Palm Beach - Horringer

It was my day off work today, and I drove over to my parents for lunch. They live in Horringer village and my dad has three bicycles in his shed, which we sometimes take for a ride around Ickworth park. The one in the picture below is named Palm Beach. After a few turns of the peddles today, I realised there was nothing exotic about sitting on this bicycle seat, but carried on.

Horringer is a great village, and I lived there for 25 years, before moving to Bury in 1996. Below is one of many thatched cottages.

When I was 16, around September of 1986, I started my drinking apprenticeship in the Beehive with my best school mate Mike. The landlord and landlady (they still run the place today) hadn't been there long, and served us with no I.D. Anyway we got chatting with two other customers, and I still reminisce with one of them, about the good old days.

New Years eve that year, I took my brother, who was 14 at the time, to the Beehive, who I had been asked to stay home and look after, by my parents while they went out. Well they found out and I was grounded for two weeks, but my brother was chuffed he got a Cider in a pub at that age. I have a picture of the evening, but we're wearing some really bad knitwear, I'm not posting it !

There used to be a ritual on New Years Eve that the clientele at the Six Bells, around the corner, would conga through the pub, at midnight, and pinch the Beehive that sits in the front of the Pub, but its weighed down now.

Ickworth House, Once owned by the Bristol family, now run by the National Trust. The East wing is now a Hotel. Read about the colourful 7th Marquess of Bristol on this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hervey%2C_7th_Marquess_of_Bristol

I spent many hours in my teens fishing on the lake, morning til night, rain or snow. The church in the picture is the one the 7th Marquess of Bristol married in, attended by Elton John. The church is now one of the fifty buildings on the unsafe list, in suffolk.

These are the grape vines located in the area behind the summerhouse, in the picture above this one. They have probably been established here over 12 years now. I sneaked through a gate, they are closed off to the public, and they were only very tiny. It must be our crap summer causing it.

No.5