Bronte Country

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Although I am still at an age where an approaching birthday isn't cause for concern, this year my birthday marked exactly one year since I said goodbye to so many loved ones after a night of cocktails and dining at Brewery Wharf in Newcastle. So unsurprisingly I was feeling alittle fragile about the whole event. It was an absolute thill then when our dear friends Lara and Sean planned a visit to Leeds to celebrate with us! It is always wonderful to meet up with this gorgeous pair who have been based in London for 2 years. We've not been able to see eachother as much as hoped since ariving in the UK so this was a lovely opportunity to spend some quality time together doing some hard-core catching up! As is typically the fashion in our catch-ups together, their arrival late on Friday evening marked the beginning of a weekend of much wine drinking and endless chatting into the wee small hours.

Saturday was my 27th birthday and it was wonderful to have close friends from home here to celebrate the occasion. It was Adam's suggestion to spend the day visiting the tiny village of Haworth, Bronte country. I confess I've never read any books by the Bronte sisters despite my best intentions over the years. So the suggestion to visit Haworh, once home to both Charlotte, Emily and Anne, seemd like a good chance to gain some inspiration to get reading! Haworth itself is less than an hour from Leeds but the fun part about the trip there is that a steam train travels between the last few villages in Bronte country. And so we headed off via the steam train to this tiny hill village with its steep cobbled streets, surrounded by wild, rugged moors.

Haworth itself is a big tourist spot for millions of Bronte fans each year. While in Haworth I found this very difficult to imagine as the town really is very tiny. Fortunately being the middle of Winter, very few tourists were out in force today and we were able to wander through its little tiny craft shops, numerous bookstores and tea shops freely. It felt like a quintessentially English way to spend a day, complete with drinking tea and eating scones! The goal of being inspired by the town and countryside to read the works of some of Brittain's great novelists certainly worked to good effect, with all four of us coming up with titles we 'promised ourselves' we'd read...one day!

That evening we headed out to an Argentinian Steakhouse for what was a really fantastic meal. We were joined here by Alex, our flatmate, and while the boys revelled in the opportunity to eat some good quality steak, Lara and I continued to savour every minute we had together, sharing stories of the pat few years and reminiscing about the good old days when we lived in the same city and saw eachother every day at Uni.

Like all great times with great friends, the weekend was over seemingly in an instant. We'd no sooner met Lara and Sean at the bus station, than we were heading back there to sadly wave them off again! It was however lovely in every way to have them here to celebrate my birthday. As the saying goes, old friends are the best friends. Weekends like this one reaffirm just how true this really is.

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