cardunculus is going on holiday

Tomorrow.  At half past nine the man from the house sitting agency will come, and after we have briefed him about the black cat's stiff leg and run through the rest of the list (cats, pots, chickens) we'll be off.  He and his wife sat for us last year and it all went smoothly.  Yes, it is very sad that we don't have friends or neighbours to do it, but the nearest neighbours live in London half the time, and the next two houses are occupied  by pensioners in fragile health, while the only one of our friends who lives within a quarter of an hour's drive works in London.  Such is our fragmented society.

We are going to stay in Leek, Staffordshire, on the western fringes of the Peak District.  It is a part of the world that neither of us knows at all well.  Once, on a company visit, I was driven in a corporate minibus through the outer fringes of the grounds of Chatsworth, simply because they are so large they encompass the local roads, and that is the sum total of my Peak District tourist experiences.

We have a long list of things to do and see, so many that I have entered them on a spreadsheet, roughly grouped by geographical proximity, with notes on which days of the week they are open. There is Chatsworth, of course, and Biddulph Grange, Hardwick Hall if we drive over the Peaks towards Chesterfield, more glass than wall, and Haddon Hall, a fortified stone manor house which you have probably seen if you have watched many costume dramas on the telly.  It appeared fairly recently in Jane Eyre with Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens.

There are a great number of industrial museums.  There are textile mills, pottery museums, and I have a fancy to see the pre 1914 working flour roller mill.  The Wedgewood Museum, which won the Art Fund Museum of the Year Award a few years back, is horribly threatened with having to sell its entire collection to help fund the pension deficit of a now bankrupt company with which it is only very distantly connected, but still connected enough under bonkers UK pensions legislation.  Something must be done, but I hope and believe that the Art Fund is on the case.

We might run up to Manchester for the day to visit Salford Quays, home of the Lowry Museum and the northern branch of the Imperial War Museum.  It occupies a building designed by Daniel Lieberskind so should be worth a visit for the architecture, never mind the contents.

And we could go for a walk in the country.  The Peak District is the UK's oldest national park, and the scenery is stunningly beautiful, to judge from the pictures I've seen.  It depends partly on the weather.  Sunday is forecast to be a shocker, but it probably won't rain that hard all week.  I'm packing my walking boots and waterproof trousers, in anticipation of a bit of outdoors action.

The blog is not coming with us.  It does impose something of a constraint, having to find half an hour back at the cottage in the afternoon or evening when I can tap away, and I'm not going to try. A break from your normal routine is partly what having a holiday is about.