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Holiday Day Five – Midland Air Museum & Baddesley Clinton
For the final day of our holiday, we didn’t really know what we wanted to do, so I googled things to do in Coventry and the top result was the Midland Air Museum, based at Coventry Airport. At only £6.50 per adult, it was an absolute bargain!
The main exhibit is all about Sir Frank Whittle, the inventor of the Jet Engine. His story was fascinating, and I’m really glad I got to learn all about him. There was a hangar full of old planes, including a couple with steps up to the cockpit so you could sit inside. Around the edge of the hangar were display cabinets full of information.
Once we stepped outside, I got a big grin on my face to see a Vulcan parked outside! You could even climb up into the cockpit if you wanted (although the ladder looked a bit rickety for me!). There was no charge to do so, although they do say you can leave a donation for the upkeep if you want to. The outside exhibition area contained a lot more planes on display, with a few people hard at work on restorations.
I’d really advise people to go for a quick look around, we stayed there a couple of hours and we learnt a lot. You could also combine it with a trip to the RAF Museum at Cosford which is nearby. I’ve not been there, but I’d love to go!
After we’d left the air museum, it was a bit too early to head back to the hotel, so we decided to visit the nearby National Trust property that my uncle had been telling us about: Baddesley Clinton. It was a beautiful medieval moated house, with fantastic gardens. The interior is Elizabethan, showcasing the priest holes which were necessary to hide the priests from the persecution of Catholics at the time. The house contained some beautiful stained glass, although I wouldn’t call the mounted foxes head above the door particularly beautiful – quite horrifying really!
Outside round the moat were lots of little ducklings, and some ducklings that were obviously not so young and halfway between fluffy down and grown up feathers. They were very tame though and not scared of coming near us! Just like the ducks in the café courtyard, who were not shy about trying to demand some food, pecking at our legs until we shooed them away to bother another poor family!
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John Green – The Fault in Our Stars
Having seen trailers for the film adaptation of this book, I thought I knew exactly what was going to happen, but the best authors have a way of ripping the foundations from under your feet. And I am currently residing in the same place that my heart sunk, the second floor basement, a place reserved only for books such as this.I don’t think it’s spoiling it for you to tell you that you’re going to need a box of tissues handy when you read this book, although I don’t want to reveal too much so that you can experience the same jolt of tragedy that I did.
I’ve actually had this book since last year, I’d packed it to take on holiday but never got round to it, and then completely forgot about it until I packed my suitcase for this holiday and found the book still in there. And I’m so glad that I read the book before the film comes out shortly. I have to say that if you’re considering seeing the film, you absolutely must read the book first.
I found the characters of Hazel and Augustus were beautifully laid out on the page. I’m sure pretty much everyone has had an experience of cancer (family members, friends etc.), but I for one have not had any personal experience of childhood/teenage cancer. Even so, I still felt like I was along on the journey with them, not just standing on the outskirts looking in.
Reading some reviews on Goodreads, a lot of people seem to be complaining that the characters act much older than they are and make long speeches which don’t sound ‘teenage-like’. Well these are not normal teenagers, they’re amazing teenagers who have gone through so much but are still strong willed and hoping to carve out some kind of life for themselves in the time that they have left.
I don’t really have any more I can say, I’m still recovering from a serious case of book-induced heartbreak. All I can say is, read this book. Seriously, you won’t regret it. Just be prepared to fall in love with an amazing book. I’ll leave you with my two favourite quotes:
“I fell in love the way you fall asleep, slowly and then all at once.”
“It occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.”
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Holiday Day Four – Castle Drogo
Day four of our holiday involved a drive partially home for the next stage of our holiday in Coventry. We didn’t want to lose an entire day to travelling, so we decided to pick a National Trust property on our way and stop off for a look around. We picked Castle Drogo in Devon completely at random, and it was quite an interesting choice to make.
Castle Drogo was the last castle to be built in the UK and it was built will full electricity. But despite only being finished less than 100 years ago, the roof has never been watertight and there is a lot of water damage.
We didn’t know this until we got there, and neither did we know that they are currently in the process of a multi-million pound restoration of the castle, which involves taking it to pieces and rebuilding it again. Most of the castle is covered in a big plastic sheeting covered scaffolding structure to keep the weather out, so you couldn’t see what it was supposed to look like.
One condition of the funding that they received for the restoration was that the castle had to remain open throughout. None of the regular exhibits are on show as the castle is in such disarray, so each room in the house which remains open contains a different theme, for example the ‘Room of Time Passing’, which was storing every clock from the house.
It was fascinating to see how the restoration is completed, and I’d love to go back there once it’s finished to see the castle in it’s true glory!
