I had been hoping to get this post done yesterday but I’m still decorating our bedroom, it’ll definitely be finished by tomorrow though, then I’ll be starting on the wee loo.

Anyway, on our recent road trip in England we ended up visiting Gloucester which hadn’t been on our original list of places to visit. That part of England, I suppose you could call it the mid-west, has lots of ancient towns and wherever you are you seem to be only about seven miles away from another place that you’ve heard of and it seemed silly not to visit them. We had to call a halt eventually and so we decided to leave Malvern, Hay and Ross-on-Wye for another road trip.

We went to Gloucester after visiting Cheltenham, which I’ll write about soon. Somehow Gloucester wasn’t at all what I was expecting it to be. I know that quite a few members of the royal family live in that county and I think that was why I thought it would be very up market and posh – but it wasn’t. Then I remembered that a certain serial murderer said that the paving stones of Gloucester had bodies under them, and that gave me a bit of a shudder.

So I was pleased to see the Tailor of Gloucester’s shop, which is now full of Beatrix Potter collectables. This is the actual building which she copied for her illustration but I should have photographed the whole alleyway because that would have been more like her drawing. My mother-in-law’s claim to fame was that she met Beatrix Potter when she was in the Brownies and was camping on B.P.’s land in the Lake District. Beatrix Potter actually gave her a signed copy of one of her books, I wonder what happened to it!

In common with just about every large historical building at the moment, Gloucester Cathedral is having work done on it as you can see.

Here it is from another angle.

I can’t say that it’s a place that I’d like to revisit but it was a wet and freezing cold day which doesn’t help things. It might be one of those places that you need to be shown around by a local, I think that’s the best way to see anywhere. I keep going to places and then realising that I missed things which I would really have liked to have seen.

Hopefully I’ll be back with some book chat tomorrow, if I don’t get engulfed with domestic mayhem.