When I first got up this morning and went outside for a short walk, it was cloudy with a brisk, cold wind blowing. I was very glad I had my coat on. Gradually over the day and into the long summer evening it’s got warmer and warmer, and I even got to take my jumper off for a while!

We had a slowish start to the day before we set off for the day’s expedition. Pam had forgotten that the annual Isle of Wight music festival is on now. It’s a huge event, nearly up there with the Glastonbury festival and thousands of people at it. People camp out in fields and go to see the music acts. We even got caught in traffic jams!

We didn’t go to the music festival – we drove on to Osborne House on the northern coast of the island. It was built in the mid-1800s as a holiday residence for Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and their growing family of nine children. (It’s a history part of our holiday for Philip’s benefit.) We had lunch there in a cafe so Philip could have scones, raspberry jam and Cornish clotted cream – a special treat for him.

Philip went inside Osborne House to see how royal people in those days did holidays. He forgot to take any photos.

Pam and I chose to explore the gardens, starting with the Walled Garden, (reminding me of the children’s book The Secret Garden) and walking round the parklands with magnificent, huge trees. I found it awe-inspiring looking up and through these thick, high-arching, dense green forest giants from different parts of the world. Long, sloping swathes of meadow grasses and wildflowers for the bees and the butterflies.

The Walled Garden – for flowers and vegetables

We walked down the valley to the pebbly beach (no waves) where we saw the bathing box used by Queen Victoria. It was winched down to the sea where she would slide into the water with her arms, legs and body carefully covered with her bathing costume and a mop cap on her head. When she was finished, she would go back into the bathing box and it was winched back to the shore.

Queen Victoria’s bathing box

There were deckchairs by the shoreline. My stereotypical picture of an English seashore is people sitting in deckchairs eating ice-creams. So we jumped into the stereotype – and sat in the deckchairs while Philip and Pam ate ice-creams from a nearby ice-cream van, while a gentle sea breeze blew over us. I put my hands into the water to see how cold it felt. Far too cold for me. But there were a couple of people in swimming.

Wandering around the royal residence grounds we also stopped at the Swiss Cottage which was built by Prince Albert for his children as a playhouse! He wanted the children to learn some practical skills. Not sure when they would ever use these skills in real life! Nearby were garden plots where the royal children learnt to grow vegetables. Inside the “cottage” were different rooms like a kitchen, scaled down so they learnt to cook.

The Swiss Cottage – the children’s play house

We live in very different times, and it’s easy for me to see from my angle what a privileged, pampered and (to my eyes) irrelevant life it seemed to be. But so much of how we live nowadays would be put in this same category.

We did have a great time there. The gardens were a feast for all the senses – the colours, the smells, the sounds, the grandeur. I revelled in it.

Driving back to Totland, Pam took a different route back to their house to avoid the music festival crowds. We went across the River Medina at Cowes on a “floating bridge”, also called a chain-link ferry, where the small ferry with cars, bikes and passengers is pulled across the river by a thick, clanking chain to the road on the other side. Back to a wonderful dinner which included home-grown rhubarb and apple crumble!

Bikes and cars coming off the ferry. You can see the thick chain on the right side of the ferry.