Zelda Fitzgerald and her husband’s leading ladies

I've recently become part of the regular feature-writing team for Exeposé Books, which is very exciting! Here's one of my first two 'audition pieces', as like to call them.

With the recent release of Baz Luhrmann’s unspeakably glitzy take on The Great Gatsby, the unreachable Daisy Buchananfeels like a familiar character. But the rest of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novels are studded with complicated female stars too. Brilliant yet flawed, each draws her inspiration from one source, tragically close to the author’s heart – ‘a vivacious blond who had hoards of suitors’ – Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda.

In Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, Gloria Patch is restricted by a role which would not have been unfamiliar to a woman of Zelda’s status.  As the wife of the heir to a phenomenal fortune, she has already achieved her sole aim in life: to snare a rich husband. Her subsequent, dangerous lack of occupation is questioned in the novel. Once Gloria has fulfilled her quest to marry into money, her life becomes empty and the only path open to her, at least in her mind, is the descent into alcoholism and idleness. Sadly, Fitzgerald saw this phenomenon of the rich and reckless in his own life, and particularly in Zelda. Gloria clearly shares his wife’s tendency towards reckless, irresponsible and selfish behaviour; the portrayal of the Patches’ idle lives evokesFitzgerald’s concern that, in the early years of the 1920s, their own lives were growing dangerously close to becoming a circus of bingeing and self-indulgence.

Perhaps the character who draws most on Zelda for inspiration is Nicole Diver of Tender is the Night, the last completed novel that Fitzgerald would write. Again, her only apparent vocation is to be one half of a rich and glamorous couple, but, like Zelda in reality, she is of course much more complex. In the novel, Nicole is admitted to a sanatorium in Switzerland with acute neurosis, where her future husband Dick is a psychoanalyst. It is clear that Fitzgerald is directly referring to one of Zelda's many admittances to sanatoria, where she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. During her stay at one institution, Zelda wrote her first and only published novel, a semi-autobiography, Save Me the Waltz. Although Scott was incensed that she had published such personal material, he would do exactly that with Tender Is the Night, even lifting extracts directly from Zelda’s own diary and letters she had written to him from the psychiatric ward. In spite of their challenging conditions, both Nicole and Zelda desired a career and independence from their husbands. For Nicole, this took the form of psychiatry; meanwhile, as the vivid, moving prose of Save Me the Waltz suggests, Zelda desired recognition of her own writing.

Each of Fitzgerald’s leading ladies is a reflection of his life with Zelda in some way, be it in the portrayal of her fragile mental state or of the hollow, frivolous lifestyle they shared. But most readers are of the opinion that none of his characters manage to capture her vivacity or her enormous complexity. There are naturally glimpses of her in her own novel, but as her husband forbade her to publish anything more and she never completed her second novel after his death, it seems unlikely that we can ever know or comprehend the real Zelda Fitzgerald.

The mad, bad and probably most intriguing family of the 20th Century -the Mitford sisters in writing and popular culture.

This is the second of my two pieces for Exeposé Books. It's a re-jig of a piece I had already written on the Mitford sisters (yes, them again), but they're some of my favourite people to read and write about and so I hope you'll forgive me for bringing them up again! 

For those who don't spend their time with their nose in endless books about the inconceivably crazy antics of minor aristocrats (who doesn't?), the Mitfords were a family whose lives were full of outrageous coincidences. Their story would be thought of as highly unrealistic at the very least; the Mitfords' parents, by some act of fate, missed their journey on the maiden voyage of the Titanic and their fifth child, the infamous Nazi-lover Unity, was conceived in a Canadian town called Swastika - and given the middle name Valkyrie. Add into the mix their family connections to Winston Churchill as well as the current Royal Family, and they could be the creation of an over-zealous writer.

There were seven Mitford children in all, including a brother, Tom, who was sadly consigned to obscurity, despite his scandalous schooldays at Eton. It would be Tom's six sisters - Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah - who would go down in history, or perhaps in infamy.

