We had a few days in Ironbridge recently, visiting all the places we didn’t get around to last time. Including places we didn’t realise existed (like the street named Paradise – we visited Hell in Norway some years ago, so this was the logical destination).

This time, we headed for the Jackfield Tile Museum and the Coalport China Museum on our first day. Having seen tiles being made on The Great Pottery Throwdown, we were keen to see whether this was how they were made here – but of course, this was a factory. No careful individual rolling out. The range of designs was amazing, and there’s an entire lifetime collection donated by someone who bought a single tile in 1968 and got hooked on collecting more.

It’s easy to miss the fact that the Victorians started the push for better hygeine, public lavatories everywhere to keep the common folk from piddling in the gutters and of course, tiled walls and floors are easier to keep clean than wood or stone. The tile industry took off. Jackfield supplied tiles for the stations being built on the London Underground. We looked everywhere for the tiles we uncovered on our kitchen floor without finding anything like them, but I suspect they are late Victorian or early 20th century. Maybe on a future visit I can take a photo of the tiles to Jackfield and ask them.

Between Jackfield and Coalport is an old tile factory that used to be run by the Maws family. These days, it hosts a gathering of artists and craftspeople. It’s worth a visit – in many of the places, artists sit working on their pieces and they are happy to chat to visitors about the techniques they use. I dropped in on a man making jewellery out of coins (legally) and then we were invited in to a model making studio. Beautiful, accurate, detailed models.

I had to include this photo of the door of the Boat Inn at Coalport. The Severn was boiling along quietly about twenty feet below the doorstep level at this point, and it was hard to believe that it reached this height even once – but clearly, this is an annual event. Only 2017 and 2018 breaks the run of at least one high flood a year since 2008.

Over the bridge to the Coalport side, and a canal full of ducks. And drakes. And several fluffy ducklings zooming around like a group of wind-up toys. A drake made a dive into one of the floating duck islands while we were there, and a duck came flying out, followed shortly afterwards by six ducklings.

Coalport China Museum. They have photos there of the staff in 1951, some of whom were in their seventies and still working. The old equipment and moulds are still preserved, and there are staff working there who are happy to chat to visitors about the history of the factory – a special thank-you to Janice, who took a great deal of time at the end of a long day to talk to us. They suffer just as badly when the Severn floods, and they have photos of the factory during lockdown with river up to the fourth course of bricks. They get warnings, and they can move artefacts up to a higher level, but the scrubbing job afterwards is probably beyond belief.

Back to the accommodation via the chip shop. Yes, not healthy, but it was that halfway time of night when every cafe had shut its doors and none of the restaurants were serving. By the time we got back to our own room we had walked somewhere between eight and ten miles and were not too inclined to walk back down the hill and then back up with a full meal on board. Not just not inclined – barely capable of walking.

Day Two, and we were headed for Blists Hill. All the way back out to Coalport, up the hill to the Shakespeare Inn and then more up – up until we were sure we’d missed a sign somewhere and were headed for the outskirts of Telford. Just as we were about to reach the top of the ridge, we got to the entrance of Blists Hill Town.

Blists Hill is a town frozen in 1900, the last full year of Victoria’s reign. Many of the shops and cottages have been rebuilt there from buildings demolished elsewhere, or preserved where they stood. The contents of the chemist’s shop above came from a Bristol chemist that closed down with so many ancient boxes and tins and dusty old artefacts in its store-room that it was a museum in itself. There was a dentist’s chair in a side room, ready to have a patient strapped in and teeth pulled out. Reminded me of the people who pulled out their own teeth during lockdown. Have we really got so far back to Victorian times?

The haberdasher’s shop dresses their window in mourning every January as a tribute to Queen Victoria and a stalwart early volunteer, both of whom died in January (different years). They sell embroidered and tartan hankies, ribbon and fabric. Just up the road, the sweet shop sells traditional sweets from jars in ounces. Sad to say, something we both remember from our childhoods. If we’d wanted to be authentic we would have changed up our modern money for Victorian coins – all the shops take both currencies and card as well – but the bank was full (and I worked in a bank with Victorian values, and thank you, I don’t want to go back). The shops all function as shops, by the way. You can buy cloth in the haberdashery, bread and cake in the bakers, scent from the chemist and beef-fat chips from the chip-shop. We arrived at the stables just in time to see the Shire horses being harnessed for their outing – a film crew were busy at the warehouse, filming an episode of ‘Belgravia’, and I assume there’ll be two solid Shires plodding past in the background.

