Just keeping my hand in

At work we have something called "London Days" - every two years, you get effectively an extra day's leave, in order to have an educational visit. Today was mine, and I had planned to visit Audley End House - until I checked and found that it doesn't open on Mondays. So I drove to Bury St Edmunds instead and visited Ickworth House.

Ickworth House, nr Bury St Edmunds

It was a very quirky building. There was a whole wing built just for the purpose of symmetry, and had no other function (though they've conferenced it up considerably). The history of the family was pretty salacious - including a couple of bigamists, a murderer and a gun runner! Heady stuff.

The view from the garden at the rear of the house

Inside (where we were not allowed to take photographs) there were an awful lot of family portraits, and a Titian, a Velasquez and a Reynolds. There was a beautiful Clementi piano, but you couldn't play it. The library has only two walls - which sounds more interesting than it actually is, given that one of them is semi-circular. Upstairs was one of the finest private collections of miniatures in the country, and a collection of fish made of silver which were used to contain nice-smelling stuff like pot pourri. Apparently when the house was first built, the owner went on his Grand Tour and bought tons of art to fill up the place, but then everything was confiscated by Napoleon's army! D'oh.

I can thoroughly recommend eating in the restaurant in the West Wing (so-named because it's not the East Wing - nothing to do with American TV dramas). The gardens were lovely too; there was a rose and temple garden, a silver garden, a stump garden, a gold garden (better than the silver one, I suppose) - but it was raining pretty heavily by that point, so we didn't tackle the 7-mile walk around the 1800 acres' perimeter.

Okay, I'll 'fess up. This doesn't have anything to do with Web2.0, or Cam23. But it's professional development (of sorts!), and it proves I haven't quite forgotten my blog yet!