The latest work about this strange sextet is Lyndsy Spence’s The Mitford Girls’ Guide to Life, published in August 2013. In the midst of such a wealth of existing writing about and by the sisters, Spence is challenged with creating an original and entertaining version of their story. Her idea of portraying theMitfords’ lives through a guide to English high society in the middle years of the twentieth century, is a fun and novel one, and we learn how the girls might  have coped with modern life. Pamela's guide to throwing a jubilee party, Nancy's guide to fashion or Diana's tips on how to stay young all feature in this endearing compendium. It’s far from a laborious, detailed biography, but this was always supposed to be a clean, informal glance at the Mitfords’ lives.

Aside from Unity, who died in 1948 after earlier attempting suicide in a Munich park at the outbreak of the Second World War, each of the sisters has published her memoirs. Jessica’sHons and Rebels and Deborah’s Wait For Me are two of the most loved by the ever-growing number of twenty-first century Mitford fans. Meanwhile, Nancy is best remembered for her novels Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love.

It was in contemporary British popular culture, though, that the elder sisters would first find fame with their well-known friends, the earliest set of Bright Young People. Rushing around London, falling into and out of the most over-the-top fancy dress parties, cocktails in hand, the young inter-war generation lived fast and partied hard. After Evelyn Waugh, author of Brideshead Revisited and observer of these wild antics, separated from his wife, he became obsessed with Diana and even dedicated his novel Vile Bodies to her. The novel went on to be adapted by Stephen Fry into the film Bright Young Things in 2003.

In spite of their polarising reputations  and decadent lifestyles, in her 2001 biography The Mitford Girls – The Biography of An Extraordinary Family, biographer Mary S Lovell is at pains to emphasise that the women always stuck together.  Despite a wide age gap - Nancy, the eldest, was sixteen when her youngest sister Debo was born - they remained close throughout their lives, perhaps even more so in adulthood than they had been as children. An abridged and condensed collection of their vast number of letters was edited by Diana’s daughter-in-law Charlotte Mosley –Letters Between Six Sisters is a hefty volume, but it captures a version of the women very rarely glimpsed, even in their memoirs. Their letters portray an obvious love of life and vivacious nature which would characterise them as much as their infamous deeds.

Perhaps the reason that many are still so absorbed in the sisters' unique stories – even after the publication of innumerable biographies, memoirs and homages such as Spence’s – is that the Mitfords were such vibrant, interesting people. Yes, they were hugely flawed, of course; what with their associations with the far-right and some certainly questionable morals, they were not exactly salubrious company. But every biographer appears so in awe of them and portrays each of their lives in such a way that it is impossible to avoid being swept along with them, through the débutantedances, the summer tours of Europe, the wild parties of inter-war London. Maybe it is because their lives are so incomprehensible and far-moved from our own that generation after generation is drawn to their fantastical stories.

Sorting out Stammtisch and deciphering Русская - my first weeks back at uni

After moving into our new house last week, we've had a little while to get things sorted before the start of term. It's my second year at Exeter, so most things are familiar by now, but this year looks as though it's going to bring lots of new and exciting things my way.

As I've been writing on here for a little while now, I thought that it might be a good idea to blog about university life and so I got in touch with the people who run the university's Students' Blog and asked to write a few things for them. Basically, anything remotely interesting and/or uni-related will be linked across from there to here and vice versa (at least I think that's how it works).

So the biggest new thing that I'm doing this year is acting as the Education Officer for the German Society. My role is, as the name might suggest, more education- than social-orientated, so it means that I can avoid clubbing for the most part; sorry, I know, I'm a student, ergo I should like clubbing, but unfortunately it isn't really my cup of tea. But that means that I'm much more suited to my Ed Off role, as I like to call it. My main responsibilities will be running weekly conversation classes, where we'll teach and also learn some German with other society members and native speakers, and organising Stammtisch, which is a lovely, informal way of practising our language skills - really, that means that we all go to the pub and speak German!