Our feet were begging to go home by this point, and we agreed. It was another four miles home. It went faster this time, probably because we were walking downhill and because we recognised waypoints. We didn’t realise it at the time, but the orchard we walked past was the Coalport Community Orchard, and we could have gone in and wandered among the blossom.

It was an ambition this time, to wander around the Woodside Community Orchard while it was in blossom and compare it to our own local orchard, but every time I put it off. My legs and feet hurt every evening, and they hurt so much on the morning we left that I was just grateful to be able to lower myself into the driver’s seat. No chance I could have walked uphill for half a mile and enjoyed the view. We got home and enjoyed the chance to put our aching feet up.

Still. A great couple of days away. Next?

The previous post was completely full up with all the goings on in Scotland – hard to believe that we were there for just two days. Northumberland took up just one full day, but I think this post will be just as long.

We were watching the weather forecasts with a bit of concern as there was the threat of snow north of the Manchester / Sheffield / Grimsby line on the afternoon we travelled up. In the end, we ran into one light snowstorm on the A69, right at the end of the trip. Snow had settled on the tops of the hills and the temperature outside was around zero – so we were driving wary of ice.

The room at the Twice Brewed Inn was much nicer than I’d expected, but cold at first. We thought it was because we’d arrived early, but the following day we realised that the cleaning staff propped the exit door next to ours open for about an hour to get all the laundry shipped down the outside stairs. The room went from cosy to chilly and took another hour to warm up. Not usually a problem as we would have been out at that time, but we’d packed the visit full this time and were sprawled out knackered in the room.

Up early on Thursday and out straight after breakfast. The Twice Brewed is the closest accommodation (apart from Peel Cottage) to Sycamore Gap. That’s the dip in the escarpment near Milecastle 39 where the most photographed tree in Britain fills that gap magnificently. We tried to find it last year and ran out of time before we could get there, but we promised ourselves we’d go back.

We were close, last time we were there – just thirty minutes’ walk from the tree, though it would have been thirty minutes in rain and high winds. This time we were walking on wet rock and muddy ground but in light drizzle at worst. We took the high route to the gap – up a narrow, twisty rock stairway that looked very like Cirith Ungol on the borders of Mordor. I watched the hobbits climbing those steps thinking that I couldn’t cope with that steep climb myself. I can, but just.

The path follows Hadrian’s Wall and runs up, over the peak and down into the trough of a gap – then up another peak, down into a trough where Milecastle 39 is – then up, over a peak and suddenly, you’re looking down on the tree. I gave up at that point on ups and downs – my feet had slipped twice on wet, muddy rock steps and that last descent was near to vertical. We retreated to the milecastle and took the lower path, the flat level track that went around the back of the escarpment. I could imagine the Roman soldiers marching along that hidden track and walking up into full view of any approaching raiders.

We were joined by two people from Florida who wanted to visit this tree because (apparently) Kevin Costner climbed it in the film ‘Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves’. Why they couldn’t send him up a tree in Nottinghamshire is beyond me. We spent a few minutes enjoying the view and then walked back. Missing the spectacular rainbow to the north by about ten minutes, but hey. I guess somebody has captured that shot in the past.

Back down to The Sill, the magnificent visitors’ centre next to the Twice Brewed. Hot coffee and lunch, then to visit their exhibition – Jackie Morris and Robert McFarlane’s Lost Spells. Her artwork is wonderful, and we were seeing it while listening to the Spells, a series of poems about the creatures with recordings of their calls in the background.

Back to the inn for a shower and tea before dinner and stargazing. Yup. It was cloudy. But still, we had a long session in the planetarium dome set up nearby and a few dashes outside to glimpse the stars whenever the clouds cleared away. At the end of the evening the presenter passed around his collection of meteorites. A tiny, dense meteorite. A chip off the rock that exploded in the skies over Chelyabinsk in 2013. A piece of the Moon that landed on Earth and finally the most incredible thing – a miniscule fleck from a meteorite which matches the composition of Mars surface rock. Sneeze and it’s gone.

