If you live in or near Cirencester, or are visiting, I recommend this little gem of a place.
A new food outlet opened recently in Cirencester; we hadn’t had a chance to try it – until now. Burrito Mama is small, but very, very good.
Donna and I popped in at lunch time today to see what it was like. What we found was friendly, prompt service, lovely Mexicanesque decor, good coffee, tables inside and out, and an interesting menu. And when the food arrived it was nicely served and absolutely delicious. I chose their Ancho chilli asada mushrooms, and Donna went for the Honey chipotle chicken bowl. Both were great.
If you live in or near Cirencester, or are visiting, I recommend this little gem of a place. Check out their website online. Scroll down and take a look around. Book online or just pop in if they have space available. Locals will know where the Swan Yard is, very central, just beyond the west end of the Market Place.
Overall assessment… We’ll be back as soon as we have another opportunity!
In May 2022 we visited St Neots in Cambridgeshire, our home town before moving to Cirencester where we live today. We were visiting friends for a big party in their local village hall.
Pretending to be on a tropical beach
The whole thing was themed for a Caribbean feel, and we all had our photos taken against a backdrop of palm fronds, a golden beach, and sparkling sea dotted with distant islands.
In May 2021 I took a photo of this plaque in Black Jack Street, Cirencester. It commemorates 1900 years of the town’s existence, founded by the Roman invaders in 75 AD. I wonder what they’d make of it now?
The phoenix rising from the ashes has long been Cirencester’s emblem. Corinium, as the Romans called it, was a frontier settlement in 75 AD and the years immediately following, but it grew to become the regional capital of south western Britain – the province of Britannia Prima.
In May 2018 I wrote about the work going on in our new house. The builders had done much of the work on the new extensions, but nothing was finished yet and a lot of our possessions were inaccessible – including our summer clothes. And the weather was getting warmer and warmer!
In May 2013 I was reading ‘The Shaping of Things to Come’, an excellent book by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch. Amongst other things, they remark on the fact that Jesus was a Jew, the New Testament was written almost entirely by Jewish authors (the exception being Luke), and the earliest church (in Jerusalem) was Jewish in nature too. If we are to understand Jesus, the New Testament, and the church, we have to pay attention to their Jewishness. Read the original post.
May 2008 – We had a holiday in Catalonia and visited Barcelona where we took a look at the famous Sagrada Familia with its amazing ‘biological’ shapes. What an astonishing place it is!
To learn more about this wonderful feat of design and engineering by the architect Antoni Gaudi, read the Wikipedia article.
In May 2003 I was reminded about the significance of rivers and their behaviour and about the river in the books of Ezekiel and Revelation. Life is not about the mundane things we do from day to day, and we don’t get far by our own abilities. Real life has an essentially spiritual focus. I wrote a blog post about a meeting that helped me see these things more clearly.
May 1998 saw me designing an automated news website for internal use by research teams at Unilever. I’d only been in the job for a month, and I already had an overall mechanism in mind and was working on the programming required.
In May 1993 we made some very large bubbles in the back garden. We had a special bubble-making kit with a large fabric loop on the end of a wand. It was an amazing process! The picture shows my daughter Beth and nephew Tom experimenting with a bubble.
In May 1988 I was working at Long Ashton Research Station near Bristol, developing techniques for imaging water droplets on waxy leaves by rapid freezing and scanning electron microscopy. This led to a paper on the topic.
In May 1978 I borrowed a friend’s car (we didn’t have a car at the time) and drove with a very excited daughter to visit her baby sister at Bristol Maternity Hospital.
In May 1968 I was in lodgings in Pershore, working on a fruit and vegetable farm nearby as part of my undergraduate degree at Bath University. It was a sandwich course in horticulture, and the summers were the industrial experience part of the course.
I sum these topics up on my Twitter profile as biology, web, science, technology, family, faith, history, and travel.
Having recently restarted blogging after a long pause, I’ve been thinking through how best to move forward – what should I change, what should I drop, and what should I keep?
Today’s post explains some of this, I’ll share what I’m doing and what I plan to do next. I’ll consider any comments you may leave, either here on the blog, or on Twitter or Facebook. But here’s how I see things right now.
Buy me a coffee
I’m offering everything I publish for free, but will always be delighted to receive a small gift, especially if you have sold or republished something (though even then it’s optional). Details are at coffee.scilla.org.uk .
Cruising the Gospel
This is a moribund blog that I’m in the process of restarting. I’m not sure yet whether to continue it in its present form, or to roll it into Journeys of Heart and Mind (JHM) as a topic in its own right. Currently I’m inclined to keep it as it is, and perhaps generate some PDFs from each book I complete. See it at gospel.scilla.org.uk .
