Rudyard

The mother and I took a morning trip to Nantwich, one of Cheshire’s more historical and lovelier towns. It’s known to have a good collection of Tudor architecture, but seemingly like every town it lost a large portion of its original extent to a fire around three centuries ago. Mother had been haranguing me first thing about breakfast so I advised that I would grab something in Nantwich, and I made the error of saying that I fancied an almost croissant. ‘This isn’t Cambridge you know, you might not get an almond croissant in Nantwich’, she said. Fine, I’ll have a sausage roll, I thought. However, cue forever being labelled as a pretentious consumer of baked goods as mother took great delight in regaling my desire for an almond croissant to the family at dinner later in the day. Coming from a woman who thought she was social climbing by buying lobster at Lidl, we might just say the score is even. Just joking, mam, when you read this.

We settled on a coffee shop-cum-book shop where I made do with a plain croissant, and then we took a stroll around the peaceful meadows by the River Weaver. Nantwich is far from being the dive that many English market towns seem to be.

In the afternoon, heavy rain was threatened but the sister, sister’s dog and I took a walk around Rudyard Lake in the Staffordshire Moorlands. This is the scene of many a school geography field trip, and is how Rudyard Kipling got his name after his parents met here. We largely escaped the rain and had a good five-mile trot around the perimeter.