Idyllic Picnic in the English Countryside + Books I'm Currently Reading

hi everyone i'm miranda and welcome to my youtube channel and welcome to this week's vlog it's a nice sunny afternoon it's monday today and mom and i want to take advantage of the sunshine and go and have a little picnic in a pretty garden not far from us the weather was really changeable over the weekend so we couldn't do it then but we want to make the most of these last few days of summer before autumn really appears and do a few summery activities so a picnic will be really lovely i've got a few goodies for it let me show you what we've got and we'll bring you along with us so i'll show you what's going in our picnic camper i'm very excited about this so we've got some little victoria sponge cakes here and some strawberries got some more strawberries too clotted cream strawberry and rhubarb jam our scones and some cheese and bread rolls and a little bit of chutney and butter so time to start getting the hamper packed [Music] [Music] so we're here at ripley castle it is absolutely glorious the idyllic place to sit by the river and have a picnic with the castle behind us you can see it there what a perfect summer activity it's really just glorious here's mum hello it's actually gorgeous here it is i hear the ducks it's lovely i know it's just perfect isn't it i'm looking forward to this perfect actually picnic lunch me too this looks so fabulous i think we should dive in definitely [Music] how are you enjoying your bread and cheese it is absolutely delicious perfect picnic food and it's wednesday del cheese as well so what could be better i know very very orchestra yes and isn't this the most blissful setting it is i mean look at that that gorgeous view yeah beautiful round beautiful great big white floppy clouds yes the clouds are gorgeous blue sky we're very lucky yes well this is a perfect summery day to celebrate the end of summer it is i love being by the river the lake part of it yes yeah really beautiful [Music] lovely little cream tea [Laughter] we really managed a wonderful spread you did you did absolutely dashless delicious i just love this it's perfect [Music] so we saw cows approaching and decided [Music] so that was lucky so we just moved off and then um they all came down yesterday that way so i'm glad we were we'd moved yes but now we're in the beautiful walled garden um which is charming i'll show you around [Music] [Music] hi again everyone so we're back we had the most wonderful afternoon it was a perfect picnic it was so much fun i mean ripley castle is such a beautiful spot and it was just a perfect last sort of hurrah of summer for us it was really so much fun the location was gorgeous the picnic was brilliant yeah we really really enjoyed it and the gardens are so beautiful too that world garden and the kitchen garden i wish you could have smelt those sweet peas oh it was just amazing walking between them the scent in the air was just summer really so what a wonderful way to end the summer that was just really really gorgeous i mean hopefully we'll do a couple more summery activities before september for sure but it's just every sunny day feels like very lucky right now we're just really making the most of this end of summer and that was just a perfect afternoon so we really enjoyed it but before i end this vlog i actually wanted to chat to you about a couple of books that i started over the weekend which i thought you might like to hear about as well because so far i'm really enjoying them so i started this world war ii memoir which is called where stands a winged century by margaret kennedy you might remember from my video when i was chatting about my summer to be read pile and sort of compiling a list of books that i wanted to read over the summer and i was having trouble deciding between some non-fiction books and so many of you voted that i should read this one first and i really wanted to read it so i decided to pick it up this last weekend and so far i'm so enjoying it i've read about half already and as you know i love margaret kennedy's writing i recently read the feast by her which i thought was amazing i was so interested to read this memoir which has just been republished by handheld press you can see the cover i think is really lovely i really like handheld press they're a great independent publishing company and this book is made up of journal entries that margaret kennedy wrote from the months of may 1940 to september 1914. so it was an interesting one to read in the summer because it really follows a summer and it's the summer before the blitz started in london and margaret kennedy writes so feelingly so poignantly about that horrible waiting time when all of britain were fearing invasion they were expecting it almost every day they knew that something bad was coming they knew that they would most likely be heavily bombed but they didn't know when it was going to start or quite how and it was so moving to to read this i'm still reading it and i'm i'm just loving it i think it feels very immediate because it is written in the form of journal entries margaret kennedy when she wrote this was already a household name she's become famous for her novel the constant nymph and she'd written several other novels by this point and she wrote quite a few screenplays and things like that as well so she was very well known but interesting in this book she doesn't actually write about her professional career at all so far it really is about her life as a wife and a mother and the concerns that she had during this time she writes about whether she should send her children abroad to the states or canada for safety her feelings about keeping them at home in britain and i find this a really honest account of the way that people thought and felt at that point in how margaret herself was feeling she's very honest about her own emotions she stares several time in this i am terrified and i found that very moving and i really admired her for that as well she sent off for safekeeping the journal entries that she'd made at this time she said in the introduction to this that she had the idea of preserving her account for sort of future generations her great grandchildren so she sent off her journal to a friend of hers in america maybe she did have some idea of publication for a wider audience as well and the book was in fact published in america in 1941 and there are a few notes from 1941 that margaret kennedy has added in um amongst her sort of journal pages from 1940 which are very interesting to read too and when you read both you realize how she had no idea what the future was going to hold what would happen and her incredible bravery um really comes across in this book but it's just so such a fascinating account of a particular time margaret kennedy wrote about how aware she was that she was living through history and i know so many of us have been aware of living through history ourselves in terms of the pandemic over well over a year now which in some ways is comparable to this i mean it's nothing like world war ii nothing like the bombing and everything but this awareness that we are living through history living through this particular historical moment in time is really interesting and kind of connects you back to the past in some way too but yeah i really recommend this i'm so enjoying it and i love her descriptions of nature there are some lighter bits in this too um there's a lot of reflection on the war and her own emotions and on the politics of the time but there are also some funny moments and there are some beautiful descriptions of the natural landscape as well there's a bit in the book where she describes an abundance of hawsan in may and she says it looks like clotted cream and i just love that description or maybe it's just with i've got picnics on my mind right now we just had a great cream tea but i thought that was just such a good description of hawthorne so anyway i'm really enjoying this so far and i'll keep reading this this week and then the other book i started over the weekend is this one the adventurous summer by mabel esther allen you can see the cover it's a bit reflective but hopefully you can see that and it's published by girls gone by publishers so i got a copy because i run their instagram account and maybe lester allen is one of my favorite bygone children's writers i loved her books when i was little and i still enjoy reading them now this is one i've never read before it's very rare so it's great that girls gone by have just republished this one for the first time i think it was first published in the 40s yes it was first published 1948 and it's about a sister and her brother who moved from london to the cotswolds they're sent to live with their uncle and aunt and their young cousin because their parents go off to america it's that typical start to sort of children's books from this time when the parents just make themselves absent and the kids are sort of left or shoved onto relatives which is what happens here and they're rather sad about having to leave london and go and live in the country but when they arrive in the cotswolds they realize that their uncle and aunt live in a really beautiful place they live on a house on sort of on the estate of a much bigger house and they fall in love with the beautiful cotswolds countryside they make friends in the area and one of the friends they make is the daughter of the earl who owns all of the land and lives in the big house on the estate and she's not very happy living with her grandfather the earl she'd much rather go to school but he insists on the governess and she ends up making friends with um the two young children who've been sent to live with their uncle and aunt i can't remember any of their names sorrel that's right yeah a bit of an unusual girl's name sorrell and nicholas and then it's catherine who's the earl's granddaughter they become friends and they form an adventure club with some other young people in the village as well and they decide to have lots of summer adventures together so i haven't got too far in this yet but so far i'm really enjoying it it's just a very charming sweet story and it's my sort of bedtime reading book um which is really nice it's just a very gentle story that's nice to read just before i go to sleep so yes those are the two books that i i started over the weekend i'll keep reading them through the week and hopefully i'll keep liking them but i'll let you know anyway i'm going to end this vlog here but thank you so much for watching i hope you're all having a good start to the week let me know how you are and do give this video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it and you can subscribe to my channel by clicking on my face that pops up on the screen over here but i'll be back again very soon with another video goodbye

Channel: Miranda Mills

Views: 5,470

Keywords: Cottagecore, English Countryside, Picnic at an English Castle, Booktube, Anglophile, Picnic, Picnic Food, slow living, simple living, aesthetic, vintage vibes, cottagecore aesthetic, Picnic food, Bibliophile, Bookish, Bookstagram

Id: noWgUi_95RM

Length: 18min 6sec (1086 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 17 2021