Well, I finished off my May with the hope that June would be slightly less hectic. I’m not entirely sure that it was.
I did however spend more time at home, but after the previous 2 months there was quite a lot of admin both for work and life in general that I needed to catch-up with. I managed to fit in 3 review sessions to work on my website (they’re meant to be monthly, but some months I just don’t have the time so can build up a bit of a bank to catch up with.) I also did a bit of local in-person networking with the Coventry & Warwickshire Chamber of Commerce. Just to remind them all that I was still alive.
As a guide, I do quite enjoy the longer tours as it gives me a chance to get to know my clients a bit better and usually it doesn’t seem to generate quite as much paperwork as lots of smaller tours. However, it can be quite tiring and when I do get home there’s often a lot of things that I need to catch up on – even such as getting parcels delivered, now that so many things seem to only be available via internet shopping.
June was also a month in which I spent time with my family. One of grandsons usually spends the first week of June staying with me while his mum is at work and this year was no different. As he lives in Cleethorpes collecting him and taking him back home at the end of the week gave me a chance to see my other daughters and grandchildren as well.
No really long extended tours this month, but there was plenty of variety in my work. I WAS still away from home for various reasons and had a scattering of short tours in a variety of different places. This in itself creates quite a bit of planning and admin.
An early evening walking tour of Birmingham for a group of international NGOs who were there for a conference, a morning tour with a group of friends from the USA who wanted a guide to give them a bit of background while they were visiting Blenheim Palace, student group from the USA in Stratford upon Avon and a tour of Coventry city centre.
Now that was a tour to remember!
The tour had been booked weeks ago, and just as we were meeting up in Broadgate as I was thinking that perhaps I had been overly pessimistic in wearing a raincoat, there was an almightly clap of thunder, the heavens opened and what seemed like an almightly deluge lasted just about all of the 90 mins of the tour. Then, just as we were finishing back in Broadgate for some photographs with a local photographer, the sun came out.
I don’t usually spend the first 10-15 mins of a tour talking about Coventry’s history stood huddling in the entrance to Wagamamma and almost running between stops to try and find a tiny bit of shelter!
As a countryside walk leader I have an Outdoor First Aid qualification which was due to expire later this summer. Now, there aren’t many providers for this in the Coventry area so mid-month saw me driving out to the Forest of Dean to complete my 16-hour course to revalidate my certificate. Although the Forest of Dean is in the Heart of England Region, I haven’t been back there much since qualifying 10 years ago. I have done a couple of tours which involved a few days walking, but that’s about it as it’s a long way to go for just a short tour. By the time I’ve taken into account my travelling expenses I would have to charge rather more than most people want to pay me.
A last-minute request to cover for a Walk Leader meant that the next weekend I was off to the Cotswolds to walk along 2 stages of the Thames path. The first day started with a quick tour around some of the main university and college buildings in Oxford, before working our way through the roadworks to find the Thames Path.
Then end of the month saw me back staying in Bourton on the Water for the start of a Cotswolds Garden Tour. This was a tour that I’d also led earlier in the year – in April, so it was really interesting to go back to mostly the same gardens and see how different they were in June.
The photo is taken showing Painswick Rococo Garden which is more or less unique. The English Rococo style was fairly short-lived, and most gardens were reworked into the English landscape style towards the end of the 18th century.
This one fell into disuse as a garden and during the 1960s it was a commercial conifer plantation.
However, in the 1980s restoration to it’s original, or as close as possible, design was started based on a painting of the garden from 1748. As you can see, it’s very green. That was the fashion, and right in the middle is quite a large area of kitchen garden.