Gateway
My Gateway site is mainly for my own use, but it’s full of links about Cirencester (my home town in England), local time and weather, some Christian links, local and national news, science and technology links and so forth. Some of you might like to take a peek. If so, head to gate.scilla.org.uk .
JDMC
JDMC stands for Jesus, Disciple, Mission, Church and is an introduction to Alan Hirsch’s Forgotten Ways. To learn more and download a copy to print (or read online), visit jdmc.scilla.org.uk . I need to update this booklet and plan to when I have time, unfortunately the web links in the PDF open OK, but using the browser to return take you back to the title page; I’ve been unable to fix this so far. If you open the links in a new tab you’ll be OK, but it’s easy to forget.
Journeys of Heart and mind
I intend to continue with this more or less as it stands. That means a mix of topics will appear here, articles about all of the things that motivate me as they occur to me (so in no particular order). I sum these topics up on my Twitter profile as biology, web, science, technology, family, faith, history, and travel. Others include photography, astronomy, spaceflight, archaeology and a few more. One thing I will add is a way of seeing just posts on one of these topics at a time, I think that will be useful; not everyone wants to see everything. You’re reading on this site at the moment.
Photos
I use Smugmug to display my photos and will continue with this, but I need to rearrange things in topic folders to make it more usable. Visit photos.scilla.org.uk to browse my all time favourites.
Twitter
My main Twitter account is ChrisJJ, but I have a second account, JHM. I haven’t used the JHM account for a long while, but might post tweets about faith topics there, and everything else on ChrisJJ. My mind is far from made up on this as there are quite a few pros and cons.
The stonework to turn doorways into windows suggests a change of use at some time after the building was first erected
This dilapidated, old building, of lovely Cotswold limestone (including the roof) stands inside Cirencester Park at the end of Barton Lane. It’s part of The Barton Farm, along with the ancient nearby dovecote and magnificent, old barn.
But what was its original purpose? If it could speak it would no doubt have an interesting tale to tell. What might it say?
A row of cottages
I was row of cottages, full of the sounds of children playing in the sunshine, chopping and stirring sounds from a kitchen table indoors, smoke rising into the air from my chimneys. How many families lived in me? How many were born here, lived and worked here, died here?
Stables
I was a row of stables, my partly built up doorways were once open and inside each one was a stall for a horse. Inside I would have smelled of horses, sweat, droppings, and in a room at the back I would have had the aroma of well cared-for leather – saddles, harness, heavy collars for pulling.
Storage shed
I was a place where valuable implements were stored and cared for. Oiled steel hoes, shovels, spades and rakes with well-worn wooden handles. An old plough, a harrow, scythes. Or perhaps I was used to store fruit from the orchard, and sacks of seed for sowing crops in winter or spring.
A base for farm workers
I was a bothy where the farm workers would gather to eat bread and cheese and perhaps a mug of cider. I’d be used for breakfast, a mid morning break, or a mug of hot tea on a cold afternoon, a shelter from heavy rain. Perhaps there was banter, silly tasks given to the youngest worker, ‘Go and fetch me the glass hammer from the big house, ask the Master for it – politely like’.
There are some clues
The stonework to turn doorways into windows suggests a change of use at some time after the building was first erected. There are two brick chimneys, so clearly there were regular fires. Maybe the far end was a dwelling while the right end was a workshop, or a smithy, or a place for basket-making, or laundry.
If you have other thoughts on what this place might once have been, or you live locally and know for sure, why not leave a comment?
The sun came out and brightened everything up, even the puddles seemed more cheerful
I spend quite a bit of time in Cirencester so sometimes there are short stories to tell (tales), and I walk a lot in and around the local area (trails). Some of these might be interesting, fun, or even useful.
Puddles in the sunshine
Today the weather has been quite mixed, a sort of shall I/shan’t I go out. There was a good deal of rain in the morning, but it cleared a bit by mid morning and I decided to dodge the showers and walk down from Stratton where I live; I got a bit damp on the way, but not really wet. I had a couple of items of food shopping to do, so visited Tesco for those, then it began to rain again and I popped into Fora for coffee and to stay dry.
Walking home afterwards, the sun came out and brightened everything up, even the puddles seemed more cheerful. The Dexter cattle in the field west of the Gloucester Road didn’t apparently care about the weather, they didn’t even mind the fact that parts of their field have now become ponds, or even small lakes!