With my excuses for not going clubbing already made, the main parts of my Freshers' Week comprised Joint Languages meet and greets, where the committees said hello to all the new and returning languages students and hopefully answered any questions they had, and the all-important Freshers' Fair - below is Katy, one of our Social Secs, and Chris, our President, at the fair on Sunday (photo credits to Dan, our Treasurer; thank you!). The Freshers' Fair is held every year in the Great Hall, the Forum and other parts of central campus and every society sets out a stall to help sign up as many students as possible. Our figures on Sunday - if I remember correctly! - were 65 who signed up to GermSoc, as I affectionately call it, on the day and hopefully many more who didn't want to brave the crowds and did it online. Also war er ein sehr erfolgreicher Tag!

Following on from that, my new role as Ed Off for GermSoc (do keep up, at the back!) has meant that I've been able to organise some volunteering, by way of running an extra-curricular German language club at a local primary school in Exeter. We don't start teaching until later in October, but three committee members and I had our introductory training during Freshers' Week with the wonderful Chris Wakely. He is a languages consultant, teaches the PGCE course here at Exeter and is the editor of the very exciting 'Take 10' programme, a teaching resource for primary school pupils which combines learning French, German or Spanish with physical exercise - and that of course meant that we were all dancing to such classics as Ich habe zehn Finger in a glass-fronted conference room in the middle of Devonshire House!

A big thank you also to Sara Bennett from the Student Guild for all her help and advice regarding the project, for purchasing the society's copy of Take 10 and for helping the four of us navigate those fiendish DBS forms!

When we were choosing our second year modules, months and months ago, a previous and clearly very optimistic version of Hayley decided that it would be a really good idea to start beginners' Russian. I think that that version of Hayley morphed into the why-on-earth-did-I-do-that Hayley around the time that my shiny new Russian textbook arrived in the post. Well, the time has come for me to actually open it and start learning some Русская, Русский or Русского - why are there so many different ways to say the word 'Russian'?!

Да, I had my second ever lesson of Russian today and yesterday's session seemed quite straightforward in comparison. On Monday, we learnt the five Cyrillic letters that look and sound like English ones and we learnt the Russian for 'cat', which is clearly the most important word I will need (it's кот, if you were wondering). But today, upon our arrival, we were designated new, Russian names. So as well as remembering to actually learn Russian, I also need to remember that I have a new name. Henceforth, I shall be known to my teacher Yulia and the rest of the Russian department as Galina, which is of course spelt галина. I'm hoping that I'll get the hang of it soon...

Way back in January, I took up French evening classes for beginners (because you can never collect enough languages - hopefully there'll be a blog post on this kind of theme coming soon...) and I'm picking them up again this year at intermediate level - argh! No, I'm really looking forward to starting French again, it's a beautiful language. I decided to start studying it mainly because I was just about the only student in the Modern Languages department who didn't do French in some form. My degree combination of German and Spanish seems to be quite an unusual one and, if I want to go into teaching after university, French will come in very handy. I'll have a couple of weeks to settle back into university life before the evening classes begin again in October, so I'm going to get back down to my books and try to practise lots beforehand!

Added to all of this, I'm still doing a lot of the same things that I did last year, in terms of modules and actual uni work. Each student gets 120 credits to 'spend' on modules, so my Russian counts for 30 and I'm resuming 30 credits of German language and the same of Spanish language. But for me, the best thing about the ML department is its vast range of cultural modules, which we study alongside the core languages to broaden our understanding of history, literature, politics, philosophy and linguistics in the target language. Because I've already 'spent' lots of credits on three core language modules, I only have 30 left to use up, so I've only been able to choose one cultural module for each term, as they're 15 credits each. This term's is on literature during Franco's dictatorship with Dr Katharine Murphy, who taught the Spanish memory and identity module I took last term. Then next term I'll be studying ideology and identity in German cinema with Dr Chloe Paver, another fantastic lecturer whose first year module I studied last year. (Below are the books we're studying for Dr Murphy's Spanish module).

