Queen Anne was a monarch more noted for her furniture than her statesmanship, but the National Trust, at least at Hanbury House, seems keen to rehabilitate her. I’ll explain the reason in a minute, but first, here’s a picture of Paula in a field of broad beans. Yes, bushwhacking through a bean field is one of the many skills required to bring you this blog. Now, technically we were on a public right of way, but the farmer had planted…
Rain was forecast for this afternoon, so we headed off in the morning, and moored up by lunchtime in the village of Tibberton, just outside Worcester’s suburban sprawl. This is the view from our bedroom window. Though we only came a few miles, there were twelve locks, so we had a busy morning. A family of battle swans came to see us off, or perhaps chase us away. Tibberton has two pubs, Speed the Plough and The Bridge… … though…
It’s 1751. On the death of his brother, George Coventry becomes sixth earl of Coventry, and inherits a hundred year old brick manor house. Determined to make the place more contemporary, he hires an unknown designer, Lancelot Brown, to remodel the house and grounds, and a budding Scottish architect called Robert Adam to work on the interiors. The result was a masterpiece. Brown later became known as Capability Brown, the great landscape gardener. Gone were the highly formal garden designs…
Worcester is not just the place that strange brown sauce comes from, it was also the home of the composer Edward Elgar. This is just a statue of him of course. The real Edward Elgar did not have pigeon shit on his head. Elgar had little formal musical training, and initially had little success as a composer. He eked out living as a musician, teacher, and conductor of the band at the Worcester lunatic asylum. It was not until his…
Two days of traveling, and we are back on our boat Wharram Percy, which is currently moored in swan-infested Worcester (pronounced Wooster, like Bertie). This is the River Severn, which we have navigated before, but we are actually moored on the Worcester and Birmingham canal, which we haven’t been on before. We’re likely to head up towards Brum, and when I say up, I don’t just mean north. The longest flight of locks in the system lies is in this…
During the Napoleonic Wars, the Emperor Napoleon in the interests of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, made his brother Louis king of the Netherlands. OK, it was mostly Fraternity. Louis, instead of declaring himself Koning van Holland (King of Holland) he announce that he was Konijn van Olland (Rabbit of Olland). The Netherlands had previously been a republic, so there wasn’t royal palace for Louis to move into. Instead he took over the Amsterdam town hall, and had it done up…
We started the day with a visit to the Gassan Diamond factory. I’d always imagined that “cutting” diamonds involved some sort of blade but it turns out that it is mostly grinding and polishing rather than cutting. Yeah, there’s a diamond in that clamp somewhere. The whole diamond market is a scam, with a cartel of suppliers maintaining artificially high prices, but, hey, shiny! Our tour guide seemed intent on getting through the presentation as fast as possible, but he…
OK, trivia question. What was the first mention in literature of metallic female robots? The answer will be somewhere in today’s post, so now you’ll have to read the whole thing and not just look at the pictures. Today we visited the Tropenmuseum. The collection started out to investigate the best ways to exploit Dutch overseas conquests in the tropics, but these days it is an extended apology for Dutch colonial history. The ethnographic artifacts are mostly from Indonesia, South…
The real Hermitage Museum is in St Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), Russia, but they have a branch office, or as they call it a Space Station, in Amsterdam. Here they show a selection of items from mission control, rotated every six months, as well as Dutch paintings borrowed from the other collections in town. The current exhibition features pairs of similar objects from different time periods or cultures. It’s good to see the cross-cultural importance of battle swans. OK, the second…
Today we are having a rest day, with only the thrills of hauling a suitcase full of groceries up three flights of near vertical stairs to report on. Instead of describing my plans for an ice cream and massage parlor on the second landing, I want to tell you about the concert we went to last night. We were in the main hall of the famous Royal Concertgebouw for an evening of Russian music: Shostakovich’s second cello concerto and Rimsky-Korsakov’s…