We’re getting to the end of another month, and so with just a few hours remaining in August, here’s this month’s playlist. I appreciate that the weather hasn’t been particularly summery this week (stormy more like) but this month’s theme is songs that remind me of the summer holidays of the 1990s. You can listen along on Spotify if you want.
‘Steal my Sunshine’ by Len. This Canadian band ended up being something of a one-hit wonder with this upbeat song 25 years ago.
‘Waiting for Tonight’ by Jennifer Lopez. Oooh, a JLo song for the second month running. I listened to a lot of Galaxy 105 (now known as Capital) during the school holidays and this was in regular rotation.
‘Save Tonight’ by Eagle Eye Cherry. This was everywhere in the summer of 1998, from the half-brother of Neneh Cherry. Whilst a second single and an album did well, you may be surprised to know that a further five albums followed – I certainly was.
‘Lovefeel (Tee’s Club Radio)’ by The Cardigans. The dance remix of that song from Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, courtesy of American DJ Todd Terry. It was some time later before I heard the slower original.
‘Staying Out For The Summer’ by Dodgy. Dodgy had been around since the early 90s, and this song was originally released in 1994. Their 1996 single ‘Good Enough’ was what brought them fame, however.
‘Cecilia’ by Suggs, Louchie Lou & Michie One. The original was by Simon & Garfunkel, but Suggs from the band Madness released this speeded up version with some additional reggae vocals in 1996.
‘In The Summertime’ by Shaggy & Rayvon. We’re in 1995 now and another cover, this time of the Mungo Jerry classic with additional rapping from Shaggy.
‘Twist and Shout’ by Chaka Demus & Pliers. Another cover! Reggae music was big in the mid-90s and I prefer this to the original.
‘Wake Up Boo’ by The Boo Radleys. A mainstay of the student club nights that I went to in the early 2000s, but originally from 1995. They’re regarded very much as a ‘one hit wonder’ despite having released eight (!) studio albums, the most recent of which came out last year.
‘Macarena (Bayside Boys Remix)’ by Los Del Rio. And we’re back in remix territory. The original came out in 1993, but it was the 1995 remix by the Bayside Boys, and subsequent dance moves, that made this song so popular. Sorry, but I actually like this song.
This is now the third mine that we’ve been down in as many months; last month, we went to the one in Beamish, and in May we went to the one in the Black Country Living Museum. Caphouse Colliery, the mine at the National Coal Mining Museum, is different as it’s primarily a deep mine, and so the tour enters and exits using a lift in a 140 metre deep mine shaft. There is a drift entrance to the mine as well, but it’s mainly there for emergency evacuations now and isn’t part of the tour.
Mining ceased at Caphouse in the 1980s and it became a museum shortly after. So, whereas Beamish and the BCLM are set in the early twentieth century, here the mine tour covers the full history from the early 1800s right up to the more mechanised latter times. Though coal is no longer mined here, the mine is still regulated as an active coal mine and all battery powered devices have to be surrendered before the tour – hearing aids being the only exception. As such, I don’t have any photos from down the mine.
Back on the surface, we had a look at the indoor exhibitions, about miners’ lives and a special exhibition marking forty years since the Miners’ Strike. Around the colliery, you can see the old steam engine that powered the lift mechanism, and the Pithead Baths, where miners would start and end their shifts with a communal shower. There was also a cage with some canaries – the literal canaries in a coalmine.
We then caught the narrow gauge paddy train which takes you to the other end of the site, where there are new stables for horses and ponies. Ponies were still used down coal mines as recently as 1994, and so when the museum opened, it served as retirement stables. Whilst the ponies there now are rescues, none of them have worked down a mine.
As it was the summer holidays, there were some additional activities on for kids. A large sandpit was outside the Hope Pit to recreate a beach; when miners eventually became eligible for a week’s paid holiday, thousands would go to various UK seaside resorts like Blackpool, Skegness and Cleethorpes.
We had a good time; in retrospect, I’m surprised it’s taken us so long to go back, as it’s only just over half an hour’s drive away.
Accessibility
The underground mine tour is mostly accessible to wheelchair users, but the no batteries rule applies. Some of the buildings aren’t accessible due to their age. There are accessible toilets but the nearest Changing Places toilet is a ten minute drive away. More information is available on the web site.
Parking is available on site; it’s normally free, but there’s a £5 charge in summer (which in turn gives free use of the paddy train). There’s an hourly bus service between Wakefield and Huddersfield which calls at the museum.
