My dad's visit

My dad came to visit at the beginning of August. It was lovely. We rented a car and were able to go around any number of places that I couldn't or wouldn't have gotten to on my own; we also spent some time just hanging out and trying to understand cricket.

Note: I still do not understand cricket. I understand it a little bit more now than I used to, but I think I need one or both of two things: 1 - to attend a live test match. 2 - a specific player to watch/follow through a game/series.

One of the nice things about my dad being here, and taking me around places, is that it reminds me of some of the things I like about this area of the country: the history. London is the obvious place for history, of course, and god knows I love going to London and going to the museums and turning a corner and seeing, say, the pub that Chaucer frequented (it's in Southwark) or Dickens (it's in the City and is actually quite dark inside) or whatever.

History in the Midlands, at least the history that is packaged for tourists, is much more of the 'normal people' form of history, where 'normal people' often means 'noble people who were active outside of London'. Pre-Industrial Revolution sites are stately homes of landed gentry, not usually royal (there are exceptions); post-Industrial Revolution sites are, you know, focused on the Industrial Revolution and its effects including the rise of the merchant/middle/industrialist class.

Dad suggested going to Newstead Abbey, but I have been there twice in the last ten years, and have less than no desire to go back. The Romantic poets tend to annoy me and I can't stand Byron as a personality. Instead, to satisfy the literary pilgrimage portion of the trip, we went to Eastwood. It made for a nice afternoon trip - we went to the main museum which also had quite a lot of information about mining in the area and daily life for the working class at the time, as well as Lawrence's life, and we went to the birthplace museum, in the house that Lawrence was actually born in. I quite like Lawrence, actually, and think that his writing often gets overshadowed by either the more 'experimental' modernist authors like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf or people like that, or by the obscenity trial about Lady Chatterley's Lover. I really liked Lady Chatterley's Lover. I liked the writing style of Sons and Lovers, although I found the central relationship between Paul and his mother incredibly creepy. I also want to read Women in Love, but haven't gotten to it yet.

We also took a day and drove up to Gainsborough Old Hall. That was fantastic. We found out when we got up there that Gainsborough has a claim to be the place where King Canute 'tried' to stop the tide, so that's really cool in and of itself. The Old Hall, although smaller than other manor houses we've been to and completely surrounded by the town now, is a fantastic museum. The kitchen and banqueting hall area is set up as it would have been in the late fifteenth century, when Richard III visited, and the kitchen especially shows what a working medieval kitchen would have been like. The audio tour gets a touch long at times, but is informative without being boring. Gainsborough Old Hall was also a safe place for the Puritans/'Pilgrim Fathers' before the Dutch exile and journey to America. I can imagine that they do quite a lot there with living history/reenactment events - it's a perfect place for it.

Over the weekend that he was here, we did things slightly closer to home. First we went to Sudbury Hall. The Hall itself is fine - nice, but nothing really extraordinary. The Museum of Childhood, on the other hand, is amazing. A nice mix of display and interactive - including a 'chimney' that kids can climb through to see what it would have been like for chimney sweeps, a Victorian classroom, and a room on storytelling/books/imaginative play. It was a blast. We were there with my godmother and her granddaughters, and another family friend with her husband and mother-in-law. The girls loved the Museum of Childhood, even the older one who's fourteen. (She and I had a lovely squee-ing discussion at the Doctor Who exhibit that was part of the 'pop culture'/'collectibles' exhibit.) The eight-year-old was in heaven. She went through the chimney about ten times. There's also a lake on the estate, with about two dozen swans that we counted, so we got some relaxing "be in nature" time in as well. The other nice thing is that, no matter what, days at my godmother's are always full days with my godmother. If she comes in to Nottingham, then it's lunch and maybe an hour or two of shopping. If I go there, it's "Oh, no, we'd better drive you back because it's after dark now."

The Sunday my dad was here, we went to Chatsworth House. It's one of our favourite places to go - in fact, I had begged off a trip with some friends the week or so before because I knew that my dad would want to go. Chatsworth is so beautiful. The house is currently undergoing quite a bit of restoration, but is still open to visitors, and they have an exhibit inside called "Chatsworth at the Movies" or something like that. Obviously one of their main film connections is The Duchess, but there's also Pride and Prejudice, where Chatsworth is both the interior and the exterior for Pemberley (as it may have been for Austen herself), and an upcoming movie called The Wolfman which I don't really want to see, but might since it features Chatsworth. (...what? That's normal.)

Chatsworth was also hosting a Jaguar car show that day. It was an incredible, welcome coincidence, because car shows are one of the things that my dad and I do together when we can, and we both appreciate Jaguars greatly. It was nice. I miss cars sometimes.

We also wandered through the grounds. Gave up on the maze - we know there's a way in, because we could hear people in the center. We just couldn't figure it out. We wandered around the gardens for a while, just enjoying the views and the fresh air and the fountains and the beauty of the area. I even took a few pictures, which is quite rare for me.

We'd rented a car, as I said, and a GPS system to go with it, because driving on the other side of the road is difficult enough without also having to figure out how exactly to get places. The only time the GPS was a problem was in Gainsborough, where it told us that the Old Hall was at least half a mile away from where it actually was. On the way back from Chatsworth, we turned off the GPS (it wanted us to take the motorway, and traffic was backed up for miles to get there) and managed to find our own way back. Success!

We also did some Nottingham-touristy stuff: The Galleries of Justice and the Caves, both of which now do dramatised tours although I think I preferred the Caves a few years ago when it was an audio tour setup. Also we learned that there aren't really any cybercafes in Nottingham - one up on Mansfield Road, I think they said, and a few computers at the information centre. That's it - at least, that's all that the information centre told us about. (I wonder if that would be a feasible small business idea, or if there are enough wireless access points around to make it unnecessary?)

While my dad was here, we also spent some time just chilling. I read Silks, by Dick Francis (which I reviewed on my new book blog, where you can also find some comments about literary pilgrimages a la our Eastwood trip), we watched The Ashes, we went to two pub quizzes (my normal monthly PGSA one and a commercially-provided one at the carvery attached to the hotel), and we ate takeaways. All in all, a good trip.