architecture, sun, totaler

Sand castles on the beach at Sitges, as I wrote here while still on holiday,  seem to reflect the architectural style of Gaudi whose La Sagrada Familia cathedral and his domestic architecture are high on the list of the things to see in Barcelona, a few miles along the coast.

On the way to Taunton, the sun, as we proceed in a westerly direction, in the late afternoon,  moves from the left hand to the right hand side of the train, as the line winds through the countryside, following, one supposes, the route originally taken by Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Western Railway.

The occasion is a dinner to celebrate  the 60 years in which the Chapman Family has managed and now owns the  stately Castle Hotel in Taunton.  Now retired, Paul Henderson, a former hotelier who had one of the finest collections of wine in the country, and by all accounts still hangs on to much of it, drinks fruit juice throughout the evening. He was, but no longer is, also also an enthusiastic smoker, and now... " I don't drink any alcohol at all," he says. "I can't do anything by halves. I'm not the sort of person who smokes five cigarettes a day."