Tag: GOING OUT

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A Trip to Great Dixter & Rye

On By samanthaIn GOING OUTLeave a comment

Great Dixter House and Gardens are situated in East Sussex, about eight miles from Rye. The drive there along the A268 is very pretty, the road is lined with picture-postcard worthy homes. You can of course also take the train. Great Dixter is best know for being the home of Christopher Lloyd the famous creator of gardens and author of books about gardening. The house itself is stunning on the outside, an imposing Tudor mansion. Inside there are three rooms open to the public, the Great Hall, The Parlour and The Solar. There are sausage dog ornaments everywhere and bookcases stuffed with Christipher Lloyd books. To be honest there isn’t that much of interest inside but there are tour guides to bring the history of the house to life

I visited Great Dixter with two friends and the first thing we did upon arriving was find the coffee shop. There is only an outside cafe area but the cakes were delicious as was the coffee. We sat shivering as unfortunately the day we visited it was chilly and raining, despite it being late May. I had visited five years previously on a beautiful sunny day and the weather really does make all the difference. We walked around all the different gardens especially admiring the roses, lupins and irises. The planting is dense and very imaginative. On this latest visit everything looked a bit overgrown and there were an awful lot of weeds everywhere. I actually wondered if they should let visitors in for free on the condition that they pull up some of the cow parsley that was infiltrating every flower bed. Adult entry to the house and gardens is £16. You can buy many different plants, horticultural books, gardening tools and little mementoes like tea towels at the small gift shop.

After spending an a couple of hours at Great Dixter we decided to head to Rye for a spot of lunch and a look around. I have never been there before and was delighted to see how quirky the pretty period houses are, they have names like “The House Opposite”. Rye is quite hilly and the streets are cobblestone so wear trainers or sensible shoes if you visit. The cobbles are covered in moss so it is all a little slippery. We had lunch at a Turkish restaurant called Layla. I had a chicken wrap with fries and my friends had the chicken salad, The portions were generous and the food tasty.

After lunch we had a look around the shops. It has been some time since I have seen such a healthy looking high street. There lots of shops and I didn’t spot any nail bars, vape shops or the usual coffee shop chains that make up most high streets in 2024. My friend bought a raffia handbag in a shop called Colette. There is a dress agency selling pre-loved designer clothes and a number of independent boutiques and gift shops. All of the clothes shops were rather expensive in my opinion and they seemed to stock the same sort of thing, linen smocks and wide, floaty dresses, not really my cup of tea. I did spot a lovely cranberry red sweatshirt but it was £106 but so I didn’t buy it.

We had a walk around the town but it was still raining so , after walking the the viewing point situated outside the Castle Museum, we headed home. Rye is a picturesque town to visit with a good variety of shops and restaurants. I imagine there are lots of lovely walks as well, just not on days when there is torrential rain.

A banana plant, the house at Great Dixter, a cobbled street in Rye

Thank you for reading

Samantha

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The Tower of London & The GunPowder Plot Immersive Experience

On By samanthaIn GOING OUTLeave a comment

I am always on the look-out for something different to do in London. We live about a half an hour train journey from central London and I try to get there at least every couple of months. I love the village where I live but it is very quiet and sometimes it is nice to feel the buzz of the city. Last year myself and a friend went to The War Of The Worlds Immersive Experience in Aldgate which was great fun so I have been searching for something similar.

I used to work for a merchant bank located at Tower Hill but have only been to the Tower of London once before, as a very small child. I decided to book tickets for the GunPowder Plot Experience followed by a tour of The Tower of London. It is not an inexpensive day out, tickets for both came in at around £90 each and then there were the train fares as well. I booked tickets for the experience via Fever https://feverup.com/en/london

If you plan on doing both The GunPowder Plot Experience and the Tower of London in one day I would recommend you do the plot first and book an early slot, 11am or before in order to fit everything in. The Beefeater led tours of the tour stop surprisingly early, we got on the last one of the day which was around 3pm. Our GunPowder Plot Experience was booked for 11.30am, for some unfathomable reason we were told to arrive half an hour early, ten minutes would have been plenty of time to stash our belongings in a locker and sign the waiver. There was a fair bit of waiting around in the bar before the experience began but it gave us time to visit the spotless loos. The venue is cashless so bear this in mind if you want a drink at the interval although you can order and pay for one whilst booking.

