On the way to Center Parcs

July 12th

After our very busy day near Kings Lynn, we set off towards Elveden Forest, intending to stop on the way for sightseeing. We had intended to stop at Oxburgh Hall, a 15th century moated manor house, but the opening arrangements for July were immensely complicated, and I got them wrong so it proved to be closed. We drove instead to a rather strange place nearby, called the Iceni village, which was not at all what we expected.

There was indeed a replica Iceni village, which would probably be very interesting to school children; it certainly gave a very good idea of the of the way people lived in the huts, and how tough you needed to be to survive. This was the watch-tower at the entry to the village.



The village had a ditch around it, which was crossed by a bridge. This particular bridge is fixed, but there was a mechanism on the lookout tower for lifting a drawbridge so it could be removed if enemies were sighted. I couldn't help thinking that the ditch was rather small and the fence round the village rather short and flimsy, so neither would have been all that much of a deterrent to an attacker.

After we had seen the village, we went on the nature walk. This was a walking track all round a small shallow lake, full of reeds and other water plants calculated to appeal to waterbirds and other wildlife. We had thought it might take 20 minutes or so, it seems just to be a piece of set-aside between two farms. However, it was very much longer than we had thought and took over an hour and a half. The first bit was quite boring, around a field edge with trees and thick vegetation on the other side and with no sight of the water, so we could hear the birds but not see them. Once we had a view of the lake, it was much more interesting, with plenty of birds, all with babies.




After the walk, there was a museum of things, largely from Victorian times onwards, which had been in use in the surrounding farms. This was a very old horse-drawn steam engine.



It was taken round neighbouring farms to drive various pieces of machinery. It really was horse-drawn when travelling between the farms, and there was also a living wagon for its driver.

Along with an enormous collection of horse-draw vehicles, there were a lot of farm tools and everyday and household items.


As usual, I was quite unable to to resist the bathing arrangements. And I can remember my granny having an old mangle rather like that one.

After managing to drag Paul away from all that, we went to see another two buildings. The first was a 17th century cottage, which had been inhabited in the reign of Charles II.


I'm not sure if the spaces between the frames would originally have been wattle and daub, or whether the brick was original. You could walk all round the inside, which was set up the way it would have been in the time of Charles II.



This was the kitchen, which would also have been the main room of the house. The little cupboard on the right of the fire was apparently to keep the salt. Keeping it next to the fire, which was always lit so it could be used for cooking, would help to keep the salt dry.

There was another room in the downstairs part of the house, which was used by the master of the house as his study and library. A space under the stairs was used by the lady of the house or the servants for sitting and spinning wool.

Upstairs were two rooms for sleeping. Only the master and mistress of the house had a bed, which was hung with un-dyed linen curtains. In their room there was also a cradle for the baby. The children and servants slept on pallets on the floor in the second room.

The other building was a Saxon church. It was not in a particularly good state of repair, having at one time in the 19th and early 20th centuries been used as a cottage. The later additions had been removed.



This church was undoubtedly very early. At one end it had a semi-circular Byzantine apse, a feature of such very early churches.



The wooden tomb at the bottom of my photo was thought to belong to a hermit. What I found very interesting was that under the church were Roman remains, possibly the remains of a Roman temple. There could have been a religious building on this site for 2000 years or more.

The whole site, the Iceni village, the wildlife walk, the museum and the old buildings had a lot of possibilities, but they all looked a bit run down and needed a more care and attention. There weren't all that many visitors, which I suppose meant there wasn't a lot of money to spend on it all, which was a pity. At least the two old buildings deserved better care - and a lot more visitors!

By this time it was rather late, so we drove into Swaffam for lunch, and to do some food shopping, before setting off for Elveden Forest and the very long queue to get into Center Parcs.

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A Busy Day in Norfolk

July 11th

Well, only 10 days behind now! I did catch up, but then I slipped again by being too hot and tired on Thursday 11th to write up what we did, and too busy on the following days.

We had collected my sister from Kings Lynn station on Wednesday night - she caught the train up from London after work - and on Thursday morning, we set off for some determined sightseeing. We had afternoon tickets for Houghton Hall in the late afternoon, so we started by setting off for Castle Rising, which is just to the East of Kings Lynn.

Castle Rising is a good example of what you might call a Norman Motte and Bailey castle, built in 1138.



