Winter Adventures

2018 is so far proving to be a particularly odd one in term of weather. It wouldn’t surprise me if I saw an old man herding pairs of animals onto a sizeable vessel given the amount of rain we’ve had over the last week.
Before that, it was snow. Anything more than a few flakes here in the South of England is quite unusual and I have to confess to being delighted when it meant I ended up with an extra two days off work. Whilst it can be immensely inconvenient if you need to travel in it, I love the way snow can make anywhere gain a magical quality- it’s like the ultimate Instagram filter.
The cold temperatures remained for a few days and so all the snow froze making getting about something of a challenge. The roads were like speed skating tracks which inevitably led to me falling over dramatically twice. It turns out dyspraxia and a shit load of ice are not a good combination.
Two weeks later and we had another barrage of snow, an unprecedented occurrence (in my lifetime at least). By this point we were all hardy survivors and made our way as if we were Ernest Shackleton, no longer phased by the white sprinkling. Give it another year though and we’ll all have forgotten and it will be snowmageddon again.
For a variety of reasons I’ve ended up visiting various towns I wouldn’t normally go to over the last few months. Salisbury was the first with its magnificent cathedral always catching your eye.
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By sheer coincidence I found myself at a spot near where famous British artist John Constable painted one of his paintings of the cathedral. Of course I had to have a go at re-creating it in photographic form. It hasn’t changed too much in nearly two hundred years though John had more favourable weather!
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Another trip saw me go to Bath which was really cold considering baths are normally warm. I haven’t visited the town for many years and though it had a lot to offer it’s not the same without the Cadbury cafe that used to be there. I did take this rather lovely photo of Bath abbey however.
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My most recent town trip was to Wareham which it turns out is a really lovely little town.
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Wareham is one of those towns which doesn’t appeared to have changed much for hundreds of years. During my explorations I even discovered the Town Pound, where stray animals used to be taken and incredibly still exists.
Sadly not everywhere I ended up was lovely. A few weeks ago I ended up going to the Somerset town of Yeovil which was like Hell only with wetter weather. Everything was grey and dilapidated, there was dog poo all over the place and I even witnessed a group of teenagers shouting abuse at a man in a mobility scooter. My top tip for visiting Yeovil? Don’t!
That’s it for today but with any luck I’ll be back with some other nonsense next week.

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