As long as you're ready to pay for your pleasure, Lucerne is heavenly

Two things are immediately obvious about Lucerne: it is almost impossibly beautiful, and it is breath-takingly expensive.

That's an observation from someone who lives in the orbit of one of the world's most most expensive cities. When London looks like a bargain, you know your credit card is in trouble.

As a basic point of comparison, a 14-piece take-away box of assorted sushi from London's Itsu chain costs £8. In Lucerne, something similar will cost you £28. Our hotel was the most basic I can remember staying in since student trips in the early '80s; that will set you back £130 a night. Transport and admissions are equally pricy. Want to go up the local mountain by cog railway and down by cable car? £75 per person. (For more on that adventure, read this.) A pretty, hour-long boat ride to reach the starting point of that trip? Another £26 each. The cheapest bottle of wine at a local, non-touristy pizzeria is almost £40. And so on. Lucerne is not for the faint hearted or the lightly-funded.

The fact that the whole place is so utterly beguiling gets you past the sticker shock. After a while, you just shrug, enjoy, and accept that you need to pay for your pleasures. It's the deal you have to cut to enter this Alpine utopia.

Mountain lakes have a special kind of beauty. Dramatic peaks ring jewel-toned, crystal-clear water. Cows graze ludicrously green fields. Onion-domed churches and flower-decked, peaked-roof farmhouses dot the slopes.

Lucerne kicks these norms up a notch. The town straddles the Reuss river, which is famously crossed by two medieval wooden bridges. It's framed by a steep hill still crowned by the old city wall and several watch towers Elegant hotels and charming local architecture jostle for riverfront space. Like Bavaria, the indigenous building style favours lavishly-frescoed exterior walls and exuberant iron work for balconies and shop signs. There is modern architecture here. Some of it, like the waterside Cultural Centre near the train station, is strikingly bold. But it's done sparingly and with exceptional good taste.

There's very little industry to cloud the view ... or, indeed, many signs of people living beneath the upper 10%. A boat ride around the lake, which is a must-do for any visitor, reveals an environment so perfectly engineered is seems created by Disney. There are striking homes in a variety of styles: mostly either bel époque, traditional mountain chalet or the kind of sleek modernism found in design magazines. Even the garden allotments look perfect, with all the plants in serried rows, weeds banished and tiny, beautifully maintained little sheds all flying Swiss flags.

There is no rubbish. No graffiti. No potholes in the road. I saw no homeless people. Where do they sweep all the unattractive problems? Are the misfits locked in some chamber beneath a mountain, banished like the children in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? It's a mystery. Truth be told, I think actually living here ... assuming you could afford it ... could feel a bit repressive. But it's an idyllic place to

spend a long weekend.

WALKING TOUR
The greatest joy of Lucerne is to be had by simply walking around. The city is marvellously compact, with all of its main sites being within not much more than a square mile. Playing to this advantage, the city is strewn with benches and outdoor cafes.  The local tourist department produces a booklet with a map of a suggested route that loops the essentials. You can do a comprehensive walking tour in a day, though we broke our exploration into three parts over our long weekend. (Each, unsurprisingly, ending up at the same microbrewery with a magnificent riverside view. Of that, more in the next entry.)

First, wander down the Reuss, taking in the medieval bridges with their striking paintings in the long procession of roof trusses. The Kapelbrücke, closer to the lake and with a sharp change in direction where a stone watch tower breaks its flow, is more famous, but I prefer the Spreuerbrücke with its striking scenes of the Danse Macabre. One assumes privileged Luzerners throughout history have benefitted from the skeletons cavorting with the rich and powerful, reminding them that death comes to us all. In between the two bridges you'll find the Jesuit Church, a particularly bright and cheerful version of Northern Baroque. The ornate plasterwork owes more to Chinese wallpaper than traditional religious iconography: look for peacocks hiding in the curlicues.

The old town on the north side of the Reuss is decorated with a range of painted buildings that elevate the historic centre to an outdoor art gallery. The style and freshness of colour on many of these buildings suggests the painting is from ... or at least, was restored in ... the 20th century, but all the themes conjure old world elegance. Lots of happy hunters and elegantly dressed burgers and their ladies feasting amidst wreaths of Renaissance-style foliage and flying putti. Cobbled lanes open into picturesque little squares decorated with fountains ornamented with statues. Knights, their ladies and fairy tale figures spout water, their features painted and gilded as if the craftsman just stepped away from his creation.

On another expedition, we climbed up through quiet, leafy residential streets to the line of medieval walls. You can keep climbing up several different towers: we chose the Männliturm for astonishing views. You can supposedly see 74 different Alpine peaks from up here. and you get an up-close view of the eponymous "little man", actually a towering knight holding a pennant who watches over the city.