This is the ditch and bank of the motte, showing the entry across the ditch into the gatehouse.

This is the keep, set inside the bailey.


You can see from my photo that the earthworks round the castle are now very high, but this height is not original; when they were first built they would have been much lower and the castle would have been visible from a great distance away. The earthworks were raised to the current height at a later date.

There was something on the site even before this castle was raised. Doomsday Book shows that before and after 1066, it was a part of the manor of Snettisham. Stigand, the Saxon Archbishop of Canterbury, owned it from 1052 until his overthrow by the Normans in 1070. Then William the Conqueror gave it to his half-brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux (the person who ordered the Bayeux Tapestry)

Odo fell from favour in 1088, and the castle's next owner was William's son, William Rufus, who later became King William II. It was later bought by William D’Albini, and he built the current keep in 1138. After a couple of changes of ownership, it was given by King Edward III to his mother, Queen Isabella in 1331. Even though she was popularly believed to be implicated in the death of her husband, King Edward II, she was not held prisoner and lived a life of considerable luxury here. When she died in 1358 the castle passed to Edward the Black Prince. He seems to have been the last owner to spend much money on it, and after his death it gradually fell into decline. In 1544 King Henry VIII gave it to the Howard family who still own it, but it's now a ruin, as you can see.

Most of the stairs are in the towers, so you can still go right inside and upstairs to see the remains of the rooms.


You can see marks in the wall where beams would have been to support the intervening floors. There are many interesting smaller rooms just inside the walls.

After that visit, which took quite a while because it was very interesting, my sister decided she would like to see the sea, so we drove to Snettisham beach. The tide was out



and the beach at this point was very shallow, but beautifully sandy. There was almost nobody to be seen anywhere, though we walked about a mile along the beach. We got lots of sea air because it was extremely windy!

Then we set off for Houghton Hall, where we had tickets to get into the house at 4.30. Tickets to see the house were in rather short supply, so I was fortunate to get any at all. There was plenty to see in the gardens, so we wanted to arrive for lunch to have a good look at everything outside the house first.

I should explain that Houghton Hall was built in the 1720s by Sir Robert Walpole, who is usually regarded as Britain's first Prime Minister. It is described as being one of England’s finest Palladian houses.



Houghton once contained part of Sir Robert Walpole's great picture collection, which his grandson the 3rd earl sold in 1779 to Catherine the Great of Russia to pay off some of the estate's accumulated debt. Most of the paintings are now in the Hermitage, in St Petersburg.

The current owner of the house is a descendant of Sir Robert, the Marquess of Cholmondeley. (This is yet another of those delightful English names which is pronounced differently from the way it is spelled; the name is pronounced Chumley!) In a drawer in Walpole's desk he discovered handwritten plans showing the position on the walls of all the paintings, and thought it would be wonderful if they could be displayed where they originally were. Little else has changed since Walpole’s time with much of the original furniture and fabrics still in place, as the family had very little money to spend on 'improvements'. Lord Cholmondeley negotiated with the Hermitage and other Russian museums as well as the National Gallery in Washington and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to return 70 lost paintings to their original position on the walls, surrounded by the original furnishings as well so visitors would see the house looking much as it did in Walpole's time. Now perhaps you can understand why the tickets were in such demand; the exhibition only runs from May to September, and visitor numbers are limited - I booked about a month before we went, and was lucky to get any tickets at all.

After lunch, we walked around the ten acres of beautiful gardens.



This is the rose garden, a sea of white roses and lavender. The herbaceous borders were also spectacular.

There are other beautiful gardens in the huge heavily cultivated area, including wonderful kitchen gardens; heaven knows how much it costs to maintain such huge and spectacular gardens in such a lovely condition.

After that, we walked round the rest of the extensive grounds; the Marquess of Cholmondeley collects modern art, and pieces of it are displayed all over the grounds.



This is the giant stainless steel Scholar Rock by Chinese sculptor Zhan Wang.

Before 4.30, both Paul and I were completely exhausted and needed a rest in the shade before we could contemplate seeing inside the house.