Cooking at home is one of my wife’s passions, although it’s something I enjoy too. Over the years, we’ve amassed a selection of cookbooks, but there are four that we use the most at present. So, partly as a way of sharing nice recipes, and partly as a cynical way of getting Amazon affiliate commission, here are our four go-to cookbooks.
All the links to Amazon below pay me a small amount of commission should you choose to buy these books from there. However, we often borrow cookbooks from our local libraries. I’ve also added links where some of these recipes are available online.
India Express by Rukmini Iyer
Of the four cookbooks mentioned today, India Express by Rukmini Iyer is our newest. We found it first in our local library, and then bought a copy as there were so many recipes that we wanted to try. All the recipes are vegan, vegetarian or pescatarian, and are generally quite quick – almost all can be done in an hour and many less.
Our favourite recipe so far is Spiced Roasted Paneer with Tomatoes and Peppers (available at this link). Paneer is an Indian soft cheese that you can usually get at larger supermarkets – our local Sainsbury’s stocks it in the chilled world food section. The recipe is basically a traybake – preheat the oven, put the ingredients in a roasting tin, and cook for 30 minutes. We’ve also enjoyed the South Indian-Style Black Pepper & Fennel Prawns recipe and had this a couple of times.
Bored of Lunch by Nathan Anthony
Nathan Anthony’s Bored of Lunch: The Healthy Slow Cooker Book, is apparently the biggest selling slow cooker cookbook in UK publishing history. I can see why – there’s some really good recipes, and the majority just require you to throw all the ingredients together and leave the slow cooker to do its thing. Other slow cooker cookbooks add on significant extra preparation, and undermine much of the ease and time saving that a slow cooker offers.
We typically have a slow cooker meal once a fortnight, using the slow cook mode on our Instant Pot. Almost all of the recipes come from this book, and the most recent we had was the Chicken and Peanut Curry, made from peanut butter and coconut milk. We also like the Thai Basil Beef and Gin-Infused Spiced Beef, and I was really impressed with the Garlic Parmesan Chicken with Potatoes which involves layering the ingredients to get a full meal in one pot. We also have the follow-up, Even Easier, but use the first book more.
There’s also some good side-dish recipes, especially for making flavoured rice.
Nigella Express by Nigella Lawson
Christine had this book when I met her, and though it was published 17 years ago, it still gets plenty of use. We have several of Nigella’s cookbooks, but Nigella Express is the one we use the most.
We don’t own it, but we’ve cooked several good recipes from Donal Skehan’s Super Food in Minutes – we particularly like his Red Lentil Daal which we have with paratha. Most of the recipes in this book come with lots of vegetables.
My wife has gotten rid of several of her cookbooks recently, having not really used them. Jamie Oliver’s 15 and 30 Minute Meals both went – I’m sure you could cook the meals in 30 minutes with a full team of staff but they seemed to take us far longer. We also picked up the first two River Café cookbooks at a charity shop, and they’ll probably end up back there soon too. The Grains as Mains book seemed like a good idea, but we were underwhelmed – some are really basic recipes that just happen to have some extra wholegrains sprinkled on.
On Friday, the UK was visited by Storm Lilian, the twelfth storm of the season (which runs until the end of this week). And it took out our electricity supply.
I was all ready to start my working day at home, when my screen went black. I use a laptop, so that was still running, but with no internet and a rapidly depleting battery. This was around 8:30am.
Thankfully, almost instantly a text from Northern Powergrid, the privatised company that runs the local electricity distribution network, informed me that they were aware of the problem. But a fix wasn’t likely until 10am, and August is my busiest month of the year at work. As rush hour had passed, I could be in my office in half an hour if I drove, so I got in the car and drove to work.
This turned out to be the right decision, as when I got to work, another text arrived, this time advising it would be 6pm before the power would be back on. As it was, everything was up and running again by 1pm, but it’s been a very long time since I’ve known a power cut last for over four hours. It turns out we were one of around 36,000 people without power in the Northern Powergrid area. Thankfully, nothing in our fridge or freezer spoiled.
Whilst we do have a massive battery in our cellar, linked to our solar panels, this doesn’t automatically kick in if there’s a power cut. Instead, we have two dedicated sockets that run off the battery. I did try running an extension cable from there to the fridge-freezer, but it didn’t seem to do anything, so I plugged the fridge-freezer back into the mains and left for work.
