QC Blogging day

Times Quick Cryptic No 1189 by Izetti

I approach my introduction to this blog with some trepidation given that I underestimated how difficult others would find the lovely QC from Izetti last time out and how much longer it took me today. I note also that plenty of people have found several recent puzzles harder than usual and are looking for something less stretching. Well, there I was, thinking this is very straightforward for an Izetti puzzle with just the SE corner to complete. Then I was interrupted by the wife looking for her laptop charger. When I restarted, the last 4 clues took me as long again as the rest, leaving me with my slowest time since the beginning of August at just over 10 minutes. But there are plenty of more straightforward clues than usual from Don, I think, so maybe it was just the effect of the interruption on my concentration. Or maybe those clues were a bit tricky. So if, like me, you struggled with the SE corner, commiserations, but we are here to learn, aren't we? A very nice puzzle with lots of anagrams and several reversal clues.. and it's a pangram!  That's hard enough to achieve in a 15x15 grid and even more impressive in a 13x13. Some lovely surfaces too - I liked REINFORCE and thought QUARTERFINAL was brilliant. Thank-you Izetti for another fine, educational, pangramatic and entertaining puzzle. How did you all get on?

[Addendum: Unrelated to this QC, on a walk in Newmarket yesterday, I was challenged to come up with a crossword clue related to a sign we passed along the way... so here it is " Hankers after coat, seen on boat at a distance, worth 1000 guineas, perhaps? (5, 8)". Any better suggestions?]

( Read all about it... )

Newmarket 2-part walk

"We will walk on Thursday 27th September around Newmarket and the small village of Snailwell. Please find your own parking in Newmarket. We will then meet outside Waitrose for a 11am start. It is a great walk (no spoilers) with lots of surprise, history and great views. We will stop at the George and Dragon pub in Snailwell around lunchtime for refreshments/toilets. This walk could be 10 miles in total but you have the option to stop after the first 5 miles when we will be back near our cars.", said the invite.

That sounded interesting and, unusually, I was not working - I usually work Wednesdays and Thursdays. It was also a lovely sunny day. So, having finished my chores in time,

I joined Joyce with 9 others for a very pleasant stroll. It was nice to meet up again with several I had walked with before and meet some new faces.

This was our route...

Well actually some of it was just my route, as I parked some distance from Waitrose.

Our 'surprise' happened only a few minutes into our walk....

We were met at the gate of St. Agnes Church by John, armed with a set of handouts about the church and it history. It was built just over a hundred years ago by Caroline Agnes, Duchess of Montrose, a member of the Episcopal Church of Scotland, in memory of her second husband, W. S. Stirling Crawfurd, Esquire.   No expense was spared in its building. The description of it in the Supplement to Cautley's Suffolk Churches speaks of 'the lavish interior embellished with a great deal of Salviati mosaic and a majolica-tiled dado', and draws attention to 'an oil painting of the Last Supper in a fine late seventeenth century frame and an elaborate marble reredos by Boehm in Renaissance-manner' depicting the Assumption of St Agnes over the Coliseum at Rome. All the windows are of stained glass and it is said to be 'the only example of the high Victorian use of such elaborate tile and mosaic work in Suffolk'. The organ, incidentally, was designed by Sir Arthur Sullivan.You can read more about the church here.

We carried along the road until we cross at a Pegasus crossing. We weren't on horseback though!

From here we were out in the open country. Our walk included lots of lovely manicured grassland ...



..and horse tracks and rails everywhere.

 We found some really big conkers...

 ..just before we got to Snailwell. St. Peter's church here is not as lavish as St. Agnes's, but has one of the peculiarly East Anglian features of a round tower.

 Just round the corner was our drinks break at the George and Dragon

 Here we are in the beer garden.

Behind some fencing was a cute tortoise.

We tried to get to the River Snail, but the gate at the bottom of the garden was locked.

Some of our walk was through woodland.

We returned along the Bury Road nearly back to where we started, where we left those who weren't doing part 2 of the walk - around the Gallops.

We followed the track round. Here at the 4 furlong marker we saw the track being harrowed to leave a prsitine surface for the horses tomorrow.

When I commented, Joyce asked my how far was a furlong... and then challenged me to come up with a cryptic crossword clue. This was the last of the markers.

...and here is my clue "Hankers after coat, seen on boat at a distance, worth 1000 guineas, perhaps? (5, 8)".

From the top of Warren Hill we had the best view of Newmarket.

As we descended, a fmiliar spire came into view - it was St. Agnes's church again

Getting back to the town...

...we found a geocache...

and visited Nell Gwynn's house..

...before heading for home.

Here is a slideshow of my photos (Flash required)

You can see all of my photos on Flickr here. You can also see more details of the route on MapMyWalk.  So thanks, once again, to Joyce for the lovely day out, and the rest for their company.

P.S. The answer to the clue?
EIGHT FURLONGS - LONGS (hankers) [after] FUR (coat) [seen on] EIGHT (boat). The 1000 guineas is a 1 mile race... run at Newmarket, of course.

U3A River Cruise

 

This was the invite I got from the U3A. It sounded like a good afternoon out, and so it turned out to be! The weather was perfect - I didn't put my fleece on until the return trip, when a cool breeze sprang up and the sun got lower.

We boarded our boat, the Orwell Lady, at Ipswich dock and had to pass through the lock to the tidal reaches of the river. It was interesting to pass along the route of my Orwell challenge walk and view it from the river.Along the way we were given a most informative commentary from our captain.

