Over the border and into the past

"The morning of the visit dawned bright and clear".... This was a great relief. Only one week earlier it had been so cold and wet that the central heating had had to be turned on, and cars were driving around in broad daylight with their headlights on.

The purpose of the visit was a trip to Mount Vernon, the Dr Edward Bach Centre at
Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, over the border in Oxfordshire. Among other things, I teach aromatherapy and Bach Flower remedies for self-help to recovering addicts in Gloucestershire. (We use the alcohol-free versions of the remedies). I trained to practitioner level in Bach Flower Remedies some years ago, and enjoy helping others to help themselves mentally and emotionally with the remedies, which are based on UK native plants and flowers.

Unfortunately our numbers were rather down, and we ended up as a party of four, including the driver. A previous excursion had ended up with our getting lost, and arriving late, but the vehicle has Sat-Nav now, so getting there was a doddle, driving through gently rolling rural Oxfordshire in midsummer. We'd booked in for a half-day seminar, which included refreshments, a tour of the garden, a talk and Q and A with Stefan Ball, the 'chief' and a wander round the house, which is furnished in the way that it was when Dr Bach lived there in the 1930s. It felt like the house of an apothecary hobbit, and is one of my well-loved places, this being a return visit for me.
More about Dr Edward Bach here

The staff were highly hospitable, and even gave us a refund of half the cost of the seminar, as we were such a small group! This action is in the spirit of Dr Bach, who never sought to profit from his work, only to provide a service.

We finished with a walk to the graveyard to see Dr Bach's grave, and a stroll around the village. There was no picnic with lashings of ginger pop and hand-cut sandwiches, but it would have been the perfect day for that sort of thing. We don't get out of the county much, and this was a truly exceptional outing to a unique place.

I wasn't blipping when I went on this trip, but my sister, TMLHereandThere, who lives in New Zealand, has seen the pictures and commented that she wants to go there too. So perhaps a third excursion is in order.

If I had been blipping then, I might have taken more care over this shot, but here it is, for the record. The Bach Centre deserves a mention in my journal, because it is so
different from any other visitor centre I have ever encountered. And we need to have evidence that there was at least ONE sunny day in England in June 2012!