Capital Ring

Dave and I have just spent our most middle-aged weekend yet. We've taken it upon ourselves to walk the entire length of the Capital Ring over the course of the summer. We started at Wembley Park and walked all the way back to Crouch End, a distance of approximately ten miles. I don't think the Capital Ring circuit really takes you through the most attractive greenery of North London - the path completely misses out Hampstead Heath, Waterlow Park and Alexandra Palace, for example, and often you are walking through some terribly suburban housing estates. However, we did get to meander along a couple of unknown brooks through Hampstead Garden Suburb, see a duck-filled reservoir in Brent and enjoy the bluebells in Highgate Woods.

And today, since we have just spent £640 servicing and insuring Little Car for another year (Mum's old car - it needed a home so we abandoned some of our environmental credentials and adopted it), we took it on a "little run out" to the country. The country surrounding High Wycombe and the M40 in fact, where we visited two National Trust properties, Hughenden Manor and Cliveden. How lovely National Trust properties are - they have clean toilets and cake-laden cafes for the middle-aged to elderly ladies, a fair amount of history and romantic imaginings for those who fancy themselves as Jane Austen heroines, a shop to buy twee soap gifts for grandmothers in, country parks and woodland to go walking through, and lots of freshly mown mounds for children to roll down. The latter was something my brother and I took very seriously as kids, and I was delighted to see that the tradition still continues in subsequent generations today.

Yes, we are proud to be entering our middle age, with a wealth of stately homes left to explore.