At last we reach Dover Castle, the journey was slightly delayed due to my blog difficulties. I hope it was worth the wait.
Although I am a member of English Heritage I still had to pick tickets up on the way in and I was given an introductory leaflet. When I looked at it I noticed it was in French, I wonder if they thought I was French?
To enter the inner bailey you have to go through Palace Gate:
The inner bailey walls, built by Henry II in the 1180s, are punctuated by 14 projecting rectangular wall towers, enabling defenders to use flanking fire to prevent an an enemy approaching the main curtain walls. The two gateways are well protected between pairs of towers, the earliest English examples of such planning. Both gateways had outer defence works, or barbicans, but on the northern one survives. It’s outer gateway is deliberately not aligned with the inner gateway, to blunt the rush of any attacking force. *
Since they were built the walls have been refaced and reduced in size.
*From the Dover Castle guide book.
Tags: Dover Castle, English Heritage, Weekend away
My blog and I are back at least for now…
There was a lot of correspondence with tech support who after all else failed tried to restore the pages to how they were before they stopped working properly. Even that didn’t work so I was advised to do a manual upgrade of Wordpress. There was one small hitch with that, which was just me being silly and forgetting to change one of the settings in the config file.
Before all that could happen I had to do a separate, fresh installation of Wordpress to see if that would work. Whilst I was doing that I came across this new theme that I am using. I hope you like it 
I have done a little tinkering around with the sidebars but I still need to upload my own header. So please don’t ask me where that picture is because it isn’t one of mine.
In addition to fixing my blog I have been very busy planning for campaigns in the run up to the general election. We have proved that the government are going to ignore PCS until after the election. Despite making a lot of noise, saying that BA and Network rail should get back to the negotiating table with the unions the government have remained stonily silent on requests by PCS to talk to it’s own employees about the Civil Service Compensation scheme. The PCS union have made several requests for talks, to cabinet office minister Tessa Jowell and to Gordon Brown who have not yet replied.
So for now we will be concentrating on the Make Your Vote Count (MYVC) campaign which we have been building on for the past four years. We will be engaging with the prospective MPs to find out their views on Public Services and to get them to sign up to five pledges. All responses will be made publicly available. This will also involve a local public hustings which is being organised by the Shropshire Action Group and resulted in me attending another meeting last night, where I was told I ‘had to’ take notes!!! I have yet another meeting tonight which I could really do without.
On the plus side, I did have one evening off to visit my Mum for her birthday and my brother was in town which was nice. The spiky plant I mentioned the other day was much appreciated 
Tags: Book, Cherie's Place, Civil Service Compensation Scheme, CSCS, MYVC, PCS, Roses, Shropshire Action Group, Trade Union
Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.
Michael Caine
Tags: Cherie's Place Thought, Ducks, Hodnet Hall Gardens
This weekend started with a mass of roses, a lot of hard work spring cleaning and getting the spare room ready for visitors. In the evening after the visitors arrived we had fun in the local Chinese Restaurant. It is always interesting to go with different people because this means you end up trying dishes that you would have never picked out for yourself. The food was delicious and the wine wasn’t bad either
Today I was a woman on a mission to find a spiky plant for my Mum’s birthday. She wanted it to replace the one that died off over the winter due to the frost. It was referred to as the spiky plant because it was located in the conservatory and if you sat to close to it you got prickled by it’s leaves. The proper name of it had long been forgotten, so it was a bit of challenge trying to find what I was looking for. It took visits to three garden centres for me to be satisfied I had tracked one down.
To set myself up for the challenge I thought lunch in Attingham park would be in order. Some of you might remember what I like to eat when I go there. It also gave me the opportunity to see the deer being fed for the last time this year which was a nice bonus even though I got a little cold.
All in all it has been a good weekend and I still have my evening meal of roast pork to look forward too
Tags: Attingham Park, Cherie's Place, Friendship, Good Friends, National Trust, Roses
I couldn’t miss PhotoHunt even though you won’t be able to comment on the post due to a technical hitch with my blog. Hopefully it will be resolved soon.
For more of this weeks PhotoHunt pictures check out tnchick.
Tags: Bowood House, PhotoHunt, Waterfall, Weekend away
Today was always going to be long but it turned out to be even longer than expected because the doorbell rang twice at 4.30am or maybe I was just dreaming and that didn’t really happen… Whatever I didn’t get back to sleep properly after that.
I had to get up early to man the picket line which in our case meant standing well away from workers driving into the car park for fear of being run over. There have been quite a few incidences of near misses due to people looking in totally the wrong direction (because they are too embarrassed to look at us) when entering the car parks. It was rather chilly and my back seized up a bit due to standing around for too long, but it didn’t rain even though there was an ominous black cloud overhead.
Following that I had to take my car home and get to my local railway station so that I could attend a rally and demo in Birmingham. During the 20 minute walk from my house to the station I lost the heel off my shoe! One of my colleagues knew there was a shoe repair place on the way out of the station at Birmingham. I went in only to find that the sole of my shoe had split too!!!
I needed replacement shoes, so now I was a woman on a mission! I rushed up the street into the Clarke’s shoe shop and did a quick scan of the shoes and found just the type I needed and prayed they had them in my size. They did (which is unusual) and I tried them on and they fitted perfectly. I explained the situation and was allowed to keep the shoes on, all that was needed was the label of the shoe bottom to scan in for me to make the purchase. To top it all the assistant kindly offered to dispose of my less than adequate shoes. Who says a girl can’t shop in 10 minutes flat
I got to Victoria Square in plenty of time for the demo which was followed by a rally in the Britannia Hotel, plenty of time for catching up with my colleagues and a well earned evening meal before the train journey home.
Tags: Civil Service Compensation Scheme, CSCS, Demonstration, Industrial Action, PCS, Public Services, Trade Union
