Mrs P and I like to get the biggest bang for our buck. We both know how to be economical. So, assuming that there would be little chance to escape our home shores until much later in the year, we bought ourselves a joint annual membership of the the Historic House Association. Normally £89 for the pair of us, I found a £5 discount somewhere online and paid £84.
In the spring we visited Minterne Gardens (twice), Abbotsbury Subtropical Gardens and West Dean Gardens. Last week, instead of the original, long planned trip to Bergerac, we went to the Cotswolds for three nights. The weather was terrific and we managed to fit in three more stately homes, castles and gardens. Bowood Hall, Eastnor Castle and Sudeley Castle.
I’ve done the maths on the back of a napkin and calculated that we would have so far paid £155 if we were not HHA members. We are therefore winning. It’s good to be thrifty. Not least because slap bang in the middle of the holiday, the MD of the railway company I work for, sent out the Email of Doom. Redundancies are coming.
This did not come as a huge surprise. It is concerning. But I suspect I will be ok, providing they do not decide to take drastic action and close all the ticket offices. There’s a goodly number of people close to retirement who will take the enhanced voluntary severance payment. Then there’s a lot of low hanging fruit for my employer to pick from before getting to me.
One always hopes for the best and prepares for the worst.
The Mexile 
It’s one of the things I miss from “back home” old and very old places to visit.. and the taste of history!
Most of the buildings here are less than a hundred and sixty old but there are many ghost towns, engineering masterpieces in wood. There are amazing natural sights to behold of course and wildlife. Having just got our second jab we are looking forward to getting out of our cave too and embracing a whole new world.
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There used to be many more stately homes around. But hundreds of them were flattened in the aftermaths of WWI and (especially) WWII. They proved too expensive to keep.
Bowood Hall was a good example of the destruction. What looks like a nice building is in fact a small, surviving splinter of the original structure.
There were a few historical pieces in those photo albums I shared. The resting place of Catherine Parr, the last of Henry VIII’s wives. She is, apparently, the only queen of England buried on private land. There is also a death mask of Napoleon in there.
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Should they close the ticket offices, are there retraining programs? Someone has to keep those machines spitting out tickets. We had loads of robots in the steel mill, they required a small army of people to keep them fit for service. By the time I retired, we had gone from about 800 physical workers to about 125, putting out more steel at much better quality. At least one half of the 125 physical workers were employed keeping the machines up and running. Only about one quarter of the workers were engaged in making the actual steel. My job was to route the steel through the process, clipboard work and computers. I had to work around the steel, be out in the mill environment, the crazy 24/7 shifts of work. My contact with the product was minimal.
One door closes, another opens. My first job, paying government taxes was clearing and cleaning up the buildings from a rock quarry so an entertainment complex could be built on the site. It was by far the best job I had in my work years-I was 15 years old. 15 years old and blowing up buildings. Does it get any better than that?
If the ticket gig ends, take the training.
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Closing all the ticket offices would be incredibly drastic, but even that wouldn’t necessarily usher in mass redundancies. We’d simply be given new, multi tasked roles out in the station. Well, most of us. There’s no pretending that ticket selling has changed mightily in recent years and there are plenty of shifts which have become a bit pointless.
I will do what I need to keep myself employed on the railway, in whatever role. The pay far exceeds what I’d get elsewhere and the pension is as good as it gets these days. Plus all that free rail travel…
Blowing stuff up has huge appeal though, I won’t lie.
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Hope your job is safe.
On my first trip to England, my travel companion and I spent several days in the Cotswolds, and Sudeley Castle was one of the places we visited. I was really looking forward to the Cotswolds, but, unfortunately, most of the time it was raining.
We also had purchased, not a membership, but some kind of tourist pass for a long list of historic places. We planned our itinerary around those places, and it certainly saved us a lot of money.
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Paying our annual memberships often saves a small fortune if you make sure you use it. But the rain puts a bit of a dampener on any day out. We were lucky. We hit a four day stretch of scorching weather.
The Cotswolds are nice. Do you have Amazon Prime? If so, have a look for Farmer Clarkson. It’s the most glorious television I’ve watched in a few years.
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Loved Farmer Clarkson, can’t wait for season 2!
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Fantastic, wasn’t it! He’s been writing a column in the Sunday Times for most of the last year about his farm, so I’d really been looking forward to it.
At one point we were just a ten minute drive from his Diddly Squat farm shop. But alas, it’s only open Thursdays to Sundays and it was Tuesday, so I didn’t bother…
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