The GunPowder Plot Experience lasts around one hour and forty minutes and takes you through the events leading up to the execution of Guy Fawkes and his collaborators in 1605. It is a history lesson brought to life. I definitely learnt some new facts about this period. A group of participants, there were around ten of us, were given black, hooded cloaks to wear and are then led through a warren of murky passages by actors playing various characters. The participants visit houses, cellars, dungeons and churches. The actors were really wonderful and the whole experience is extremely atmospheric. There was a dad with a young son of about nine years old in our group and I did wonder if the lad would be frightened but he thoroughly enjoyed himself as did one American participant who got so into the spirit of the occasion that we weren’t sure if he were actually one of the actors. – he wasn’t.

Me wearing the rather smelly black cloak I was given upon arrival

There are a few points in the experience where the participants don virtual reality headsets and find themselves transported across the Thames or watching the night skies of London. There is one where a tortured priest is flown across the sky to supposed safety . These are very effective and quite creepy, in a good way. If you look to the person next to you on the boat you will see the other participant transformed into a dark figure wearing a plague mask. The entire experience was thoroughly enjoyable and great fun. Do bring a sweater, everybody was complaining that they were chilly in the understandably rather dank venue. The venue for the experience was a bit tricky to find, don’t walk down to the Tower itself, head for the ticket office and it is right next door. The GunPowder Plot Experience is enough by itself for a trip out, you could come back another day and see The Tower. I’d thoroughly recommend it and I thought it was good value for money.

After the experience we had a lovely lunch in the nearby Pizza Express and then returned to look around The Tower of London. The sun was shining and a Beefeater, also called a Yeoman Warder, named Tracey Machin took us on a tour. She was a fantastic speaker and really entertaining. She clearly felt her role was a huge honour and explained that she had been a nurse in the RAF for twenty two years before becoming a Beefeater . We learned about the various sad and grisly executions that had taken place hundreds of years ago and the reasons for them. After the tour we looked around the various buildings by ourselves, there is a huge exhibition of armour and armoury and of course the world famous crown jewels. I assume they are the real jewels and not replicas given the thickness of the vault doors but it does seem unlikely that these would be on display. Anyway they were all dazzlingly beautiful.

Tracey Machin, the Beefeater

At 5pm sharp everything started closing up which is why I suggest starting your day early if you wish to fit both things in one day. Sadly the gift shop closed and I was unable to waste £20 on a Jellycat corgi keyring. We did manage to buy some Palace Mints at a little kiosk though.

I would say that The GunPowder Plot Experience is suitable for ages ten and up, depending on the child. The Tower of London itself is a fascinating place to visit for any age. Both venues together were well worth the £90 price tag, less expensive tickets may be available depending when you wish to go.

Thank you for reading

Samantha

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A Trip To The Theatre – The Mousetrap

On By samanthaIn GOING OUTLeave a comment

My friend Helen and I like to go out somewhere nice every few months or so. In between these trips we will go for walks to the cinema or just have a coffee but we both work hard and like to treat ourselves to a theatre trip or visit a nice restaurant once in a while. Just for a change of scene as much as anything else I think. It’s also nice to have a catch up during the train journey into London.

This time we decided to go and see the long-running play The Mousetrap. Based on the famous murder mystery by Agatha Christie, it is the longest running play in the West End, showing since 1952 . I was in two minds about going to see this because, thanks to an unwelcome spoiler on a radio arts show, I already knew whodunnit but it seemed like something we would both enjoy and reasonably priced tickets were available.

We decided to go for dinner before the show and I booked a table at a small restaurant called Violas in Tavistock Street. As seems to be the case nowadays I had to provide my card details when booking online and was informed that, in the event of us not attending, I would be charged £40. This is the steepest no-show fee I have encountered but I suppose it is Covent Garden. Anyway, Violas is very prettily decked out with lots of artificial flowers everywhere (must be a nightmare to dust) and there are faux fur throws on the back of each chair. The staff were unsmiling apart from the French manager who was running up and down the stairs to the kitchen every five minutes and apologetically explaining to customers that there would be at least a twenty minute wait for their food. This obviously isn’t ideal if you have to be at the theatre at Seven O’Clock and the party on the table next to use took their food away in take-out boxes and asked for the service charge to be removed from the bill. 

I ordered the Black Truffle Pasta which was absolutely delicious . Helen wanted the Salmon but this wasn’t available so she ended up with the Prawn Pasta. Her dish was a plate of tagliatelle with a few prawns, one sliver of aubergine and not much else. Disappointing. We both had a coke to drink and the bill, including tip was about £50. I would have liked a desert but we ran out of time.