And a few other things that are coming up this term at uni: Varsity football this evening, German Society's first conversation class tomorrow morning, Oktoberfest social on Monday and our first Stammtisch next Wednesday. And it's my birthday soon, yay!

I hope you enjoyed my first foray into student/uni blogging - and hopefully there'll soon be plenty more where that came from!

Bis bald and hasta luego.

(: xx

Back to uni and moving into our new house...

This summer has been one of those peculiar ones which seems to have lasted forever, yet simultaneously flown by. Sometimes I actually feel as though I haven't been to university at all - summer has been so long that I feel like I've never been away from home!

But today I've been busy moving into our new student house, ready to begin our second (eek!) year. We're officially fully fledged students now, which is exciting and a little bit terrifying in equal measure. I'm very excited to have a kitchen of my own (well, we have two and they are shared between the six of us, but you know what I mean), so that I might be able to learn to cook some Grown Up Food rather than just cakes!

I thought that it might be a nice way to integrate my blog with Round 2 of my student life by showing you around our new home. As it's a student property, there isn't bound to be much in the way of decoration provided in our rooms, so another thing I'm really enjoying is making my humble abode seem a little more homely. In preparation for this, I've brought with me all of my posters, lots of books, some lovely handmade bits and pieces, and a couple of vintage and retro trinkets too. 

As a sort of leaving present, my sister made me a pom pom 'bunting' string, which is very cute; I've hung it around my noticeboard, where I've pinned some pretty vintage-style postcards that I found in my scrapbook box. (In other woolly news, I eventually succeeded in making a giant pom pom to hang in my window as well. It's all good). 

My pink bunting came from a Crikey It's Vintage fair in Exeter last September, so I'm rather late to the bunting party, but I think it's very pretty all the same. The ceilings in the new house are very high, though, so I needed a little assistance to put it up on the picture rail! 

At the moment, I appear to be having a small candle phase. For my new room, I bought an oil burner and vanilla-scented wax from a local craft fair - I'd had my eye on the fork-and-spoon oil burner for a couple of months after seeing it at the previous fair, so I thought that I would finally treat myself. The wax 'clam' comes from Sara's Waxworks, a Plymouth-based business which sells lovely scented wax in all sorts of fragrances - from perfumes like Chanel No. 5 to a fresh and simple 'clean linen' scent. I've not melted any of my wax yet, but it still smells amazing even though it's still in its packaging.

Sticking with the candle theme, I've brought with me the teacup candle that you might have seen in a previous blogpost, and thankfully, it's made it up to Exeter in one piece! Another craft-ish piece resulting from trip to Hobbycraft is my desk tidy. It was essentially six plain cardboard tubes in a shallow base and the idea is that you use pretty découpage paper to stick on and make it look nice. It's my first go at découpage, but I don't think it's too awful.

These retro advertisements and railway posters are from calendars that I cut up to make a collage for my room in halls last year and I thought I'd reinstate them this year because having things up on the walls makes everything a bit more interesting and homely.

The lavendar Jan Constantine loveheart was a generous gift from Vintage Life magazine and my many and various cushions have also travelled with me Up North. I'm amassing quite a collection now, with three rather patriotic, retro ones from Past Times (before it very sadly disappeared from our high streets), a handmade owl from the same Crikey It's Vintage fair as the bunting and a pretty cake draft-excluder-style cushion, which I might use to avoid falling down the gap between the bed and the wall.

The two posters above were made by teachers at my secondary school; they read Keep Calm and Enjoy German and Spanish! 

You may or may not know that I'm studying Modern Languages, meaning that most of the books I've brought with me to uni are either textbooks or not in English. I did, though, bring my Bake Off Everyday and a couple of Mary Berry's recipe books, and we currently have three copies of Nosh For Students by Joy May, so I think we're well covered in the cookbook department. In terms of more leisurely reading material (you mean you're not satisfied with looking at pictures of cakes for fun?!), one of the reading-for-fun books I've brought along is Letters Between Six Sisters. It's a volume of the collected letters sent to and by the Mitford sisters - again, if you follow my blog at all, you'll probably know that I have at least a passing interest in them.

