Before heading off to Cheltenham for the Literature Festival, we took the short drive out to the fifth Shakespeare property - Mary Arden's Farm:
Cheltenham is only an hour away, so we got there in time for lunch - after having again to park our car in a public park, albeit the Holiday Inn at least arranged a 25% discount for us. We were just across the road from the newly developed Brewery Quarter, which, coincidentally, contained a brand new brewpub, the Brewhouse & Kitchen - very nice indeed.
Our first show was foreign correspondent, John Simpson, BBC News' World Affairs Editor. It was a straight one on one interview - very interesting. Our next show was a few hours' away so we went back to our hotel for a while then went out to look for something to eat and stumbled upon The Stable, which advertised "Pizza, Pies & Cider". Pizza was what Jo fancied and I decided that this was a "when in Rome" moment for me and sampled their ciders -very interesting, although not something I would normally partake of.
Val McDermid was interviewed by fellow crime writer Mark Billingham and they were brilliant together. We came across these odd statues before stopping for a nightcap at the local Wetherspoon's on the way back to our hotel:
Saturday morning arrived and we had a free day as the two shows we had booked were both in the evening. We had brunch at Patisserie Valerie then took a stroll over to Pittville Park. We briefly discussed the possibility of taking a drive down to Bath - and we had sufficient time - but eventually opted for the easier stroll round the park:
A mid-afternoon snack back at the Brewhouse & Kitchen, followed by a rest back at the hotel, then off for a nice steak dinner prior to the Festival - Jeremy Paxman first, followed by a very poor panel talk on The Ages of Bowie - our only disappointment of the weekend.
On Sunday we decided to have brunch at the Boston Tea Party, a busy place we had passed several times, but this time it was just too busy and we chose the easy way out and diverted to Wetherspoon's, which turned out to be very nice.
On our way to the Festival, we stopped for a photo in front of a nice street fountain:
On arrival at Imperial Square, we noticed this statue of Gustav Holst:
The Brian Wilson show featured a filmed interview with the great man and was really well done, but it underlined what a troubled man he is. As we came out of the marquee, I was pulled to one side by a BBC local radio interviewer, looking for comments on the festival to appear on Monday morning's news show. I susbsequently picked it up on the i-player and, if you click this link and scroll forward to 55:05, you can listen to it - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p049d2fh#play.
We had a bit of time to kill as the planned George Harrison tribute show, due to feature his widow Olivia, was cancelled "due to unforeseen circumstances", so we headed off to the CAMRA National Pub of the Year 2015, the Sandford Park Alehouse - and what an excellent place it was. So good, in fact, that we had lunch plus 3 pints there - well, I did anyway:
Just 2 shows left - first was Shetland - the TV series that Jo was a big fan of, and, even although I didn't watch it, nor read any of Ann Cleeves' books, I enjoyed it too.
In between shows, we had another nice meal before going in - fractionally late - to the Wilko Johnson interview, which was richly entertaining - and amusing.
Another nightcap at Wetherspoon's and that was our weekend in the West Country over. All that remained on Monday morning was to drive to the airport and catch our flight back to Aberdeen, where Ross met us and took us home.
On Tuesday morning, I drove over to Inverurie to bring Luca over to ours for the rest of the week before heading off for a morning cycle. Now that's me up to date again.
No comments:
Post a Comment