Charleston

A rainy day and we’d booked tickets for Charleston to go and see the Duncan Grant exhibition that has been getting rave reviews. I haven’t been there since the early ‘80s when I knew the family, which must have been only five years or so after Duncan Grant died.  It was much more developed and although the house was unchanged there was a big gallery and a nice cafe alongside. We saw the exhibition first and then were the last into the house.  You are not so much given a guided tour as handed from attendant to attendant who fill you in on each room.  I can see why, there was so many objects in each room that would have been easy to steal.  The garden was lovely, a tapestry of colour and height.  Their cosmos must have been 7 feet high and hollyhocks, rudbeckia and helianthus towered over us.  Of course it’s a walled garden so beautifully sheltered.  The rain stopped and we drove home to the west in blazing setting sun.  Realised through instagram that a friend had been there at the same time but we missed each other, though quite how I don’t know!   He’s very tall and noisy!