I hope you enjoyed the brief tour of my new room; it still needs to be tidied up a little, but most things are sorted now and I'm looking forward to beginning my second year of university properly!

(: xx

Review - The Great British Bake Off 2013, Episode 1

After almost a year of waiting, the Great British Bake Off is finally back on our screens! Rejoice - or, to reference the programme's tantilising advert, HALLELUJAH!

Now with an audience of millions and several international spin-offs, the Bake Off is in its fourth series and for the first time features a baker's dozen of thirteen contestants. I'm a huge fan of the show and this year found myself the proud owner of 'The Great British Bake Off Everyday' recipe book before the show had even aired. And so, being such a keen bean, I was able to familiarise myself with the new names and faces of the bakers well in advance, which is always a good idea.

I don't know about you, but watching the Bake Off makes us ravenous and we always need a nice cup of tea and a slice of cake to see us through. A little birdie had let me know that the featured bakes from the first episode were going to be a Signature Bake sandwich cake and a Technical Challenge angel food cake with a finale chocolate Showstopper - so I thought I'd tick at least two out of three boxes and make a chocolate sandwich cake for our delectation during the show.

In homage to the programme, the cake is actually Mary Berry's Very Best Chocolate Fudge Cake from her 'Baking Bible'. It takes a lot of prep to get ready for Bake Off viewing in this house, so we found ourselves in a bit off a rush to catch the start!

Anyway, with our preparations done and cake cut, we settled down in front of the tellybox for the grand opening of the series.

Mel and Sue are of course back on form, as are la Berry and Mr Hollywood, as they welcome this year's bakers to the competition. Will there be soggy bottoms? Fridge-and-pray moments? Will the GBBO squirrel make an appearance?

There's only one way to find out. On your marks - get set - BAKE!

As we were expecting, the first challenge our bakers faced was the sandwich cake Signature Bake. Paul and Mary wanted a variation on the classic sandwich. The idea behind setting such a (seemingly) simple test was that it would flag up straightaway any issues the bakers might have, be it with the recipe, the crumb or any other elements of the cake. To put it Paul's way, any mistakes would mean 'serious trouble from the offset'.

But, in theory at least, the contestants came up trumps. Teacher Glenn (who just so happens to hail from my university town, Exeter - yay!) chose to put a slight twist on a Victoria sandwich, in that it contained whole fresh strawberries and was consequently of quite a phenomenal size. Lucy was the first to use what is reputed to be the 'flavour of the series', cardamom, while Frances took the brief literally and set about creating a giant jam sandwich in a sugarpaste paper bag.

Toby stuck to a classic with a spiced and iced carrot cake, which features in the Everyday recipe book and is one that I'm very keen to try, while Ali also used a familiar flavour - rose, which, he informed viewers, is a staple of Pakistani desserts.

Several of the bakers seemed to be finding baking in new surroundings difficult; Rob bemoaned the lack of work surface, while Ali declared that his workstation looked 'like a bomb's gone off' - it seems that his style of baking is not dissimilar to my own...

However, the many and varied creations of the bakers were causing problems; there were more injuries in this episode alone than I think I've seen in any other series! 'It's Bake Off meets Casualty,' quipped Sue, joining Howard at the back of the tent with the medics.

But lo, in spite of the drama (underbaked sponges, blood, sweat and tears) the Signature Bake was finally finished. 

Among my personal favourites are Glenn's giant strawberries-and-cream cake (and hey, us Devonians have to look out for one another), Frances' beautifully executed sandwich/sandwich and Lucy's cardamom and home-grown rhubarb sponge, which Paul and Mary agreed looked absolutely beautiful.

Leaving the first task behind them, for better or worse, our thirteen bakers moved swiftly on to the Technical Challenge: Mary's own angel food cake. We learnt that it contains no fat (sounds ideal) and its only raising agent is whisked egg white (sounds tricky). As the recipe left out several vital details - oh come on, we don't want it to be too easy, do we? - the contestants whisked their whites to varying consistencies and added the remainder of the ingredients.

