This morning I cycled back to the glass blowing studio to see how that bowl we has watched being made turned out. Very nice. We were running out of various sorts of food, so we decided to head for the nearest Tesco, which is on the way into Coventry. Unlike the Ashby Canal, which does not get to Ashby, the Coventry Canal actually makes it all the… Ooooh, look, first Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy boat name. As I…
We started making our way back down the Ashby Canal today, and moored up for the night near Dadlington, a one pub village. The pub hadn’t even been able to make it and had been foreclosed by the bank and shut down when a roving American restauranteur bought it up five years ago and turned it into a successful gastropub. The Dog and Hedgehog (known by the locals as The Woof and Prickle) has been recommended to us on the…
The Ashby canal gets its name from Ashby-de-la-Zouch (rhymes with douche) though it doesn’t actually go there, and never did. It used to end at the nearby Moira Mines noted for their high quality coal production, and not to be confused with the Mines of Moria, noted for their high volume orc infestation. It’s an easy mistake to make, as I said when they stopped me dynamiting the mine entrance. These days the canal ends eight miles short of there…
There are few more decisive moments in English history than the Battle of Bosworth. In the white corner King Richard III (York), who got to be king by disposing first of the claims and then of the bodies of the Princes in the Tower (probably). In the red corner, Henry Tudor (Lancaster) who had been living in France planning his comeback tour. In the middle (politically and physically) the Stanley brothers, Thomas and William, and their army. Thomas Stanley, the…
MORTICIAN: Who’s that then? CUSTOMER: I don’t know. MORTICIAN: Must be a king. CUSTOMER: Why? MORTICIAN: He hasn’t got shit all over him. That great historical documentary Monty Python and the Holy Grail was as accurate as ever. Sewage disposal in Roman times (if you were lucky enough to live in a town) was usually an open sewer in the street. Though there were some underground sewers they were rare enough that the Latin word for gutter is the same…
We spent most of the day trundling up a flight of eleven locks in Atherstone. For the first few we were behind a boat called Which seems like a good time to present some other narrowboat names inspired by Tolkien. I think we also passed Strider and a Gandalf, but I didn’t have the camera handy. Then there’s this. So the current score is JRRT 8, GRRM 1. Not that there aren’t a lot of GRRM fans out there, it’s…
A few years ago toasted cheese sandwiches became a thing. A tea room in Tamworth has discovered that there are other things that you can put on toast besides cheese. Marmite, marmalade, chocolate, butter, the possibilities are endless. Any year now someone will come up with the idea of putting butter AND marmalade on toast. Of course, that sort of decadence is usually sign that a massive social collapse is about to happen, so you can think of Tamworth as…
No, The Ladies of the Vale is not a Game of Thrones reference, it’s the affectionate name given to the three spires of Lichfield Cathedral. However, looking through my photos I don’t have one showing all three, so your going to have to take my word for it that there are two at one end… and one at the other. The building was built of red sandstone about eight hundred years ago, with a more recent overcoat of industrial pollution….
Princess Anne would turn up in a battered old Land Rover and say, “I’m here to see Patrick.” … She held the speed record for riding a scooter around the grounds. Our guide at Shugborough Hall has been working there for twenty years, and had many stories of when it was still occupied by the Earls of Lichfield. The fifth earl, Thomas Patrick John Anson, otherwise known as Patrick Lichfield, lived there until his death in 2005, though the house…
If you inherit a brewery, what do you do? In particular, if you inherit this brewery that we went past today? Many might be content to spend their days in a well financed and mildly alcoholic haze, but not James Prescott Joule. He decided to make his brewery more profitable, and around 1840 wondered if replacing the steam engines used in the brewery with the newly invented electric motors would save money. He set up experiments to determine the amount…