Tuesday and it is to be a day out. Firstly as its 7 o’clock I read for an hour and a half before I get up for Its breakfast. A quick shower and I am driving to my friends house who drives us to Kedleston Hall. Its a big old house whose family originally supported William the Conquer and over the generations generations built a huge house and pleasure gardens. In order to do this the family moved an entire village to facilitate the landscaping of the park and grounds. Today its still a very impressive house filled with goodies from all over the world.
My friend and I do the short walk and end up walking through the old church, which is full of the tombs of the Curzon family. Most of the tombs date from the 1700s but there is one marker stone dates 1245 and was thought to be the marker for the fourth Earl/Duke. Nearby is a folly, apparently all good estates had follies.
We lunch and continue to chat before visiting the second hand book shop. I scan the shelves and find nothing and think for once I am going to get out of a book shop with out one. I was wrong. I spotted the books displayed above the shelves and there was my prize. The collected poems of Clive James, not someone whose poetry I knew very well. I cannot pass up such an excellent bargain and buy the book.
When I get home later I read some of the poems and I am stunned by them. If you have a moment read One Man to Another. Perhaps I will put it here in the future. The actual house is an amazing display of wealth and power, trees were grown in curves in order to make curved floor boards for a curved corridor. That’s indulgence of wealth. Dotted around the house are volunteers who are ready to tell you anything you wants to know about the room you are in and there are people in costume. One in particular is dressed as the famous house keeper that showed Ben Johnson around the house. She looked uncannily like the portrait of the woman that hangs at the bottom of the stairs. She was full of interesting facts about the house keeper and the history of the family. A final cup of coffee and a biscuit and my friend drives us back to her house were I pick up my car and drive home. Running through this day are the attempts to verify that the new sofa is going to be delivered tomorrow and that it is okay to chop up the old one. These efforts fail adn the expected phone call does not emerge. The result of this is that the guy who is going to chop up the old one cannot do it and kindly agrees to come again tomorrow if the new one arrives.
I arrive home to have the difficult conversation with the sofa chopper and then run my oldest daughter to the late chemist to get antibiotics for her possibly infected toe. Finally the family are able to sit down to eat and move into the evening, watching TV, knitting, reading, putting bins out, washing up and finally for me to take my meds and go to bed having drafted the blog. Its been a long but full day. It does me good to get away from the house and into the fresh air to see new places or things. I’m frustrated about the sofa but apart from that its been a good day. Hopefully things will go smoothly tomorrow. Although the day is a good day I reach the end of it spoonless.
