A trip to England, at roughly this season, has become an annual institution, and for the last week and a bit, we've been based in Newark, Nottinghamshire.

This year, the weather has been all over the place, starting ridiculously cold but warming considerably as the days went by.

As always, there's been much to enjoy (over and above the family catch-up which is the trip's raison d'etre, and despite the need to set aside time for work).

Spring here might be cold at times, but it's always incredibly beautiful, and blossom and birdsong are among my enduring memories of England.

And when the warmth finally arrives, it's as though the whole of nature is staging a festival.





I've been documenting these English sorties for a while now (in 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014). A common theme is that we enjoy re-experiencing the familiar just as much as we enjoy exploring the new.

Take Nottingham's Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, for example. Last visited back in 2012, it offered the tried-and-tested cave decor but also an innovative "BBQ burnt ends beef melt burger" (accompanied by a "beef tongue and cheek croquette, Croxton Manor rarebit, and tomato relish"). Very fine. Do you know what "burnt ends" are? I didn't either. But here is your answer. You definitely need a big glass of the Jerusalem's Merlot to go with them.







And did you know Lord Byron is buried in Hucknall, just a tram ride from Nottingham? I didn't either. (Below are the commemorative marker and the pretty churchyard. There's more inside which we did not see. Next time...)











(A quick internet foray reveals the versatility of this extraordinary poet, whose work ranges from the humorous through the weird to the totally chilling. Not everything might have succeeded, but if it fails, it fails in a riproaring way.)

Since Nigel last visited Lincoln Castle, it has acquired a number of new exhibits (including a sarcophagus unexpectedly unearthed during some refurbishment). As well as paying homage to one of the four ancient copies of the Magna Carta, you can walk the walls, and read the poignant stories of the captives held in its prisons.

















And so it goes. Old and new. Old things, newly experienced.

Lincolnshire plum loaf paired with Stilton. Scotch eggs. The last, lovingly restored Trent barge...







Then there are oatcakes. No, not the small, crispy, Scottish things. Derbyshire oatcakes, which are a big, nicely chewy cross between a pancake and a crumpet. They're great wrapped around cheese, or as an accompaniment to a cooked breakfast, or just with butter and marmalade.

We bought ours in Ripley, an unpretentious and very pleasant little Derbyshire settlement that is reputedly the country's "most English town"...

Be that as it may, Ripley offers a view-rich hill-top location, and lots of handsome red brick. It is also home to the admirable Seafish restaurant. Smart but down-to-earth, this place served up a great plate of crumbed haddock, "chippy chips", and mushy peas (plus my first cider of the trip).







Byron's exile means there's an elegiac quality about much of his verse. It's adieu, not au revoir. He doesn't see himself as coming back. By contrast, there's nothing final about our absence, and we keep popping in again. Even so, there is a nostalgic quality about our expeditions here. We once lived here, but live here no longer; it's beautiful, yet it's changing, and no-one knows what it's changing into; so much is timeless, yet there is an undercurrent of impermanence.

In lines addressed to a beloved elm in a Harrow churchyard, Byron writes:

Spot of my youth! whose hoary branches sigh,
Swept by the breeze that fans thy cloudless sky...
How do thy branches, moaning to the blast,
Invite the bosom to recall the past,
And seem to whisper, as they gently swell,
"Take, while thou canst, a lingering, last farewell!"

We'll see all these places again (if we're spared, as Dad would have said). But there's a fragility about every place. It will never be precisely like THIS ever again. All our moments, anywhere, are like little time capsules. All the more reason to seize them...