Unfortunately, having such late tickets, we only had an hour in the house, and could have stayed much longer. No photographs were allowed, and there are room stewards who watch you closely, so I had no chance to sneak even one. There are paintings by Van Dyck, Poussin, Rubens, Rembrandt, Velazquez and Murillo, as well as lots of other artists. The Van Dycks were superb, as was the Velazquez, and the Rembrandt quite remarkable. My sister thought the Poussins had been over-cleaned. Because it was a house and not a gallery, the painting were crammed in all over the place and hung right up to the ceiling. It was frequently hard to discover what they were, because the numbering system in the little booklet was so very strange. Most of the paintings are not well know, or not by us at least, but that's not surprising as they aren't in this country. Many of them were by people I had never heard of, and some were 'studio of' and I would consider them quite poor. One in particular, 'studio of Veronese', showed the risen Christ in such an odd attitude he looked like an almost naked Bruce Forsyth with arms spread wide and one foot forward, exclaiming 'Da Dah!' The furnishing and tapestries were superb though, and there were some wonderful statues, not to mention spectacular ceilings. As usual, we had to be ushered out at closing time - an hour was not really long enough for us to appreciate everything. We were all exhausted though, and had to go back to the hotel to recover before going out to eat. You will appreciate why I was too hot and tired to write this up in the evening!

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Ely

July 10th

Hooray, a few days off! We had booked a weekend with friends at Center Parcs in Norfolk, so we decided to take a couple of extra days. So this morning, we set off to drive, in a slow and leisurely fashion, to Kings Lynn where we are going to an art exhibition tomorrow.

I had intended to be off by 10, but somehow or other, mostly because of tidying up and watering all the plants on our terrace, we didn't manage to get away until 11. That gave us plenty of time though, and by lunch time we'd gone over 100 miles and were at the top of the M11. We stopped for lunch at a cafe attached to a farm shop, and then drove slowly into Ely, where Paul had never been before, with the intention of visiting the cathedral.

We also had a brief look round the town, which is tiny and rather attractive - this is a little cottage on the route from the car park to the cathedral.




The old brick wall on the left is part of the cathedral precincts, I think.
Fairly near that is a green at the centre of the town where you will find Oliver Cromwell's house.



We didn't have time to go in on this occasion, but might go into Ely again on Friday, so there may be time then.

Ely cathedral is built on what was once an island in the Fens, a low-lying marsh, so it rises high above the surrounding landscape and is often referred to as 'the Ship of the Fens'. Ely Cathedral History and Heritage says "Wherever you went in the Fen country you had only to look up and see it there, riding the sky like a great ship", and you can certainly see it from a long way away as you drive up the A10. This is a rather nearer view.



The last time I visited it, which must have been 18 or 19 years ago, I have the impression that it was much whiter, but I seem to recall it had then been very recently cleaned.

That strange-looking round thing on the bottom left centre of the photograph is a Russian cannon captured during the Crimean War. The mouth of the cannon is facing right towards you.

There have been religious buildings on the Isle of Ely since the year 673, when a monastery was founded by Etheldreda, who later became St Etheldreda. Her tomb became a place of pilgrimage, and by the year 970, there was a Benedictine monastery on the site. Following the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Fens refused to submit to William the Conquerer, and the area was not subdued until 1071. The Normans then set to work creating a monumental statement of power and wealth, Ely Cathedral. Building began in 1083, and continued for almost 100 years. When you enter, you are in the original Norman part.




You can see the massive pillars and rounded Norman arches. The nave is very long; it is the third longest Cathedral in Britain. Above this Norman part, you can see the wooden medieval ceiling, which was painted in Victorian times.

In 1322, the central tower collapsed in a heap of rubble. A 74ft wide octagon tower was constructed in its place, and this is now regarded as the jewel in Elys crown. It is capped by a lantern tower.



You can perhaps see, in this rather dark photo, that the arches are now pointed and gothic, and the pillars are slimmer. The lantern is decorated with paintings of angels, though I am afraid they are impossible to photograph because so much light comes through the glass in the lantern. Beyond the lantern, the fan vaulted ceiling over the choir which is hardly visible in my photo is a stone ceiling - by that time, builders had learned to support the weight by using flying buttresses.

At around the same time, the Lady Chapel was built at the side of the cathedral and completed in 1349. It is an astonishing confection of white stone, full of light from huge windows and so almost impossible to photograph. I couldn't manage a decent overall photo, but this might give a flavour of it.



You can see the intricate detail of the carving and the pale hue of the stone - though it was even paler the last time I was here.

