Planet Ruby Starrs

A little bit of an interim post.. I'm having a long weekend jolly in London with a friend and we're having a great time.  We are staying in an airbnb in sunny Dalston and it's fantastic place.  I'm not putting pictures up because it's somebody's home and that would be intrusive but it's very comfortable and very welcoming I'm full of interesting objects. Its part on an old chapel and its obvious someone creative lives here.  It has a place to sit on either outside so we can be in the sun both morning and evening... and is very convieient for tube stations so easy access to everywhere we want to go. We started on arrival with the Tracy Emin exhibition at the Tate Modern.  This has had very mixture revews and I have to say while I'm quite pleased to have been to see it I found it incredibly depressing and sad and pretty grim. ... and while I appreciate her openess and honesty I'm just not sure whether it's what I want to have shared...

Last week we were living a Scottish Georgian dream..  A group of friends renting an amazing stately home just south of Glasgow... Auchinleck House. It is a very large grand affair with a large number of (usually - see later) cosy sitting rooms a very large general living room - well equipped kitchen and posh dining room.  It sleeps 13, there were  actually 10 of us - and Dr Fred and I had an enormous room with a (faux) four poster bed.... It was only faux because the curtains were purely decorative but it was still lovely.  The whole house is stunning.  In keeping with its history, the furniture - while standard Landmark trust is supplemented with nice wooden closets, fancy tables and oil painted portraits pf unidentified often stern looking people.  Externally its a really imposing looking building with glorious carved stone work and at each corner there is a kind of gatehouse which all have fabulous...

I'm punctuating this post with random totally unrelated to the text photos just to share some more pictures.  Some of which might have appeared before...🤣   I never swam once... inspite of buying newcozzie... This is our last cruise for quite a few months, in fact until December.   We've been on the Balmoral which is my favorite boat.  This is sideways on andzwont change.. specimens... Apparently it's going to be decommissioned in 2029 and actually when you look around I'm not surprised, in spite of the refit it is starting to look a little bit tired in places.   Lovely nativity in Sans Sebastian (not as nice as Bishop Auckland Palace one) The cabin we were finally allocated ( no fault of ours ) this time is definitely been the worst we've ever had.  It was extremely noisy,  meaning that we perhaps got three hours of sleep any one time being constantly woken in the night by crashing and ba...

There was another change of plan due to having to avoid the storm across the Bay of Biscay.   Instead of going to Porto we stopped overnight in Lisbon.  We have been to Lisbon many times and while it is a beautiful city we have wandered around it several times and don't feel the need to explore further. In fact last time we came we didn't even get off the boat...  but this time we had enough time and an overnight stop so we went on the train to Sintra.  We met up with some people we had made friends with and the four of us set off for an adventure in Portugaul.  Sintra is a small town about 30 minutes away by train.  It is the home to the National Palace of Pena plus a couple of other really interesting buildings.  We didn't pick the right day - not that we had any choice..  as we sat off uptown to the station ( its a beautiful art deco station) it absolutely chucked it down and we got wet, very wet!  ...