Looking ahead
Nov. 8th, 2019 02:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustOnce Halloween is past, you can no longer put off thinking about Christmas. I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it is the case. We have booked railway tickets to London (we may have mislaid them already, but that's a whole other story); we have fixed several engagements for things to do while we are there (quite apart from the Carol Evening which is the purpose of our visit). I have ordered Christmas cards online. This all feels premature.
D. is with us for a few days. He is here for a conference on Bronze Age archaeology, which is the only looking back element of this post. While he is here, we are making plans for next summer: we have already booked a week on Lindisfarne for midsummer, and a few days in fancy surroundings in Scotland to celebrate D.'s significant birthday in August. Now we are looking for somewhere on the Isle of Bute to recover from that excitement. This too feels - not premature exactly, because we know what we want to do, so let's organise accommodation while we still have some choice: but my inner voice is still saying what, already?.
Further ahead, and altogether more speculatively, the Guardian's Travel section has a feature on Nantes. We usually avoid big cities (which is why, if I'm remembering correctly, we have never been to Nantes, though we may have driven round the bypass!) but I liked the idea of art installations in the Loire estuary: you can admire them, it seems, from a cruise between Nantes and Saint Nazaire (Saint Nazaire is the tein town of Sunderland). The article also tells me that the Machines de l'Île, of which I had heard, are based on an island (a post-industrial island) in Nantes. And of course, there's muscadet...
D. is with us for a few days. He is here for a conference on Bronze Age archaeology, which is the only looking back element of this post. While he is here, we are making plans for next summer: we have already booked a week on Lindisfarne for midsummer, and a few days in fancy surroundings in Scotland to celebrate D.'s significant birthday in August. Now we are looking for somewhere on the Isle of Bute to recover from that excitement. This too feels - not premature exactly, because we know what we want to do, so let's organise accommodation while we still have some choice: but my inner voice is still saying what, already?.
Further ahead, and altogether more speculatively, the Guardian's Travel section has a feature on Nantes. We usually avoid big cities (which is why, if I'm remembering correctly, we have never been to Nantes, though we may have driven round the bypass!) but I liked the idea of art installations in the Loire estuary: you can admire them, it seems, from a cruise between Nantes and Saint Nazaire (Saint Nazaire is the tein town of Sunderland). The article also tells me that the Machines de l'Île, of which I had heard, are based on an island (a post-industrial island) in Nantes. And of course, there's muscadet...
