jacey | A Very British Day Out

This week has been somewhat unusual because Number One Son, J, is home from Rome for the week. It seems almost strange to have him in his room again as he's been away for huge chunks of the last eight or nine years and usually when he does come home he's dashing up and down seeing people. This week, however he's in residence and it's been lovely to have him just hanging around. He's busy doing all sorts of administrative bits and pieces prior to starting a five year PhD at Princeton in September, so there's been all the choosing of accommodation options and the sorting out of childhood vaccination records for the medical forms. It's like sending him off to university all over again - for the fourth time, as there have already been departures for Cambridge, Cooper Union (Manhattan) and the British School (Rome).

BB and I took him and my mum to Castle Howard for the day, yesterday. We made sandwiches and ate them in the car sheltering from the not-as-warm-as-it-might-have-been breeze, but considering it's still April the weather wan't too bad. White cloudy skies, light breeze and if the promised sunny spells didn't present themselves at least it didn't rain until we were almost home. How very English.

Number One Son wanted to ogle the house because it was designed by Vanbrugh three hundred or so years ago and Vanbrugh was James Sterling's favourite architect and N1S is making a film about Sterling's architecture. We just wanted to ogle the rooms and the pretties and have a mooch around the grounds, taking photographs. Not incompatible objectives.

So we ogled house, pretties and grounds, walking back through Roy Wood with numerous varieties of flowering cherries and delightful clumps of primroses, then had conversations with a noisy peacock, ate a clotted cream tea and came home through only a modest traffic jam. Very pleasant.