Caitlin through the Looking Glass
I released this at Offshore Cafe in Glasgow, where I am currently visiting family. It was picked up by another BookCrosser who left this journal entry:
Journal entry 14 by MikeWoods from Glasgow, Glasgow City United Kingdom on Sunday, July 29, 2007
I’ve just found this book whilst leaving another bookcrossing book in Offshore cafe. Lucky me or what ?
book rating: not yet read
Read all journal entries here.
See all my wild catches here.
www.flickr.com
|
After almost a week in London my family went up to Broadway in the Cotswolds to spend a few days in the country. I joined them for a few days last week and my Dad’s brother Jeffrey came down from Scotland with his wife Judith.
We had a perfectly pleasant few days. It rained on and off but nothing major and it didn’t really disrupt our plans. Dad and Sarah had hired a car and driven up on the Sunday, so I met them in Oxford the following day. We had a look around town and then drove back to the Cotswolds, with me in the back, wedged between the two children’s car seats.
Broadway is not far from Blockley, where my boyfriend and I went for a walking weekend in May. It’s slightly bigger with a few pubs, shops and restaurants along the high street and the Broadway Tower overlooking the town from a nearby hill. My family stayed in the Broadway Hotel and I was in a nearby B&B.
Sarah and I went horse riding on the Tuesday. It was just the two of us plus the guide and we had a lovely ride. Sarah has a horse at home and rides a lot so they put her on a feisty chestnut, which was quite hard work. I rode quite a bit as a teenager but haven’t done much recently so I was pleased to be given a comparatively easy-going horse. We saw some beautiful countryside – we rode up into the hills where we could see stunning views, and into a forest where we saw a doe and fawn, and through classic villages of stone and thatch. The ride lasted two hours and there was lots of trotting and cantering – we both really felt it the next day, especially in our back muscles!
Jeff and Judith arrived that night and the following day we went to Hidcote Gardens and then for a drive to the Slaughters and Bourton-on-Water. It didn’t go completely to plan and we wound up eating lunch at 3pm but it was okay. Hidcote Gardens was quite beautiful and Emma enjoyed making up stories as we walked around.
I left on Thursday as I had lots of work piling up for me in London and everyone else left the following morning – Dad and the family drove to Wales to see relatives and Jeff and Judith drove back to Scotland. It’s really lucky everyone left when they did because the entire area was underwater just a few hours later! Dad and Sarah were trying to drive the scenic route to Wales but gave up because the B roads kept flooding and went back to the A (main) roads. When they got to Wales they looked at the news and realised they’d just driven through the floods. It’s a lucky escape considering loads of people in the area were holed up in school buildings for several days – that wouldn’t have been much fun, especially with a five year old and a toddler.
They arrived back in London on Sunday and Monday was their last day in the country. They are now in New York, where they are staying with friends and relishing the cheap shopping. (The Aussie dollar is currently worth 90 US cents).
My family are here! Hip, hip, hurray! That’s my Dad, his wife Sarah, my five-year-old sister Emma, and my one-year-old brother Huw. They arrived on Tuesday morning and I’m easing off on work this week and next so I can spend as much time with them as possible. I’ve already impressed them greatly since I managed to get a welcome sign for my sister at the Tube station near their hotel, courtesy of CBS Outdoor. (Thanks, Jo T!)
www.flickr.com
|
Yesterday we went to the Tower of London in the morning. It seems extraordinary that I’ve lived in London for three years and I’ve never been to the Tower of London before. It’s very touristy but also hugely historic and romantic. Emma loved the “real life fairy tales” about King Henry and Queen Anne and her daughter Queen Elizabeth and could remember many of the details later. She was entranced by the sparkly Crown Jewels, correctly identifying many of the gemstones, and she didn’t baulk at the torture instruments and seeing the lawn where the executions were carried out. Huw meanwhile was enjoying the new experience of learning to walk on cobblestones and probably didn’t notice his surroundings much beyond that.
The Tower of London was recently added to the list of World Heritage sites in danger because of tall the building work going on around it. Indeed, where it was once a stately and imposing site a little isolated from the rest of the city, now there are tall buildings on three sides and a busy road. I can understand why that’s happened but it does seem a shame.
www.flickr.com
|
Meanwhile, in the afternoon I met my friend Dom in Kensington Gardens. I brought Emma and she brought her two children and a friend’s daughter. We had planned to go to the Orangery but it was closed for a private function so we just bought ice creams from the kiosk and then let the kids run around in the Peter Pan playground. It’s an amazing place with a huge pirate ship and lots of little houses and boats and slides. The kids – ages six, five, four and three – had a great time running around together and Dom and I had a good chinwag about life.
Emma and I walked all the way across the park and back – a long way for a five year old but she managed very well. On the way back we saw the Peter Pan statue and the Princess Diana fountain, and Emma had a squirrel eat out of her hands thanks to a kind, little boy who let us have one of his peanuts.
