Bergen

It's been a busy few months with a few trips for work, holidays and weekends away keeping me on the move pretty much constantly - or so it feels!

Latest trip was to Bergen, Norway, where I was treated to a much bluer sky than London, and even some warm sunshine. The Hanseatic Wharf on the harbour side in the middle of the city proved a beautiful and fascinating place, with its 18th century rebuilt wooden houses, many of them a bit lopsided and all of them looking pretty ramshackle. 

Part of the conference social programme included a walking tour, during which I learned all about Bergen's historic role in the stockfish trade and the fact that the city fell under control of the Hanseatic League after most of its indigenous population was wiped out by the Bubonic Plague that arrived on a boat from England. Luckily the Norwegians don't seem to bear a grudge about that, they are too busy feeling aggrieved about various historic wrongs visited on them by their neighbours in Denmark.

As well as the wooden houses, there's quite a bit of 20th century architecture in the city, including this wonderful department store which was designed by architect Per Grieg and built in 1938 as the city's first shopping centre. The statue on top of the tower is apparently Mercury, Roman god for trade, commerce and profit.

Close by the Sundt store is this rather dramatic Sailor's Monument which was completed in 1950 and is surrounded by statues representing sailors through the ages, topped with four panels showing different seafaring scenes - including whaling, naturally. You can't get away from whole whaling thing here.

No visit would be complete without a trip up one of the city's hills - this is the most popular one Floyen, which is reached via the Floibanen funicular railway.

Gifted coasters

Part of the enjoyment I get out of crafting for gifts is the wrapping and sending. 

I recently crocheted these coasters for a friend as a thank-you gift and enjoyed packaging them up and labelling them almost as much as I enjoyed the crafting!

You'd think it would be a simple matter to find a good pattern for a circular, basic crocheted coaster - in fact it was anything but! I had to try quite a few iterations - I had selected some yarn from my stash (Rowan Cotton Tape in a nice rich navy colour) and it was not easy to find a pattern that suited it fully.

After a few false starts, I managed to find this lovely simple pattern - took me about 15 minutes to make each coaster, so it was nice and quick, as well as being very simple to remember.

The coasters are now hopefully keeping my friend's furniture free of coffee cup rings.

Bristol street art

Found some very impressive street art on a recent weekend break in Bristol, these are on Nelson Street and are part of the 'See no evil' project which has been held for several years now on 'one of the ugliest streets in the UK'.

Some of these are huge and take up the whole of sides of the buildings, begging the question of how they were created.

There's a great video here that answers some of these questions as well as explaining how street art in Bristol went from being an illegal activity to an artistic pursuit.

Aside from this impressive collection of pieces, and the famous Banksy murals that can be found around the city, there are plenty of other creative interventions to spot whichever part of the city you are in. And all for free.

Grain and Hoo

My exploration of the Hoo peninsula in north Kent continues; it seems there are many more secret corners to unearth, some of them in the most unexpected places. Yesterday we started at the eastern extreme, the Isle of Grain, which is nominally part of the peninsula. However since a new bridge was built recently over the end of the Yantlet Creek, it does seem like you are actually crossing to an island. Most of the island is covered by power stations and other industrial compounds, but at the very end of the road is the windswept and strangely otherly village of Grain, with a two-mile long sea wall you can walk along and gaze over towards Sheerness and Sheppey.

Our mission to walk to the London Stone - the boundary of the city's jurisdiction - was aborted due to the presence of a military firing range in our path. Going to try from the other side of the creek next time. So after enjoying the crazy geometry of the rows of WWII tank traps and the desolation of the rubbish-strewn sand dunes we wandered the other direction through the bitter northerly winds and watched the oystercatchers, dunlin and curlews strutting around on the acres of mudflats.

After lunch it was on to familiar territory - the Northward Hill RSPB reserve - in search of herons. They were all in hiding, it seemed, although we did catch one poking its head above the reeds as we headed back, and as usual there were many rooks circling the rookery.

I was disappointed not to see any adders, perhaps it's still a little early for them. Last year I spied two of them basking in the sunshine at the edge of the drainage channel that runs along the edge of the field in a sheltered spot. I'd hoped they would be doing the same this year, on the first proper day of sunshine, but if they were, they were keeping to themselves.

Even without much wildlife to be seen, there's always the glorious swathes of reeds to gaze on, and the lichen-covered trees to marvel it. It was bitterly cold in the wind, so much so that even the twitchers took to setting up their equipment behind the bushes, but somehow we felt obliged to soak up as much as we can before the risk of hypothermia drove us back to the car and home for tea.