Back down at the lake level, a promenade along the northern side of the waterfront beyond the mouth of the river reveals another kind of town. This is all 19th century: like Cannes, a town built for well-heeled tourists. Grand hotels look over a tree-lined boulevard to a wide promenade dotted with fanciful light posts and a grand band shell. The opulent architecture of the waterfront hides a modern section of the town that is perhaps Lucerne's least charming, but it's there you'll find its most iconic image.

An enormous, weeping lion (the Löwendenkmal) is carved into a rock face above a still pool. Two centuries of visitors, including famous American author Mark Twain, have written about the sculpture's ability to stir emotion. It commemorates a slaughter of Swiss Guards who died defending the French king during the revolution. The sculptor is Bertel Thorvaldson, the Danish master who's known as the Northern Canova. (It was like stumbling on an old friend; one of Piers' cousins is a curator at Thorvaldson's museum in Copenhagen. Read about it here.) This would be a remarkably peaceful place if it weren't for the bus tours that disgorge scores of visitors every few minutes. Grab a bench and wait. Few of them linger for much longer than it takes to snap a few selfies in front of the grieving feline. If you can hit a window in between groups, this is a zen-like place of soul soothing.

AT HOME WITH WAGNER
Beyond the walking tour route is one more sight that will be of interest only to ardent opera fans. Richard Wagner, fleeing from debt and living on the largess of fans with Swiss properties, spent some of his most productive years in Switzerland. He lived in a gracious villa on Lake Lucerne that sits on a small promontory with a magnificent sweep of lawns leading down to the lake. Here, while composing the foundations of his Ring cycle, he also hosted famous visitors like King Ludwig of Bavaria and Frederick Nietzsche.

Today it's a museum, set in a park at the back of a community sports complex out in the suburbs. At £8, admission is cheap for Lucerne, but that's because there's not a great deal here. Besides inspiring views, the ground floor ... which is still decorated in classic 19th century style ... has a collection of portraits and some cases showing off Wagner memorabilia. There are musical scores, personal correspondence and personal effects like his trademark hat and velvet jacket. I was most interested in photos and promotional posters from early productions of The Ring, revealing effete Siegfrieds and beefy Brunhildes in heavy medieval costume. How times have changed!

By the time you get upstairs they've run out of artefacts, so this floor has videos and a temporary exhibit. You can watch videos on Wagner's life and extracts of live performances. There's currently a show on a comic book about Wagner's life. How it came about from concept through production, with lots of commentary from the illustrator on the choices made for drawing style. It's fair to say the appeal is fairly limited. I did enjoy, however, their attempt at hands-on participation. You can sit down and try your hand at some cartooning, following boards with step-by-step instructions, while listening to a Wagner playlist.

On the day of our visit, admission also included a piano recital. Unfortunately, the lady who sold us the tickets forgot to mention that it would be preceded by a 45-minute lecture in German, and that there would be no Wagner on the programme.

I shouldn't have been surprised. In Lucerne, you pay for your pleasure, one way or another.

A spectacular mountain ascent looms over the home of my Swiss ancestors

We've always known the starting points of my American immigrant ancestors' journeys. But identifying a point on a map from understanding a place.

As I've traveled more in Europe, I've gotten a sense of these places of origin. For a person who's had an affinity, and longing, for the sea all my life, it's ironic that my four ancestor famies all came from landlocked bits of their nations. Even more surprising is that two turn out to be proper mountain people. For a child of rivers and plains, who'd hardly ever laid eyes on a mountain until recently, thinking that my DNA springs from such vertiginous landscapes is a stretch. And yet, that's reality.

Last weekend I traveled to Alpnach, the small village outside of Lucerne from which my paternal grandfather's family came, on a journey of discovery with my father. It was the first time anyone from our line of the family had been back.  Taking in the glorious view before us, I wondered if those immigrants were at all disappointed with the comparatively placid landscape of the Missouri and Mississippi river valleys. I love my home town, but in visual appeal it pales to insignificance beside this emerald valley encircled by saw-tooth peaks.

I felt a mixture of awe and unease; the strangeness (to me) of mountains always gives me a slight, jittery discomfort. Did Franz Melchior Wallimann felt the same in St. Louis, as he swapped the solid walls of his mountain valley for an indistinct, limitless horizon that landed somewhere beyond the rolling hills and river?

Lacking diaries, we will never know. Nor will we know why he and his family abandoned what appears to have been a stable and prosperous place. They certainly left plenty of people behind, as the family name is all over the modern cemetery and several current businesses. I think we can assume, however, that Alpnach was as boring as it was beautiful. Though the town name appears in documents as early as the 10th century, a walk around the place shows little built before the very late 19th, and probably early 20th, centuries. Only the farmhouses up in the hills give off a sense of real antiquity. I imagine Alpine beauty can pale beside a life of farm labour, limiting social life to your family and never meeting anyone who comes from beyond the valley.