A good night’s sleep before packing away and getting ready for the trip to Scotland. Leaving on a clear, bright, sunny morning on Hadrian’s Wall and driving into… Well, we expected rain, and we weren’t disappointed.

Yup, slightly alarming title. I admit it was a bit scary for me, too. We went to a talk on foraging wild food on Thursday evening, and the speaker laid out a load of plants on his table and began to talk to us all about foraging. He was a little nervous, as he usually took people on a wander around the Wethersfield Eco Project and the surrounding grounds to see the plants themselves in their natural habitat – this was a new format for him and he was worried that it wouldn’t engage his audience.

He started by talking about water. Foraging water. The topic of foraged water continued for about twenty minutes, and he could have continued all night as far as we were concerned. He had only drunk water from the spring on the farm for the last two or three decades and loved it – and he’d brought along a two-litre jug of it for us to share. ‘Anyone want some?’ he asked. At first we all shrugged – the glasses we had were full of ginger ale, gin and tonic or mead. The second call, I’d drunk my ginger ale and was the first one up. Tim filled my glass. ‘Please, don’t die,’ he said, as he began to pour. He was joking. I hoped. The water was fabulous, cool and slightly chalky in a very pleasant way. It was a small compensation for having missed out on the chance to slug back some glacier meltwater in Milford Haven in 2014 (we were later told that the glacier itself was due to melt completely, with the last of that ancient ice flowing into the Sound by 2020. I haven’t wanted to check. In my mind, it’s still there).

He walked down the aisle distributing sprigs of plants he’d foraged over the previous 48 hours, inviting us to crush, smell, take a nibble of a leaf and pass it along. Nobody around me appreciated the yellow samphire he’d gathered from the Heybridge Basin, so I ended up with an evening’s supply – likewise the wild garlic leaves (‘The stems are the best’), though the Herb Robert was thoroughly crushed and the chickweed had been eaten to the stems. Never mind, we have plenty home here.

The variety of weeds that can be eaten and enjoyed is stunning. Our local council is about to charge for the garden waste collection service, and we’re deciding that paying £3 a time to have the weeds removed is not worth it – especially as there is only us to stop for within a hundred metres, as our neighbour doesn’t put out his green waste bin more than four times a year. I think Tim Wells has suggested the solution. Eat those weeds.

We even tried the sequioa sprig. Lovely, piney (of course) and definitely in the category of spice notes rather than bulk filler. In the end, the organiser was tidying up the glasses as discreetly as she could and Tim realised he’d gone an hour over his allotted time and wrapped up quickly.

We went home with a new determination to dig out our kitchen well this summer (weather permitting) and test the water. The sky was dark and the grass was frosted as we walked back to the car. Well worth the time to visit.

Someone said to me last week; ‘Last time I looked it was Boxing Day and now it’s February! Where did January go?’

It was an odd month. I had a vicious cold just before Christmas which I passed on to himself, and which he passed back to me for a January present. I’ve just about come to and January’s done. Meaning it’s time for 28 Plays Later. The Literal Challenge has made it easier this year in one way – no timed route, so you can in theory take the whole month off and submit all 28 plays on the final day of the challenge. I’m still sticking to the timed route, myself. It does mean that I’m not likely to mix up the prompts. As if that could be done.

TLC asks contestants not to reveal the details of the prompts themselves, but we’re allowed to tell others the rough outline. So far, we’ve been invited to write a play about time, a play that can be performed only once, a play relying on riddles and a traditional farce. The top puzzler so far is to take inspiration from the life and work of a singer who was so famous in her own country that the national radio station devoted one hour a week to broadcasting recordings of her singing – every week, for almost forty years after her death. None of the playwrights responding to that one had even heard of her. Well, we certainly know about her now.

