Festivalwatch II, and a visit to the Cotswolds

Things are hotting up on the Festival front, it's getting busy, busy, busy. These were the scenes from the hide (well, bedroom window) this morning:

Free squash going down a treat

Spot the tout...

And on a completely different note, the Family W took a day trip to the Cotswolds on Sunday. First stop was Burford, a village we have driven through several times and admired from the safety of the car, but somewhere we had never yet stopped. So this time we decided to disembark and investigate whether Burford could be a future home for us.

After careful consideration involving going in to lots of the shops, buying a new cross-stitch project (me, not hubby) and eating a sandwich from Maison Blanc (clearly a monumental decision about our future can't be made on an empty stomach), we came to the conclusion that while Burford is an extremely pretty village (as can be seen from the photos above and below), it's not somewhere that we could see ourselves living due to being a bit too touristy for our liking. It's fine for a place to be 'touristy' when you are a tourist but not so good, we find, if you actually live there.

With that in mind, we then headed off for our fifth return visit to Chipping Norton, the current fave on our list of possible places to live. We made haste directly to the rather lovely bookshop/cafe/artspace that is Jaffe & Neale where we partook of some yummy cake and a hot drink. I was very excited to see that one of my favourite authors - Lindsey Davis - will be making an appearance there in October, so it looks like a return trip is not too far off.

While we were in Jaffe & Neale, the boys did a spot of reading.

DC loves a good book, but in this instance he put up with what his Daddy was reading. Didn't taste quite as good as his own books.