We're planning to be here a little while, so I thought it was time to set up a "Newark diary" series.

Our negative Day 8 covid test on Tuesday not only saved us lots of hassle (last year, the third time was emphatically not the charm, so it was really good to score a triple negative this year), but also set me off nicely on a "saving things" theme...

SAVING DAYLIGHT

Today we've had 8 hours and 28 minutes of daylight. The sun got up at 0734, and decided it had had enough by 1602. Just last week we had in excess of 9 hours, so winter is encroaching fast at the moment...

It's funny to us to see the sun struggling its way up from the horizon of a morning... Back where we live, the thing shoots up like a rocket, and before you've got time to say "wow, it's hot in this mask", you're looking for shade... Here, every wintry ray is welcome.

But it's all very, very beautiful:







SAVING CHILDREN

New to us was this statue of Irene Sendler, sculpted by Andrew Lilley, and located at Fountain Gardens:


Born in 1910 in Warsaw, Sendler was a Polish health worker who during the years of the Nazi occupation managed to save the lives of many hundreds of Jewish children. She is recognized in Poland as a great heroine.

Newark has many links with the Polish community (as we saw in our last visit in early 2020).

SAVING TREES

We saw this story on TV one evening, so we had to swing by and see for ourselves. Short version: Some grand trees in the centre of town were slated for felling, in order to build yet another carpark; locals say no; locals actually win; we're still waiting for an all-of-council vote to countermand the previous all-of-council vote in favour of the damn carpark, but hopefully reason will continue to prevail. Go trees!


SAVING BUILDINGS

The former Robin Hood Hotel, left derelict for years, much to my late father-in-law's disdain, has been incorporated into a new Travelodge, opened earlier this year.


The St Leonard's almshouses are still going strong:



And another set of almshouses seem to have been given a new lease of life:



SAVING CROSSES

It has been moved from its original location, but Beaumond Cross is still "a good example of a richly ornamented medieval standing cross with documented historical associations".




SAVING OLD ROUTES

I talked last week about the Newark-to-Cotham rail trail (a great way of saving an old stretch of railway). Today, we walked in the other direction, into town. We've done this often before, and it's always a pleasant, bird-filled route, but now the bridges sport some new murals: