be really sharp (top photo) and randomly blurry (above) within moments of eachother...fickle beast

 As well as my knees, I want to share a new project with you...from next wednesday (which is our official launch) you'll be able to find me on The Fabelist site, writing about artsy things and sharing some more photography. I'm just a minor contributor, but there are some fantastic artists and writers there so please please do check it out and follow us! So excited. Hope everyone's enjoying the last few weeks of summer...

Mmmmm fresh berries

 

Cards, Keys and Capes...

Aka. Summer Shopping! I've been a'travelling again, just a short (both distance and time-wise) journey up to St.Albans to stay with my lovely uni friend Rachel hence my slight laziness on the posting front. With both London and St Albans adventures, I've overloaded myself with fantastic places and less fantastic photos, so wanted to take a quick breather and share a slightly different post. Basically I found some lovely things lately; charity shops, markets, Urban Outfitters, museums, graveyards (I kid ye not.) The last two are cheating slightly. I've been finding myself buying a lot of postcards lately; they're mostly nice and cheap, a nice momento and an easy way of personalising a space, I'm planning a big collage of them in my uni room next year. Hope everyone's having a good week!

Also I realise the distinct lack of recipe posts lately. It shall be addressed forthwith, I doubt I'll be able to resist getting back in the kitchen before long...

#1 LONDON 

Blouse: Urban Outfitters Sale. Postcards: Imperial War Museum. Key and Stamp: Covent Garden Antique and Vintage Market

Future necklace perhaps? And an encouragement to write more letters...least that was my excuse

#2 ST. ALBANS

Navy cable knit cape and cropped blouse: Charity shops (sorry I can't remember which ones, but they were excellent!)

Peter Rabbit, black and white and floral postcards: Fleetville Vintage Emporium (incidentally one of my new favourite places) Snow postcard: Highgate Cemetery. St Alban etching postcard (peeking out behind): St Albans Cathedral

Summer Adventure #3 and a bit

Can't believe how lucky we were to be in London last week instead of this week, I'm watching all the news reports just in disbelief at how the gorgeous city we enjoyed so much a few days ago has changed so much! My thoughts go out to the policemen and the local people trying to make life normal again...It would feel wrong posting my photos from our wonderful stay, so I'll keep those for a bit and focus on the beautiful garden from Anne Hathaway's Cottage instead, as a little over-fill post from Summer Adventure #3. Hope everyone had a good weekend and are all safe! 

  

And it goes by the name of London...

The song that line is taken from in Sweeney Todd may not exactly conjure up the best image of our great capital, but it's all i could think of on short notice. In an hour or so I'm going on a short break to London with my family (and hopefully meeting up with some much missed friends) so i'll be away from all things internet. This does mean my other Anne Hathaway's Cottage photos will be a bit delayed, which is slightly upsetting. But I'm so excited about our trip! The galleries, the exhibitions, the shops, the shows (I believe 'Shrek, the musical' is on the cards) maybe Blenham or Kew Gardens on the way home, i can't wait! Also going to be doing some research and finding inspiration for a new and very exciting project, which you'll be hearing about soon if all goes well. Hope you all have a lovely week, and the weather stays nice wherever you are. See you next week! 

Summer Adventure #3

Anne Hathaway
by Carol Ann Duffy

'Item I gyve unto my wife my second best bed ...'
(from Shakespeare's will)

The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas
where we would dive for pearls. My lover's words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights, I dreamed he'd written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer's hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love -
I hold him in the casket of my widow's head
as he held me upon that next best bed.

 Goodness last sunday seems a long time ago right now, it was blue skied and scorching then. Today is rather muggy and grey, but I can escape by posting about sunnier days. Last sunday we went to Stratford (if you hadn't guessed) and visited Anne Hathaway's Cottage before seeing the open air performance of Taming of the Shrew  at the Dell in town. 

Top: what may or may not be 'The Second Best Bed'. The other bed I included because I just loved that quilt...

The cottage was absolutely lovely, it was obviously very well looked after, the guide was brilliant and knew so much! Even told me a thing or two I didn't know about Oxford, so I was mightily impressed. We managed to get there early and so avoided the big coach groups for the most part, so I managed to get some clear pictures of the gardens. These definitely deserve their own post, it was so beautiful. All the sweetpeas were out, something like 40 varieties; there was an orchard, a sculpture park, a woodland walk. And there were cute little Shakespeare references literally (and literarily) everywhere. A few years ago the Trust had built a willow cabin in the garden, and recorded actors reciting four of Shakespeare's sonnets for visitors to listen to while sat there. On top of that, all the plants that were labelled in the garden had a little Shakespeare quote relating to them underneath. It was details, and the gorgeous weather and flowers blooming everywhere that really made the day. Plus I got to wander round in a new floral dress and my straw boater and feel wonderfully stereotypical English-student. What more could a girl ask for?

