Written in the stars

I always enjoy a trip to Hexham Abbey when I visit Hexham. This time, there was a beautiful display of origami stars made by schools and communities.

The exhibition is entitled:

Stars for Eternity

We are raising thousands of origami stars to the Abbey ceiling, all of them made by local people and dedicated to the shining souls who have brightened others’ lives.

Suspended 45ft high in the Chancel of the Abbey, the stars stretch from the old choir stalls to the high altar and are lit from each side. The stars are high enough that dedications can't be read from the floor, keeping memories and thoughts private but still present, much like a prayer. 

Similar to the Angel exhibition from a couple of years ago, I really enjoyed the effect of these being displayed.

 Such a wonderful display

A miscellany

Here's some photos from September and October that I wanted to post about but that didn't merit their own post

We had a Mandevilla plant 2 years ago that didn't survive the Winter so in Winter 2022, CBC decided to bring the replacement one inside for the season. It survived but looked decidedly peaky by Spring time. It took it all Summer to finally start to grow but eventually, in September, it started to flower again! We were happy to see its jolly pink flowers again!

I ended up being asked to play 2nd flute for a concert with the Highbury Players in September by a lady called Emma who I used to play with when I first joined my regular orchestra (which I've been playing with for 20 years this year!). We played Brahms' 4th symphony which is a DELIGHT to play as a flautist. It was really nice to play with Emma and actually realise how similar we are as players personality wise and how well we blended. We also had a delightful fish and chips in Drayton Park road.

I picked many blackberries from round the corner from my house in September and made lots of fruit amber!

When I went to Highbury for the aforementioned concert, I visited a charity shop I used to go to when my ex-boyfriend lived there when I was in my final year at university.  I found a beautiful Ukele in a case in their half-price sale! 

I found some excellent books for the school library too! The Piers Torday books were FANTASTIC!

My sunflowers FINALLY flowered in September!

When I went to my Dad and Stepmum's, they'd bought me some Chilli rice-crackers and Shittake crunch from their local refill room.  They'd got them in their own containers but I used the empty Cornflake bag to take them home in! It worked well!

Dad's Cobnut tree was covered in nuts and the squirrels hadn't got them so I picked lots to take home for CBC's porridge!

My orchestra was rehearsing in the Paddington area and there is an excellent Indonesian restaurant nearby called Bonda Kitchen. I ordered their Mie Goreng Mamak and it was superb!

I was still picking raspberries into October! Had an excellent harvest this year into the thousands!

Saw a jolly Red Admiral Butterfly on my trips to the Blackberry bushes.

At the end of September, CBC and I made a trip to the Chilterns to do a reccie for Duke of Edinburgh for his school. We stayed in a rather grim High Wycombe Travel Lodge (breakfast was good though!) but had a great walk and we saw the church that they used as the church in the Vicar of Dibley.

Lots of Midsomer Murders were filmed at pubs we passed.

What a strange and wibbly-wobbly (timey-wimey) house in the village!

The church was really lovely inside.

I enjoyed looking at the organ! Such fascinating instruments!

I adore it when the light hits just right and reflects on the floor!

Beautiful embroidery.

The shiniest ceramic teapot!

My gamelan group played for Indonesia Night at the Methodist central hall in London. It was a huge spectacle!

It's been fun playing gamelan regularly again!

I was given a cutting of a purple house plant from a friend's mum in August. I am happy it has thrived in our bathroom in the vacated Aloe pot! It has even flowered in the last week.

We were given Harrods goodie bags from the Indonesian embassy! The Neuhaus chocolate was delicious. I'd tried this brand in Belgium!

 What would be in your miscellany?

France- Sacre Couer, Nice

 We travelled to France on Saturday 13th August.  We stayed at CBC's brother's flat the night before as there was a train strike so it would have been impossible to get there from home. As it was, luckily, the DLR, Elizabeth line and Circle lines were running so we were able to get there from his. We met CBC's mum at St Pancras for breakfast.  The queues to get into the Eurostar terminal were massive but well-organised and moved quickly.   It left on time, at around 10.20am and the journey went quickly.

We arrived at Gare du Nord in Paris and quickly joined the taxi queue to take us to Paris Gare de Lyon where we were to join our TGV train. Luckily the queue moved quickly and we were soon in a taxi. It cost around 14 Euros.  We didn't get the Metro as CBC's mum struggles to walk far, particularly with luggage. I was also glad as my soft bag on wheel had already got a slight rip at the seams and some small holes in the base which I would prefer not to stress too much. This meant I am rather over protective of anyone else picking it up as if it is picked up not evenly, the rips would get worse.

As it happened,the taxi man picked it up before I could stop him...and caused another rip in another place!AR HGHGHGHGA!!! CBC and his mum kept mocking me and making fun for being so overprotective of my bag but it wasn't them that had to cope with it!

At Gare De Lyon, we went to a Pret to get something to eat (they did. I just got a drink).

When the platform showed for our Nice train, we had to get moving. We had 10 minutes to go and of course, it was the most far away platform and our carriage was right at the end of a really, really, long Double-decker train!!! It was SUCH a walk and we only had about 2 minutes before our train left.

The train was due to take 5 hours but the journey seemed to go really quickly. We all had a bit of a sleep and we read books and ate snacks. I had bought cucumber, carrot sticks and tomatoes plus some fruit, crisps, chocolate and some M&S sandwiches.

The view from the train is brilliant once you reach the coast- it really is picturesque so I recommend it.

The journey was mainly pleasant and relaxed except for 2 incidents...one, where we happened to be staring out the window and saw some children by the rail tracks who threw rocks at the train!! The massive bang when they hit was really scary.  There was also a massive argument between two men...one who we think was really rude to his children!

We arrived to Nice at around 9.30pm at night and despite our hotel being only 800m away, CBC's mum insisted on getting a taxi...it cost 20 euros for 800m essentially! RIP OFF!

The hotel was very pleasant but we had to cart the luggage up a winding staircase.

We were too tired to go out for dinner so we went to sleep after a cup of tea with CBC's mum in our room.

The next morning, after a very pleasant breakfast in the hotel, we headed out to look around Nice. It was scorching hot but luckily, there were regular benches with white canvas canopies so you could sit and enjoy the sun without getting burnt.

I briefly paddled in the sea.

We headed to a lovely restaurant in Nice La Femme du Boulanger where we had a very pleasant 2 course menu with actual vegetables!!

We continued wandering  and came across the church,Sacre Couer.

It was a beautiful,modern church which had some lovely art works and windows of various kinds.

I took some photos to share some of them.

The outside.

The fotn was flanked by a beautiful mosaic.

Here there were coloured ribbons tied for prayers.

Various pulpits had mosaics too.

The main window, which had a banner saying, Dieu est Amour (God is love) was really striking.

The area behind the altar had more mosaics.

The altar was carved stone and there were more traditional stained glass windows.

As with many French catholic churches, there are various altars around the sides. Perhaps stations of the cross?

Here are some close ups of the main stained glass window.

After a while, it was time to meet CBC's brother, sister and her husband who had come to France by plane (we were the eco-friendly contingent!)

They picked us up in the hire car (sadly necessary for the location of our house for the week) and we headed off to La Motte, near Draguinan, an hour or so away from Nice where we met the host of our house but more of the house another day.

xx

Antwerp Day 3- Chocolate, churches and charity shops!

It's been a while since my last post on our Antwerp holiday!  I finally managed to get some photos copied across.

On our Monday in Antwerp, we woke up fairly late and after a lazy breakfast, had to hotfoot it across town on the Velo hire bikes to near the railway station. We had booked to go to Antwerp's Chocolate Museum. Having been to, and loved the Bruges Chocolate museum in 2019, I was excited for this one.

We arrived and put our bags in lockers.  They told us that the whole exhibit was Covid safe with nothing we needed to touch and was timed with all doors to sections so that people in groups didn't have to have any contact with other people. It was very clever.

The whole museum was really interesting with a detailed history of chocolate from bean to processing, to wrapping to all the different types and important Chocolatiers. It was hugely informative and fun to see.

One part of the exhibition showed you a vintage Belgium chocolatier and you got to hear from the woman who ran it (a reenaction)

One part showed some of the most iconic individual chocolates and their shapes in massive form

and introduced you to the great innovators in chocolate.  Here above is the Guylian shell.  Apparently, the most recent innovation was a truly new type of chocolate- Ruby Chocolate!

There were a few sections where you could see chocolatiers decorating and making chocolates.  There are opportunities to join demonstrations but sadly there were none when we were there which was sad as I ADORED this part of the Bruge chocolate museum!

This section here was where they introduced us to the ethical side of chocolate making and how the Chocolate Line is trying to support the communities who harvest and grow cocoa for them.

There were many 'instagram photo' type locations for you to take your picture.

As we progressed through, I became more and more disappointed at the lack of opportunities to TRY any chocolate.  At the Bruges one, there were chocolate button dispensers in various places.

 

It was only in the last room (before the shop), that we FINALLY got to try some chocolate. We were met by a lady who handed us a spoon each and showed us how to operate these melted chocolate machines.  They would dispense a sample of melted chocolate of all the different blends and combinations onto your spoon.  We started with those blends with a really large cocoa content and progressed to lots of different ones including the aforementioned ruby chocolate.

The warm liquid chocolate was delicious!!  We even managed a couple of samples of a few of them as the lady just left you to it!

We went into the shop where CBC chose some presents and some treats.

We then made a hasty stampede towards St Charles Borromeo church where I would be meeting one of my favourite Belgium blogger, the wonderful Ann!

We were pretty hungry and went into a nearby cafe where we ordered some food, hoping it would arrive quickly (which it didn't!).  Luckily, Ann was lovely enough to come and join us whilst we ate out lunch!

It was SOOOOO exciting to see Ann in real life after seeing her in beautiful pictures for so long! She is just as beautiful and stylish  in real life as she is in her photos!  She's also so incredibly kind and friendly! I've often been incredulous over Ann's writing- there is no way I could write in a language other than my native one in such an idiomatic way than Ann does and she is JUST the perfect person to chat to! It's so nice to be able to be able to natter and talk about those things you can't when typing.

Once we'd eaten our lunch, we headed to St Charles Borromeo- a well known Baroque church. It was built in the 1600's.  Sadly, the original 39 ceiling paintings by Rubens and lots of other works were destroyed, around about 100 years after it was built, in a fire.

It looks fairly undecorative from the outside, but the inside is WONDERFUL!

There is a wonderful Rubens altar painting.

The church is crammed full of things to look at- marblework, wood carvings, paintings and decorative floors. The organ is pretty exciting too!

There were confession booths here- so intricate!

After this, We headed off to......yes.....THINK TWICE!  For anyone who does not read Ann's blog, Think Twice is the most incredible Secondhand clothing chain in Belgium who have a very vast array of vintage clothes at reasonable prices.  They then have sale days where items get progressively cheaper until the final day where EVERYTHING is 1Euro! Ann is the Think Twice queen!

I was fortunate enough to be there with Ann on the penultimate 2 Euro day!  Because of Covid measures, we had to queue outside. At which point, CBC took himself off to go and seek a loo, which gave Ann and I an opportunity to have a proper chat which wouldn't bore him through not knowing all the things we were talking about!  Her we are in the T2 queue! You can see the T2 poster advertising the sale on the window!

We finally made it into the shop!   We walked around and realised we were very compatible shopping partners, showing each other things we though the other would like and giggling about things!  The selection was really good! 

We both ended up making purchases- Ann one skirt and me, a couple of items to add to my previous purchases from an alternative T2 I'd visited the previous day (there are FOUR in Antwerp!)

I was really sad when we had to leave so I walked with Ann to meet Jos, her husband, who was coming to pick her up in the car.  It was really lovely to meet him too!

We'd had SUCH  a jolly, easy time and I felt SO privileged to be able to meet someone who has become a good friend via blogland over the past few years! The nice thing was that we ended up texting each other all through my visit (and beyond) and it made my holiday that bit extra special that I had a friend who I could share my adventures with, who knew exactly what and where I was talking about! Ann had already given me lots of brilliant suggestions for places to visit!

That evening, CBC and I headed out to dinner to a bistro near Volkstraat which served some traditional Belgian dishes and I took the opportunity to choose the dish Ann had mentioned to be earlier when we asked about traditional Belgian dishes. I THINK it was called Endives au Jambon. Apparently endives or chicory was dicovered by a Belgian farmer in 1830.

CBC and I are HUGE Chicory fans so I was gleeful to try it.

As you can see, I was served the most ENORMOUS portion- that's my hand right next to it! It was IMMENSE.

A thick layer of bechamel cheese sauce with ham rolls and lots of endives plus mashed potato.

I discovered, after wadingt through one half, that all the MASHED potato was on the side I left till last and I'd eaten all the endives and ham on the left so my meal ended up being rather heavy-going on the mash at the end but it was a GREAT choice.  CBC had the beef stew. Yes, he forgo his veggie ways to try it. When in Belgium....

It had been a rather wonderful day and I wondered what would be next?

Oh...you want to see my T2 purchases????

Well, as well as the two skirts I showed in previous posts (the red daisy one and the blue/purple stripy glittery one, plus a woven leather belt), I bought the above.

Most useful were the navy camisole and the corduroy rose skirt which I wore whilst there. I've now worn everything except the rainbow dress and the teal top!

Oh...and here's an unheard of photo of me trying CBC's cherry beer. I think it was a La Chouffe beer.

I LOATHE and DETEST beer.  Watch me drink it and see what true horror and abject disgust looks like (apparently it's hilarious) but CBC insisted I try this and it was pleasant! I even took an extra sip when he went to the loo!

Hope you are having a lovely day!

xx