No, the title is not a comment on the Brexit vote today. We finally managed to score some of the non alcoholic beer that Nick recommended in the comments.

Hops! Hop hoppy hop hops! Hoppity hop hop! I now have hop scented steam coming out of my armpits. So many hops you don’t notice there isn’t any alcohol. Good stuff, but a bit on the hoppy side.

In other beer related news, here’s the recipe for Butter Beer that is so popular with adolescent witches and wizards.

Pewter pot? I don’t have one on those, let alone two. Screw it, let’s just use magic.

This was a full day today. First we went to the boat to rendezvous with Clive, who got the locking system on the boat working better, so we should not get broken into again. Then on to Great Witley Church, a baroque gem set next to the derelict shell of a mansion in the middle of nowhere in particular.

The painted ceiling is handily viewed by a mirror set in the aisle.

The organ was designed for Handel.

The stained glass was made too late for the Puritans to smash it in the civil war.

This country would have a much better architectural heritage if the Parliamentarians in the English Civil War had not been into smashing statues and stained glass. The world was aghast when the Taliban in blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan. The religious vandalism of the Roundheads was far worse than that, but they won the war, wrote the history, so nobody remember that.

From Great Witley church we went on to Brockhampton, a medieval manor house inhabited from 1425 until 2014.

The gatehouse and the moat were never fortifications, they were built to make the house look more impressive. The different rooms inside are decorated as furnished as they would have been in different periods, about a hundred years apart. One of the earlier ones has a collection of flintlock muskets.

This is what the guys who wrote the US constitution had in mind when they said there was a right to bear arms.

Ant spotted a pied wagtail in the moat.

Was our day finished there? No, we stopped off on the way home at the house of a friend of Ant and Carol’s who is a keen gardener.

Though it’s a thatched cottage in a traditional style, the building is in fact modern. Here’s some more pictures of the garden.

Of course, there is a seedy and violent underbelly to the English country garden. Here are the battery strawberries, caged in horribly overcrowded conditions, suckers brutally lopped off to prevent then escaping and kneecapping the runner beans.

Here are the combat onions, caged at the moment to prevent brawling in the onion beds, but ready to take on a defenseless rhubarb patch in a backyard prizefight.

I’m not going to show you the parsnips, as this a a family friendly website.

This evening Ant and Carol’s kids came over with their significant others. Getting a family portrait after an evening partying proved challenging.