It has been an interesting few weeks.  If I was any good at blogging, I would have posted separate blogs for each of these events.  It is ironic that usually very little happens that makes me think of blogging and then so many things come at once that I forget to get around to it.  Anyway …

Three weeks ago my extended choir, The St Giles Singers sang one of our quarterly Choral Masses at St Giles.  The music was fantastic, and included one of my all time favourite choral pieces, the Cantique de Jean Racine by Gabriel Faure.  The day after that was the annual Walsingham National Pilgrimage, which is always a lovely day.  Bishop Martin Warner was the celebrant in the morning and Archbishop John Sentamu preached the sermon in the afternoon.  This was less than a week before the news of the Archbishop’s operation for prostate cancer.  He was very engaging and entertaining.

I have had a couple of weeks off work, which began with a trip to Muckleburgh for a miltary display day; we arrived at lunchtime and spent an hour in the cafe waiting for a simple lunch and whilst I got some warm clothes from the car (although sunny, it was freezing cold in the breeze as we were right on the coast) the end of the military display took place.  So … basically … I missed it 😦  However I did manage to see some interesting things.

During the week, the weather was, certainly at first, wonderfully sunny and warm.  So what holiday with good weather would be without one of my traditional summer pastimes – painting the shed!  One coat on Monday and the second on Tuesday in time for the weather to cool down a bit for the time I had set aside for myself, which included a visit to Pensthorpe with my scope.  I don’t know where all the birds had gone from the scrape, but I guess it was their day visiting somewhere else as well!

The next weekend had two (or three) significant events.  Firstly, the Bishop of Norwich visited our church, coincidentally on my birthday.  The third event was a barbecue which I put on for a few friends, that same afternoon.  We had put plenty of work into the garden, putting up an awning, getting power into our summerhouse so that we could have music (and enjoy it with its new lights right through the year), setting up trestle tables and chairs.  Unfortunately the weather was still getting worse and it was a bit of a chilly, even though very enjoyable, afternoon.  Still, it was lucky that we had the barbecue that day; on the Tuesday we enjoyed lunch outside under the awning until it again got too cold outside and by Thursday the weather had become so windy that I had to take the awning down again, rather than leaving it up right through the summer as originally planned.  I’ll wait for the summer and then put it up again 🙂

We also made a treck across to Leicester to visit the National Space Centre during the week; we’ve never been there before, although we have been to other Space inspired places in the past (the Spaceguard Centre in Knighton on the English/Welsh border is really to be recommended).  There is a wonderful planetarium which is used for animated presentations which make full use of the whole interior of the dome.  Absolutely brilliant!  Also there is a tower with two real rockets (floating ominously over part of the cafe) and a fantastic 3D simulation of a trip to one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa, which is thought to be another place in our own solar system which, as it has water, could sustain life.

Another highlight of the week was seeing Derren Brown at the Theatre Royal, Norwich in his current show – Infamous. It was absolutely fantastic!

As my enjoyable and brief holiday at home draws to an end, we took a trip to Titchwell.  The scrape there definitely had more birds than Pensthorpe the previous week!