Month: June 2024

Bob and I left Bury St Edmunds today after seeing the happy return of our homeowners from their driving trip through Norway. Angus and Mollie were quite excited to see them. Our homeowner kindly offered to drive us to the train station as it was raining.

We then caught the bus replacement service to Ely, due to work being conducted on the rail line, where we had a short wait for an initially very busy train to London Stansted Airport via Cambridge and Audley End.

We are spending the night at the Hampton Inn next to the airport as we have an early morning flight tomorrow to Copenhagen. We’ll be flying Ryan Air for the first time, so are expecting to have to pay more for our bags as their weight limit is a little lower than other airlines.

We walked back to the airport to pick up dinner before the start of the England game in the Eurocup, and both the airport and hotel seem quite busy.

Bob and I took our 3rd trip east today on the East Anglia train in the direction of Ipswich. The first time, we went to Ipswich, the 2nd time we went to Needham Market (stop just before Ipswich), and today, we visited Stowmarket (the stop before Needham Market). It was a quick 20 minute ride.

Just as a random aside, I liked this quick journey because there were only two stops before Stowmarket, and I remember them because I seem to have immediately associated them with other words. The first stop out of Bury is Thurston (Howell III from Gilligan’s Island TV show), and the second stop is (Alls well that) Elmswell. This is the kind of stuff that amuses my brain, and don’t even get me started on the town of Diss. I can solo laugh for quite awhile with that one.

Anyhoo, back to Stowmarket. As we noted during our trip to Ipswich, there is a 17 mile trail that connects Ipswich and Stowmarket and that runs along the River Gipping. As we did in Ipswich, we started our visit to Stowmarket with a short walk along the trail. While the path was fairly clear right in town, it was very narrow and surrounded by tall grasses as we left the town center.

Stowmarket is a market town with a population of approximately 21,000. Unbeknownst to us it was one of their biweekly market days today, the other being Saturday. There was a fairly active high street, and we enjoyed our walk around town.

As we start our last week in Bury St Edmunds, Bob and I are still finding new paths to walk. Today, Bob and I walked a bit on the Lark Valley Path where it runs in conjunction with St Edmunds Way. We headed to the train station to catch a path that brought us through a nice neighborhood to our desired route. Once on the path, we then walked north along the River Lark past a golf course before turning around and making our way back to near the train station for a Tesco run for ingredients for a kimchi omelette for dinner tonight.

One of the best parts of this UK trip has been visiting with former homeowners/now friends. Today, our Cambridge friends, Sue and Peter, treated us to a surprise outing to Ely. While Bob and I had visited Ely before while house sitting in Cambridge, today’s visit allowed us to see new sites while catching up. It was a lovely day in lovely summer weather!

And to top off the great day we got to learn about the My BlackBerry isn’t Working skit by Ronnie Corbett and Harry Enfield. So funny!

Random musings from Bury St Edmunds.

Whether weather? Wherefore art thou, summer weather? This is a tiny gritch in the big scheme of things, especially considering the man above and his possible 2nd presidency, but kinda surprised about the weather we’ve been having. It seems as if April may have been our warmest month. I think we may have had three days in Bury where it has reached 70 degrees F, but they have been quite spread apart. We are definitely not freezing but a bit surprised that we’ve had days in June that haven’t reached 60 and mornings still in the 40s.

Food. Bob and I rarely do big grocery shops while we’re traveling. While this would likely be more economical, it’s easier to carry smaller loads, and we enjoy the daily walk to the shop and also frequenting different stores. We have had a wealth of options here. To date, we have shopped at Aldi, ASDA (super store), Tesco (super store), Nisa Local, Waitrose, Co-op, and Sainsbury (super store). One of the things that we appreciate about the stores here is the markdown items section to help the older items sell. It always pays to check out this section for items we like anyway, especially produce, as we feel like we’re helping reduce food waste and they still cook or roast up nicely.

Books. Bob and I attended another book talk this week. This one was at the library, where they aren’t keen on pictures, so no photos, and was for a series of mystery books by the author Tom Mead. It was an interesting talk, although the moderator jumped right in with questions without presenting any background or introduction, but maybe that’s how these things go and we should have read the book first? Anyway, it was still an interesting talk, and we did learn a lot about the settings of the novel and some of the thinking of the author in terms of the 4 books he has now written. We have been surprised that these presentations come with free wine and/or juice and sometimes nibbles as well. I don’t know that this would be the case in the States for a book reading/discussion at a museum or library.

That’s it for now. We’re off to a gin festival tomorrow night at a cathedral, as you do, so will let you know how that goes.

Up the street from us and just around the corner is the West Suffolk Sixth Form College (similar to a junior college), where Bob read that they had a cooking program and a related restaurant, Edmunds, open to the public. Reservations are required while the restaurant is open during the school term, and by the time we learned about the restaurant, there were only reservations available for the lunch service. So today, we had a lovely long lunch while we helped to train some future culinary superstars.

Lunch is offered from 11:00 to 1:15, and there was plenty of staff on hand for food and bar service. There was also a manager/teacher helping to run things and checking on customers. All of our food was very good, and while we’re not sure our wait person has found his real calling (low energy, had to ask someone else for the answer to every question), he was very nice. He may prefer back of house operations. We’re not sure how the program works.