After we’d walked around the castle and the gardens, we stopped for a quick Devon cream tea, during which we were joined by a very friendly little bird who just wanted a few crumbs!
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Cornwall Day Three – Lands End & St Michael’s Mount
No trip to Cornwall would be complete without a trip to Lands End, so we decided to venture down there on day three of our holiday. We arrived quite early, but it was already packed with visitors! There were quite a few shops to go in, then we ventured out to the actual end of the land, with spectacular views!
Surprisingly, after having no phone signal in pretty much the rest of Cornwall, we actually got a really good signal out there, go figure!
We were initially undecided about whether to pay to get our photo taken with the famous sign post, but eventually we realised that we’d paid so much to get there that another tenner wasn’t going to hurt, and it would be a nice memento of a lovely day!
After eating a proper traditional Cornish pasty, we left Lands End to go to St Michael’s mount, but after seeing the boats that were going out to the island, and then reading that the path up to the top was steep with no hand rails – with no proper shoes with us, we decided to just sunbathe on the beach instead. Unfortunately, we didn’t put sun cream on, so we both ended up quite sunburned since it was such a lovely sunny day!
But Cameron had fun digging a big hole, and I had fun walking around in the cool water, so it was a perfect end to a great day!
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Essie Fox – The Somnambulist
Honestly, I only decided to read this book because of how it looked. I didn’t have long to spend at the library choosing my next book, so it was very much a case of judging a book by it’s cover. And what a cover this is, so pretty and enticing!But oh how I’m glad I did. The book was a beautiful tale of love: hidden love, forbidden love, unrequited love and the love of a mother.
I’ve never really read a book of this genre before, historical/Victoriana, but it’s something I’d love to explore further.
The book was split into three parts. I thought the first part was quite slow to get going, but after reading the whole book, I can see now that this was to set up the story for what was to come. We meet a young girl called Phoebe, living with her tyrannically religious mother Maud, a member of the Hallelujah army, and whole-heartedly against the world of Phoebe’s aunt Cissy, an actress and singer on the London stage, the person that Phoebe feels closest to in the whole world. But when Cissy dies unexpectedly Phoebe’s world starts to unravel, and things that she thought were solid fact suddenly seem ‘blurred’.
Can Phoebe figure out what the truth is before it’s too late to take things back? And in a world where no-one is honest with her, can she be honest with herself?
This was a brilliant debut from Essie Fox, I could guess where some parts of the book were going, but I frequently found myself caught off guard with a plot twist that I could never have imagined.
While I checked this book out, I also checked out Fox’s second book, with an equally beautiful cover, so I can’t wait to get reading!
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Cornwall Day Two – Holywell Bay
On the second day of our holiday we decided to go for a drive and find one of the National Trust car parks on the coast which are free to park in for National Trust members like us. We picked Holywell Bay randomly from the map and boy did we make a good choice.
The car park was a (slow) ten minute walk /stroll from the beach, although you do have to take your shoes and socks off to cross a stream that flows into the river. Not that I wanted to put them back on after because the sand was so soft and golden white. And the sea, I’ve never seen anything like it! I’m used to the slightly murky looking seas of Scarborough and Bridlington, but this sea was so crystal clear and blue it was almost Caribbean!
We sat on the beach for quite a long time before taking a slow stroll down to the sea and then back round up the stream back to the car. Unfortunately, Cameron couldn’t get his jeans to roll up over his calf muscles, so as you can see he got his jeans quite wet!
As it was Sunday, everything was closing quite early, but we stopped off at the Cornwall Gold shop for a look around at some very nice (and expensive) jewellery and then a scrumptious cream tea!
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Cornwall Day One – Fowey
The first day of our holiday was mostly spent driving from Bristol to Cornwall after staying the night with my uncle the night before. But after we’d unpacked at the hotel, we decided to go for a drive and check out some of the Cornish countryside. After getting stuck behind an old VW campervan on a single track road for what seemed like ages, we ended up taking a ferry boat across a river to Fowey (pronounced Foy as in Boy), a picturesque little town with a lot of boats on the crystal blue water and a lovely little church where someone was getting married.
In the evening, we drove across the bridge to Plymouth to the cinema to see Maleficent, and had the chance to drive across it in sunshine and darkness. Surprisingly, Cameron loved the film, even though it was a Disney film! It definitely wasn’t aimed at young children though, it was a bit dark and scary!
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Rachel Schurig – In Search of a Love Story
I read a few of Rachel Schurig’s books earlier this year and really enjoyed them. It’s typical predictable chick-lit, but that’s not always a bad thing. If you want to get lost in something easy to work where you can become completely absorbed with the characters, there’s nothing better than a good chick-lit book.I found it very easy to get lost in this book, Em was a very likeable main character, not stuck up or pretentious like some lead characters can be. And I liked most of her friends too, although I did find the character of Ashley quite annoying.
