The End - I promise. The final episode in my cataract saga

I have finally finished my eye saga, having, completed all the surgery, checks, eye tests, more tests and finally an eye test for glasses. Saturday I visited our optician to collect my new glasses.  I can now drive, read, watch TV and work on the computer without changing my specs.
Our optician originally had a practice in Cheltenham, but moved to Stratford Upon Avon. Having had only good results from his practice, we followed him there.  It is a bit further than Cheltenham, but being retired and not having to fit appointments in with work, it makes a nice ride and Stratford is a pleasant place to wander around, so we are happy with this arrangement.

Receiving a message that my specs were ready on the Friday, we decided to go Saturday morning and started out first thing, well 10 ish.
On arriving at Stratford Upon Avon, we discovered that this weekend was a River festival and an often quite crowded town was absolutely heaving. We were able to find a parking space, right at the end of our favourite, but rather long, car park and after a coffee break to recover from the stress of queueing for miles and fighting our way through the mobs of visitors, we went to collect my specs.
Fitted out with glasses once more we stopped for lunch at a Bella Italia. I ordered a slow cooked lamb shank and when it arrived, I was annoyed to find it was cold and not very well cooked. The staff scurried around and after some negotiation, a second one arrived. This had been cooked properly I am glad to say and we were able to finish lunch before our parking ticket expired.

We often have a wander around town after seeing the optician, but today the streets were so crowded it was not very easy to get around, so we decided to head for home straight away. Just as we got out of town, the heavens opened and it rained like the flood. However, this did not last long and soon we were driving along bone dry roads which had not seen any rain at all that day. I hope the river festival did not get rained off, a lot of people would have been disappointed.

When we came up to to my first appointment with the optician, we had noticed a patch of poppies in a field close to the side of Fosse Way, the road we take to get to Stratford. Today it is about two acres of poppies, so I decided to stop in a nearby layby and take few pictures. And here they are.

Fosse Way takes you through the Cotswolds past Bourton on the Water, through Stow on the Wold and Morton in Marsh. I often used to use this road when working for a national company and I had to get to Rugby quite regularly, so it is a familiar road. There are some interesting places along Fosse Way.
One place it passes through close by is Northleach where there is an agricultural museum and a Museum of Mechanical Music. This is a rather small museum that collects and sells ancient musical devices from musical boxes to player pianos. Once when visiting it there were some early phonograph wax cylinders on display with their original cardboard cartons and we were interested to see that the cartons had been made in my grandfather’s factory. They were clearly marked with his Cartonite brand name under the main label. His company ceased trading long ago and no longer produces cardboard tubes.
Fosse Way is one of the main Roman roads that criss cross Britain and is quite straight for much of its length, but still has bends here and there where boundaries have altered over the centuries. What it does do is go up and down and at Foss Bridge there is a deep dip that goes a long way down quite sharply with another steep hill on the other side.

Heading north you see the road dip and in the distance you can see it climbing up the other side.  At the bottom is a bend that has been the cause of many a person leaving the road.

Heading south, the road falls away suddenly and you find yourself going down hill with little warning.
This used to be a really good place for overtaking slow vehicles, but they have put a 40mph speed limit on it and you risk getting a ticket if you try to race up the hill now. Spoilsports!

One building that I have always been curious about is this rather quaint gatehouse.  It is on the boundary of what must be a huge estate, judging from the length of the wall surrounding it.  It is a typical Cotswold dry stone wall and it runs for miles alongside Fosse Way.

A week in Stratford upon Avon

Whilst visiting this quiet little town, buried on the borders of the Cotswolds, I got the strong feeling that Stratford upon Avon has some kind of connection with a little known playwright called William Shakespeare. It may have been the prominent theatre that tends to almost exclusively put on a lot of plays by this guy and is the home of a tiny bunch of enthusiasts who call themselves the Royal Shakespeare Company, or the many old Tudor houses that seem to bear names like ‘William Shakespeare’s birthplace’, ‘Anne Hathaway’s cottage, ‘Mary Arden’s Farm, Halls Croft and ‘The New Place’, all of which lay some claim to his immediate family. These subtle clues made me realise that this was some kind of local celebrity.

Shakespeare's Birthplace

I imagine that many of you reading this will have never heard of this little known playwright, who although recognised by the residents of this tiny country town, may not have spread far outside his home town.