As mentioned, Storm Lilian is the twelfth named storm of the season, and it’s the first time since the storms were named in 2015 that we’ve reached the letter L. The season ends this Saturday and so we probably won’t experience Storm Minnie, but the fact that we’ve had this many storms over the past 12 months is rather worrying. Is this going to be the new normal with climate change, and are we going to experience more power cuts like this one?
I managed to span the list of things we did whilst on holiday in Northumberland to eight blog posts, representing the seven days that we were on holiday. Because it was a short holiday, there were lots of places that we could have visited, but didn’t have the time. Here are some of them.
Alnwick Castle
Whilst we did visit The Alnwick Garden, which is adjacent and shares a car park, we didn’t go into the more famous castle next door. It dates from the 11th Century, following the Norman Conquest, although it was extensively re-modelled in the 18th and 19th Centuries. It’s often been used as a filming location, with the first series of Blackadder set there. More recently, it was used in last year’s Dungeons and Dragons film, and featured in the first two films about that wizard boy whose enemy cannot be named.
Howick Hall
Not far from Seahouses is Howick Hall, the ancestral home of the Earls Grey. The hall itself is open to visitors, as are its gardens and arboretum, and of course there’s a café where presumably there’s an expectation that you’ll drink Earl Grey Tea. Whilst the Earls Grey have owned the site since the 14th Century, the current house is less than 100 years old, having been substantially rebuilt following a fire.
Craster
Craster is another pretty fishing village like Seahouses. Whilst Seahouses claims to be where kippers where invented, Craster Kippers are more well-known. Craster is also known for its lobsters and crabs.
Dunstanburgh Castle
Had we visited Craster, we could have also called in at Dunstanburgh Castle. It’s a ruin – moreso than Warkworth Castle – and it’s just over a mile’s walk from Craster where the nearest car park is. We saw it from a distance as it’s on the coast, but the long walk from the car park and the fact that it’s a ruin put us off.
Beadnell
One of the main roads into Seahouses from the A1 passes the village of Beadnell, and so we drove past it multiple times without actually going into the village itself. It’s also a harbour, and looked quite pretty in some paintings that we saw.
Grace Darling Museum
Up the coast in the village of Bamburgh, and just a short walk from Bamburgh Castle, is the RNLI’s Grace Darling Museum. Grace Darling lived on the Farne Islands and was a daughter of one of the lighthouse keepers. She came to fame in 1838, when she was 22 years old, by risking her life to rescue the stranded survivors of a shipwreck – of the 62 people on board, all but three were rescued. Whilst she died a few years later aged 26, she managed to go down in history as a local heroine. The museum opened in 1938 to mark 100 years since her dramatic rescue.
Whilst the museum was very close to where we were staying, we’d pencilled it in for a day of bad weather. As it was, we were really lucky with the weather and so didn’t need an indoor backup plan.
Northumberland Zoo
Our summer holidays normally result in a zoo or aquarium visit, but we didn’t find the time this year. Had we stayed for longer, then we may have gone to Northumberland Zoo. It’s less than 10 years old, and tends to have smaller animals; the largest are medium-sized cats like servals, lynx and snow leopards.
I’ve no doubt that we’ll have another holiday in Northumberland at some point in the future, and we may well visit some of these places that we didn’t manage to fit in.
This is the eighth, and final, blog post about what we did on our 2024 holiday to Northumberland. Previously, I wrote about Cragside, and today is about our visit to Beamish.
‘Wait a minute’, you may be thinking, ‘Beamish isn’t in Northumberland’. And you would be right – Beamish is in County Durham. But we called in on the way home and so I’m counting it as part of the holiday.
Beamish is an outdoor, living museum – very similar to the Black Country Living Museum that we visited back in May. It’s split into different areas, each representing a different time period, from the 1820s through to the 1950s. I’ve been a few times, and all three of us last visited in 2019 for my 35th birthday.
Beamish is huge, and it’s now just about impossible to see everything in one day. So, as we’d been before, we strategised and focussed on visiting a few key areas that we wanted to see.
1820s Landscape
This is the area set 200 years ago, around Pockerley Old Hall, a farmhouse and one of the few buildings that was in situ and not rebuilt on the site. Elements of the farm have been there since the 15th century. At the farm, there are a few horses and pigs to see, and a brand new tavern where we had lunch.
This area is also is home to a waggonway, which was a predecessor to the railways and has a replica of Puffing Billy to haul visitors up and down a short section of track.
