Going away and coming back again

We've been away for a little holiday. First we went to Norwich, in the south(ish) east of England, where we visited, among other places, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery. In the art gallery, some of the paintings were hung upside down. This has been done because it's a ... what? ... an installation, maybe, by an artist whose name we didn't know and have now forgotten. He has recently chosen some paintings to be hung upside down so as to ... the attendant I spoke to didn't really know, but thought that it was to make us look at them differently. Yes... . 

Anyway, we had various nice walks along the river, 

and visited the very impressive Norwich Cathedral, built 900 years ago.

Then we went to Cambridge to visit my brother and sister-in-law, who moved there last year to be near their daughter. This day, we visited Bury St Edmunds, and walked among the ruins of Bury St Edmunds Abbey, which was built around 1020 but destroyed by Henry VIII after 1539 in the dissolution of the monasteries. There are various lumps left of it, and interesting diagrams and models to show you what it was once like. HUGE, is what it was like. 

See the mustard-coloured bit on the drawing of the abbey as it was? 

This is it here. It's a fair size, so the rest of the abbey must have been enormous.

We also took a trip to Anglesey Abbey, which is neither in Anglesey nor an abbey, but a stately home. Mr L and I visited this in 1972, while staying with my aunt, who lived in Cambridge at the time. 

I remembered that I'd taken a photo of Mr L lying on the grass, so we recreated it in roughly the same place, 51 years later. He would look more like his youthful self if he didn't have the beard. He still looks much the same to me, anyway. 

There's a dahlia bed with flowers shading from red, to pink, orange, yellow and white. Dahlias can be a bit garish but this was a nice way to display them. I'm not really into clashy colours.

And this is a photo of my niece at her allotment. "Is this for the blog?" she asked. Turns out, it was. 

So we had a lovely time and now we're back and catching up with stuff.