As we neared the Felixstowe docks we went below decks for our afternoon tea of sandwiches, cakes and scones. Yummy. Meanwhille, we could see the massive MSC Mirja arriving. As we had a bit of spare time our captain took us closer to see it docking.

Then we returned, motoring close to some of the ships in Felixstowe and back the way we came. The tide had gone out a lot since we left so filling the lock to get back to the Ipswich dock took some time. Thgen it was back on the coach to Bury St. Edmunds.

A great afternoon out!


Here is a slideshow of my photos

And you see them all individually on Flickr here.

U3A Choir

Today was the first rehearsal of the new season for the U3A Bury St. Edmunds choir. This is what the website says...

"What do we do?

The group is developing well and has already given a number of concerts. Our repertoire is very varied ranging over secular and sacred music, serious and popular."

I got sent an email a few days before with all the music I needed, and yes, indeed it is a nice variety. A Handel coronation anthem, some Palestrina, Mendelssohn and a couple of madrigals.

I was surprised when I turned up to find so many. But the tenors were rather outnumbered so I was most welcome. My voice didn't enjoy the Handel too much, however. Hopefully it just needs a bit more use!

Rehearsals are from 2:30 to 4:15pm. A pleasant way to spend a Monday afternoon.

Sarah goes to Uni

A bit of a landmark day yesterday. Now we are only 3! We took Sarah to York yesterday to move into here student accommodation at...

...in York University.

It was very well organised and we had an army of helpers to take the contents of the car to her room.

Here is her house.

The shop is just around the corner.

I wonder how long the kitchen will look this pristine?

Here's her room. Very nice!

 

Time to say hello to her housemates...

..and leave her to enjoy her first term.

Jumbo Blogging Day

Times Cryptic Jumbo No 1342 - 8th September

Hello all. I found this an entertaining and somewhat educational Jumbo, with some lovely wordplay and an eclectic mix of general knowledge - some of which was beyond my ken, but the wordplay was generously helpful when needed. There was one that defeated me, though, and I had to resort to aids for my LOI. That the puzzle contains no less than 2 semi-&lits and 1 &lit bears witness to the level of cleverness on display here. Nothing too hard, though, as I finished in less than 40 minutes. I enjoyed the death of DIOGENES, the motmot bird in the wordplay for TOMATO, LEARNING, BREVIARY and the French letter, but my favourite was the clue for ONGOING. What fun! So thanks to our setter for a lovely crossword to solve and to blog. How did you all get on?

( See all the details here... )

Clare to Bury St. Edmunds Walk

This was one I had been looking forward to for a few weeks. A pukka Long-Distance Walk of 18 1/2 miles, we were doing it in a single day. Well we didn't quite do it as it is documented and how people usually do it - from Bury St. Edmunds to Clare, but did it in reverse - from Clare to Bury St. Edmunds.

"Dear All,

We are going to walk this Long Distance route on Monday September 17th. Please be honest about your fitness for this walk as it is 18.5 miles long, mostly off road and there are NO refreshments en route.

I'll be catching the 9am bus from Bury St Edmunds bus station and arriving in Clare at 9.51am.

Please bring plenty of water and food as we will be walking til 5-ish I think.

Any questions? I'm doing a recce this Friday so will be able to answer any questions after that"

..said the invite. So I brought plenty of liquid in my backpack - and needed it all as well as a top up of a bottle from the tap of someone out watering his garden.

Here is a map of the route as we walked it...

As it turned out, there were more people on the recce than the day itself, and, with Alex unable to make it, it was just Joyce and me. We met at the bus stop as planned and sat upstairs at the front to enjoy the ride and views.

We got off the bus just outside Clare Town Hall and started from there rather than walk to the Country Park and back again.

Here are some of my photos. The start of the walk was dominated by huge fields, but as the walk progressed it got more interesting. We saw some more berries like those we found on our Needham Market walk. Doing another look I think they might be redcurrants rather than cranberries - see here. We saw a nice haystack, some chicory flowers  (check that I'm right here), some cute little pigs, some goats and even spotted a couple of deer. And we saw some rather fine buildings too. The weather was warm and the sun came out so it was very pleasant walking conditions. One thing the recce walkers didn't see was the massive bonfire that we could feel the heat from from 20m away as we crossed the ploughed field next to it.































The aircraft in the garage was a bit of a surprise!



We finished at the proper point in Nowton Park by about 4:40pm so we had made good time. Here I am at the sign.



Of course I wasn't finished yet. I had to get back to my car in the Ram Meadow Car Park.... which was another 1 1/2 miles walk!

One question we had... which direction is better and is one harder than the other? Well here is the elevation profile of our route...

It seemed to me that the ups in this direction were steeper than the downs, so it was maybe a little harder. But the scenery was definitely better after the first couple of miles, so I'm glad we did it our way. The walking was mostly fine - what was on roads was on very quiet ones - but there were a few ploughed fields to cross where the path had disappeared. I didn't enjoy those much.

This is our speed profile...

You can see where we stopped for lunch at the bench near Somerton Church and I forgot to pause my tracking and a few drink breaks. As you can see, we started at quite a brisk pace, but we took it a bit easier later.

Here is a slide show of my photos taken en-route.

You can see all off my photos on Flickr here and more details of our route and progress on MapMyWalk. Thanks Joyce for the great day out! It was a bit of a long one but aside from some trigger finger cramps once my sausage fingers subsided, no ill-effects in legs and feet the next day, so I think I could have done it again.