I have been wanting to do an Arvon Foundation writing workshop for some time but it’s been a question of time and money. When I saw they had a food writing course with Sophie Grigson and Alastair Hendy at Totleigh Barton in Devon, I jumped at the chance.
I am a sucker for recipe books and foodie magazines and I would love to add food as a strand to my writing. I do some travel writing and I think food and travel is a brilliant combination – this is a lot of what Alastair does and he is a photographer as well. I am also interested in restaurant reviewing (which Sophie has done) and food issues journalism. I am currently developing a website of my own, called The Gooseberry Fool. There’s nothing up there yet but check back in a week or so.
The course covered everything from how to write a recipe to literary agents and we also had a guest lecture by the deputy editor of Olive, Lulu Grimes. We took a trip to a local farm market (a market with farmers rather than a “farmers’ market”) and a nearby mixed farm to give us something to write about for the week but we could also do our own stuff. We read our stuff to each other in the evenings and also had one-on-one tutorials with both tutors. Sophie and Alastair were great and very funny together as they are so different in their approaches and were constantly disagreeing – in a friendly way as really I think they got on well. It was also fascinating seeing the diversity of people on the course (all women but very different women) and their different projects.
Since nearly everyone doing the course was a good cook and we made dinner as a big group twice, we ate like royalty. We had three course meals with resplendent, creamy desserts every night and the table groaned with fabulous West Country cheeses at lunch time. It was inspiring and fun but, despite the fact that I went running twice, my clothes were certainly tighter by the end of the week.
I could justify the time and expense because it’s relevant to my job and also because Arvon helped out with a grant. However, now I’ve got the bug, I think I might have to start saving for one of their fiction courses.
Totleigh Barton was beautiful – a pre Domesday farmhouse in the heart of the Devon countryside. I caught the train from London to Exeter St Davids and it was an hour’s drive from there, sharing a taxi with other course attendees. I spent a couple of hours in Exeter with another girl on our way back on Saturday morning – it’s an attractive city with a cathedral and old buildings, centred along a river and a canal. Arvon also has centres in Scotland, Yorshire and Somerset.
I took photos with my film SLR (having left the digital camera in my friend’s car coming back from Brighton), so it’ll be a little while before I can put any photos online.
At the Brighton Unconvention, we were given a preview of some of the exciting plans for the site. I couldn’t blog about all of them at the time because they were still secret, but now I can reveal that Singapore is becoming an official BookCrossing country.
It seems odd since I think the idea of leaving books in public places is slightly subversive and Singapore has a fairly authoritarian government but it makes sense because Singapore has a strong emphasis on literacy and is geographically small enough for the concept to work. The deal was struck directly with the Singaporean premier, which is pretty cool!
Meanwhile, I have put photos up from the weekend on Flickr and there is a badge on my previous blog entry. I have had one wild catch from the weekend.
I released this on the mass releasing walk at the 2007 BookCrossing Unconvention in Brighton on Sunday 1 July 2007. I left it under the stone archways at the entrance to the Brighton Royal Pavilion. It was picked up by a member of the public, who joined and left this journal entry a few days later.
Journal entry 5 by charliebean from london, Greater London United Kingdom on Wednesday, July 04, 2007
i didnt like the illustrations at all.
but its funny because ive learnt french this year, so i understamd all the text, but i was a bit disappointed by the story.
CAUGHT IN BRIGHTON SUSSEX UK – ANGLETERRE
book rating: 3/10
Read all journal entries here.
www.flickr.com
|
A weekend at the seaside filled with books and socialising – what more could a girl want? (Okay, so I can think of a few things, but it was lots of fun all the same).
I spent the weekend in Brighton at the 2007 BookCrossing Unconvention (so called because the official Convention is usually in the US). I’d been to Brighton once before, for a weekend away with my boyfriend, and I loved it, so it was good to go back. Brighton is a really funky little city with great restaurants and boutique stores and general good vibes. It’s also wonderful to see the ocean and have that feeling of space that comes with seeing the horizon, even if it was actually too cold and wet to go swimming.
Brighton is only an hour and a half on the train and the train actually comes right through my part of London so I didn’t have to trek into central London first. I stayed at the Genevieve Hotel, a very nice B&B a couple of hundred metres from the sea, sharing a room with another BookCrosser from Devon.
The Unconvention was on Saturday and included a speech from the new CEO about the future of BookCrossing and author talks – Linda Gillard, Christine Coleman, and Sue Moorcroft – a writing workshop with Linda Gillard, live book swaps, and plenty of food, wine and chat. We split into smaller groups for dinner on Saturday night and then rounded it off with a walking tour (releasing books as we went) of Brighton on Sunday morning. I also went running both days, and was joined by three others on Sunday morning – most unlike BookCrossers!
Previous BookCrossing Unconventions have been in Birmingham. Next year we are hosting the official worldwide Convention in London, and I believe San Francisco will have an Unconvention.
My travel and food blogBad Behavior has blocked 257 access attempts in the last 7 days.
