Fletching

This morning James and I checked out of the Ibis and walked to London Victoria Station. On our way to the we saw a red carriage and horses approaching Buckingham Palace. We stopped as they approached and entered the grounds of the Palace, but couldn’t see who was inside, although I did see a waving hand! We checked the court circular later and it may have been the Countess of Wessex. 

We took the train to Haywards Heath and took a taxi to the little village of Fletching in Sussex. It’s very pretty and very old; the Church dates back to the 12th century and our hotel (the Griffin Inn) is an old Coaching Inn which has been here since the 16th century. It is an area that we have never visited before and I would like to come back for a longer visit because it’s beautiful. The weather has been getting distinctly colder over the last couple of days and there has been some snowfall around Britain. We only saw a very few flakes of snow here in Sussex but there was a very chilly wind. What a difference from the unseasonably warm weather over the past week! We went for a walk around the village and along a path towards Piltdown; back at our hotel we looked from its gardens over the South Downs, known to locals as the “Sussex Serengeti” because of all the grazing animals that you can see in summer. Today we only saw a few cows, munching grass in the sunshine. 

We had dinner in the cosy bar of the hotel and were pleased that our table was right beside the log-burning stove, which was very cheery. The hosts were very friendly and the bar was busy. We couldn’t help overhearing an interesting conversation from a nearby table from some people who I think were members of the church choir, and we’re talking about music and bell-ringing and of course some juicy church gossip.