Hidcote Manor (Revised Edition) ~ Gloucestershire 6
Gloucestershire
Hidcote Manor
2017
HIDCOTE MANOR is a short drive along the Stow Road from my home, taking me over the top of the Cotswolds - my roof of the world as a tiny boy - to the northern tip of my home county, Gloucestershire.
A National Trust property, it was gifted to the Nation when, thankfully, the National Trust accepted the owner’s invitation to take on the manor, farm, gardens and grounds in 1948.
Last Wednesday, sensing the approach of the pending lockdown announced this evening by the prime minister and to be approved by parliament this coming week to commence Thursday, November 5, I’m glad I made the journey.
Nature is a healing balm.
I’m not a photographer, but grateful for the iPhone camera, and I decided this time to make use of it. Only upon returning home did I realise I had taken in excess of fifty images! Some are found here.
The history of Hidcote is fascinating, and there is a delightful record of this history on the National Trust website, so I will refrain from repeating it here.
Today
The world over, people are under enormous pressure, and we are not always living within regimes whose politicians have our interests truly at heart. Some countries are worse than others. Others, still, have, in the name of democracy entered into totalitarianism. Russia invaded Ukraine at 3.59 am on Thursday, 24 February 2022 having done a remarkable Adolf Hitler rendition of having no such intention to invade.
China, meanwhile, destroys in the name of democracy, the very democratic institutions in Hong Kong in flagrant breach of its treaty with Great Britain. Now, emboldened by Russia, it eyes with great envy the thriving democracy in Taiwan. Do you know what gets me down? Everything I buy here, in Britain - and I look for the companies I have known over a lifetime - I look beneath and see those ominous words made in China. I might as well be reading made in Nazi Germany or made in Soviet Russia.
Wherever we are, let us observe nature, for Nature rises above human nature; and even though millions will argue otherwise, Nature is well ahead of its poor relation and wayward ‘spin-off’ ~ humankind!
And, if need be, Nature will reset, recalibrate and wipe out humankind, and then rebuild.
12 November 2022
All Rights Reserved
LIVERPOOL
© 2023 Kenneth Thomas Webb
First written on 1 November 2020 in a more peaceful time.
Ken Webb is a writer and proofreader. His website, kennwebb.com, showcases his work as a writer, blogger and podcaster, resting on his successive careers as a police officer, progressing to a junior lawyer in succession and trusts as a Fellow of the Institute of Legal Executives, a retired officer with the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, and latterly, for three years, the owner and editor of two lifestyle magazines in Liverpool.
He also just handed over a successful two year chairmanship in Gloucestershire with Cheltenham Regency Probus.
Pandemic aside, he spends his time equally between his city, Liverpool, and the county of his birth, Gloucestershire.
In this fast-paced present age, proof-reading is essential. And this skill also occasionally leads to copy-editing writers’ manuscripts for submission to publishers and also student and post graduate dissertations.
