A few times since I retired, Jane and I have resolved to break up our routines (my retirement routine especially) with more frequent outings and trips.  This has resulted in short bursts of trips away from the house and we have had one of those brief bursts of outings recently.  A combination of summer weather and a little more determination this time, may mean we sustain the run of outings for a little longer than previously.

Jane kicked us off by organizing our rather impromptu trip to Basel and then we had a trip to Belfast and Derry.  Those were followed up by a visit to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford which had originally been conceived as a birthday treat for me before the grander idea of a weekend in Basel intervened.  Then we had a day out in and around Bath and finally, before Jane headed off for a few days in Southern France with her book group, we pottered around more than a dozen open private gardens a nearby Cotswold village.  I love my daily and weekly retirement routine but it has been fun to give it a jolt.

The main reason for visiting the Ashmolean Museum was to celebrate my birthday by visiting the current exhibition of paintings by Anselm Kiefer.  I hadn’t heard of him until I saw an incredible exhibition of his work about five years ago and I have sought him out since. 

His subject matter and resultant paintings are often dark.  At the Ashmolean, we read about his early preoccupation with post-Second World War thinking in Germany and his ambition to expose some of the cultural and artistic taboos of that time.  One of the first pictures in the exhibition – and the only one for which photographs were prohibited – was an image of Hitler. 

Actually, the exhibition started with some typically monumental, deeply layered works that were very recent.  I confess that it was these of those on show that resonated most strongly with me.  Perhaps this was because they were so reminiscent of Kiefer’s works that I had seen in previous exhibitions and were in a style I was familiar with. 

The rest of the exhibition lived up to expectations though.  Kiefer is an interesting artist and a couple of his watercolours were as arresting as the larger, more obviously impactful oils.  I’ll continue to look out eagerly for his exhibitions.

We spent an hour of so wandering through the Ashmolean before a very nice lunch on the roof terrace in the sun.  It was good to come across a section of the museum dedicated to its founder, Elias Ashmole, because it reminded me of an excellent book by Phillipa Gregory (called ‘Virgin Earth’) about Elias’s friend and colleague, John Tradescant, that I read last year.

The museum’s rooms are full of a wide huge variety of exhibits from Egyptian mummies to cabinet after cabinet of ceramics. 

There was also a short more temporary exhibition of portraits of leaders and the Iranian elements of this show were well presented and explained.  Then lunch beckoned….

We took in another dose of art during a trip to Bath.  We visited a well-reviewed exhibition at The Holburne Museum of watercolours by J.M.W. Turner – another of my favourite artists.  I enjoyed this even more than the exhibition of Turner watercolours I had seen earlier this year in Edinburgh.  The room was a lot less crowded, Turner’s watercolours were more varied and, in some cases, more interestingly abstract. Plus, there were several lovely paintings by his friends of the time which showed how they influenced – indeed, competed with – each other.

We had a stroll through the adjacent Sydney Gardens.  Despite visiting Bath many times, it was the first time I had walked through these gardens and was surprised that they spanned both the Kennet and Avon Canal and the Great Western Railway with lovely bridges and impressive vistas.  In the dappled sunshine, we could somehow imagine the mix of Jane Austen romance, toll path horses and Victorian railway steam as we wandered about.

We had an excellent lunch at our favourite bakery in Upstairs at Landrace.  We are so lucky to be able to just drop into restaurants as good as this and take home what we still think is our favourite sourdough bread.

Then, to complete the day, Jane took us down some very windy and narrow lanes into deepest East Somerset to Caisson Gardens where she had booked a tour.  The sun was shining still and the gardens were a delight.  Visitor numbers were restricted and so the views of the flower beds and the backdrop of the house were largely unimpeded and aspect after aspect was beautiful.

There was some interesting history too in that the remains of Somerset Coal Canal runs through the gardens and adjoining fields.  This once had innovative, but ultimately flawed, Caisson Locks.  The remains of the waterway now supplement ponds full of tiny black frogs, a small lake and a pattern of rivulets running down from the house. 

The garden has only opened to the public recently but is well-established and is already a wonderful spectacle at this time of the year.

Less spectacular but enjoyable nonetheless, was an afternoon spent on the Box Open Gardens tour in a village near to our previous house.  It’s always interesting to peek into other peoples’ lives – or at least, their gardens.  We picked up a couple of ideas for our own garden and met a lot of people who we hadn’t seen for a long time.  We also were able to wander around the extensive, organic gardens of the local special needs school which you can only get a glimpse of from the road.  Again, the sun shone and we had a very pleasant afternoon.

We have plans for more outings.  We just need to keep breaking the routine.