A Day-Trip to Birmingham

 Back in August, basically on a whim, Tim and I took a day-trip up to Birmingham, a city neither of us had been much interested in previously, but we ended up having a fantastic time and will almost certainly need to go back again.  What I discovered almost immediately upon arrival is that Birmingham is filled with treasures for a Victorianist, filled with lovely red-brick buildings and, for instance, the above-pictured Great Western Arcade, built in 1875-76.

 The lovely interior.

 Then we went to Birmingham's cathedral, one of the smallest in England, but lovely to visit, especially because it features four huge stained glass windows by Edward Burne-Jones, the pre-Raphaelite painter.

Here you can see two of the windows.  They all featured a surprising amount of red, making them seem rather lurid.

 We were very impressed with the civic spaces and buildings surrounding the Town Hall, which looks like a classical temple and which we apparently didn't take a picture of (tsk, tsk).  I've forgotten what the first building pictured was, but the lower one is the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.  The museum is free and wonderful - sort of a smaller mix of the Victora & Albert Museum (furniture, ceramics, etc.) and the Tate Britain (many pre-Raphaelite paintings, which we somehow missed), plus some great local history.  The history of the city did a great job of covering the Enlightenment figures who lived in Birmingham (many of whom Tim studied for his MA) and the city's abolitionists.

 A statue of Joseph Priestly, who discovered oxygen and was a Unitarian minister.  He was unfortunately run out of town when a mob burned his house down.  He ended up in the United States.  Tim considered writing his thesis on him.

After the museum, we went to the Pen Museum in the Jewellery Quarter.  For quite awhile, Birmingham was the centre of both the jewellery trade and the steel pen trade.  The Pen Museum housed tons and tons of metal pen nibs (including giant ones for use on posters!), pen nib boxes, and the machinery used to punch and shape pen nibs, plus fountain pens and typewriters of varying vintages, which you could actually test out.  For years we kept Mom's old university typewriter in the basement and when I was little, I remember playing with it was fair bit, and getting frustrated with the keys would all jam together.  This was the first time I'd used a typewriter since Mom's ribbon ran out of ink - they even had ribbons with black and RED ink!  It was all very fun, but I came away very grateful for computers.  I can't imagine typing an essay - a thesis - a novel - on a typewriter!

If we'd had more time, we would have booked a tour of the Jewellery Quarter Museum as well, but instead we set off through the quarter on a hike up to Matthew Boulton's house, Soho House, where the Lunar Society met.  One the way, we passed buildings that were (are?) jewellery workshops.

 This is Soho House.  I have to say, it seemed very liveable to me for an eighteenth-century house.  They've even uncovered the remains of a hot air heating system Boulton rigged up for the house.

Boulton was quite the man.  The house originally abutted the land taken up by Boulton's ground-breaking Soho Manufactory (sadly, it's all suburbs now).  With James Watt, Boulton came up with a new version of the steam engine, which ended up in factories all over the country.  He also minted coins and lobbied for an assay office in Birmingham, which allowed for the growth of the silver trade in the city.  Plus, how can you not love a man who had a Fossilry in his house - that is, a room for storing fossils!

At the end of our day in Birmingham, we went down to Gas Street, a span of the Birmingham canal charmingly lined with restaurants and pubs.

If we ever go back to Birmingham, we'd also like to see the university campus, Winterbourne House and garden, Aston Hall, and the Birmingham back-to-backs, the last surviving court of houses in the city, but you have to book ahead, as they only allow tours of eight through at a time.

Picture Post: Four Colleges and a Palace

Here are some pictures from the Easter vacation.  The end of March was very warm and summer-like, so Tim and I had an excellent excuse to go exploring Oxford and its college.  April, however, and frankly most of May so far, has been rather cool and rainy.  April was, in fact, that rainiest April since 1910, which is quite something.

 The ceiling of Pembroke College's chapel.

 The view of the Radcliffe Camera from the very grand quad at All Soul's College.  All Soul's is a graduate only college and you must be invited to become a member or become a member by writing a gruelling exam.  Yikes.

 The antechamber of Merton College's chapel.  J.R.R. Tolkien was a professor here for many years.  Also, Merton is very old (I think it was founded in the Medieval period) and has lovely gardens.

 Another view of the Radcliffe Camera, this time from Exeter's Fellows' Gardens.

I really must work in here sometime.  I've only ever popped in to take a very reverent look around.  I usually either work from home or read in the Upper Reading Room at the Old Bod.

And Blenheim Palace, which we visited with my parents.  It is the only non-royal residence in Britain to be called a "palace" (I think).  Its library, which is tremendously grand and boasts its own pipe organ, is apparently the second longest room in a private house in the UK.  Now I'm most curious to find out which house has a longer room.  Also, if you happen to visit and have the opportunity to tour the private apartments of the current Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, do so.  You'll get a much better idea of how the residents of this house actually lived, as the state apartments are only used on special occasions.  And, if you are a Winston Churchill fan (as we all are), take a walk around the grounds because a) they are wonderfully landscaped, with their own waterfall and lake and b) you can see the Temple of Artemis where he proposed to his wife!

A Canadian Care Package, and Walking

This week, a long-awaited box arrived at our flat.  My parents had promised Tim and I a dual birthday box, as our birthdays fall less than a month apart.  It was shipped by ground mail, so it took about a month to arrive.

What we found when we opened the box basically amounted to a Canadian care package.  My parents had sent us two big cannisters of Tim Hortons coffee, for one thing.  In Canada, Tim Hortons is sort of the national coffee and doughnut shop.  On my last university campus, there were an equal number of "Tims" and Starbucks.  This is the coffee Tim and I had been happily brewing every morning for the two years before we moved to the UK.  We also knew it was tastier and stronger than the coffee we had been drinking since we got here.

The first cup, and all the cups that have follow so far, have been glorious.  Funny, how a cup of coffee can remind one so much of home.

We also received University of Saskatchewan socks (our alma mater) and two bags of Hershey's Kisses, which is I believe an American product, but they certainly don't have them over here.  There's also a small bag I have to wait for my birthday to open.  But for now, I will continue to rapturously drink Tim's.

In other news, yesterday was a fine, sunny day, so we decided to make use of our public rights of way and go trekking out into the countryside.  This was extraordinarily easy to manage, as a public footpath begins just down a nearby street.

This also marked our first, and certainly not last, use of an Ordnance Survey Map.  We had to play a bit of the "Is this the path?  Is this the turn-off?" game, but we eventually found our way to the public bridleway we had been heading for.  Our walk among farmer's fields (odd that - not something strangers do at home) was curiously a very English experience, while also reminding me of my many visits to my grandparents' farm, with fields stretching away in every direction and few signs of "civilization."

It must be spring here - look at all the snowdrops!

I've now discovered that the Oxfordshire country website has maps and directions for a great many interesting-looking walks around Oxford, so I suspect we will be doing a fair bit of exploring this spring and summer.