Put on your thinking cap. Mark Mason has written Question Time – A Journey Round Britain’s Quizzes. I know this because he has an article about it in the October edition of The Oldie.
On Friday we had lunch outside in the square at La Romieu. The village gets its name, likening it to Rome, from its magnificent church and the Collégiale St. Pierre, a 14th-century cloister with a tower (above).
The Boileau Arms sat on the south side of Hammersmith Bridge at the beginning of Castelnau Road. Since the 1980s it has changed hands and name many times and is now The Castelnau. All this is terrifically relevant to Gascony where Castelnau is a common place name.
The French are better at preserving their architectural heritage than the English. Gascony (aka the Gers) teems with bastide towns built from the 12th to the 14th centuries.
The title may ring a bell if you grew up on a literary diet of Enid Blyton. In fact we were four as our fifth had a knee injury and we didn’t have Timmy, the dog in the Famous Five series.
The soft water, clean air, quietness and lack of light pollution in Yorkshire was good for my skin and I slept better. One lunchtime it was too hot to eat outside; unusual in Swaledale and the farmers were out in force tedding, windrowing and baling; making hay while the sun shone.
Tan Hill is only about four miles due north. It is a stiff two hour climb across marshy moorland made boggier by the path being on the Pennine Way but luckily it was what passes for a perfect Summer day up here.
After dicing with death for almost five hours on the M1 it was good to change down a couple of gears and drive up the narrow, winding road to Swaledale and Keld. The cottage is old-fashioned with thick stone walls, a small stone-flagged kitchen and so on.