What I Did On My Blog-Holiday

So what have I been up to during my extended sabbatical from dear old Blogville?

Well the fools let me loose on the Tudor panelled rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge and then plonked Norwich Castle in my lap.

The Castle project, called Royal Palace Reborn, intends to return the gutted Keep to how it was at Christmas, 1121, when Henry the First and his second wife, Adeliza of Louvain, moved in and threw a big old partay.

So I've been building this here model. It's a little unwieldy, being currently around three-quarters of a terabyte, but it's my baby. All the construction detailing and information is stored in the model so they can build from it. This view shows the new Great Hall with minstrel's gallery and the archæological exhibit below.

Here we see the King's Chamber (with the red curtains) and the Great Hall on the right. The tinkly light things above the archæology are "Ghost Arches"; the original arches having long disappeared, we're putting back ghosts of them with thousands of little LEDs.

We're putting a big viewing platform on the roof so you can see the whole city, and for the first time in 900 years, making the whole thing accessible to all, from dungeons to roof.

So anyhoo, as part of the project, Old Dive, as Architect and historic buildings expert, put together a side project: a series of lectures telling the history of the Castle. As these were for internal company use only, they tended to get a little Dive-ish and in places exceedingly silly and gross. 

In my next post I shall begin posting a potted version as I know Petrea especially loves old history.

Hope you enjoy it. In the meantime, the archæologists are digging furiously away in the basement and there's a massive tower crane looming over the Keep so that we can start work (Covid safely).

This is the view of it from my office, where I'm working on the Castle three days a week and hopefully posting some bloggery in between.

Winter Wonderland My Arse

The view of the Cathedral from my office window (see previous post) this lunchtime.

Apparently "The Beast From The East" is due to arrive tomorrow, bringing the gift of blizzards straight from Siberia via the Baltic and the North Sea.

Hey ho …

Snowstorm Coming In

Office window.

Cathedral.

Rainbow.

Nuff said.

It's Nice to be Recognised

Yay! We're officially literate!

Old School Spiffy

Well "Old Chapel" spiffy to be more precise. Welcome to the Octagon Chapel in Norwich, where, thrice a year the faithful gather to drink rather a lot of wine and enjoy the dulcet tones of the Bach Players.

A tiny place, untouched by the centuries and the perfect setting for period music played on period instruments by some of the world's top players.

Apologies for the crappiness of the photos; I had to sneak these on my tiny camera-ette.
This time around they gave us Vivaldi and Ferrandini, with Sally Bruce-Payne singing stunning alto in Vivaldi's Stabat Mater and Ferrandini's 'il Pianto di Maria'.
Boffo all round.

More Reasons to Love Where I Live

Norwich … Never a dull moment.
Today's headline is above.

See also, from last year …

NFN - Just Another One of Those Days

Hokay … so a giant octopus is eating the Guildhall …

This is Norfolk … These things happen. Get used to it.

A Sunny Sunday Stroll

As it's still officially February here, last Sunday morning we donned sweaters, coats and scarves and headed out into the summer heat. The blue sky and bright sunshine lightened our hearts.

We headed to the Cathedral to celebrate the successful fledging of all four of this year's peregrine chicks and managed to see at least some of the new family. They're pretty hard to spot so I've circled them in red.

The brightness of the sunshine made photographing them really easy … er …

Here's one of the adults in a classic movie pose, pretending to be Batman watching over Gotham.

This chick was yelling and shrieking at its parents to come and feed it. Just like kids everywhere.

It's still got a lot of downy feathers, which considering the bitter nor'easterly that was blowing seemed a sensible strategy.

So congratulations to the peregrine parents for doubling their output this year. Four chicks successfully fledged is quite an achievement, especially in our permanent state of winter.

We're Going To Need A Bigger Lens

Passing by the Cathedral this morning in the freezing cold, the peregrines nesting on the spire apparently have four chicks close to fledging.

 I only had my standard lens with me, however (I even forgot my binoculars, dammit), so could take nothing but blurry, distant shots.

 Nice to see at least one boid, though.

Maybe next week I'll remember to pack the right equipment.

They are, after all, a long way up.

Just A Normal Norwich Sunday Afternoon

Meet the Promettes.
I dunno … I pop into the city for coffee with Gerry and I get kinda persuaded by the lovely Francesca (aka Miss High Leg Lick) to take a bunch of photos.

You know how it is: you start chatting to someone and the next thing you know, you're part of a drag troupe of majorettes in pink air hostess jackets dancing through the city to gloriously trashy disco songs from the seventies and eighties.