1900s pit village
Jumping forward, and there’s the pit village – a small community around a coal mine, set around the peak period of coal production in the area. You can go down the Mahogany Drift Mine, which was a real mine – if you go down a closed off mine road and keep going you’ll end up about a mile away. The village shows how people lived – there’s a school, church and several miners’ cottages.
1950s town
This bit was still being built when we last visited, and is now mostly complete. In a way, this felt like the oddest bit of the museum seeing as the houses are just like those that friends used to live in. You can go into the houses, and they have been decorated as they would have been when new. There’s also a playground and a high street with a toy shop, cinema and appliances shop. You can book to have your hair done in a 1950s style, and there’s a fish and chip shop.
It’s the first time in a while that a setting in Beamish reflects a time in living memory.
1900s town
Joined onto the 1950s town is the 1900s town, one of the older sections of Beamish and probably the most well-known. It’s expanded somewhat over the years and includes many transplanted buildings, including a bank, sweet shop, pub, co-operative store and a pharmacy. It’s certainly the busiest bit of the museum and the most complete.
This was all we had time to see – the weather was starting to turn, and we had a two hour drive home ahead of us, so we missed the 1940s home farm, the 1950s farm and the fairground.
Getting around Beamish
Beamish is a large site, and unless you’re super fit, you’ll probably want to make use of the transport options provided. One of the things Beamish is known for is its tramway, which forms a circuit of the site and connects most (but not all) of the areas. At peak times, there are three trams in operation. They’re all heritage trams, although not all from the North-East of England – one is from Oorto, although painted as if it was from South Shields.
For the areas not reachable by tram – namely the 1900s Pit Village and the 1950s Town – there are a series of heritage buses running. These are all diesel, but there’s a plan to run electrically-powered trolleybuses into the 1950s town in future.
Wheelchair users can use a replica classic bus which has had a foldaway lift added at the back. It’s an on-call service reserved for those with mobility issues.
Accessibility
Accessibility at Beamish is pretty good, considering that there are lots of old buildings – you can tell that some thought has gone in to ensuring access where possible. But that doesn’t mean that every building is accessible, although the newest areas like the 1950s town are the most accessible. Indeed, the 1950s town is home to a Changing Places facility, and many of the buildings have lifts to access upper floors where needed. There’s an extensive accessibility guide on the web site.
Tickets for Beamish are valid from one year of purchase; as mentioned, it’s more than one day out and so you can visit as many times in the subsequent 364 days without paying again. At time of writing, tickets are around £28 each for adults and £17 for children. A Max Card discount is available on tickets bought on the day. However, I would recommend buying tickets in advance as we had to queue for quite a while to purchase them on arrival.
There are regular direct buses from Newcastle, Sunderland and Chester-le-Street. Chester-le-Street is also the nearest mainline railway station, served by regular Transpennine Express and occasional LNER and CrossCountry services. The bus services seemed well-used when we went, and drop you right outside the front entrance.
Ever since we started using the ‘new’ Microsoft Teams, my home computer would glitch whenever joining a meeting where I wanted my webcam on. By ‘glitch’, I mean both screens going black – usually just for a couple of seconds, but sometimes longer. It may also be triggered by someone sharing their screen during a meeting – meaning I could hear them, but not speak.
Finding new graphics drivers
The simple solution to this was to update my graphics drivers. At home, I use a relatively basic Lenovo laptop bought in 2018. In 2021, I upgraded the RAM from 4 GB to 16 GB, which has helped to keep it going despite its age. Its processor is too old for Windows 11, but Windows 10 still works fine for me.
When I opened Device Manager to check my graphics drivers, they hadn’t been updated since 2018. Over the past few years, more and more applications have been updated to take advantage of GPU hardware acceleration – as I write this, Firefox, Outlook, Excel, Teams and Spotify are all using my GPU. That was less of an issue in 2018, but is now.
Windows Update wouldn’t offer any new drivers, and nor would Lenovo Vantage, the tool that shipped with the computer for vendor software updates. And on Lenovo’s web site, the latest software downloads were the same driver that I already had.
As the laptop uses Intel built-in graphics drivers, I instead went to Intel’s web site to download them. Sure enough, Intel had drivers updated as recently as May this year. So I downloaded them, ran the installer, and got an error, saying ‘Your system has a driver that is locked to manufacturer specification.’
Bah. This means that Intel only wants me to download drivers from Lenovo, but Lenovo are not offering updated drivers.