Thanks to the miracle that is Google Maps and Helen’s navigational skills we found our way in the nick of time to St. Martin’s Theatre in West Street. We had paid £40 for each of our tickets and we were sitting very high up in the Upper Circle, the stairs are very steep and quite deep. There was a long queue for the two cubicles in the ladies toilets which would have benefitted from a freshen up. We decided not to have a drink during the interval although we did go into the tiny bar which is right behind the light-up sign. The window was open and it was nice to get some fresh air as I had an immovable migraine. As is typical of these old theatres, there is very little leg-room between the seats. It would have nice to have had the option of borrowing some of those little binoculars, or Opera Glasses, to see the actor’s faces more clearly. 

Although I already knew who the villain was, I knew very little about the story itself. Set in a guest house called Monkswell Manor, it tells the story of the two young guest house owners who find themselves hosting an odd assortment of strangers during a snowy night. There has been a shocking murder nearby and investigations have led the local police sergeant to their door. I thought the actors were speaking too quickly at the beginning and it took me a while to settle into the story which, to be honest, was a bit daft but enjoyable. Another friend coincidentally went to see The Mousetrap the night before us and she described it as “a homely play” and that seems quite an apt description.

The woman sitting next to me kept whipping out her iPhone and checking her social media. She was in her fifties, old enough to know better and I found it very distracting. She also kept muttering the dialogue under her breath. She seemed a bit strange so I just tried to ignore her.

We enjoyed The Mousetrap but I was pleased we hadn’t spent a lot of money on the tickets and it definitely isn’t something I would want to see twice. We walked back to Charing Cross station where a train was already waiting on the platform. Towards the end of the journey a very drunk man walked through the carriage asking the other passengers for money. This can be very intimidating, especially if you are travelling by yourself. He didn’t cause any trouble though. We were back in our home town by ten forty five.

Thank you for reading,

Samantha

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Goodbye to 2023

On By samanthaIn FAMILYLeave a comment

It is New Year’s Eve and the most exciting thing I have planned is my Tesco delivery. All three of my children are going to various parties and I am on chauffeuring duty for my youngest who has a house party to go to. I wonder if the parents realise they are going to be besieged by sixteen and seventeen year olds or whether they are going out themselves. It’s my son’s seventeenth birthday next week and I am waiting for the “can I have a few friends over?” request. It never is a few but I don’t mind, as long as nobody is vomiting. Unfortunately once they reach sixteen it’s not really a party unless someone is sick, for some reason is it usually one of the girls. I’d rather them all be safe at my house or, preferably somebody else’s, than hanging around somewhere. My son knows no hanging around allowed!

I have never really enjoyed New Years’s Eve. To be honest, I find it a little depressing. My friends would persuade me to go to the to the pub as a teenager and there would invariably be creepy men demanding a kiss at midnight. In 1992 my now-husband and I went to a NYE ball when on a skiing trip in Colorado and I even managed to be miserable there. I seem to remember everyone (well, the women) wearing taffeta dresses while I was in an itchy angora jumper and ski-pants having not known where we were going. So much for last minute, vague arrangements. I have never worn ski-pants again – the only person ever to have looked good in them is Audrey Hepburn. The last time we went out for NYE was about three years ago to friends for dinner. Usually my husband stays up to watch proceedings on the television and I try to be asleep before midnight but there are usually loud fireworks gong off in somewhere in our village. Even my parents, nearly ninety years old, have more fun than me, going to their neighbour’s house for drinks and nibbles.

I pop round to my parents’ house and give them a hand with a few bits around the house, my mum seems a little confused as to who I am at one point. I then send my daughter off to her party with a bottle of prosecco and settle down to watch Suspicion, a 1941 Hitchcock thriller with Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine.  I can’t say I am suffering from FOMO, it is blowing a gale outside and I am quite happy to have a sedate transition into 2024. It has been a somewhat difficult year what with my dad’s heart attack and my mother-in-law’s recent long hospital stay but we are still all here and that is something to be grateful for.

Happy New Year to everyone!

Thank you for reading,

Samantha

Photo by Kostiantyn Li on Unsplash

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Hello There…

On By samanthaIn ABOUT MELeave a comment

I’m Samantha.  I’m a fifty-something wife, mother, daughter living in beautiful Kent, the so-called Garden of England.

Like many women of my age, I am juggling looking after my family; two of my three children are still in their teens, with helping to care for my elderly parents along with my actual paid role as a PA. It isn’t always easy is it?

I hope my little bit of online space will allow me to share the challenges that present themselves as I go through midlife along with some of the fun stuff.

I love books, films and the theatre, any form of story-telling really. When I have some free time I can usually be found either reading in a hot bubble bath , having a catch-up with with girlfriends or walking through the picturesque Kent countryside with my husband and kids (when they deign to join us). 

Thank you for taking the time to stop by my blog, I really appreciate it.

Samantha