The monastery was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1539. Ely suffered less than many other monasteries, but even so, statues were destroyed together with carvings and stained glass. St Etheldreda's Shrine, which had attracted so many pilgrims in the past, was also destroyed. The spot where it stood is now marked by a ring of tall candles in sconces on the floor.

I wish I could include more photos, I have neatly 50 of the cathedral, including many of the wonderful carvings and decorations, and the lovely stained glass. But my connection in the wilds of Norfolk is very flaky, and there is no phone signal here at all. So I am being quite careful not to make this post too big - if it will even post at all.

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Rats and the Rest

June 25th - July 9

The previous week, we had received email from the tenant of our Aldgate apartment complaining that, on Thursday when they were eating dinner in the garden, they had an uninvited dinner guest in the shape of Mr or Mrs Rat. They subsequently found that, in erecting their desirable residence in the garden, Mr and Mrs Rat had excavated a considerable proportion of the soil under the brickwork of the patio, which they had considerately left in a large neat pile in the corner. Mr Rat is stronger than you would think; he had also picked up and moved several of the patio bricks because they were in his way. He piled these up quite neatly too.

Our tenant emailed us at the end of the previous week with photos, so at the beginning of the week we arrived with pick and shovel, intending to excavate chez rat and make them unwelcome. Unfortunately, chez rat proved to be quite extensive, so excavations on the patio and subsequent repairs took most of the day. Paul found the cozy bedroom, with a considerable number of Miss Rats and Master Rats comfortably installed;




these young rats are now 'late' rats, having unfortunately met a savage end at the hands of Paul (and a convenient brick). He says that is much kinder than poisoning them, which is a slow and painful death. I asked what I could do; his suggestion that I read the service for the dead over them did not meet with my approval.

Chez Rat proved to be very extensive, having a number of passages and doors, and was not excavated in its entirety, time (and energy) having run out. However, all the excavated soil was returned underground, along with several buckets of water, the four or five entrances I found have all been blocked up, and we have been supplied with two bait boxes which are apparently superior to those we can obtain in B&Q. If Mr and Mrs Rat return, I suppose we'll need to have a professional exterminator in.

This was just one day in our busy fortnight. Let me describe some of the rest of our days.

I am a Director of the Residents Association of the development where we have this apartment, and seem to have had at least 8 solid days work associated with it. The development owns an apartment which was supposed to be the Head Porter's apartment, but we don't use it for that. It has been rented unfurnished for many years, but we have now been advised by the Estate Agent that it needs to be furnished, so one of the other directors (A.) and I got stuck in!

The first task was to visit the apartment (70 mile round trip, so a lot of driving) and decide what furniture to buy and what other work needed to be done - the oven cleaning again, it goes without saying! Then, some days were spent on the Internet looking at possible furniture. You can buy various 'landlord's furniture packages' but we were reluctant to commit money to something which might look charming in the photo but awful when you actually saw it. So in the end most of the stuff came from Ikea. It's only about 15 miles from us, but traffic is awful so it usually takes an hour each way. Then you have to get the aisle and location numbers by tramping round the long and winding Ikea trail, and put the stuff on trolleys. We needed 4 trolleys in the end, and lots of Ikea people had to help us.

I arranged for it all to be delivered - we are used to carrying a lot of Ikea furniture in our car, but not a whole houseful! Checking the delivery isn't possible when you live more than 30 miles away, but the Facilities Manager received the delivery and told me one item had been forgotten and would have to come the next day. However, when we drove up to build the furniture, it still hadn't arrived. We soon noticed what it was - the 3 seat sofa! How can any delivery company forget a huge sofa? And of course, with everything being identified by those weird Swedish names, all anybody but me knew was that there was a Skogaby missing!

So then there were several phone calls to locate our missing sofa, which fortunately turned up the next day. Next, Paul embarked on wardrobe building, while A. and I tackled the building of the dining chairs so we could all sit down. The first chair, fortunately, was no problem, but the legs belonging to the second one just would not fit at all. We turned the leg frame every way we could, we turned the chair itself around every way we could think of, wondering if we had gone mad, and then it dawned on us - wrong set of legs! Fortunately, all other sets of legs were correct, but we only had 3 dining chairs until we could visit Ikea to change the wrong legs.