Ironically, everything was changing for Alpnach right about the time our family left. The Romantic movement had taken Europe by storm, giving the educated classes a new taste for dramatic landscapes and the picturesque. Turner had painted his way through the Alps early in the 19th century; a one-man promotional bonanza. Thomas Cook established tours of the country in the 1840s and Queen Victoria spent a season in Lucerne in 1868 trying to shake off the gloom of her widowhood. The 49-year-old royal even ascended 2,128 metre Mount Pilatus by horseback. Well-heeled tourists followed. By 1889 the Swiss had established an engineering marvel to entertain them. The cog railway that ascended at 48% (still a world record) allowed anyone to follow in Victoria's mountain-climbing footsteps. The Mount Pilatus Railway starts in Alpnach.

Who knows? Maybe our Wallemanns were misanthropes who decided to clear out when their valley got too popular. Somewhere along the journey they also left behind the middle "i", starting to use an "e" instead. At the Alpnach source, everyone is Wallimann.

Alpnach itself is a bit of a misnomer. It's not one place, but a loose string of three villages that fill a bowl-shaped valley with about 6,000 residents. (There were fewer than 1,800 in the valley when the Wallemanns left.) Alpnachstad boasts the Pilatus railway station and the little harbour onto Lake Alpnach, at the end of which, through a narrow channel between mountain slopes, you pass into Lake Lucerne and can travel on to the big city. This is the prettiest bit of Alpnach, where you'll find the greatest concentration of charming Victorian architecture. It presumably sprang up at about the same time as the railway.

Just up the road, in the flat bottom of the valley, is the population centre of Alpnach Dorf, where you'll find the big church (an early 20th century take on Northern Baroque), grocery stores and a handful of restaurants. Grain silos ... one still prominently labeled "Wallimann" ... and lumber yards suggest the region's historic livelihood. A couple of modern hotels catering to hikers and the small airfield that's home to a branch of the Swiss Air Force presumably helps the modern economy. Although from the affluent look of the place I suspect there are plenty of corporate commuters here. Both Alpnachstad and Alpnach Dorf have stations with frequent trains sweeping you to Lucerne in just 20 minutes. A bit further up the valley an outlying cluster of houses around a second, smaller church is called Schoried. Traditional farmhouses of dark wood with peaked roofs and shuttered windows encircle the heights above the trio of villages, looking after herds of cows grazing on rich Alpine grasses. I little river called the Schliere bisects the valley, running down from the mountains to feed the lake. It is a sleepy, pretty, obviously affluent and remarkably quiet place.

The Pilatus Railway remains a major tourist attraction and is the only reason most foreigners travel to Alpnach. It should be on every Lucerne visitors' priority list, but brace yourself for the price. You'll pay about £60 ($78) to go up and down the mountain ... presumably it takes a lot of cash to maintain the precision engineering that gets you up and down ... and another £20 ($26) for the boat ride out from Lucerne. Switzerland is not for the budget traveler. But if you've got the cash and appreciate spectacular views, it's worth every penny.

Though you can zip out to Alpnachstad on the much cheaper (£6, $8) and faster train, the boat is part of the whole experience. Cruisers take off from just outside the central train station regularly and take a zig-zagging meander across Lake Lucerne for an hour. Lucerne itself is magical from any angle, but particularly breathtaking from the water. From the centre of the lake you can better appreciate everything from the towering mountains and imposing monasteries to onion-domed churches and holiday villas. There's a mix of architecture here, from traditional Swiss straight out of the pages of Heidi to classic Edwardian grandeur and a lot of sleek modern stuff. From the water, it looks like everyone here sits comfortably in the world's top 10% of earners.

This is particularly true as you pull up to the dock at Bürgenstock where a sprawl of buildings so cute they could have been designed by Disney fronts a cog railway that whisks visitors to the luxury resort on the cliffs above. It's positioned exactly opposite, though high above, Lucerne, giving spectacular views along with clean mountain air. (Qatari investors recently funded a £400m+ renovation; you can check it out for a starting price of £700 a night.) I recognised those cliffs. Thirty two years before, when I was travelling around Europe after university with $20 of spending money a day and staying in places a good deal more humble, we'd splurged on a dinner cruise that dropped anchor beneath the cliffs. A local, kitted out in leather shorts and boiled wool jacket, let loose on an Alpenhorn and demonstrated the lake's magnificent acoustics. I suspect that memory is worth more than a stay at the Bürgenstock. Not that I'd mind it, if someone else were paying.

Things get a little more "real" as you pass into Lake Alpnach and spot a bit of heavy industry to one side. The gravel pit and quarry implies that someone actually does physical labour here, and might make less than an investment banker. On the other side of the lake, however, are brand new apartments marketing the yacht space below that comes with your new digs.

