Our first port of call today was St Mary's church in the village of Cholsey, where we were looking to find the grave of billion selling author Agatha Christie. We turned up to find the car park closed and a sign directing us to park in a field. The reason for this was that there was a gathering of Toyota MR2s in the car park. Well I say a gathering, there were four. Hardly worth closing the car park for.
So we drive into the field and immediately another car follows us and gets in my way even though I made a point of driving all the way to the other end of the field. The MR2 owners looked disappointed as we made our way through the gate and into the graveyard, oh well.
Agatha's grave was easy to find, seeing as it was enormous, twice the scale of a normal gravestone, there was also a little visitors book by the side which we didn't bother to fill in (and neither had anyone else it seemed). So we'd seen the grave, marvelled at it's bulk, and so we headed off to find Agatha's (privately owned) house.
Winterbrook house, situated in Wallingford was recently on the market for 2.75m, which given the prices of some of the terraced houses in the locale doesn't seem entirely egregious! As it is in private ownership we couldn't actually visit it, or even take a photo of the plaque on the front wall, instead we drove past as slowly as we could on our way to our next destination.
The museum was better than expected to be honest, and if we hadn't been on the clock for lunch we could have spent another half hour at least. The Agatha Christie part was one room and again was pretty good. Obviously a lot of the display items were written, I mean what do you put in a museum to represent an author? But it was well worth a visit and some of Agatha's quotes were very amusing, particularly in this interview she gave in 1970.
The museum features as it's centrepiece a huge model of a huge castle which 'allegedly' existed once, although they were at pains to point out that a lot of the design has been 'assumed'. Probably about 50% of it! All that's left today is a couple of bricks in a field somewhere that most visitors struggle to find. We didn't look, but then we had to get to Henley on Thames in time for lunch.
Henley, of course, is all about the river and boats. I have never seen so many boats, boats and Bentleys actually. I must have seen at least 4-5 Bentleys in Henley, and actually the whole day we saw posh cars, including a Lamborghini, an old Bugatti, an AC Cobra, a Lotus, I'm sure there were others too, but Bentleys are definitely the car of choice around these parts.
As it was a sunny day (well, sort of - it veered beetwen blazing sunshine and black clouds) the place was packed and as such the parking provided was barely adequate, God knows what they do during the regatta? We ended up in the car park for the boat museum (which we didn't bother visiting, not even a 'Wind in the Willows' exhibition could tempt us inside), which confused me because it had a barrier but didn't give you a ticket.
We made it to 'The Angel' or 'The Angel on the Bridge' as I thought it was called... with ten minutes to spare. It was very busy outside and I was glad we had booked. It wasn't so busy inside, but still, it filled up by the time we left, so it was still a good idea. The scampi was nice and the puddings were pretty good too, though the chocolate truffle cake turned out to be less of a cake and more of a big chocolate. The sticky toffee pudding was satisfyingly stodgy and sickly, like eating treacle out of a tin.
We had an hour to kill before the boat trip, but staying in the pub wasn't an option since an American family sitting next to us had a very irritating child who was constantly entertaining itself by making a fucking noise.
So we went for a potter around Henley and visited a bookshop run by a very well to do lady. She had labelled the shelves with things like 'Decent Fiction', 'Trashy Novels' and 'History Books and books which are somewhat historical' and things like that, which amused us.
Then we made our way back to the river for an hour long boat trip, cunningly sitting inside on comfy chairs while the rest of the muppets sat upstairs in the blazing sun on wooden benches. Inevitably the fools above eventually realised their mistake and started invading our space, bringing with them their squalling children. At times like these I can see why people with extraordinary amounts of cash do things like chartering boats, or arranging private sailings...
But overall the boat trip was nice, it was certainly one of the nicest boats we'd been on, even if it was a bit rattley. After that we decided to make our way home as it was nigh on two hours, arriving home just before 6pm.