Halls Croft, Shakespeare's daughter's house

Amazingly, for such an obscure playwright, there seemed to be a large number of tourists wanting to visit the town, many arriving from distant lands just to see his birthplace. Coachloads of tourists were constantly arriving and jamming themselves into the tiny hovels which had once been occupied by this local hero.  

Anne Hathaway's cottage, later Mrs Shakespeare

By the last afternoon of our visit, a Saturday, the open grassed area between the bridge over the river Avon and the Theatre, an area of at least two acres, which had been a pleasant place to stroll in the sunshine, was so crowded it was just a sea of people.

I think I should warn anyone from overseas who has yet been persuaded to spend good money in order see the place, that it is not very good value for money. Whilst there are many perfectly good modern clean, spacious and well lit buildings around the town, the tourist guides insist on sending their clients to see some really ramshackle buildings that are obviously very old and built to very low standards that would be firmly rejected by today’s more discriminating citizens.

There is no double glazing, the central heating and sanitation is primitive to say the least. The floors are extremely uneven and could cause accidents due to their irregularities. The windows are tiny and let in little light and the ceilings are so low that anyone over five foot in height stands a good chance of injuring their head on the low and protruding beams that abound in all these buildings.

This notice mind your head should have read mind your back.
Bending down so far was not good for lumbago.

Some of the local people were able to quote a few lines from the plays written by their local bard and will put on an impromptu play for the benefit of the tourists as a part of different guided tours.

Juliet

We were able to watch an extract from two plays, Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer night’s Dream. They were very good and The Granddaughter (TG) was entranced.
Unfortunately the theatre was closed for refitting and so we were unable to watch the real thing.

Although the weather started cold for the first two days, despite weather forecasts of rain and clouds, we had the most glorious weather for the rest of the week.

A visit to Mary Arden’s Farm was interesting, since it is run as a Tudor period farm and as far as possible keeps the traditional methods in use. The staff are all dressed in Period costume and provide a lot of information about how people lived and worked. They have a falconry exhibition and display certain birds of prey whilst explaining how they would have been used in medieval times to augment people’s diet by hunting with them. They also went through the hierarchy of who could use which kind of birds and the penalties of transgressing these hunting laws.

The Eagle owl refused to co-operate with the handlers and comically walked around rather than fly for them.

A Waddling bird of prey

Another one of the nearby places to visit in Stratford-upon-Avon is the Butterfly Farm. This is quite small but full of tropical butterflies and other insects and arachnoids. Once inside you are surrounded by butterflies, fluttering past and around you.

Food is put on the flower shapes to attract the butterflies

For some reason whenever I stood in a patch of sunlight, several butterflies settled on me. This did not happen to any of the others of my family until finally one settled on The Better Half (TBH) TG was quite disappointed that none settled on her. The one on TBH was able to disguise itself as a dead leaf when it closed its wings, which was obviously a survival tactic for that species. 

 It was quite hot inside, being kept at a tropical level for the insects, but we were glad of the change because the weather had not at that stage of the week warmed up much outside.

Close by is the stately home of Coughton Court, the home of the Throckmorton family since 1409 and we did the tour and listened to the guides give some really interesting stuff about the family history and their involvement in both the Gunpowder Plot and in the English Civil war.

Coughton Court

It had grown really warm by that day, and so for lunch we picnicked outside and whilst we ate, we were entertained by a single crow driving off a buzzard, a much larger bird. Later three buzzards soared above us climbing on the thermals until they were almost out of sight.

The crow chasing the buzzard off

The gardens of Coughton Court are very extensive and well maintained by the family. We were able to wander around and admire the views for the rest of the day.

Some blooms in the gardens

The daffodils were almost over but still had masses of blooms

The Lake in the gardens

A View from the roof of the tower

Another view from the tower showing some of the extensive grounds

Because we were staying in a self-catering place which did not provide an Internet connection, I decided to buy a 3G pay-as-you-go dongle. As I am sure many people will know, these things plug into your laptop and are supposed to connect you to the Internet via the mobile (cell) phone network using the modern smart phone technology but without an actual phone.
It was rather erratic but did allow me to get on line for a while each evening, just enough to get my e-mails reliably but it did not let me get into blogging at all well and most of my comments were often blitzed by it, so apologies to anyone who sees me regularly on their site and got nothing from me.

Apart from poor Internet which, contrary to TBH’s opinion, I can live without, it was a brilliant week and we are now resting our sore hips and knees, the result of being on our feet for several hours every day and being with a lively granddaughter.