Its just a short walk from the boat to Pilatus station and, this being Switzerland, it's all perfectly timed so that rail cars are waiting for the boat passengers.

The ascent itself feels like a merger between a lift (elevator) and a train. The cars are built at a steep incline, with each 8-person compartment positioned about four feet below the next. Surprisingly, the operation of the huge metal cogs is almost silent, remarkably smooth and fairly quick. At first, you're beguiled by the houses and the airfield in the valley below dwindling to dollhouse proportions. Then you clear a ridge and the whole sweep of Lake Lucerne opens up beside you. Long views alternate with passages through tunnels hewn from the stone and thick forests. It's a a mix of elm, oak and pine, later only the last. As the trees start to thin, you come into the meadows, where cows go about their milk-making duties and Alpine flowers dot the grasses. The track has curved, so you've now lost Lake Lucerne and are looking down into Alpnach. As you go above the treeline, heather comes to dominate the vegetation, house-sized boulders scatter the landscape and sheer walls of rock rise above you. This is where the incline slopes to its record-breaking 48 percent. It is spectacular, and over far too soon.

On clear days, of course, you can see for miles. We ascended into a cloud. Though the views were good for 90% of the journey, By the end we could only make out things about four feet in front of us. We didn't see the station as much as feel it when the train reached the end of its line.

Up top is a modern concrete and glass visitor centre with terraces, cafe and gift shop. There are walks across the peaks for hikers, though only an idiot would have ventured onto them with the visibility we had. There are also two hotels, and it's to one of these that we retired for a leisurely lunch in the clouds.

The Hotel Pilatus Klum opened a year after the railway and saw a full restoration in 2010 to bring it back to its original Victorian splendor. It's a classic aristocratic hunting lodge: hard woods, glazed tiles, enormous fireplaces, lots of antlers. The total lack of view gave us a chance to focus fully on a magnificent lunch, which was firmly drawn from local tradition and served by a strapping, rosy-cheeked lad who looked like he could easily chop down a few trees and haul some cows over mountain passes as soon as he finished with the easier business of giving us our lunch. (For more on the food, see my restaurant review coming soon.)

You have a choice on your descent: back down the cog rail or transfer to a cable car. (Or walk, of course. You can get off at multiple stops on the way up or down for Alpine strolls.) We switched to the cable car, which brings you down the other side of the mountains into the suburbs of Lucerne, making for a pleasant round trip. Our first few minutes started in cloud so thick you'd be terrified if a plane attempted to take off or land in it. We could see one or two metres of cable, then nothing. Then, quite suddenly, we emerged from the cloud and the whole valley of Lucerne spread below us. This side of the mountain is gentler, more heavily forested and liberally threaded with hiking paths. Half-way down, you reach a station where you switch from the room-sized, large-group car to four-seaters reminiscent of amusement parks of my youth. (Why did Disney take the cable cars out of Fantasy Land?) Had we had more time, this is where I would have happily gotten off and spent an hour walking before continuing down the mountain. But the day was getting on and a combination of rich food and white wine was suggesting nap rather than exercise, so we pushed on.

There is, however, a pretty little walk from the cable car terminus in Kriens to the Lucerne bus. It winds down through a residential area, past a pretty church, a traditional farmhouse and barn with dairy fields and a traditional Alpenhorn workshop whose proprietor, sadly, was already enjoying his Saturday afternoon so we could only admire through the window. Back on the flat, you emerge onto a main street just up from the bus stop. All of which was clearly signposted from the terminus,  with classic Swiss organisation. The No. 1 whisks you back to Lucerne central station in about 15 minutes.

We'll never know how many of our ancestors wandered that mountainside, but it's a safe bet they did. Who knows. Maybe Franz Melchior followed his herds up to the plateau that would become the Hotel Pilatus-Klum. Maybe he looked down on the spectacular, but then nearly-empty Alpnach valley and thought he needed to get out of the most boring place in the world. Sadly, the one thing we know he did not do was think to invest in the cog railway, the steamer line that brought tourists to it or a posh little hotel on the summit. Had he done that, we might have been enjoying the profits of the day rather than spending a fortune to enjoy it.

I forgive you, great-grandfather Franz. At least you gave me an excuse for a spectacular day out with your grandson.

Ickworth, Wimpole show off East Anglia's country house glories

Had life taken just a few turns differently, I might have settled in East Anglia.

