Wollaton Wander

Given the choice of a visit to Wollaton Park, or putting up an Ikea wardrobe - I will always pick the park.

Saturday was predicted to be a sunny day, but Sunday, not so much - so I decided that it was better to go to the park in the sunshine, and spend the rainy day swearing inside a wardrobe.


The Boy was keen; wearing sunglasses because it was sunny, and not wearing a hat because we are idiots.





The stables are nice, but don't look especially grand - they do however, contain toilets, and a coffee shop.

From the outside however, the stables are rather grand.

Inside the hall there is a display of muskets.

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We waited for friends outside the Hall.

It is probably worth noting that the sky in all these pictures was completely empty - not only of clouds, but of contrails too - there were no jet planes flying because of the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland.

Here's a hastily stitched panorama as illustration.

A Chicken Pox Wander

The Boy has chicken pox. He's not poorly in himself (as my Gran used to say), in fact he is happier and better behaved than last week. That said, he has a million red spots…so he can't play out.

He can however go for a walk. I recently heard the observation that boys are like dogs - they need a run out once a day. This is very true, so I took him for a walk round the block. 5 minutes for a grown-up, 45 minutes with a 2-year-old in tow.

Sometimes being a parent is a real pain in the arse, but simple quality time like this makes it all worth while… it makes me wish I spent more time with my boys.

Anyway, I managed to convince little Rasputin to bring his camera with him… he didn't take many pictures, but what he did take were way better than mine.

Little David Bailey stopped taking pictures with his camera here, and started using it as a carrying tray for a plastic 5p piece. Really, don't ask. The rest are my pics.

A Vertical Wander

It doesn't happen very often, but everything came together nicely today. A Friday, good weather, manageable workload, well-behaved children and a compatible schedule... so my lovely wife met me at work, at lunchtime. After showing the boys off for slightly too long, we took them into town to get some lunch.

We weren't especially hungry, and as as we walked into town, the looming shape of the ferris wheel above Market Square gave us a much better idea of what to do. After the briefest of queues (it is term time) we were on our way, upwards. The Boy loved it, he was totally without fear (in the tiny wind-rocked gondola), and Helen gripped the baby as if he was the only thing that would save her from a terrible, plunging, death.

A city might seem chaotic at ground level, but it is only from the air that we can truly appreciate how organic and thrown-together it truly is. New buildings wedged between older ones, walls and windows now only visible from private courtyards, and endless alleys and snickets. The exotic gridded cities of the new world seem almost impossible here.