Month: September 2003

The following was written last night as I sat in the Old Mill in Elmley Castle, Worcestershire:

What a long day. I’m not sure how many miles I’ve covered today – about 350 or so, I think. I began at the Golden Pheasant hotel in LLanglldoflllwrynlllll, or whatever the village was called near Oswestry, with a pleasant breakfast and a fantastic view down the valley. This was followed by one of the most fantastically beautiful drives you could possibly take in this country, heading across country to pick up the A5, and then on past Snowdon to Caernarfon. A very successful meeting took place there, followed by hours of slog up the A55, M56 and M6 to rural Lancashire, not far from Blackpool. There I had an insightful visit to a grower, before slogging back down the M6 and M5 to Worcestershire. I’m now ensconced in The Old Mill, a pub, restaurant and hotel in Elmley Castle, not far from Evesham, who were able to put me up at short notice.
Tomorrow I have a meeting in the afternoon, but the guy I was planning to meet in the morning has yet to return my calls, so my plans for tomorrow might be slightly disrupted. Not to worry, I also had a phone call from Dave Kennamatic, so we should be able to make some progress on my windows. Hurrah!
All of this has taken place to the soundtrack of an old mixtape (remember them?) given to me by Robyn eons ago.

I’m pooped and hungry. Thankfully, the restaurant is still open.

Well, the trade show was excellent, if not very GLEEful, and I made some good new contacts, as well as refreshing some old ones. I also had coffee and a sandwich with Kearn and Paul C, who were both in evidence in professional capacities.
I have a meeting tomorrow in Caernarfon. I didn’t fancy driving all the way in one go, so I have booked a hotel near Oswestry, roughly half way. I missed the turning off the A5, and realised when I reached Llangollen. Consulting the road atlas, I saw an unclassified road that offered a shortcut. Well, the road is roughly as wide as the hire car and includes a few vertical inclines, but also furnished me with some of the finest views of my travels to date. A couple of photos were taken, so you’ll see those later.
This will be a very brief update, as telephone calls cost £0.20 per minute here, which seems incredibly expensive to me. Additionally, I want to go downstairs and investigate the bar and get some food in. And no mobile signal here either. But then I am in a lovely country pub hotel in a small village in the Cambrian Mountains, so I should really expect much else!

Off to GLEE, an exhibition for the garden and leisure industry, and not a place where everyone sits around being cheerful.

Well, I went into Warwick. When I left the hotel, nobody was in the restaurant. When I got back, there were two.
Warwick is a nice town. The Warwick Arms is not a good place to eat though. The food was unexciting. The service worse. And their machine wouldn’t take my credit card, even though I know it’s valid. But the people-watching was fun, so I’m glad I went.

OK, I admit it. I’ve surpassed myself for booking into a bizarre hotel. The Stoneleigh Park Lodge Hotel is situated in the middle of the Stoneleigh National Agricultural Centre showground, a most unusual setting. For those that have never been to a major agricultural showground, it’s a wide open space with a grid of roads and seemingly randomly placed buildings which are left unused for much of the time. One of those buildings, in this case, happens to be a hotel. I reckon there are no more than ten guests here. The restaurant is in another of the randomly placed buildings, about two hundred yards distant across a "green". I can’t decide if I want to be the only guest in the restaurant but be able to have a glass or three of vin rouge with my meal, or if I want to drive into Warwick and see if there is any more life to be had, but be limited to just the one beverage. Hmm.
I think Warwick will most likely win.
On the plus side, the hotel is quiet, comfy and has a phone point. All pluses. And it’s reasonably priced, though not the cheapest. £50 for a double room, including breakfast. But then PFE is paying, so it doesn’t matter, does it?
Oh yeh. I’m PFE. Arses.
Incidentally, isn’t there a blogger in Warwick. Where does that Dead Kenny bloke hang out?

Oxford services on the M40. Not likely to be highly recommended by me any time soon.

Some of you will have noticed that Dave Kennamatic seems to have gone missing. Alarmingly, he’s not even answering email.
"What can I do about this?", I thought to myself. Why – a poll, of course!

Vote-o!
The poll will remain open until Dave posts something.

Funny that the EU referendum vote in Latvia, and most of the other referenda votes too, have seen much less coverage in the media than the "No" vote in the euro referendum in Sweden the other day. Clearly a pro-European news story doesn’t sit so comfortably with the agendas of the newspaper editors.

Bren, Greg and I were going to go to Reading today to poke about the shops, as I need to find one or two items, and I’d travel on from there to Birmingham where I’m attending a trade show tomorrow. But Bren is under the weather, so they’re not up to it. Which is good in one respect, as I’ve done nothing about packing yet, although I have managed to organise myself sufficiently to go and pick up the hire car.

The Plants For Europe website now has a few more pages added. This should hopefully begin to make a little clearer what exactly it is that I am doing – or, at least, it will do when I finish the site. The "What are Plant Variety Rights" and "I have a new plant…" pages will make things even clearer, when I get around to making them.