Sorry about the long hiatus. I’ve been very busy since the beginning of May, so there’s going to be a flurry of posts yet again! A lot has been happening, but after a concert yesterday (Cheltenham Music Festival), I now have the ideal excuse to arrange my posts by subject matter. So let’s start with the Cheltenham Festivals – that’s Jazz, Science and Music in chronological order. But I shall handle them in reverse order, as that’s the order I can remember them best.
After a fairly rubbish day, we rushed off to Cheltenham for a meal at Ask Italian before venturing into the “Pillar room” at Cheltenham Town Hall … ah
… and now that concert wasn’t yesterday either, it was well over a week ago! Still, I shall carry on regardless even though that music concert is fading into the distant memory as well. It was great fun – a combination of baroque and folk musicians. There were bagpipes, pipes and recorders, fiddles, cello, harpsichord and something indescribable (well see the picture below). A sort of lute type thing with a very large extension piece having “sympathetic strings” – I think. Unsurprisingly, his instrument with extra long extension piece got lots of enthusiastic interest during the 15 minute drinks break … and a fairly dubious posting by Kevin on Facebook which questioned whether he was trying to “compensate for something”.
So now passing swiftly backwards to the 2nd week of June (you must remember it, it was the one with the rushed general election in the UK and I’ll post a picture about that too – I wonder if you can guess which one!) … straight back from holiday – more about that in a separate post – and there we were at the Cheltenham Science Festival. For once, the weather was not too bad and we had glorious sunshine (for a day), lots of wind (nearly every day) and some intermittent, light rain (which is much better than normal).
Now it is questionable how “accessible” the polling station really is, when this notice is pasted on a closed and seemingly locked door which can only be opened from the inside. Thank goodness I have a Kevin, who can enter the polling station via the main entrance and then open this fire door from the inside!
… And this is the day with the nice weather! I am only looking rather concerned, because we are waiting to enter the tent in which the “overambitious demo challenge” is due to take place and that’s where lots of things tend to start flying about. This is one of the few times when being in a wheelchair and located at the front is not necessarily the best place to be!
Now my last festival is actually the Cheltenham Jazz Festival which is one of our favourites, but it took place at the very end of April / beginning of May. Therefore, I can remember very few of the concerts – they were all good – and I don’t have any photographs. I remember the Saturday though, as it was extremely tiring and we attended 7 different events, starting with the “Trondheim/Birmingham jazz exchange” at 11 am and concluding with a concert at 9 pm at night. To put this in perspective, it takes us about one hour to drive to Cheltenham and back, it takes a while to find parking and so this day started about 9.45 am and didn’t finish until after midnight.
bibbysmith 