One Fell Swoop

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I was hoping to make some progress on at least one of my current projects today and report back to you, but in the aftermath of yesterday's tree-cutting activities and the side effects of the Covid jab, I've taken one step forward and two steps back in that department. So, apropos of bugger all, the above picture is of a hotel sign that featured in two of my early-teens summer holidays with my family, back in the late 1960s. The Brathay Fell Hotel was a big old house just outside Ambleside in The Lakes, where I stayed with my mom, sister, nan & grandad, and my uncle, who did all the driving. One abiding memory of our stays there is that of the room - in the old stable-block? - where they had a table tennis table, and wondrously, bar-billiards.

I still have a letter my mom wrote my dad whilst we were staying there, and how she was teaching my sister and me how to play table tennis, a game I still love to play, albeit occasionally. As to bar billiards; if I had the spare cash, I'd love to get a table: it's a fabulous game and one that is so difficult to find in the wild these days, more's the pity. The kicker to all of this, though, is that the current location of the sign shown is hanging on a wall in the breakfast bar of The Castle Hotel, in Bishop's Castle, Shropshire; one of our frequent haunts for the past nigh-on thirty years of family holidays in that county. How it fetched up there I've no idea, but again, these weird connections and synchronicities abound.

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