No more food for us today. We definitely recommend Edmunds for lunch or dinner. Good prices, great food, and good to help with training the next culinary generation.

Bob and I took the train today for a quick 25 minute ride to Needham Market to walk around the lake on a path we had seen from the train when we went to Ipswich and then check out the high street. See photos below from our short visit.

We snapped a couple of pubs on the high street and popped into an old church and cute hotel.

Yesterday, Bob and I finally decided to check out the cafe at the Rigsbygate Sports Center that is in our neighborhood. In fact, we can hear people playing tennis when we’re in the back garden. The cafe was pretty low key with homemade cakes and folding tables and chairs, but they had a pretty impressive menu, and the staff were very nice. While there, we also learned that there is a bar as well that opens at 6 pm, but we’re not sure what days of the week. The cafe is open from 10-4, M-F.

Last night, we went to the Moyse’s Hall Museum for a talk by a local historian who has written a book on the history of the Market Cross in Bury St Edmunds. The Moyse’s Hall Museum is a 12th century building in the town center that has been used as the town’s bridewell (jail), workhouse (place for poor people to work and live), and police station. It first opened as a museum in 1899. It currently contains artifacts from the town’s past and also hosts different events during the year.

Adrian Tindall presented “A Neat and Beautiful Theatre,” the story of St Edmund’s Market Cross. He gave a very informative talk, especially for those of us confused as to why what appears to be a building is talked about as a cross.

It turns out that a market cross actually began as a wooden and then stone cross, often attached to stone steps, at the highest point in a market area, where people could meet to trade but also pronouncements could be made or posted. This evolved into more sheltered structures to protect from the weather, and then these structures became more official buildings that might house other municipal type offices or space for artisans and even a place for touring actors groups to perform. Bury St Edmunds Market Cross had a similar evolution and was used as a theater until a bigger space was needed and the Theatre Royal was built. It hasn’t been used as the main center of trading for a long time and most recently served as an art gallery and then a space for creatives to work. Sadly today, the upper floors are empty and the ground floor houses a betting establishment.

On another note, a few weeks ago we were fortunate enough to be able to visit the Ickworth Estate with our friends. The Ickworth Estate was owned by the Hervey family. The patronage and support of the Hervey family was mentioned as being important for the building and/or maintenance of both theaters. It’s always fun for us to be somewhere long enough where we start hearing connections between the different places that we visit.

Bob and I were back at the Theatre Royal today for a 90 minute tour of the facility. The theater was originally built in 1819 by the architect William Wilkins as the New Theatre and was structured on the design of an amphitheater he had seen at Taormina in Sicily. A new theater was needed to expand the capacity for theatergoers in Bury St Edmunds, and increased such capacity from 350 to 780. (Ironically today, with the addition of more modern seating in accordance with safety requirements, the capacity is back down to about 350 again.). The first play staged in the theater was the British comedy ‘John Bull.’

The theater’s claim to fame is being the last remaining Regency playhouse in the country, although as our guide noted, the Regency period lasted for a relatively short amount of time, about 9 or 10 years, in between the reigns of George III and George IV.

The building and the land it is on is owned by the Greene King Brewery, however, the brewery sublets the management of the theater to the National Trust, which in turn sublets it to a local management team and board.

We are in June. Time keeps flying by as the world gets ever crazier, if that’s even still possible.

When Bob and I first got to Bury, we signed up for a number of events, most of which occur in June. Last night, we attended one of them, a presentation of “The Carpenter’s Story” at The Apex theater in the heart of the town center. We made a night of it and had some small plates and drinks beforehand at The Wine Cellar, about a 5 minute walk from The Apex.

On our way to dinner, we stopped into The Apex to look around, as we hadn’t been inside before. The building is two levels, with a ticket office and cafe on the ground level and an art gallery, bar, and lounge area on the upper level. Inside the theater, there are 3 levels, orchestra, and lower and upper balcony.

After our snoop around The Apex, we headed to the Wine Cellar, where we had a lovely, leisurely meal, including drinks, nuts and olives, tomatoes and burrata, and some great salmon with dill crème freche and sourdough bread. The restaurant is dog friendly as well, as a couple came in with their dog shortly before we left (no causal relationship, just time for the show).

“The Carpenter’s Story” tells a little bit of the story of Richard and Karen Carpenter, but mostly serves as a way to share some of their more popular songs. The brother-sister duo performed for 14 years, recording 10 albums. Some of their best known songs include “Close to You,” “We’ve Only Just Begun,” and “Top of the World.” Richard was treated for drug addiction towards the end of their recording career, which was cut short by Karen’s untimely death at the age of 32 in 1983 from complications from anorexia. Even though neither of us were huge Carpenter fans growing up, there is something about hearing songs from your childhood that’s a bit comforting.

Of course, the duo that’s been our main form of entertainment for the past few weeks has been Mollie and Angus, the dogs that we are looking after. Mollie is our ferocious but sweet little guard dog, and Angus is the lovable goofball. Neither react to other dogs, so they’ve been very easy to walk.