We ate a quick lunch, which I insisted we eat in the kitchen for fear of dropping things on the carpet, which was just as well, since Paul's sandwich jumped out of his hands onto the floor. Then he went upstairs with his cup of coffee and juggled with that as well, so there was a lot of carpet cleaning needed. The only other problem that day was a bit of the wardrobe hanging rail which proved to be missing. So on the way home, we had to stop at Ikea and change the legs and the hanging rail. We didn't get home until after 9!

Next day, all 3 of us were back again, and we finished building all the furniture we had bought. However, A and I decided we should buy a second bedside chest and a suitable coffee table. So, at the weekend Paul and I were back at Ikea buying more stuff, and then on Monday we drove back to Aldgate again so we could build the two remaining items. This time, we also took a scrubbing brush so Paul could have a proper go at his coffee stain.

So all this is the reason for no blog for a while - I've spent so much time on the Internet researching beds and sofas and bath panels and flooring and getting samples of stuff I've had very little time for anything else.

I do now trust it's almost at an end. A. is ordering Venetian blinds for the kitchen windows, which look out onto a busy street, and looking for replacement lampshades. And various staff who work for the development are co-ordinating the laying of the flooring, the putting up of various blinds and curtain poles and the cleaning of various items that A. and I felt had been left too dirty - like the oven!

And now I am hoping to have a few days rest.


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Another day out in June

June 22

This was our second day out in June, this time to Ightham Mote, a 700 year old moated manor house about half an hour's drive from where we live. We visited it several years ago, but this time we took a friend who hadn't been before.

I see from looking at my photos that the interior ones, as usual, are quite poor, since they are all done without flash, but I have some better ones taken outside. As you can see, it wasn't a very bright day, and we kept expecting it to rain, but it managed to hold off all the time we were there.



The house originally dates to around 1320, but successive owners have made relatively few changes to the main structure, after the completion of the courtyard with a new chapel in the 16th century.

Nikolaus Pevsner called it "the most complete small medieval manor house in the country", and it shows exactly how small medieval manor houses would have looked in the Middle Ages. Apparently most courtyard houses of this type have had a range demolished, so that the house looks outward. Ightham Mote completely surrounds its courtyard and looks inward.

We began by having a tour of the garden. Normally, visitors aren't able to go into the south part of the garden, which is very wild and overgrown,and is being restored, a task that is likely to take 7 or 8 more years. The south garden, when restored, will be more or less a mirror image of the north garden, which itself took about 10 years to restore. This is the north garden and north lake.


There will also be a south lake in the south garden.

The rhododendrons hadn't quite finished, some were still in bloom.





After our garden tour, we had time for a quick introductory talk about the house and how the National Trust came to acquire it. It is sad to learn how close it came to being demolished had it not been saved by some local businessmen and then a wealthy American; probably a great many similar wonderful buildings were demolished when they fell into disrepair.

After that, we were just in time to take a quick trip up the tower for wonderful panoramic views. This is a range of outbuildings which were originally farm buildings.


There are over seventy rooms in the house, all arranged around a central courtyard.



This is my view of part of the central courtyard. It also shows the only Grade 1 listed dog house in Britain. Yes, really!

The house is surrounded on all sides by a square moat, crossed by three bridges. Apparently the earliest evidence is for a house of the early 14th century, with the Great Hall, to which were attached, at the dais end, the Chapel, Crypt and two Solars. Other bits of the building came later as courtyard was gradually enclosed bit by bit; the battlemented tower we went up was constructed in the 15th century. I suppose it was the restricted site, being completely surrounded by the moat, which meant that later building was also a bit restricted.

As I said, my interior photographs are fairly terrible - the best is this carved saracen's head, which is really too dark to see properly. More time with Photoshop is needed!



There was a great deal to see, including some wonderful painted ceilings which are almost impossible to photograph.

As usual, we were the last out and were followed by National Trust volunteers rattling their keys at us.

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Days out in June

June 1 - 21

I see from my Calendar that the first part of June was very busy, and the last part was much worse!

We seemed to spend a lot of time slaving in my elder son's house and garden - particularly the garden, which had got completely out of hand. We chopped and slashed and bagged, and made umpteen trips to the dump with garden rubbish and other assorted rubbish. We also helped my sister with her house move. I can never understand why so any people leave their ovens in such a disgusting state - the number of other people's ovens I've cleaned, you'd think it would be fair if I came across one which was clean already, but I never seem to. The oven of the place to which she has moved needed a lot of Oven Pride and scrubbing.

