The Postal Museum at Mount Pleasant, WC1, opened to the public on 28 July last year (2017) with Mail Rail opening on 4 September. My sister and I spent a few days in London just after new year and near the top of our ‘must-do’ list was a visit to the museum and a ride on the train. As you might guess the museum is devoted to the story of the 500 years of the British postal service since Henry VIII tasked Sir Brian Tuke with establishing a national postal network to serve his Court.
Adderstone is the name of my friend’s cottage in Northumberland. It’s situated just off the A1 on the road to the coast at Bamburgh. I’m just home from a brief stay and I must say that, despite flurries of snow at lunchtime today and a shower yesterday morning, we had better weather than I’ve had on multiple visits to this part of the country in previous years and which were always in late June or early July.
Hello everyone and especially all who follow my posts either via the WordPress Reader Site or by having emails posted into your Inbox as each of my posts goes live. It’s lovely to have you with me but lately I’ve had unwanted viewings and spam comments and so I have made the decision to make miladysboudoir.net private. This means that all of you, I hope, will re-apply to keep following my travels and other posts.
When I started posting from miladysboudoir it was purely for my own records and this is still very much the case. I don’t need or want lots of followers but I do appreciate all of your comments and ‘Likes’. I used to upload many photos on Flickr but found that I was wanting to add information and links and decided that maybe blogging was the way to go. I never considered all the options at the time and I’m still discovering more and more about WordPress. So, following chats with the very helpful “Happiness Engineers” at WordPress, I have decided that the best way to proceed is to put up a message (this one) to explain what’s happening and hope that keen followers and good friends will still wish to come along with me.
Thank you all for your understanding and a very happy and healthy new year to you all.
Barbara
Earlier in December I spent a delightful four nights in this cosy, characterful property which has been for many years part of the Landmark Trust owned/managed collection. It occupies a central location in the small Suffolk town of Clare right opposite the church and shares its location with the small local Museum.
The best thing about visiting Woolsthorpe Manor was to see the actual tree from which the apple fell which inspired Sir Isaac Newton to discover the theory of gravitation. The story was recorded by William Stukeley who wrote :
Some weeks ago an invitation (nay, a command) arrived to attend the Christmas celebration at Temple Newsam House yesterday afternoon. It was issued by Sir Arthur Ingram to all tenants on the Estate.
The week before last, en route to Clare in Suffolk, where I stayed for a few days, I broke my journey at Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire.
Woolsthorpe was the birthplace of polymath and ‘Renaissance man’ Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727).
On Saturday I spent an extremely interesting afternoon at Sheffield Hallam University at the above event. Reading 1900-1950 is one of the blogs I follow and I was delighted to finally be able to attend one of Professor Chris Hopkins’s events. The Readerships and Literary Cultures 1900-1950 Special Collection of 1000 early editions of popular fiction is housed at The University Library. Read more about it here.
The Obligatory Book that Accompanies the Show
Before visiting Melancolia at Somerset House (see previous post) I popped in the Courtauld Gallery. Again, I had been alerted to this show in a review in the Financial Times (Weekend, 21/22 October 2017): “Uniformed but Different: Soutine: The Russian-French painter’s portraits make an exceptional show”. I’d never heard of Soutine before but it looked and read to be something I would enjoy. I’d recently re-read Arnold Bennett’s “The Grand Babylon Hotel” (first published in 19o2) and the Soutine portraits are from a slightly later era. Although his are French and not characters from The Savoy Hotel in London. Near enough. [Here‘s a review of a 1950 show of Soutine’s work in the US and brief biography of Chaim Soutine (1893-1943)].
On a recent visit to London I had time enough before catching my train home to visit Somerset House. I’d earmarked three exhibitions – none of them big blockbusters – all in the same venue.
miladysboudoir 