Hello from Nottingham!

I’m writing this in my hotel room near the River Trent, where I am on holiday.

The main reason for coming here was to watch the England men’s cricket team play in the Test match against the West Indies at Trent Bridge, my favourite cricket ground in the country. Mum and I had tickets for the fourth and fifth days of the match, and after England thrashed the tourists in the first Test at Lord’s – completing the victory an hour into the third day – we had our fingers crossed that the game would get that far.

Thankfully, the West Indies put up much more of a fight in this one and we made the two-hour journey from home on Sunday morning with the weather set fair and a finely poised cricket match in prospect.

In the end, we couldn’t really have asked for better! We saw Harry Brook complete his first Test century in a home match (his other four had been overseas), Joe Root reach not only 50 but then a hundred of his own (his 32nd Test century), Shoaib Bashir take a 5 wicket haul, and an England victory on Sunday evening. We will get a refund for the fifth day tickets, so we haven’t been left out of pocket.

Finding ourselves with a free day on Monday, mum and I went into Nottingham to explore. Nottingham has some interesting old buildings but I would describe it as rough around the edges. There is a lot of building work going on, but large areas seem almost to have been left to ruin. Centuries old architecture stands next to unsympathetic concrete monstrosities. It made me appreciate Norwich even more!

Here are a few things I’ve learned about Nottingham though:

• Traffic lights: my word, there are a lot of traffic lights in Nottingham. The city seems to have a problem with queues of traffic, and from what I can see a lot of them would be eased if they didn’t have so many traffic lights. It makes sense, though, when I discovered that Nottingham is the birthplace of the traffic light. Engineer John Peake Knight adapted the signalling system used on the railways for the roads, although the first one was installed in London in 1868. Nottingham’s Radcliffe Road (which runs behind the cricket ground) was the first road in the world to be covered in tarmac.
• Ibuprofen: at one point yesterday, mum asked me to go into a shop and buy her a couple of packets of ibuprofen. It wasn’t until I got back to the hotel and did some research that I discovered Nottingham is where this particular painkiller was invented. Dr Stewart Adams developed ibuprofen, in an effort to find an alternative to aspirin, while working in the laboratories of Boots Pure Drug Company Ltd in the 1960s. Jesse Boot took on his father John’s herbalist shop in Nottingham in the 1860s and transformed it into the famous Boots chain of chemists we know today.
• Nottingham High School: having made the effort to get to the top end of Nottingham Arboretum – the city’s first public park – we were greeted with the elegant building that is the fee-paying independent Nottingham High School. Looking into it, I discovered that Norwich-born former Labour MP Ed Balls went to the school, as well as the footballer Patrick ‘Barn Door’ Bamford, who had an unsuccessful loan spell at Norwich a few years ago. He now plays for Leeds.

So that’s the Nottingham leg of this holiday complete! Today we are off to explore Southwell (plenty of old buildings) before we reach our next stop in Lincoln later.

Thanks for reading, I’ll be back with some more in a couple of days. Here are a few photos.

Here are the highlights of the cricket we saw at Trent Bridge on Sunday: