I was going to write about a trip to Dyffryn Gardens we made back in May. The danger of planning to write about things in advance, and then not writing them at the time, is that things are forgotten. Or the joy has been ousted by later joys, and the memories are not so fresh. Not so easily written about. I shall try.
It was our second trip to Dyffryn this year: we first went back in January or February, when it was freezing cold and I had a migraine half way around the gardens. You'd think it would put us off returning. But we had packed some fresh sausage rolls, and they were still warm when we stopped to eat them, so there was that. And we had a tub of fruity crispie rockie road.
So, not put off, we returned, but in warmer weather. What could be better than glorious sunshine and a garden in full bloom? Especially with no migraine. We packed a picnic and set off.
It took us a little while to find the place: the satnav, it turned out, didn't like the postcode and required a slightly different spelling (Duffryn) to get there. I don't remember us having quite that problem last time, but no matter. We got there in the end. As did a lot of other people, who'd clearly had the same thought as us.
A garden in bloom is a wonderful thing. A garden in bloom where you can picnic on the lawn or by the fish-pond, even more so. Although Tiny was very interested in the pond, so we didn't linger there too long: too much of a temptation for Tiny to resist trying to splash.
And then I found a paperback of JK Rowling's A Casual Vacancy in the secondhand bookshop. I've been looking for it for a while, although obviously not seriously enough to simply buy it from Amazon or eBay, but our local charity shops have only had it in hardback. It's too chunky a book for a hardback, even if I find Rowling's writing very readable. I still haven't collected all the Strikes in print copies: the later ones I currently only have as eBooks, in part because of their chunkiness. I don't object to their size, but there is only a finite amount of space on my shelves, so I'm in no hurry to complete the set.
It's a good size secondhand bookshop. M also found something, to do with the Napoleonic Wars, I think it was. People talk of the National Trust cafes, but I always look for the bookshops. Not to say that the cakes we had at the end of our visit weren't tasty, but the joy of a secondhand bookshop is you never know what you might find.
A more recent joy, from this week, however, has been the fun and games of the election. I didn't quite manage to stay up for all the scalpings, but I checked in whenever Tiny woke me in the wee hours.
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