My first tentative steps into English life, rather than tourism, happened there. My American employer had a subsidiary in Cambridge, and I managed to plead my way into two week-long assignments there following British holidays in the early '90s. Had they, rather than the London HQ, had longer-term roles, I would have happily started my expat life there. At about the same time I was getting to know my first British office, the man who would become my husband had inherited a quarter share of a farm in Norfolk. Reality called him to London as well, and the family sold up, though a drive by the old place this past weekend did trigger fantasies of me, freelancing after a career of tech marketing in Cambridge, married to a blackcurrant farmer and producing my line of boutique prosciutto from heritage-breed pigs. It could have happened...

Instead, this area is mostly a vivid memory imprinted by the typical, high-intensity explorer mode of my youth. I packed more tourism into the four weekends and 10 weeknights around those Cambridge business trips than most people do in years. What I found was quite possibly England's most densely-packed region for country houses, cathedrals and charming villages. While residents of the Cotswolds, Dartmoor or the Lake District might sneer at the flat landscape, the fens have a moody charm and there are some lovely beaches.

And yet, aside from one girls' trip in 2010, I've hardly set foot in the region since moving to England permanently in '99. This is primarily because of how inaccessible it is, thanks to Britain's overstretched transport networks. Though it's only 120 miles from our house to Cambridge, that will take you about four and a half hours if you hit the typical jams on the M4, 25 and 11. (Three on the rare traffic-free run.) Trains are expensive, uncomfortable and demand the hassle of a cross-London transfer. A journey requires a good excuse. And now we have one. A dear friend is about to "marry in" to the county, so we headed to her new village of Great Hockham for a long weekend.

The sightseeing options from here are vast. Bury St. Edmunds ... home and site of the martyrdom of England's original patron saint ... has an atmospheric town centre, a romantic ruined abbey and a modern sculpture trail commemorating Edmund's story. Newmarket is the home of British horse racing. Cambridge, of course, has all the dreaming spires, culture, punting and architecture of Oxford, but is slightly less overrun by tourism. Cromer, the nearest beach town, is famous for its crabs. Duxford offers one of the world's best aerospace museums, which I wrote about here.

On this visit, and having barely used my National Trust membership this year, I opted for countryhouses: Ickworth on the way up, Wimpole Hall on the way back. Both are spectacular examples of late Georgian/Regency style and, I wager, would be far better known if they were easier to get to. Distance does. however, have its advantages. Neither were particularly crowded, even on a weekend at the heart of school summer holidays.

Ickworth is unique for its enormous central rotunda. Intended as an impressive space for entertaining and showing off collections, it was designed by an imported Italian architect and is clearly meant to channel monumental ancient architecture with its ascending orders of columns and Parthenon-style external friezes. The result is a bit ungainly. Out of proportion with the wings on either side of it, the rotunda looks more like a museum or civic building than a gracious country house. But its sheer quirkiness makes it worth a wander.

The entry hall is particularly magnificent, soaring up the full height of the building beneath the dome, the space broken by a series of landings and fly-overs. Not only decorative, the landings along the upper stories are all lined with bookshelves, making the space a rather magnificent multi-story library.  The thing I remembered most from a visit here 20 years ago, however, was the Pompeii room. It's still just as striking, though two more decades of European tourism have given me the perspective to find it just a bit less unique than I thought it was, and in far worse repair than I remembered. Still, it's one of the earliest examples of the fad for copying what archeologists were digging up beneath Vesuvius, and it's gorgeous. I had not remembered the extensive collection of family silver, which is one of the best held by the National Trust.  One of the most amusing things about Ickworth, however, is simply checking out how its decorators worked with the challenge of curved outer walls. In some spaces, like the dining room, it throws proportion off and seems decidedly odd. But it enhances the drawing room to make it a dramatic spectacle.

Most of Ickworth came together during the Regency, that brief but critical inflection point between the Georgians and the Victorians. I adore this style. You have all the scholarly classicism of the Georgians, but it's tempered with a sense of humour and fun. And while it anticipates the lavish use of fabrics and pattern, and random mix of historic styles so beloved of the Victorians, it does it with a much lighter, airier touch. Wimpole Hall is an even better example.

The most memorable interiors here are the work of Sir John Soane, who went on to be one of the go-to architects of the early Victorian age and is now remembered best for his Bank of England building (based on a grand Roman baths complex) and his house-turned-museum. There's a marvellous story of how the owner of Wimpole, while on his Grand Tour, noticed an Englishman obsessively measuring the ruins at Paestum. It was Soane. When it came time for home remodelling a few years later, that sort of attention to detail meant Soane got the call.

Though this is early work, his obsession with domes and arches ... and mixing them up in interesting ways to bring light into a room through innovative sources ... was already in full flow. He created one of my favourite libraries in England here, with a light-filled ante-room under a series of arches, classical motifs in plaster picked out with grey-and-white delicacy. The house is most famous for his T-shaped, yellow drawing room, the odd angles and tall dome of which demanded the destruction of seven rooms to squeeze it into the framework of the old house.

