We decided to 'do' East Anglia, at least the part of it that's within easy train reach of Cambridge. So we headed out to Ely, where we had a lovely time despite the rather damp weather. I feel a bit silly about repeatedly dragging
Then on to the Oliver Cromwell museum, which is interesting and quite well done (although the overly sincere announcer doing the recorded messages about each room annoyed me somewhat). I was more interested in the section on the history of the Fens than the Civil War stuff, but still, it was fun.
We had a little time before our train, which we spent wandering around Ely and admiring the pretty old town, and then decided to go and investigate the charity shops rather than going down to the riverside park to eat lunch. I got rather a good haul, including E Annie Proulx' The Shipping News which I've been meaning to read for a while, and also Esther Freud's Hideous Kinky, short story collections by two authors I've discovered recently (Walter M Miller and John Fowles), and a couple of children's books that were cheap enough for me to snap them up.
By the time we got to Bury St Edmunds, the sun had come out. So we had a lovely afternoon in the Abbey grounds. We ended up not making it to the Clock museum before it shut, but we had a nice relaxing afternoon anyway, and not going to the museum gave us time to wander round Bury (which has some really interesting buildings) and have a slice of cake in a little teashop.
Saturday
We didn't really have the energy to walk back to Shelford, and although we tried sitting on Christ's Pieces it wasn't really warm enough for this, so we headed off to Borders where we bagged a corner of the sofa and remained there until shabbat was over and we could get a bus home. Yay for American-style book stores that open late in the evening and have cafés with comfy sofas. Initially we curled up together and I napped for a bit; I really appreciated that because it's something I don't get to do very often. But then I decided that sleeping wasn't really very sociable, so I woke up and spent the rest of the evening just chatting to
By Sunday, after all the walking and fresh air and getting up efficiently early, we were pretty tired. So we had a pretty quiet day, on the whole, but I think we rather needed it. We got up late and went for a walk through the village, just across the rec and down to a pretty spot by the river, and then back in time for lunch. In the afternoon we went back into town (on the bus this time) to Kettles Yard. The thing about Kettle's Yard is that it's sort of a modern art museum, but it's also somebody's former house; in a sense, the whole thing is a macro-scale work of art. (I'm supposed to be introducing
So all in all a lovely long weekend! It's very nice to be able to show