Broadway

I'd been intending to go to Slimbridge today, for the first time in many months, but I'm still post-viral and I overslept this morning. By the time I was up and about I judged it to be too late, so to cheer me up R offered a coffe-and-cake trip to Broadway, which was looking rather lovely in its autumn plumage.

After our café visit we did a little window shopping with the upcoming present-giving season in mind, and then went to the Broadway Arts Festival art exhibition at the museum. We bought one thing, which is a lovely book about invertebrates that I spotted in the children's shop - it's too old for the Boy Wonder at the moment (by at least a couple of years), but R pointed out that if I waited to buy it, it might go out of print, so it's been put away safely until we think it's the right time for him to receive it. The danger being, of course, that like our garden squirrels with their nuts, we might either forget its existence altogether, or not be able to remember where the safe place is when the time comes to hand it over. Sadly, in contrast with the squirrel situation, our losing it most probably wouldn't result in a children's book tree springing up in some unexpected corner of the homestead.

This is the upper High Street, which until a few years ago was part of the A44 to Oxford, but since becoming a no-through-road when the A44 was diverted is surely one of the most desirable neighbourhoods in the country, let alone the Shire. The hillside you can see is part of Fish Hill, which is one of the slopes of the Cotswold scarp; away to the right, but out of view from this angle, is the Broadway Tower, to which you can walk via a path that starts part way up this road, cutting between a couple of the properties on the right hand side. It's a bit of a pull, but if you start with coffee and cake down in the village and then have some more at the top in the café by the Tower, it's perfectly doable.