 

 Once again the Gloucestershire Youth Players were incredible, the energy they had was even more impressive on a sweltering day (I for one am still a tad on the burnt side) and to add even more of a challenge they decided to do the play in the round for the last weekend. And pulled it off magnificently. They get a rest now, until the Autumn when they're going to be doing a schools tour in Gloucestershire, and may be back at Stratford (perhaps even in the RSC theatre itself??) Best of luck to them all! 

The calm before the storm...

All ready to go...

That familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer...

From F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby - in a lovely little passage that sums up my excitement at the shiny new summer weather we suddenly have;

    

"And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. There was so much to read, for one thing…"

And in the spirit of this, I've had a wonderfully lazy day sat in the garden and finally getting into some books I've been meaning to read for a while now, finishing Spenser's The Faerie Queene and about half of Kerouac's On the Road. Ever so slightly different reads, but I'm loving them both. Hope you've all been having a lovely sunny day! 

Here's some music that really gets me in the mood for jewel bright days and balmy evenings...Enjoy!

And a song that never fails to get me in a happy sunny mood (and is incidentally very good to jog to) as well as being in one of my favourite films 

 

Summer Adventure #2

'Sit by my side and let the world slide, we shall ne'er be younger'  

The Taming of the Shrew, William Shakespeare

This wasn't so far flung an adventure as the Welsh mountains, but it's a summer outing so I'm still counting it. Last Saturday I went with the family and some friends to Longborough Festival Opera to see my brother in The Taming of the Shrew with the Gloucestershire Youth Players. 

Afraid I have no idea who this is meant to be...

Longborough is a small theatre in the middle of the Cotswold countryside, attached to a lovely little manor (complete with folly) and picnic grounds. Unfortunately the increasingly inclement weather meant that our picnic turned into a 'how many people + picnic can you fit in our car?' game. 

The view from the courtyard

Luckily it was still light enough for some pics during the interval, as it was a lovely location! Plus the ever-present threat of cloud made for some dramatic skies and lighting. I anticipate some bias so I won't write about the play much, except to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it(yet was actually quite traumatised at the same time, both for the woman-breaking and the sibling cross dressing that went on with my wonderful brother as Petruchio.) You can tell they've worked so hard on it and are an incredibly talented group of people. Bravo! They performed in the gardens of Wadham College last Sunday, and are at the open air Dell theatre in Stratford this Sunday (so no doubt that's where my next adventure will take me)

Note the folly on the left hand side - unfortunately the interval was too short for me to go exploring this time

The Opera House itself, and some charming thespian types

 

Summer Adventure #1

Goodness, back home a week already! And I can't really think of what I've been doing this past week, mostly catching up on sleep and telly I'm afraid, and planning what I'm going to do in the rest of the summer when I have energy and it's sunny! But I don't have to return to my recipe backlog yet, as last weekend, having been fetched from uni me and the family then travelled up to Wrexham to visit my sister. I was already looking forward to seeing her obviously, but wasn't really counting on getting any blog ideas from the trip.Until...

On the sunday we drove up a bit further to Trevor (a wonderful town name, incidentally) and went to the stunning Pontcysyllte Acqueduct. Despite spelling difficulties and my ever so slight fear of heights (combined with my mother's rather large fear of both heights AND water) it was definitely worth walking over the acqueduct itself to see the views over the valleys and hills around. Just lovely.  

  

Yes, that would be a sheer drop on the other side of the canal

And from man-made to natural wonders, for lunch we went to Pant-yr-Ochain near Wrexham. The food was wonderful (definitely did not need all three courses but everything was so good!) the indoor decor was just to my taste (ie. lots of books, nice crockery and vintage prints) but they had the most lovely gardens, including lots of roses. So naturally, I can't resist sharing my photos of them with you. Apologies, there are a fair few...

 

Who could resist a close up of these?

Also, my blog appears to be mixing up all my posts, so I'm even less chronological than usual..hurrah! Hope you all have a wonderful weekend