This is the guitar solo from Electric Dreams, played with passion (insert your own air guitar noises here).

That's Jamie Oliver's restaurant on the left, getting a free cabaret. What's not to love?

Anyhoo … lots more of these photos should be hitting their website and FB page soon, but now I'm gonna have to leave the computer alone for a bit and dance round the room to Donna Summer.

Welcome to Normal For Norfolk.

They're Heeeeeere …

At long last, spring has sprung along Cherry Walk and gaudy petticoat pinkness abounds.

Do click on these to enlarge them. I mean: how gorgeous is that?

Look one way and St.Peter Mancroft is frilled with pink blossom …

Look t'other way and it's City Hall getting mugged by Barbara Cartland.

Pink … PINK! AUGH! The whole world has gone pink …

… with blue around the edges.

Er … I hope you like pink; if not, this post is really going to suck.

Somebody who does like pink is our Lynn, who first visited Cherry Walk a couple of years back and who is long overdue for another overdose of the pink frillies. If she hurries, she might get an eyeful of our next eagerly anticipated blossomfest: the wisteria at St.Giles (see many a past year's posts).

Wednesday Window - Hell, Yes!

Here's the outside of the shop where I found yesterday's helical stair.

At long last, Norwich has its own macaron shop. Woo and hoo!

Pretty, huh?

Saturday Statuary - Fruit of the Loom

When the freezing rain and howling northerly gale get together and try to tear your face off, who you gonna call?
The Yarnbombers! Yay!
A hearty thank you to Norwich's doughty yarn bombers for bringing a touch of colour to a drab weekend and cheering my life up just when I need it.

No Photoshop Required

Hey, the sun shone today. For a while we wondered what the hell it was as we'd not seen the thing for so long.
This was the view out of my office window around five this afternoon. No Photoshop or anything else; it really was that colour.
We're due another cold snap by the end of the week but at last the sun has realised it ought to be doing something about hurrying spring along.
Not before time.

WTF Monday - Master of Puppets

The Norwich Puppet Master (aka Puppet Man - he even has his own range of greetings cards and miscellanea in local shops) has been a popular figure here for many years. A while back, during one of the gutter press' periodic pogroms of hypocrisy the police stopped him using his trouser snake and forced him to use hand puppets instead.
But yay! Saturday saw the return of the trouser snake. For how long this will be delighting local children and frightening their prudish parents only time will tell, but I hope it's back to stay.

More Filler

Thanks to Petrea for giving me permission to post more filler. I'm pretty pooped today from all the driving yesterday, so this is to remind me that the weather isn't always this crappy … just most of the time.

It's Tuesday, So It Must Be Filler

Just using up spare photos while I spend the day hanging around Heathrow waiting to pick up Phil and Jane after they abandoned me in the snow and went on safari in Tanzania, the smeggers.

WTF Monday - The Great Osberto Parsley

Crazy name; crazy guy …
Well probably not, but what a magnificent monicker he had.
Osberto Parsley's biography is written out in full on a plaque on the side of the column that bears this lovely memorial in Norwich Cathedral.
Fifty years a chorister and choirmaster at the Cathedral; born in the first year of Henry the Eighth's reign, when the place was still a monastic institution, Osberto Parsley sang in the choir through almost the entire Tudor monarchy: Henry VIII, Edward VI, Jane Grey, Mary and Elizabeth, a time of ridiculous religious shenannigans that saw many a composer or singer imprisoned or worse. Ah, monarchy and religion … mass murderers par excellence.

These are the same choir stalls Osberto sang in (and indeed the very same stalls whose wooden walls winced in pain as I murdered the tenor parts in Handel's Messiah and Verdi's Requiem when I was at school).

So let's hear it for the Great Osberto Parsley.
Here's one of the many songs he would have sung (John Browne's Stabat Mater). He'd have also sung all of Thomas Tallis' and William Byrd's music, both in Latin and English as he straddled - and mercifully survived - Mary and Elizabeth's religious schism, but Browne is one of my all time faves so that's what you're getting.

Enjoy! And whenever you hear music as beautiful as this, remember the name of Osberto Parsley.

Minus Thirteen and Sucky

We're between snow storms at the moment.
Pulls' Ferry was unreasonably picturesque at lunchtime, but with minus thirteen on the thermometer and a vicious arctic wind, if you were fool enough to step out of the door the cold was ready and waiting to bite your face off.
Feck that!

Here's the view from my office window when I managed to get in to work.
All very postcard, but I'll be a lot happier when the white goes away and the green returns to the trees.

WTF Monday - Eat Your Heart Out, Metropolis

Best city in the world.