Glewstone Court - Guitar Retreat

I’ve already been on a couple of Guitar Retreats this year one in Portugal away back in January and the second in June to the Dordogne. I was keen to go on this weekend as much to visit my good friend and tutor Paul Nicholas as to attend the Retreat itself. I met Paul many years ago on one of the first Guitar Retreats I ever attended in The Cotswolds. He was there as a punter as well and not the tutor. We hit it off as soon as we met and we have kept in touch ever since and I visit and stay with him and his wife any time I am in the general area or when I’m going to one of the Retreats he is teaching at. Paul was teaching on this weekend and I travelled down to stay with him for the night before driving to Ross-on-Wye. Stu Marshall, who is another tutor and the owner of Guitar Retreats, was also staying with Paul.

Glewstone Court is an Edwardian House just outside Ross-on-Wye, last year I’d been at another Retreat here and it is a wonderful venue with great staff and fantastic food, it has a real country house feel to it. Unfortunately, it only has eight rooms and as the course was full Stu had asked a couple of us to stay at the Premier Inn down the road which worked out fine as we only really slept there, eating at Glewstone Court and Paul ferrying us back and forward (they are only ten minutes apart). The course was fantastic, billed as “Festive Fun” and we covered lots of Christmas songs as well as Christmas number ones. It was a great weekend and a fine ending to Guitar Retreats for the year.

I had arranged to stay with friends in Leatherhead for a couple of days after the course. Chris had been on the Retreat with me and he and his partner Sue were house and cat sitting in a large modern house just outside the town. I met Chris and Sue a number of years ago at another Guitar Retreat and we have become good friends. Last year they had planned to go sailing with me but the weather took a turn for the worse and they ended up staying with me and we did some stuff around Edinburgh. I have stayed with them at Sue’s home in Cobham.

It was great to see Chris and Sue and the house whilst not to my taste was rather impressive.

Winchester - November 2018

November was going to be a busy month for me with spending the first weekend in Cardiff, a trip to Winchester and a Guitar Retreat in Ross-on-Wye at the end of the month.

Last year I became the Editor/Coordinator for Moody Owners Association’s “Compass Magazine”. The post comes with a small honorarium but like all the other Committee Members, it is voluntary. The job mainly entails pestering and badgering other members for articles and content, then spending an inordinate number of hours editing and correcting them. The magazine is published three times a year and the work I need to do takes about one month for each edition. I’ve edited three editions now including the milestone 100th edition.

This year I was invited to the General Committee Meeting held in the Holiday Inn, Winchester. I had originally planned to spend a few days in the area and stay with a Guitar Retreat friend in Southampton for a couple of days, but his family circumstances meant a trip to the Czech Republic to see his two children who live in Prague with his ex-partner. This and with another trip south later in the month to a Guitar Retreat (when I would be seeing him anyway), I decided just to go for the one night.

I flew to Southampton with FlyBe, the only airline to fly direct from Edinburgh. Not the most reliable of companies with flights often being delayed or cancelled and their fleet of Bombardiers cramped, slow and noisy. Still, Hobson’s Choice. As I discovered on my return journey, Southampton Airport is rather run-down and tacky with poor amenities. However, it does have the distinct advantage of a main rail line running right next to it with frequent links to the city and north to Winchester. The hotel was nice and the meeting went well despite lasting till well beyond 10:00 pm. I had booked my return flight for late the next afternoon which gave me plenty of time to explore Winchester for the day.

Winchester is most famous for its College and the medieval Cathedral immortalised in the 60s song of the same name by The New Vaudeville Band.

I had a few hours to wander around the City and pay a visit to the Cathedral. It was fairly early in the morning when I arrived and the place was very quiet. I asked about tours and was told that there would be one at 11:00 am, but in the meantime, did I want a tour of The Crypt? I had read that there was an Antony Gormley sculpture “Sound II” in the crypt and I was keen to see it. The sculpture was created from a mould of Gormley himself and as the crypt is below the water table it can sometimes be knee deep in water when it rains heavily. I was the only one on the tour and the two guides took me to parts that aren’t generally open to the public. There’s also a small exhibition on Jane Austen - she is buried in the cathedral.

I found somewhere to have something to have a coffee and spent time wandering around the city before I took the train back to the airport later in the afternoon.

Cardiff 2018

For many years some of us from Boroughmuir Rugby Club made the biannual trip to Wales to watch the Six Nations Rugby match in Cardiff. We stayed in a number of places over the years including Newport, Cardiff and latterly Cowbridge. Numbers shrunk over the years and eventually it became too expensive to hire the coach with a dwindling number of people interested. Since then a smaller group of us have been travelling to watch the game. This year the Six Nations Game against Wales is being played at Murrayfield, but an Autumn Test Match in aid of Doddie Weir’s “My Name5 Doddie Foundation” was scheduled for early November and one afternoon in The Kilted Pig, we decided to go.

I had been given the job of organising the trip and on looking at the cost of flights to Cardiff it was clear that I needed to find an alternative. The cost of a return flight from Edinburgh to Cardiff for the 1st weekend in November was approaching the £300 mark! They always bump up the prices when there’s an International Rugby Match on and Cardiff seems to be an expensive airport to fly to, but this was just taking the piss. I found flights to Bristol for £94 and a private taxi would cost us £220 return. As four of us were travelling the cost would be less than half of a flight to Wales. Granted, there’s the extra time travelling by taxi but it’s just under an hour from Bristol Airport to the centre of Cardiff. I had booked an AirBnB property in Butetown just north of Cardiff Bay. Now, this use to be a fairly run-down part of Cardiff and there’s still a part of it which is a bit dodgy but where we were staying was in a modern development just 15 minutes from the city centre and about 20 minutes’ walk from Cardiff Bay. Our flight to Bristol left at 08:20 and after being picked up at the airport, we were at our accommodation by 12.30 pm.

We had arranged to meet some friends at the Tiny Rebel Cardiff in the centre and after some of us donning our kilts and regalia we walked up Dumballs Road (yes, that’s its name) to the usual car horn toots and shout and spent the afternoon there. We had looked up a couple of pubs and the “The Goat Major” was alleged to be a real ale pub which served great pies. It was a disappointment on both counts not least because it turned out to be a Brain’s Pub and the pies were at best mediocre - one of our company is a butcher and he has won the coveted “Best Pie in Scotland” completion a couple of times so we know good pies! We spent the evening in the Live Lounge watching a local band, who were very good.

On Saturday we walked down to Cardiff Bay for something to eat and pre-match drinks before getting to the Principality Stadium to watch the game – which Scotland lost by a much closer margin than the score would suggest. After the game we had decided to make our way back to Cardiff Bay to avoid the busy pubs in the centre. It was a great weekend despite having lost yet again to Wales.