This was no mean feat; for several of the bakers, the angel cake had not turned out to be the blessing that its name might suggest.

A blind tasting by Mary and Paul followed and each cake was thoroughly tested. Paul observed that one particular cake had elaborately piped icing, declaring it 'straight out of the '70s.' 'I can't remember,' Mary replied tartly.

The bakers' names were called out from the least successful to the best; sadly, Toby's accidentally salty angel food cake was bottom of the pile, followed by the youngest baker in the competition, Ruby, and then Ali and his lovely jumper. Top of the pile with some very impressive bakes were Christine, Lucy and Rob.

Now, finally, to my favourite part of the programme, the Showstopper itself. In this instalment, the contestants were challenged to create a chocolate cake on one condition alone; it had to be something very special indeed. Although it had to be a novelty cake, Sue was careful to remind the bakers that 'this is 8pm on BBC2!'

All manner of flavour combinations went into the chocolate masterpieces. Just a small cross section includes Ruby's delicious-sounding chocolate and ginger bake, while Ali used fresh raspberries and Lucy unusually opted for thyme. Glenn, not to be out-done, designed a Gaudi-inspired creation, consisting of seven different cakes. If there's one thing that can be said about Exonians, it's that we know how to pull out all the stops when it comes to chocolate cake.

Scientist Rob pulled off yet another feat of baking ingenuity with his precisely crafted striped chocolate cigars; it was thoroughly impressive, yet he managed to make it look so simple and they looked stunning atop his showstopper. And that's without even mentioning his balloon baskets!

Come the end of the task, Rob's was one of the cakes which impressed Mary and Paul the most as he was crowned Star Baker of the first week, but I think that Lucy or Frances would have been equally deserving winners, as Frances' adorable secret squirrels were also singled out for praise. (A few weeks ago, my sister used an identical cutter to produce something that Dad charmingly dubbed 'chocolate roadkill'. How very rude!)

Crunch time. After a less than ideal weekend in the Bake Off tent, the judges had their beady eyes on Toby, Ali and Ruby. Mark's 'Chocolate Monster' had left Paul and Mary underwhelmed but Christine's elegant hat and Howard's handmade chocolate bear definitely impressed.

Ultimately, the decision was made that Toby should be the first to leave after just one weekend in the Bake Off gang and he was immediately enveloped in a Mel and Sue sandwich. It must be completely gutting to go so early in the competition after such a lengthy and arduous audition process, but he did so so well and I will certainly be trying his carrot cake recipe! (I also love him a bit for his claim that he 'doesn't do gender stereotypes', but that is beside the point...)

So Ruby and Ali live to bake another day, along with ten other supposedly amateur but bloomin' fantastic bakers. How amazing was that first episode?! 

I apologise for not name-checking each and every baker - it's been difficult to keep this post of an appropriate length and there are lots of you to squeeze in, so I'm sorry for that. But I loved all of your bakes this week and I can't wait for bread next Tuesday!

If you enjoyed the return of the Bake Off, let me know in the comments box below (and as always, I'm open to constructive criticism on how my posts could be improved - this is my first time reviewing anything, so please be kind!)

(: xx

The Great British Bake Off continues next Tuesday on BBC2 at 8pm. Don't miss it! #GBBO

The many faces of Somerset

Our trip to Somerset began bright and early on Tuesday morning as we set off to Weston-Super-Mare. As the town has always been known at home as 'Weston-Super-Mud', I was slightly apprehensive. It turns out that my mum was right about the mud - when we arrived at about 9am, the tide was so far out that we couldn't see any water. But we set off along the seafront, thus far unperturbed by the distinct lack of sea.

Once we had had breakfast in a café which, according to Ol, resembled that from The Apprentice, and walked up and down the high street, we turned back towards the pier. The Grand Pier, which was rebuilt and opened in 2010, was definitely the highlight of our mini-trip to Weston and we spent several hours in the arcade there before it was time to leave for our main destination, Wells.