TLC are kind enough to let us go off-brief if it stumps us too much, though in the final reading session they will only consider plays that fit the brief exactly. The whole point of 28 Plays for me is to push myself to write something that I would never have thought of before, and the first six days have done that. Every evening at 8pm, the email pops up on my inbox with the next brief and the process is always the same. First; “I can’t think of anything around that!” followed by research on the subject. Sometimes immediately and sometimes hours later I have a weak idea that turns into a wicked idea that ends up as a play. With 24 hours to write and submit before the next brief arrives, none of them are long enough or polished enough to believe that any theatre company might be interested. That’s not the point. The point is to train you to drop the time wasting and write a first draft, something you might pick up later and turn into a full idea. It’s working so far. One of last year’s daft drafts got edited and sent off to a competition, and probably going on the ‘No’ pile right now but it’s a start.

The bird in the picture at the top of the page is a Twenty Eight bird. A kind of parrot whose call is ‘Twenny Eight… twenny eight…’ Probably all I’ll be able to say by the end of February.

Take ten points if you recognised the quote from Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons. Those are the names of the four cows under Adam’s lacklustre care, but honestly, it also describes how I’ve been feeling recently.

We took down the decorations on January 5th and switched off the strings of lights decorating the garage, the verandah and the Christmas tree. Everywhere went dark, and the weather slid into gunge territory – not anything as exciting as snow, just rain, mud, dark clouds, cold winds. General early winter yuk. Too wet and windy to enjoy a session of clearing the greenhouse for next year’s seedlings, too muddy to rip up weeds without a pint of mud sticking to roots, clothing and hands, too cloudy at night to go stargazing. This is the time of year when we could do with a small celebration of light rather than signalling the end of festivities.

Festivities ran on much longer this year. I can safely say it here, as none of my fellow cat-maniacs follow this blog – I’m part of a group of cat servants on FaceBook, and we ran a Secret Santa. For our cats. Low spending limit and this year the kind of outright chaos that happens when an automated Santa program has a Skynet moment. Elfster is great, if you keep it in its place, but this year it went off on its own and drew in previous participants (who no longer wanted to take part) and assigned partners before shutting itself down. Add the postal strike, and only half of the group received presents (whether they wanted them or not).

I took the lazy route and ordered a cat bed from that famous South American online store. The seller wouldn’t send direct to my recipient, so I was resigned to receiving the bed and sending it on to her. Best laid plans… six weeks after that order, the bed has not yet arrived, even though other parcels have broken through the blockade. I gave up after four weeks and got into that Soddit mood. Soddit. I was going to make a cat bed. How hard could it be?

Do not ask. I’m about ten miles from any good frivolous shops, so I was relying on the craft stuff I’ve built up over the years. I did manage to get hold of a large bag of sheepskin scraps for a low price and stitched four of them together to form a fluffy base. I had quilt wadding and wool stuffing left over from a project in the distant past and enough cloth remnants to start a shop.

It took three days, and one of those days I got into a proper mood about it and stayed up till 4am to follow through the idea I had for connecting the whole lot together. When you see the Sewing Bees run up an evening dress from a binbag and three staples, it’s skill. Mine was more of a comedy act with vintage thread and sheepskin. But on the third day, it was finished. It looked a bit wonky, but that stitching will not come undone. Well, famous last words. I once sewed a catnip mouse for a friend’s ginger tom with cat-proof stitching. Within one day, the ears had been torn off, the tail was severed and the woolly guts were being extracted bit by bit through the gash torn in its belly seam.

But I have faith in this cat bed. The three toms who got it as a ‘Christmas’ gift have taken peaceful turns to sleep in the bed and show no signs of wanting to take it apart to examine the stuffing. No better thumbs-up than to see a cat choosing to sleep in a cat bed you’ve made rather than plonk their furry bums on a clean jumper or your smartest black trousers.

She posted three photos showing one cat after another taking a turn to settle in the bed before one staked his claim by curling up and going off to sleep in the bed. It was worth three days’ work to see them enjoying their present. The job of sorting out the whole mess of who got a present and didn’t want one and who sent a present and hadn’t received one in return goes on, though the man who took on the task planned to finish it by Friday 13th January. In the meantime, there’s three cats asleep on my handiwork tonight and my fortnight of feeling dull and unable to get up and get on with things is coming to an end as I take heart on the projects I could get on with.