Wool House

Somerset House in London has just been host to a 12-day celebration of all things woolly, organised by the Campaign for Wool and curated by designer Arabella McNie. Although I didn't manage to get to any of the fantastic-looking workshops that were scheduled, I did find time to drop in on Friday and check out the exhibition. 

There was an inspirational range of stuff - from humorous and impressive art works like this life-size crocheted bear by Shauna Richardson to whole room sets that had been specially commissioned from leading interior designers to showcase wool in its many forms. Spinners, weavers, knitters and other crafters showed off their skills throughout the week, and there were exhibitions demonstrating how wool is used in clothing, textiles and other products, as well as some more radical applications like this chair made of fibre and resin by Devon start-up company Solidwool.

I watched a woman working on a fairly small tapestry using beautiful natural yarns to create a picture of bare tree trunks in a winter scene. This is a craft I've never really been aware of - the work looked slow and painstaking and very complicated with all the different bobbins and the need to think ahead and work out how to build the picture up with the different colours.

There were some great displays of how wool is used in clothing and fashion, including these great Vivienne Westwood platform shoes and the tweed-covered headphones below. 

As well as these quirky items, there was a whole room devoted to tailoring which was totally fascinating. It included two scrapbooks full of handwritten pages explaining the different types of stitches and techiques used for making a bespoke suit.

The seven interiors that had been built in rooms in part of the exhibition space were quite breathtaking and all very different. I'm pretty sure everyone who saw them wanted to move in at least one of them, and it was hard to resist the urge to throw yourself on all the beds and sofas, caressing every different texture and cooing over the colourful fabrics.

My favourites were Donna Wilson's nursery, Anne Kyyro Quinn's funky fun room (below)..

..and the rather classy bedroom which was designed by Kit Kemp. Green may not be a traditional choice of colour for a bedroom but would totally suit me!

Where did February go?

February seems to have been and gone in an unseemly haste - a mishmash of work deadlines (two publications in one week - argh!) and weekends with some rather difficult stuff mixed in, in particular a whole tranche of painful redundancies at work. 

St Paul's Church, Deptford

But there have been some lovely bits, and here's a taster - and a reminder that it's not all been grey doom and gloom like the past week!

A walk around Box Hill and Polegate Lacey went past this lovely youth hostel at Tanner's Hatch. It's buried in the woods of Surrey although not really that far from civilisation but looks like a great place for getting away from it all.

I had a very different day out in Kent with a walking group - I'm used to walking on my own or with one or two people, so a group of 20 was rather daunting. Loved having someone else in charge of the map reading and navigation and the company was fun. The photo above is Oldbury Hill - you know how much I love winter trees, this was like my idea of heaven. Planning to return to this walk in the spring, as there were a lot of beech trees and this woodland will be even more spectacular with a canopy of fresh green beech leaves.

Above and below: early morning bike ride along the Thames path. Sometimes I take this beautiful part of London for granted, which won't do at all. And I have almost as many pictures of the Thames Barrier as I do of trees. Just call me an engineering nerd.

Backing up my last comment - here's a few more tree photos. The one above is the rather creepy tree roots in Trosley Country Park in Kent; below a heavily-weathered tree trunk alongside the Greensand Way near Knole in Kent.

The most recent cultural delight was a long-overdue visit to Chatham Dockyard - despite it being freezing cold we had a fantastic time watching rope being made in the huge ropery, and visiting all the ships. The cold-war submarine which sits in the beautiful dry dock was my particular favourite although the tour of the incredibly compact interior backed up my assumptions about how I'd feel to be confined in such a space even for a short time.

Cliffe Pools, north Kent

Friday was a cold and grey day, but sometimes a girl has to get out for a walk no matter what the weather, and that's how I felt when I woke up on Friday morning.

What's more I wanted somewhere marshy and deserted, perhaps a bit of industrial wasteland and possibly a view of the sea or the river at the very least. The only place that seemed to suit was the Hoo Peninsula, and so I headed for the RSPB reserve at Cliffe Pools.

In two hours at the pools, I saw only four other people, but hundreds, perhaps thousands of birds - coot, little grebes and all kinds of water birds that I didn't recognise, as well as spotting the flash of a kingfisher a couple of times, and seeing a heron and little egret rise from the shallow water as I came up to a viewpoint near the edge of one of the pools.

There was some extreme picnicking on the banks of the Thames - hot soup with chunks of French sausage and paprika in it, and the heel of my homemade loaf - but other than that I just crunched around the still-frozen paths, watched massive ships drift by along the water, and gazed into the slightly hazy distance.

Luckily it wasn't so windy as to bring the temperature down any further, and I was nicely warm as I yomped around the deserted reserve.

No pictures of trees today, but plenty of bullrushes and reeds and seed heads - similarly hypnotic winter silhouettes, almost as good as trees.