My fact of the day for you is that Wells is the smallest city in England and it is absolutely beautiful. (Without wanting to be mean to Weston, I was quite glad to see the pretty side of Somerset at last). As soon as we had arrived and said hello to my boyfriend's grandparents, with whom we were staying for the next few days, we headed straight to Da Luciano's pizzeria for a bite to eat. The food is amazing - it's all homemade in the family-run restaurant and, although we didn't get to sample it this time, the homemade tiramisu really is a top dessert. Instead of sitting in the restaurant, we ate our pizza next to St Cuthbert's Church, the church in the Hot Fuzz movie (it was filmed in and around Wells) - you know, the one where the spire falls off and hits that poor person on the head. Ick.

Luckily, we left intact and made our way back through the city to the grandparents' house. The cathedral and Vicars' Close are two of the attractions en route (but I've also sneaked in some of the Bishop's Palace from a separate day, ssh!)

We had two whole days to spend in Wells and both were action-packed. On the first day, we spent the morning shopping in Street, or in the Clarke's village to be more precise, which is full of great gift shops and high-street favourites. We tried pink lemonade-flavoured tea and mint hot chocolate in Whittard of Chelsea and obviously we had to visit the Cadbury's outlet, purchasing the obligatory bag of Misfits (they're the odd ones that come off the conveyor belt a bit funny, so they're sold cheaply-ish in a bag of their own), a bag of Fudges and a whole box just of Roses' Strawberry Dreams - my favourite! Yum!

That afternoon (after Ol's grandad treated us to a pub lunch - I had a proper all-veggie meal, as I'm deliberating becoming a vegetarian - but that's another story), we went to Book Barn International, about 10 miles outside Wells. I'd never heard of this place before, but it was brilliant! As anyone who knows me will know, I really love reading and collecting books, so the Book Barn was like a dream come true. Apparently, it is home to over a million rare, vintage and otherwise interesting books, which I can believe. They all live in a huge warehouse where anybody can go in and buy any book for just £1. (!!) It even, to my surprise, had a big foreign languages section, so I stocked up on some German novels and plays, and a vintage French vocabulary book from 1956 .

On our second and last full day staying with bf's grandparents, they very kindly took us into Bath for the day. Although I've only been on a couple of occasions, it's one of my favourite cities, so I was very excited. We began the day in the magnificent atrium at the Roman Baths.

The baths had changed a lot since I'd last visited, so there were lots of new exhibits to explore and pieces to look at. (We also had audio guides to help us around the museum and I had a go at doing it in German - eventually I gave up with grown-up Deutsch and had to listen to the children's talks instead!) One exciting change was that we were now able to taste the water from the spring itself; it was very metallic and not particularly tasty, but I did drink a whole cup, just in case it turned out to be magic...

With our tickets to the baths, we also had entry to the Bath Fashion Museum, housed in the Assembly Rooms further up the city (there were more audio guides, but I chose English this time). One of the exhibitions we saw, and probably my favourite, was 50 Fabulous Frocks, which featured pieces by McQueen, Dior, Norman Hartnell (who once dressed the Queen) and Jean Paul Gaultier. Unusually, all the dresses from different eras were intermingled, leading to some hilarity when a passing visitor referred to a 2006 Versace dress hidden among 18th century crinolines and bonnets as being 'very sexy, even back then!' Below is a dress from the 1930s, designed by Handley Seymour, who also designed the Queen Mother's wedding dress.

Another highlight of the day, though, was the dressing up section! Even Ol, after dismissing Victorian men's clothes as 'boring', strapped himself into a corset and crinoline - although unfortunately I don't have any photographic evidence. I shall endeavour to get the pictures from him, because I had so much fun and look very funny in a bonnet.

To finish off this very long post, (sorry, it's several days worth of activities) I'll show you my last few photos of our day in Bath - including when we popped into the Krispy Kreme shop!

Hoping to go back to Somerset very soon.

(: xx