In between all this, we did manage two days out. One was to Standen again, where we visited last Year. This time, we went with friends and it was a bit warmer. We had a very good pub lunch first, then a long walk in the woods around Standen. After that, we wandered round the gardens. Although it was quite late in June, the rhododendrons were lovely, and it's really hard to choose just one photograph, they were all so beautiful.



This is a part of the garden I photographed last time - but this time, it's full of flowers!

It was nice to go round the house again and appreciate things I had not looked at carefully last time - like this portrait of Mrs Beale, wife of the London solicitor for whom Phillip Webb designed the house.


The house is just full of William Morris patterns and beautiful William de Morgan ceramics, many of which I longed to take home, and all of which I have unaccountably failed to photograph. There was even a little May Morris exhibition, which I also failed to photograph. I often marvel afterwards, when I look at my photos, at how many things I didn't photograph and should have done, especially when I see the things I did photograph.

I did take some photos in the kitchen. The huge old range is too dark to see properly in the photo, but I did also like this old built in dresser - probably the very latest thing when the house was built.



Although, as usual we had stayed until the place was closing, I did have time to buy the cushions I failed to buy last time I was there. So now I have two cushions on my bed which match the bedroom curtains - much to Paul's disgust, he flings them onto the floor before he gets into bed every night!

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The Old Bailey - For the Last Time

May 28th

This was the day appointed for the sentencing of the killer of our cousin, so my sister and I were off to the Old Bailey again - hopefully, for the last time. We met people from the Crown Prosecution Service again, and we also met the two policemen who apprehended the killer, so at least we were able to thank them personally.

We had to listen in court to the dreadful details of how the young German killed Douglas, by punching him so hard that he fractured his own hand, and knocking Douglas to the ground. Once Douglas was on the ground, the young man, who is very athletic and strong because of weight training, stamped repeatedly on his head, smashing his skull. This is really far more detail than we ever wanted to know, but has to be a matter of public record.

Since we had had a meeting with the police some days beforehand when we were allowed to read some background summaries, we now appreciated how seriously mentally ill this young man is. 'Completely bonkers' just about sums it up, in what you might call laymen's terms.

We read that he had been a very talented child who excelled at school and in sports. There was some suggestion that his paranoia, which only began to develop a year ago, might have been brought on or perhaps exacerbated by smoking a lot of dope. Anyway, a paranoia certainly developed, one feature of which was that he believed he had been sexually assaulted by pedophiles, and he made a number of visits to mental health clinics. At one of these clinics he met a woman who he afterwards saw and spoke to in the street. He apparently then went to her house and beat her to death with the leg of her coffee table, believing she was a witch; he left before the police arrived, so an investigation began in his home town, but it was not know who had killed her.

In the meantime, he went to Berlin where he was found by the police climbing up a building 'to get closer to God'. He was taken to a mental health clinic there, but he managed to avoid telling them anything about the murder. He believed by then that he was an angel sent by God to destroy evil people, and he had to do as God commanded. He refused medication and discharged himself against medical advice, and a few days after that, came to London. Apparently, it has been very difficult to get him to accept medication, even in the secure hospital.

When he saw my cousin Douglas he believed he had 'the eyes of the Devil' - I mentioned in an earlier posting that Douglas' eyes were always very red and sore. One of his many health problems was that his eyelashes had started to grow inwards; he had to go to hospital to have them plucked out once a month. As well as the eyes of the devil, Douglas may also have reminded him of a man that he believed was a pedophile who he thought had sexually assaulted him. Anyway, he decided he had to destroy Douglas, and that's what he did.

This was all quite difficult to listen to, though there was also a lot about Douglas himself and his life history. I had made sure, by writing a description of Douglas for the court, that it was appreciated what kind of man he was. The judge said he had been much moved by my statement.

Then we moved on to sentencing. It was what is known as a 'hospital order' which means that the young man will be locked up in a secure hospital, hopefully until he is no longer crazy. He is also subject to a restriction order, which means it isn't psychiatrists or lay people who let him out if they decide he's well again, but, in the case of Germany, where he's going next, a judge and a court.

He'll be sent to Germany now to stand trial for the killing there, and he'll be treated and locked up there. The German law says that a judge has to decide that there is no longer any chance at all of his ever attacking anybody again, so I imagine he'll be locked up for a very long time.