The basic premise of the book is that Em has just broken up with her latest boyfriend, and feels like her track record of men is terrible and she may as well just give up (she’s only 25!), but her friends decide that the reason she can’t keep a boyfriend is that she’s no good at romance; she never watches romantic films, doesn’t read books like Pride and Prejudice, and doesn’t pay much attention to her appearance. In Em’s defence, she has way more important things to be interested in, like her flourishing career as a physical therapist, but her character in the beginning is a bit of a weak pushover, and she lets her friends bully her into a ‘project’ to make her become more romantic.
Needless to say, Em falls head over heels for a guy that she believes is the perfect man. He buys her presents, takes her to expensive places and generally treats her like a princess. But when he starts to become more controlling over her, Em feels like she should be grateful that someone like him would be interested in someone like her. At this point, you’re practically shouting at the book for her to open her eyes and realise that he’s a tool. Especially since you’ve already known for half the book that the perfect guy is right in front of her and she just can’t see him.
Being a chick-lit book, you can probably guess where the ending is heading, so I won’t go any further into the plot. But I have to give props to Schurig for the way that she allows Em to realise the truth about where her future should be. I’m not ashamed to admit that I may have shed a tear or two towards the end.
After reading and enjoying four of Schurig’s books, it makes me quite happy to open her author page on Goodreads and find she’s written many more! Although I think I should read some more off my shelf before I spend any more money on books!
I’ll just leave you with my favourite quote from the book, it really stood out to me.
“If this guy was the one, you’d know it. And if he is, it’s worth losing all the friendships in the world. I can promise you that. If you’re really in love, your friends will know it. If they don’t, they weren’t worth being friends with in the first place.”
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Dirk Hayhurst – Bigger Than the Game
Dirk Hayhurst was one of the first people I followed on Twitter, way back in 2009, and I’ve been keeping a keen eye on him ever since. I absolutely adored his first two books, The Bullpen Gospels and Out of My League, and I was very excited for this one too. When it first came out, I already had a to-read pile longer than my arm, so I left it for a little while before I bought it, but I really wish I hadn’t!And as I expected, I finished the book within a day, just like the last two. Dirk is the first ballplayer to really let you inside the clubhouse and show you what the world of baseball is really like, and this book shows more of the struggles associated with being that person than the last two books did. During the time period of this book, Dirk is publishing his first book and it’s common knowledge within the clubhouse of his new team. And not everyone is happy with that, in fact, some people are downright angry.
This book contained a lot less baseball than the first two books, and as a result it felt a whole lot more personal. It’s very brave of Dirk to let us in so deep to his life and the struggles he was going through, it’s rare for someone in the public eye to be quite so honest and I found it endeared me to him a whole lot more. Obviously because the events in this book were a couple of years ago and since I’ve been following him on Twitter all this time, I knew how the book was going to end, but I still loved reading the journey.
Living in the UK, it’s kind of hard to get hold of good books about baseball, the local library definitely doesn’t have any. So I’m so glad that I’ve been able to read Dirk’s three books, and I really hope he writes more. His style of writing is so personal that it drags you in so that you feel like you’re experiencing it all along with him.
I’d really recommend this book to anyone who enjoys seeing inside a world that they know nothing about. And I don’t think that you necessarily have to be a baseball fan to enjoy Hayhurst’s books, although you definitely need to have an appreciation of juvenile humour – if an entire chapter devoted to a blocked and rapidly overflowing toilet rapidly turning into a ‘porcelain volcano’ doesn’t sound like your thing, then probably best to steer clear.
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Milly Johnson – Here Come The Boys
Oh how I wish this book had been longer. It was released a couple of weeks ago as a short story ebook in the run up to Milly’s new book which is released very soon.I don’t think I’ve ever read a bad book by Milly Johnson, and this one was no exception. I love her style of writing, I love the fact that she’s a Yorkshire lass and brings Yorkshire into her books, and I love the characters that she creates.
This book was only 100 pages long, but I feel like it could have been three times as long and been even more amazing, it would have been the perfect summer holiday read. As it was, I read it in less than an hour.
I really hope that the characters are developed further for a full book, as I loved the eventual chemistry between the two. I feel that they could be a right pair, perfect for a full length book of their exploits, particularly how Selina manages to get rid of Zander and move on with her life like Angie always thought she had.
I really can’t wait for Milly’s new book to come out. I still have a couple of her books on my shelf that I haven’t read yet and I can see them moving to the top of my ‘to-read’ pile, reading perfection!
Louise Douglas
(I've got no) Shelf Control…
Louise Douglas 