August 2026
New Posts This Month…
Battle, East Sussex (Partial Eclipse)
Min and I had been talking about going abroad but settled on the idea of going to Battle for four nights as ‘tourists’ and surprising my family.
We booked up an AirBNB and spent the next five days exploring Battle, starting with the Battle Abbey which was a fantastic place to walk around and brought back so many memories. Additionally as the schools were off for the holiday we managed to get two of the three remaining tickets to tour the hall and library - it had been 32 years or so since I stepped through that door and it made me feel so nostalgic!
While there we got to see the partial eclipse, I was fortunate enough to have one of my polarised filter for my lens with me so managed to experiment with taking photos of this. It was lovely being there among the locals, chatting and engaging in the moment.
Battle, East Sussex (Folk & Fable Festival)
Two Battle trips in one month - it’s unheard of! But while we were down there we spotted the Folk & Fable Festival happening so popped down for another weekend. Unfortunately it was a very wet weekend so we didn’t get to do as much of the event as we would have liked, but what we did do we really enjoyed. It was a fantastic set up and full of artisan stalls with some amazing stuff, we ended up leaving with a few bags of goodies in the end!
This is going on the calendar again for next year!
- Some of these photos were taken by Min
Social Media
I have a love/hate relationship with Social Media but I’ve been trying different platforms to see what works for me with the blog but have found juggling multiple platforms as well as my regular private accounts to be a bit of a nuisance. So I’m dropping X because X is rubbish, Facebook as juggling two accounts is tedious, but keeping the Sighing Bear Instagram active as it’s very photo friendly.
There’s been talk of MySpace making a return in the future and dumping algorithms which I’m quite excited about as I loved MySpace when I was a teen, however that may be looking at it with rose tinted glasses. Additionally there’s talk of Twitter.now which does have me quite excited as I loved Twitter, however the new Twitter isn’t meant to be relaunching as it was, so we’ll see what comes of that.
Formula 1
It was the Summer Break this month which meant there wasn’t much going on and as a newly addicted F1 fan I felt that, however we ended the month with a trip to the Netherlands!
Zandvoort, Netherlands - The last Dutch GP… and my first. It promised to be a rather dull race with no overtakes but turned into a partly damp, very risky, loads of overtakes, and full of drama! There was some exceptional racing in this which had me full of adrenaline! Glad to see Lando take P1, McLaren are really picking up the pace after a shaky start. Also it was interesting to see team orders and how Mercedes follow orders which worked in their favour, while Ferrari don’t follow orders and end up shooting themselves in the foot!
Podcasts…
What To Carry, What To Burn Podcast
What To Carry, What To Burn - Episode 6: Adam & Eve
This was a very interesting story about two people (Lucy Irvine & Gerald Kingsland) who willingly put themselves in a survival situation by casting themselves away together. However it turned out that Gerald was actually a rather nasty piece of work and Lucy became prey to an abusive relationship that was built on false pretenses. I found hearing about Lucy to be fascinating, especially the tidbits of her life beyond this expedition.
