Great result, the match flew by! 🏉

England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 33-19 🇳🇿 New Zealand

England’s last victory against the All Blacks was in 2019, their last victory in England in 2012 at Twickenham.

Excess power ⚡️

There are at least 21 mains power sockets in our (fairly standard double bed sized) hotel room.

• 3 above the desk/dressing table
• 5 below the desk/dressing table
• 2 by the door to the room
• 2 by each bedside table
• 2 just above a chest of drawers
• 1 in a corner of the room
• 2 behind the wall mounted television

plus at least 2 I cannot see supplying the mini-fridge and coffee machine.

Only 5 of these are being used by appliances in the room. This all seems a little excessive!

Experiencing Storm Claudia in Stratford. It’s wet outside. Spending the whole afternoon in The White Swan bar - Fuller’s beer, wine, chips and some reading 📚☔️😊

Location check in — At the RSC Swan Theatre to see Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand, starring Adrian Lester 🎭


🗺 Map of area

🔎 Zoom in

Complimentary Shakespeare Distillery Stratford Dry gin in our hotel room 😀

Tudor Garden inspired British Gin

Location check in — White Swan Hotel, Stratford-upon-Avon
🗺 Map of area

🔎 Zoom in

Follow the Storm 🍺

Watched: Now You See Me 2, 2016 - ★★★ 🎥

Tree cutting

Had to have some emergency tree surgery this week!

There was an tall conifer growing on our property boundary, about 20 feet from our house.

This tree had always grown leaning towards the house, but over the past few weeks there was evidence of the roots starting to move in the soil. It had to go before any windy winter storms!

It took four men a day and a half to deal with it - nearly 3 hours anchoring it, then stripping off all the branches and next cutting it in guided falls from the top downwards in roughly 8 foot trunk sections. These came down with a crash, shaking crockery and glasses in our kitchen (the nearest room to the base of the tree). I couldn’t guess what each section weighed.

Plus all the clear-up work, chipping the smaller branches and loading the logs in batches onto a trailer.

📖 more

Watched: Now You See Me, 2013 - ★★★½ 🎥

Watched: The Running Man, 1987 - ★★★ 🎥

🎵 My top weekly artists as logged by last.fm: Baxter Dury (25 plays), The Doors (19), Florence + the Machine (16), Bob Dylan (14), Kate Bush (13)

Watched: The Test S2E1, Own Your Own Space 📺

I watched the documentary series The Test when it was released in 2020. I didn’t realise until today that there have been two subsequent series made, which were released in 2023 and 2024 (although each has fewer episodes than the first). Started watching Series 2 this afternoon. A good warm-up for the upcoming 2025/26 Ashes matches 🙂🏏

Watched: The Narrow Road to the Deep North 📺

Superb book by Richard Flanagan, impressive adaptation for television.

Watched: Zero Dark Thirty, 2012 - ★★★★½ 🎥