My favourite, however, is his Roman-inspired indoor swimming pool. Visitors came down a circular stair from the bedroom level to enter a small room with a fireplace, towel racks and arched alcoves. From there, two arches open on curved stairs that sweep down, meeting in the middle on a wooden deck surrounding a deep pool. Not big enough for swimming laps, but eight or 10 people could happily take a dip here at once without crowding. Don't forget to shower before entering the pool! It's a Soane-designed piece of furniture: step inside the four wooden columns and beneath the round water tank (mahogany decorated with classical motifs) and pull the chain; water will drain through a lead grill to a pan beneath your feet. I wonder what Victoria and Albert made of it on their visit here. Evidently Soane designed a number of these, but this is the only one left.

Wimpole is more than Soane, however. In the best English country house tradition it shows off layers of design from different eras. The exterior and formal staircase, encrusted with decorative plasterwork on broad cornices, is Carolingian. There's a rare Baroque painted chapel by Thornhill that looks more suited to Hampton Court Palace than a Cambridgeshire country seat. Victorian tiles in ancient Roman style welcome visitors with a big "Salve" laid into the floor.

We can thank Elsie Bambridge for our ability to see any of this. Rudyard Kipling's daughter, and only surviving child, lived here from 1938 to her death in 1976, using royalties from her father's books to restore what was then a crumbling pile. Think of this as the house The Jungle Book built. Bedrooms and several sitting rooms appear as she left them when the place went to the National Trust, capturing the lovely pastiche English country house style of the late 20th century.

Outside there are walks through classic parkland, a dramatic ruined castle (actually a folly built from scratch) to catch the eye, an impressive stable block with cafe and shop, a separate restaurant in the service wing, the parish church and an enormous Victorian walled garden fully restored to grow fruit, vegetables and flowers. The old home farm buildings have been transformed to a model farm and petting zoo for kids; I didn't get that far but the flow of happy children walking back from that direction suggests it's probably a bigger draw than Soanian architecture.

Wimpole and Ickworth are just the tip of the country house iceberg in East Anglia. My introductory blitz in the early '90s gives me fond memories of the Baroque glories of Houghton, the Tudor ghost that is Anne Boleyn's childhood home of Blickling and the fanciful Jacobean skyline of Felbrigg. Holkham, the only house in the county I've visited and written about since starting this blog, is perhaps my favourite house in the country and has the added benefit of one of England's best beaches.

Yes, it's a pain in to get here from Hampshire. But I think I'm very happy that I have friends with a guest room in the region. It's time to get to know it again.

Duxford soars, Ballroom swirls between the poles of preference

There's heated debate these days over whether traditional "masculine" and "feminine" preferences are nature or nurture. Without cultural influences, would little boys dress up in spangles and feathers while little girls went for the toy armaments and beat each other up? In a week that saw a friend and me sharing two experiences at the opposite poles of the sexual stereotype spectrum, I'm leaning towards nature.

On Tuesday, we loved the stage adaptation of Baz Luhrmann's gloriously camp Strictly Ballroom. If you had emptied the theatre of women and gay men, I doubt there would have been enough bodies to populate three rows. Too bad for them. It was the most joyous, morale-boosting, feel-good girls' night out I can remember. Four days later, with our men in tow, we had to consider what to do with a Saturday afternoon in East Anglia. I was pushing for Tudor architecture (Blickling Hall was just north of us), but only the Imperial War Museum at Duxford would tempt my husband from an afternoon with his laptop. And while I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the planes and tanks, there is simply no doubt that the Y chromosome holders bonded with the military technology in a primal way we girls couldn't approach.

STRICTLY BALLROOM
In a world where the stage show Mamma Mia! rolls towards its 20th anniversary with no loss of momentum, the only surprise about Strictly Ballroom is how long it took to get to London. The original 1992 romantic comedy is widely beloved and already has all the classic elements of a golden age musical, from the boy meets-gets-loses-regains girl arc, to the ingenue-to-star story, to the impressive dance numbers. Lurhman adapted his own work for a Sydney stage debut in 2011. It had run in Australia, Canada and the North of England before opening at London's Piccadilly Theatre, all to average reviews. But, frankly, this is the kind of thing where reviews don't really matter. The singing and dancing is up to West End standards. The sets and costumes look great. After that, it's a matter of personal taste. If you (a) already love the film, (b) have a deep affection for lightweight, innocent old musicals like Singing in the Rain, and (c) have a soft spot for '80s pop, you will have a magnificent evening. (Two out of three will do. None of my companions had seen the film; they all loved the show.)

