Friday 29 May 2015

Cheddar Gorge Sketches

Sunday 24 May 2015. Once we had left Glastonbury it was raining and we decided to try our luck at Cheddar, knowing that if it came fine we could wander up and down the road from the gorge through to the village and that if it was wet there were plenty of cafes to sit in and watch somebody else getting wet...

If you are a regular reader apologies, because you will have seen this sketch before. It was just about fine by the time we had driven slowly up the hill and found a parking space in the third car park above the top show cave. I decided to leave the camera in the dry and we walked down the hill in search of somewhere to have a quick snack.

We knew Mary was cooking a meal for us that night again and we didn't want to have a full meal, but Miss Franny was fancying a clotted cream tea. In the event we should have had one between us as the cafe we ended up in served up the most huge scones! But I like a fruit scone and Miss Franny likes plain ones so perhaps one of us would have had to feel disappointed anyway.

The cafes were all fairly crowded and we were halfway down to the village when we found one with space to sit. It had a framed collection of tea cards (collectable cards from packets of leaf tea from the 1930s) hanging on the wall at the side of our table with glamour photos of Hollywood starlets of the day on them. I counted 54 cards but only knew five of them - and was proud of my achievement, given the rather short periods of relative fame most of them had. Hedy Lamarr was there and Sonja Henie, the skater. But the other three were only familiar for a single film such as Anita Louise - she played Titania to James Cagney's Bottom in the 1935 version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Looking her up on the Internet Movie Database, I found that the only other thing she did that I could remember was the 1950s TV show My Friend Flicka.

I dashed this one off earlier today for this blog post, knowing I hadn't any fresh photos. "Dashed off" might not be a totally apt description if I'm honest, but it didn't take me hours on end either... I included a cyclist riding up the gorge because there was a cyclist staying in one of the other rooms at the B&B and she had cycled all the way up the gorge the previous day.

We had a look round the village shops - is it me or have several cafes turned into souvenir shops? Anyway, there was even one with a few Edwardian penny arcade machines in it. And Miss Franny decided we hadn't got a fridge magnet of Cheddar (with all the ones we have got how can she remember???) so we came back with a fridge magnet as well. The fridge is full, I'm thinking of swapping the kitchen cupboards for ones with steel doors...

And just to finish off, because I know you will be wanting to know whether Anita Louise was a bit of a babe or was totally hideous - I can reveal she was a bit of a babe... And no, I can't remember who the other two starlets were that I recognised... Anita Louise at IMDB.

Somerset Weekend Index

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