We’ve tried hard to see this thing close-up – yesterday we arrived at its gate just as they closed and today we arrived half an hour before they opened and we knew that once they did then we’d only have a short time to see her before having to scoot back to our hotel to check out before their 11am deadline.

She’s the SS Great Britain – the first ever steel-hulled steam ship. She was designed by Brunel – I’ve spoken of his ingenuity before and we stood on the top of the Avon gorge yesterday admiring the Clifton suspension bridge (another demonstration of his brilliance). Mind you, yesterday we walked half-way across the bridge and I was totally paralysed by fear – so much so I was hyper-ventilating. DM had to hold both of my hands and guide me back to ‘safety’. It was a breathtaking experience in the worst way although I was very pleased to have been over the bridge, I think I’ll stick to going over it by car in future.

Anyway, I digress – we spent half-an-hour (not long enough) admiring this beautiful monster now in dry dock in Bristol’s Great Western Dockyard. She’s really something to behold and the team who’ve lovingly restored her after she’d spent many years languishing on a beach in the South Pacific somewhere (the Falklands I think) have done a magnificent job. She’s so beautiful, and not just her decorative bits like this, but her gubbins inside too – I actually spent more time photographing the moving drive shaft and gears than I did the outside. Brunel truly was a genius.

I love the fact that in the past people cared about making things beautiful too and this is a demonstration of that. Mind you, I do think that the dockland developments in Bristol also look like some care has been taken to create beauty as well as utility in what was, I imagine, a pretty grim bit of town before this development started. I can't say for sure that it was, so if it was full of delightful Victorian cottages that have been hacked down to make way for the modern development then please don't hold it against me.

When we got back on the road we did a quick trip to Ikea to buy some desks before heading home – now DM is nearly famous for ‘Ikea Hacking’ I think Ikea should have given us the desks free for the free publicity they’re going to get when the New York Times comes out on Thursday! In case you don’t know what this is all about, DM’s Ikea-Cam was featured on ikeahacker.com and he’s been interviewed and photographed by the New York Times, which is going to be published either tomorrow or next Thursday!

He’s a star!

Last year, we were eating the first of our corn-on-the-cobs - I am not sure that we'll get any ripe ones this year, the plants are only three feet tall and although there are cobs on them, they're nowhere near ripe.