Shugborough

Having returned my teenage ward to the bosom of his family, it was time to do old people's stuff. So his dad and I headed off for a day at National Trust property, Shugborough near Stafford. Actually its only part National Trust and part local authority owned. Its two claims to fame are that it was the seat of the Late Lord Patrick Lichfield, royal photographer and it is a complete working estate. It has the big house, flower gardens, landscape gardens littered with follies, but also the supporting farm, mill and walled garden to produce food for the lord. All of which makes it very interesting. And fortunately, on a Monday with showers predicted, not at all busy.

Walled garden with Head  Gardeners House

Blacksmith in residence

Mill complex

Aylesbury Ducks. Delicious

A guinea-pig house

The Tower of the WInds. Used as a gambling den

The sculpture walk is very lacking in sculpture - this mosaic newt being one of the few.

Longhorn cattle

The house from the front gardens

The ruin, curiously built as a ruin, but now in a more ruined, and reduced, stae

The Chinese House

The Cat Monument

And with time to kill before my train home, a little walk round Stafford

Spamalot and Now You See Me

Two athletics sessions aren't really enough to keep a teenager entertained over a weekend, so I threw in a show and a film too.

The show was Spamalot. Safe enough ground if you like Monty Python. Eric Idle had been the least successful of the Monty Python team post Python, at least commercially until he penned this musical based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail, with other Pythonesque bits chucked in with more or less contrivance, such as the Fish dance, the Spam song (fleetingly) and Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. It is all very silly, and the Python stuff is leavened with some very non-Python style material (a lot of puns for example) but it all works as an entertainment. Its biggest strength is just how much the cast seemed to enjoy it, led by Joe Pasquale as King Arthur, not an obvious choice for a musical lead given his lack of a singing voice. But all in all, just very good fun.

Now You See Me is on the surface quite the opposite. A very slick film about a quartet of magicians who are put together to form ever more outrageous Vegas style magic performances, culminating in a Bank raid, performed live on stage. You need to see it. . It is, as I say, very slick and fast-moving, indeed so fast-moving that you don't get the chance to stop for a moment and think that what you have just seen didn't make any sense. I would definitely recommend it though as a fine piece of hokum. Veterans Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman are on the cast list but the real stars are Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg.