Tewkesbury

I left my first job in England yesterday (I'm not counting the job where I did nothing for a day) – it had been a positive experience with team spirited people wanting to achieve. I took in a morning tea but instead of everyone stopping and having a chat you just leave the food in a central place and people help themselves - I get the impression most people don't know why the food is there but it is all gone by the end of the day. At the suggestion of my boss some of us went out for lunch to a little pub along the way and they gave me a lovely bunch of flowers which survived the ride home in Harry's back pack. It was a longish ride home since we had decided to explore the cycle paths to get to my new work which is further away – probably about an hour’s bike ride each way. I start on Monday and Harry starts his new job as a tutor for S and B trade training (motor mechanics) on Thursday – so it is back into the permanent role for both of us. We are really quite surprised how relatively easy it has been to get jobs both temporary and permanent. Before we start our new jobs we decided we needed another break. We have arranged to meet Michelle and Zane in Oxford on Saturday so decided we would explore the Cotswolds (Harry tells me ‘Cots’ are the little stone huts that sheep shelter in and ‘wolds’ are rolling hills) before getting there. So, we are sitting here in our bed and breakfast in Stratford on Avon with some really good memories of the day. I suggested that we bought the computer along to write the blog each night otherwise we tend to forget things over more than one day. Haz bought a lock and spent ages securing it to the car – but it is safe and no one can steal it in a ‘snatch and grab’ they would have to take the whole car. We stopped in Tewkesbury – the centre of the devastating floods a couple of months ago. The roads, showed little evidence of the floods except for a muddy look and lots of sandbags lying around.

The abbey just missed the floods though the doors had been sandbagged, but many houses looked flood damaged and many shops were closed. The town is beginning to surface again but it will take a long time before people feel as though they are back to normal. The shops that were open were quaint – and I managed to find some really expensive clothes for good prices in some sales. I saw a wall hanging in one of the shops that amused me ‘I no longer skinny dip but I chunky dunk’.

We picnicked by the river and I opened the little box of goodies that Michael, Becks, Sharon and Az had sent me. Choccy bars, sweets, a neat little book on England, socks for Haz, a photo frame and a newspaper article about Reuben and postcards with news from home. It was such a lovely treat to get it and I am saving up the choccy bars for special occasions. We managed to take the wrong road and ended up in a little road where a bridge crossed the Avon. It was a quaint bridge with canal boats on the river and beside it was a notice that showed a 3.5 mile circular walk so we decided to take our first walk across the English countryside.

There we saw little wooden platforms which you could hire to fish (they were all numbered and we saw at least 63) – the fisherman told us you could catch perch and carp and a few other breeds that we can’t remember. We passed caravan parks and boat parks and came across an area where the floods had taken their toll. The path was lined by water on one side and electric fence on the other – I wasn’t sure if it was to keep the humans out as there was no sign of animals (perhaps the fields were still recovering from the floods) - it is also haymaking season and every second field has numerous hay bales sitting in them. We walked through Eckington a little village where people take pride in their gardens and every second home has a name.

My literary streak is coming out in me as I started to get excited in knowing I would be visiting places where Anne Hathaway and Shakespeare were born, played and later drank and ate while Harry can’t think of anything except how he hated reading Shakespeare at college (I did too incidentally but prefer to forget that bit!!). We will visit their homes tomorrow but we wandered around the town tonight – the church where Shakespeare is buried inside (it was closed), the river, canal boats going through the lock and statues of Hamlet (he was a very nice looking young man) and Lady McBeth. The Tudor inns and houses are plentiful and we kept crossing the road to go into another one to look at the drooping ceilings, stories and photos. A lovely little town that we will explore tomorrow..