Getting around the manufacturer specification lock
The good news is that you can get around this, and I found the solution thanks to this Reddit thread. You tell Windows to use a generic driver, and then install Intel’s updated drivers as an alternative.
Here are the step-by-step instructions:
Do a complete back-up. We’re playing with drivers here, and the wrong driver can render your computer unbootable. Make sure you have a full system backup that can be restored in case something goes terribly wrong.
Open Device Manager, find your graphics device, right-click, and choose ‘Update Driver’.
Select the second option, ‘Browse my computer for drivers’.
On the next screen, select ‘Let me pick from a list of available drivers on my computer’
You should have a driver called ‘Microsoft Basic Display Adaptor’. Select this, and click Next.
Your screen will flash, and you may find that any external screens will stop working. When it’s done, restart your computer.
Now, try to install the Intel drivers again that you have downloaded from the Intel web site. If all goes well, these new drivers will be installed instead.
If not, repeat the above steps as far as step 3. Find the Intel driver download, and open it in a tool like 7-Zip to access the files inside, and extract them to a folder.
Instead of following step 4, select the folder that you extracted the files to, and Windows should detect the drivers and install these for you.
You can then check your driver version in Device Manager to verify that the latest version has been installed.
This resolved the issues for me, and now Teams works fine.
The fact that computer manufacturers can stop you from easily installing driver updates is unfair, in my opinion. Sure, the computer I’m using is old, but it still works pretty well. We have a massive problem globally with electronic waste, and we shouldn’t be making functioning computers obsolete through software.
This is the seventh blog post about what we did on our 2024 holiday to Northumberland. Previously, I wrote about Lindisfarne, and today is about our visit to Cragside.
Cragside was built for Lord William Armstrong, who you may remember from Bamburgh Castle. Unlike Bamburgh Castle, Cragside was never a castle and it started life as a small fishing lodge. But over time, it was extended into a large stately home, and hosted many famous guests, including royalty. Also, unlike Bamburgh Castle, Cragside is no longer in the Armstrong family, and today it’s one of the National Trust’s top tier properties.
What makes Cragside interesting is its claim to be ‘the original smart home’. As you will know from my various blog posts about Home Assistant, home automation is an interest of mine. Cragside was one of the first homes to have electricity, back in the 19th century. And, due to its remote location, this was powered by hydro-electricity rather than burning coal. There’s also a water-powered lift, and an early dishwasher.
The later extensions to Cragside are the most extravagant, including a massive marble fireplace and a huge billiards room with heated seats. There’s also a ‘lab’ where you get to see demonstrations of some of Armstrong’s innovations.
Gardens and grounds
The Cragside estate is extensive, and there’s a ‘Carriage Drive’ which is a six mile, one-way circuit that you can drive around. We did the drive to be able to access the play area to let our eight-year-old burn off some energy at the end of the day, and saw a young fox on the way.
Away from the house, across a steep gorge (which is spanned by an iron bridge), are the formal gardens. These came into National Trust ownership later than the house, and some restoration work is ongoing. The greenhouses are home to a number of tropical plants that wouldn’t otherwise grow in the Northumberland climate, and again, technology is in use here. The huge plant pots sit on metal turntables, so that the pots can be easily rotated to ensure even growing.
We spent all day at Cragside, and still didn’t get to see everything. Thankfully, overnight accommodation is available in some of the old worker’s cottages, should you choose to visit for more than one day.
Accessibility
Although Cragside house was one of the first to have a lift, it’s currently not in use, and there are some quite narrow corridors. If you’re unable to climb stairs, then you’ll only be able to see the ground floor of the house. There’s a free shuttle bus that travels between the main car park, visitor centre (in the stables), house and formal gardens.
Entry is free to National Trust members, but as it’s one of their top tier properties, the prices for non-members are comparatively high – around £25 each for adults. It’s also exempt from many of the promotions that offer discounted entry. But it’s a full day out with plenty to see.
This is the sixth blog post about what we did on our 2024 holiday to Northumberland. Previously, I wrote about The Farne Islands, and today is about our visit to Lindisfarne.
Lindisfarne, also known as Holy Island, is an island just off the Northumberland coast, further north (and separate from) the Farne Islands, which we visited earlier in the week. Unlike the Farne Islands, Lindisfarne is inhabited all year round, and connected to the mainland by a causeway.