In the unlikely event of the German case against him collapsing (there is DNA evidence and his confession to police here, but you never know) he would be returned from Germany to a secure hospital here and be locked up again here. I'd naturally prefer he stayed in Germany.

He's still regarded as very dangerous, so he'll be taken back to Germany on a military plane using a military airfield, and he'll have a heavy police escort as well as a medical one.

After it was all over, we were asked if we would speak to the BBC, and describe Douglas. We agreed to do this, in the pouring rain and amidst all the traffic noise, and spoke at some length - too great length, probably. Just at the end, the journalist slipped in the question that, thinking back, was probably the one thing he really wanted to ask. He asked me what I thought of the verdict. I just said I hoped he would be detained for long enough to come to understand the enormity of what he had done - and that's the only bit they broadcast!

There were one or two short articles in the press, mostly with Douglas' surname spelled wrongly - I think that's really sloppy journalism. The press might at least give him the dignity, in death, of bothering to spell his name correctly. Most of the coverage was in local London papers, though there was also something in the Telegraph. I gave an interview to the Camden Journal, which ran a tribute article about Douglas.

After such a miserable post, here are a couple of photos to cheer you up.
The azaleas in the garden were wonderful at the end of May.




These are some small ones from the front of the house.

A bit later, we were able to admire the peonies I can see from the window as I sit on the sofa.



They cheer me up, anyway.

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Visit to Titsey Place

Monday May 27th

I see that now I am even more behind than usual - mostly because my days have been so full I hardly ever get time to write anything. We don't seem to have been in our own house for more than a few hours for ages - though we have managed to fit in a few days out.

The weather hasn't been good - and some sunny days have been spent slaving away in somebody else's house or garden, of which possibly more later. However, we did manage one day out for the Spring Bank Holiday, and it was a lovely sunny day, though there was a cold wind.

We didn't make a very early start, so we decided to go to Titsey Place, which is close by and only open in the afternoon. The house is normally only open two days a week, though the garden is open three days a week, but we were able to see both house and garden as they are also open on Bank Holidays.

I'd have liked to include some photographs of the inside of the house, but no photographs are allowed and entry to the house is by tour only, so there are only exterior photographs.

It is a very interesting area, having been inhabited since earliest times - there are Iron Age remains and items from the two Roman sites in the tiny museum inside the house. Titsey was mentioned in Doomsday Book (1086) and the estate was owned in the Middle Ages by the Uvedale family and was bought in 1534 (during the reign of Henry VIII) by John Gresham. I imagine that's the family that were ultimately responsible for Gresham's Bank. John's nephew Richard is rather better known, as he became Chancellor to Elizabeth I.

The family fortunes waxed and waned - the Greshams supported the King in the Civil War, and the house was taken over by Parliamentarians in 1643, thought it was later returned. By 1750 the house was rather dilapidated, and was largely demolished and was re-built in the Georgian style in 1775 by Sir John Gresham. He died leaving only a daughter to inherit, and she married William Leveson Gower, so the family name changed.

Leveson Gower is one of those strange British names which is not pronounced the way it is spelled - it's pronounced Looson Gore! Anyway, he was a cousin of the Duke of Sutherland, and it has always remained a wealthy family. Having no children, the last surviving Leveson Gower brothers, Richard and Thomas, appointed David Innes as their heir. Thomas had been appointed guardian to David Innes under the will of his father who had been a close family friend of the brothers and their parents. Together they established a body called the Titsey Foundation to preserve the house and garden and open them to the public. The last surviving Leveson Gower brother, Thomas, died in 1992.

The house is extremely interesting inside, still having regency plastered cornices, panelling, and marble mantelpieces. What interested us greatly was the collection of old masters - there are family portraits by Joshua Reynolds and Peter Lely, as well as four stunning paintings by Canaletto in the dining room.

Below is a view of the house



The original simple flat-fronted Georgian house has been added to and re-modelled in 1826 and 1856.

The gardens are extensive and stunning.




This is the view from below the house, looking down towards the lake. The views are embellished by many fine mature trees.

This is a view of the lake itself, with a fountain playing in the centre.



A dam creates the lake from a river, which flows out of it.




This is the river below the lake, which has a pretty bridge over it. It seems to be quite a popular picnic spot!

My last view is taken from the lake, looking back up to the house.



The huge chestnut tree is in flower, and you can see the other even more enormous tree behind it, with the house in the background.

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