Though it's remarkably similar, you're not just seeing the film on stage. There's a new soundtrack, adding to the show's existing classics (Time After Time; Love is in the Air; Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps) with favourites like George Michael's Freedom, Whitney Houston's I Want to Dance with Somebody and Billy Idol's Dancing With Myself. There's some interesting mashing and re-interpretation, but enough of the originals to have you tapping your feet throughout the evening. There's also a new character: a narrator who sometimes enters the plot as a dance contest emcee, but who is mostly just on stage to tell you the story. He's also doing almost all the singing, a big departure from the usual musical and giving the evening, at some points, the feeling of a concert with whoever is playing that role. I assume this was developed as a star vehicle for someone. In London, Will Young had debuted the role but it had recently switched to X-Factor winner Matt Cardle. (Who, paying some attention to the reviews, I suspect was more engaging and better suited to the music than Young.) The most notable thing about the rest of the cast is how exact their likeness is to the film characters. It is as much tribute act as independent work. And it's enormous fun, in the goofiest, girliest way imaginable.

DUXFORD

There is nothing goofy or girly about anything at Duxford, but there is plenty of emotion. Awe, pride, admiration and fascination come in waves. At first glance, it's a typical air and space museum. Big, multi-story buildings with lots of aircraft scattered across the floor and dangling from the ceiling at different levels. But there are depths of human interest here that I haven't picked up on visits to similar collections in Washington's Smithsonian or Munich's Deutsches Museum. Almost every exhibit has a personal story with it; the inside scoop from someone who flew, supported or designed the craft in front of you. You can get hands on by going inside several planes, including a legendary Concorde. (Yes, just as cramped as legend says.) Several military groups have regimental museums here, bringing more real people into the picture. And dogs. The para-dog in the Parachute Regiment's section was a highlight of my day. Need your tears jerked? Head over to the American hangar where a pile of twisted metal girders from the World Trade Centre reminds you of the protective duty the military aircraft here exist to fulfil.

American hangar? Oh, yes. During WW2 this airfield became station 357 of the US 8th Air Force, and 113 U.S. pilots lost their lives flying from here. The American museum covers their experience and shows a range of aircraft since that war, including a magnificently stealthy Blackbird and that F15 Eagle. The production line was one of the prides of St. Louis when I was a kid, and F15s performed at every 4th of July air show. My first job was at McDonnell Douglas, and the pride we had walking by those magnificent machines in various stage of production was palpable. Finding one here was like coming across an old friend.

There's a lot of beauty here, too. The exquisite craftsmanship of the wooden components in the WW1 fighters. Sleek, shining art deco lines of 1930s passenger craft. Cold War jets that look like they've come out of the era's cartoons or sci fi films. A Merlin engine, displayed on a plinth like a sculpture, is lovely enough to be art as well as breakthrough technology.

Duxford is huge. Don't attempt it without at least half a day to explore. There are five sizeable hangars of aircraft, covering everything from periods of history (Battle of Britain) to types of plane (land and sea, fold-up wings) to the restoration workshop. Even the buildings themselves are worthy of note: two hangars are charming WWI-era buildings, while the American hangar makes a striking modern statement. If the aircraft aren't enough for you, there's an additional building full of tanks and armoured vehicles with an atmospheric D-Day experience. All of the buildings are strung out along an airstrip which gives this museum its most unique aspect: some of the displays actually fly. You get to see and hear these beauties in action, including an iconic Spitfire. If you're well funded, you can even buy a ride in some of the aircraft.

All of these extra elements meant that Duxford massively exceeded my expectations. I thought I was sacrificing an afternoon to manly pursuits in order to make my husband happy. I ended up almost as engaged in the experience as him. Which just shows that, while we may default to "masculine" or "feminine" preferences, enjoyment of any activity can cross genders. At least, that's the theory. When it comes to garish, camp musicals however, I doubt my husband will buy my argument.

Oxford's Tolkien exhibition reveals a man as fascinating as his books

On the surface, the people of the United States and England seem remarkably similar. It takes actually living in the opposite country for the deep divisions to surface. Public expressions of patriotism are a classic example.

An American will fly, wear, sing to or otherwise publicly celebrate their flag at the slightest provocation. There are multiple patriotic holidays decked out with the Stars and Stripes. In England, overt displays of flag waving beyond sporting events or royal occasions are regarded with suspicion. Though this has changed a bit since Queen Elizabeth's Jubilee year and recent Olympic successes, there's still a sense of discomfort amongst many that too much flag waving indicates an affinity with fascism and racism. True English patriotism, I've found, is quieter ... and most likely to be  found outside of the cities.

It's the fierce competition of villages battling it out for Britain in Bloom awards. Intense pride in the local bluebell woods. Generations coming together, dressed in white, to play village cricket. The 2014 government survey found that 83% of the English now live in urban areas, but our sense of patriotism still seems to be indelibly bound up in the countryside.