Lindisfarne Castle
From a distance, the standout feature is Lindisfarne Castle, on the eastern tip of the island. Now in the custody of the National Trust, this ancient castle was converted into a holiday home in the early twentieth century. The interior is laid out as it would have been around 100 years ago, and each room is full of objects of interest. There’s plenty of information on offer about the history of the building, as well as its owner and architect. You can head up to the top for great views back across the island and up the coast.
The National Trust is also responsible for Gertrude Jekyll’s Garden, which overlooks the castle. It’s an interesting example of a garden that’s designed to both look pretty, and withstand the exposed coastal conditions. The plants have been specially chosen for the hardiness and their ability to survive sandy soil and strong winds.
The village
There’s a small village on the island, which is home to a few pubs, shops, cafés and a post office, should you wish to get a special postmark on your postcards home. There’s also St Aidan’s Winery, best known as the producers of Lindisfarne Mead, which is produced on the island. We may have bought a few things there to take home.
Lindisfarne is also a very religious place, and you can go to the ruins of Lindisfarne Priory, which is now looked after by English Heritage. We didn’t go; having been to the castle, had lunch and done a bit of shopping, time was slipping away and we needed to get back across the causeway.
The causeway
The causeway disappears under the sea at high tide, so it’s worth checking the safe crossing times. Thankfully, these allowed for a decent day out when we visited, but we needed to have left by 3:30pm, otherwise it would be after 10pm until we could leave the island again by road. You’ll probably find that the shops, cafés, pubs and attractions vary their opening times to match the tide times, which means that if everything is about to close, you probably need to get back to your car and get away. There are warning sides all over the island about the dangers of getting stranded, and yet it’s still approximately a monthly occurrence.
Whilst raising the causeway, or building a bridge, has long been discussed, it’s opposed by residents. I suppose being able to drive onto an island that it regularly cut off from the mainland has its charms. Although personally, I think the French had the right idea with Mont St Michel, where you park on the mainland and travel across on a shuttle bus.
Accessibility
As well as the causeway, the island is reachable by boat from Seahouses. There’s also a bus service from the mainland. The main car park on the island charges £10 for all-day parking. The village is mostly on flat ground and shouldn’t present too many issues for people with mobility issues.
However, if you do have mobility issues, maybe give the castle a miss. It’s up a steep hill with uneven cobblestones, narrow doorways and lots of steps. Entry to the castle is free for National Trust members, or £11 for adult non-members.
If you’ve been reading the reviews of the places we’ve visited on our recent trip to Northumberland (especially to The Alnwick Garden and Bamburgh Castle), you’ll note that I mention whether there’s a Max Card discount available. A Max Card is a discount card available to parents of children with special educational needs or disabilities, and/or children who are ‘looked after’ (i.e. in foster care).
We recently got one, as our eight-year-old has additional needs. Each Max Card is valid for up to two years, and offers discounts to various attractions across the UK. The discounts vary – sometimes it allows free entry for the child, or it may be 25% off. The aim of the card is to make fun family days out more financially accessible to families with children who have additional needs, or who are being looked after. Having a child with additional needs can incur additional expenses – we recently paid out £400 for one of our eight-year-old’s assessments – and so being able to have discounted days out is helpful. It also offers good experiences for looked after children who may have experienced trauma.
Where you can use your Max Card
The list of venues is quite extensive. Many (but not all) National Trust properties are on there, and locally to us is Eureka, the national children’s museum. Whilst we were in Northumberland, we were able to get discounts on three of the places we visited. As well as museums and zoos, there are discounts available at places like Go Ape, theme parks and Haven resorts. All of the Merlin sites are included too, such as the Sea Life Centres, Warwick Castle and Alton Towers.
The discounts available vary by venue. In some places, it’s a percentage discount, whilst others may allow a certain number of people in your party to go in free as long as at least one full price ticked is purchased.
It’s worth noting, however, that most places will only accept a Max Card if you buy tickets on the day in person – many will not offer the discount if booking in advance online.
How to get a Max Card
Because of the eligibility criteria, you can’t simply order a Max Card online. Instead, they’re are available through a local distributor, which is usually the local authority or a charity. For Calderdale, where we live, the distributor is the charity Unique Ways, which supports parents of SEND children. There’s a £6 administration charge to collect the card, but we have already saved far more than this on our Northumberland holiday alone. It has also meant that we could join Unique Ways as members, and access their workshops and training courses, which I hope will be helpful to us in future.
