The Calls

R and I wandered out of our hotel into a murky grey morning, ate an outrageous breakfast in a nearby café, and emerged to find that the sun was just breaking through the cloud - so we waddled the extra few yards onto Bridge End, to allow me to capture this scene. The river is the Aire, and the church in the centre background, with a crane alongside it, is the former parish church of St Peter, promoted to the designation of Leeds Minster in 2012. I've never been inside the building, but I probably will visit it one day because I have quite a lot of family history around Leeds, including a crop of baptisms and burials at St Peter's.

The shorter building beyond Calls Landing is a hotel where R and I stayed - in the room with the white weatherboarded oriel - back in 2016. As we walked back from the Royal Armouries yesterday we realised that it was now empty, and we were momentarily saddened that it had apparently gone out of business, but it turns out that it's simply in the process of being upgraded into the kind of establishment that we would avoid even if we thought we could afford to stay there - so I'm glad we went while it was still shabby chic and friendly.

After checking out of the hotel we walked up into the centre of town, which has become a very good shopping area over the past few years, and bought a few essentials for Baby B (a.k.a. Grandchild One, or The Smaller Boy). By 'essentials' you'll understand, I'm sure, that I mean the kind of inessential fripperies that you somehow just can't walk past when you're a doting grandparent of a soon-to-be-one-year-old child. Then we drove back to the Shire, tired but happy after a thoroughly successful trip.