Perhaps that's why J.R.R. Tolkien is so fiercely beloved by the English. Many readers, after all, see the Shire as a vision of the best of rural England, Sauron and his forces of evil as the opposing troops of rampant industrialism, and hobbits as the stout yeomen of Britain's good old days. You can test that relationship for yourself in an intriguing little exhibition at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. And while a deep knowledge of Middle Earth isn't required ... the notes, charts and maps displayed there give a fascinating insight into how an author constructs a plot, and thus would captivate anyone interested in the art of story telling ... true Tolkien aficionados will be delighted.

Tolkien: Maker of Middle Earth takes a hard look at the man behind the legend. Most people know the basics: Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon and English literature, fanatical about detail down to creating his own languages, father of the whole genre of epic fantasy fiction. Here we learn about his childhood, education, military years, family life, sparkling sense of humour and creativity far beyond his writing.

I had not realised that Tolkien was a talented artist who created the instantly-recognisable original cover for The Hobbit. His artwork was my favourite part of the show. There's a gorgeous set of scenes from the Lord of The Rings that clearly influenced Peter Jackson. Wonderful designs for Elvish jewels and writhing dragons. Illustrations from a series of Christmas stories on the wanderings of Santa that he wrote for his children. Doodles scrawled on newspaper margins and over crosswords that show how he never stopped creating. I'm amazed that some design house hasn't picked up on his work for a range of wallpapers and decorative fabrics; there's luscious stuff here.

And there are maps. Lots of maps. With all this evidence of how visual a person he was, it makes even more sense that the map ... now a cliche of fantasy epics ... was a beautifully detailed foundation stone of Middle Earth. Some here are finished products meant for readers, some working documents, all beautiful. If you have any doubt about the professor's obsession with detail, witness the rigorous creation, on graph paper, of exact scales drawn from a measurement system based on the length of a hobbit's toenail. No distance traveled in a day in the books will ever be further than the creatures he created could actually go. In addition to the Tolkien-drawn originals, there are a couple of digital maps that let you explore different characters' journeys in the different books. The best takes advantage of video projection to cast the landscape in 3D and have shadows shrink and grow off the mountain ranges as time passes.

There's also a fun, life-sized projection of the gates of Moria at the entry to the show, setting the mood that you're about to enter a world of magic, and a big, projected Smaug dancing across the floor once you're in the gallery. Several sound stations invite you to don headphones to explore details like getting your Elvish pronunciation right. But most of the exhibitions are quite old school: peering through glass at preserved documents. It's also remarkably small: just one gallery. I would have loved more. A gallery, for example, on the cultural influences (old Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic, Medieval, etc.) that Tolkien drew on, another on the vast cultural impact that his creations have sparked.

But that's not the point here. As you would expect from a combination of the rigorously controlled Tolkien Trust and the university associated with the author for most of his adult life, everything here is tightly focused on the man and his creative processes, and drawn from the two organisations' archives. In a world where so many blockbuster exhibitions overwhelm you with their scope, I suppose it's no bad thing to visit one that leaves you hungry for more. And, delightfully, it's free. You just need to pre-book tickets here.

For a more overt display of patriotism, we were back at the Highclere Battle Proms the next weekend. They were celebrating their 100th concert that night (they do about five a summer). It was only our sixth. The formula doesn't change much. People queue up from about 2:30 for gates to open at 4, then it's a mad rush to claim a spot on the broad lawns in front of the house the world knows better as Downton Abbey. In addition to flag-waving patriotism, the English get to display their flair for competitive picnicking: there are a lot of tablecloths, candelabras and fine food and wine coming out of well-stocked hampers. Over the years my husband has been bitten by the competitive bug, steadily upgrading our kit so that we look like traders setting out to conquer the Silk Road as we queue up for entry. Though he's generally happy with the set up, I suspect our two poles with their English, British Army, Danish and American flags will be tweaked before next year. They weren't flying highly or proudly enough.

The show doesn't change much. Historical re-enactors (usually Regency) set up at the far corner. There are some cavalry displays in the late afternoon. Music starts with a WW2-era group. There's a rousing Spitfire flyover. Then a two-part classical concert that's always much the same. But who ever really tires of the 1812 Overture with real cannon, Beethoven's Battle Symphony with fireworks and mass sing-alongs of Jerusalem and Land of Hope and Glory?

A groaning buffet and bar kept people going throughout the afternoon and evening. Pork pies, sausage rolls and crisps. Coronation chicken, chicken and wild mushroom terrine, roasted carrot salad, potato salad, insalata caprese. (Potatoes and tomatoes all from my garden.) Key lime cheesecake and cheese board. Free-flowing wine, and blackcurrant squash for the designated drivers and children.

It was a spread that would gain even a hungry hobbit's approval. I suspect Tolkien would have enjoyed the whole evening. And I'd love to see how he would have painted it.