Postcard from Westonbirt

I have a fondness for autumn based purely on its colours. A crisp winter day has its merits, but tends to be cold. Spring has flowers, but can also be damp, and summer is never as hot and sunny as I'd like it to be. Autumn makes a feature out of its downside: the year may be getting colder but there's one final blaze of glory before nature's done for the year.

Westonbirt Arboretum in Gloucestershire is a great place to see the changing colours. They have collections of acers which look their best as the leaves turn.






I  might have soaked up enough colour to get me through the dark days of winter. I certainly over-indulged on the cake at their cafe. That should keep me warm. 

Postcard from book club

I haven't got on well with book clubs in the past. Too frequently having to read books I didn't enjoy or listen to people who like the sound of their own voice despite having nothing relevant to say had put me off. But when I heard Waterstones on New Street in Birmingham were putting together a group to judge the longlist for The Guardian's First Book Award, I was tempted to have another go.

One reason was the fact the award covers non-fiction, and poetry as well as fiction and the thought of reading well beyond my usual, safe choices appealed. Another reason was an assumption that all the books might be good by virtue of being on the longlist. These things are subjective but, despite that assumption, I quickly ran into one of my problems - I had to read books I didn't enjoy. At all.

It was intense - 11 books in 8 weeks and weekly meetings to collate our opinions. A good challenge for a writer looking to improve her critical reading though. And, here's the real highlight, the other members of the group were great. We didn't always agree, but that was part of the joy of it because we never fell out and had many laughs along the way.

The Guardian will announce the final shortlist based on input from ours and 3 other groups soon but here's my personal pick (and issues - while the point is that these are first books, ie the author has room to grow, none of them got unreserved praise from me):
The China Factory by Mary Costello - moving, tender, beautifully expressed short stories (but there's little light to temper the shade in the collection so I don't recommend reading it in one go and the male characters didn't always ring true to me)
The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers - intense observations from the front line (but this one split our group - some didn't rate it)
Absolution by Patrick Flanery - by far the most accomplished and satisfying read of the list (but perhaps too clever for its own good - it makes the reader work hard for the story).

Postcard by hand

What you'll also know is that I sometimes experience confusion about where apostrophes should be!

Philip Henser article

Postcard from Manchester

That title's misleading. I did spend two days in Manchester recently, but I mostly saw the Midland Hotel. After the restrained elegance of Hardwick Hall on my previous postcard, pulling up in front of this façade could only cause culture shock.

It's striking, no doubt about that. And the interiors have style and variety of which modern hotels can only dream. It has stories too - Mr Rolls met Mr Royce there and look how well that turned out.

You can hear the 'but', can't you? I like to explore any place I visit, get a feel for it, find something out, not just see a hotel. So Manchester: I'm sorry, I missed you - the difficulties of travelling for work. The conference I attended just wasn't postcard material.

However, autumn is coming and I am plotting a trip to see some colours. I also have a few events for Park Life coming up. You can see details of those here.

Postcard from Hardwick Hall

The scale of the windows at Hardwick Hall impressed me with their bling, but they must have been even more stunning in the sixteenth century. The entire house seems more glass than stone with a light and feminine feel to its construction all the way up to the filigree-fine ornamentation on the roof. This is a building dressed to impress.

Things get even less macho indoors with soft furnishings the main feature rather than paintings or furniture. And I loved the administrative triumph of the drawer-lined audit room. I almost wanted to live at Hardwick. I just suspect those huge windows of draughtiness.

The Hall couldn't be described as domestic in scale, but it's not stately or defensive. It's just beautiful.

Postcard from Stratford

This is Stratford-upon-Avon rather than the Olympic one, and things are rather more genteel. No lycra-clad exertion required and no records to beat - more likely that you'll bump into someone clad in Elizabethan finery declaiming iambic pentameter. And the worst of the traffic jams are on the water.

You might have expected me to post pictures of the Shakespeare houses or other picturesque sights but while there I went to an exhibition which made me look at things in a different way. 'Of all the people in all the world...', an installation by Stan's Cafe, used grains of rice to represent the individuals behind statistics in a way which made me fully appreciate what they meant. I work with numbers, but no graph or percentage score ever made me think as hard as this did.

Postcard from Moseley Old Hall

Complicated and labour-intensive gardening does not appeal to me. Here's what does: weathered brick enclosing a walled orchard, a lavender-lined path busy with bees, tea, and cake. This path led to a cafe serving delicious scones. Almost perfect. The quite large drawback is the M54 - makes it easy to get there but provides a constant soundtrack of tyre on tarmac.

Moseley Old Hall makes a big deal out of the fact Charles II hid there for two nights. They obviously hadn't got the cafe sorted back then or I'm sure he'd have stayed longer.

The property used to be a farm so the orchard is in keeping and the stables and other buildings have been put into service with shop, exhibition space etc. But they've done some gardening in what would have been the farm yard. Complicated, labour-intensive knot gardening. Those seventeenth century folk had no idea how to relax.