Jubilant

So, what did everyone do over the long Jubilee weekend, eh?  Street parties?  Picnics in the park?  Champagne and strawberries under a glorious blue June sky?  Lining the streets of London to wave a flag and cheer at the Queen?

No, me neither.

I was in a field.  In Derbyshire.

Why oh why oh why was I in a field in Derbyshire?  You may well ask.  Well.  Mr WithaY's new chosen career is that of bushcraft instructor, and he had been asked to go along to the Bushcraft Show to help out with one of the trade stands - a company he has been training, and latterly working with.

He asked me if I'd like to come along, to meet his colleagues, look at all the other stands, and see what it was all about.  I said yes.  But only on the condition that I could book us into a local B&B, as I have decided that I am too old, too creaky, and in all likelihood too wheezy to camp much these days*.

I found a pub with rooms a few miles from the showground, booked us in for three nights, and off we went on Friday afternoon.  It was a hellish journey, inevitably.  A long Bank Holiday Weekend, plus the usual evening rush hour traffic meant that it took us probably two hours longer than we had expected, but we arrived eventually.  Mr WithaY rang his colleagues to find out if we were needed to go and help set things up, but they were only then leaving home, and weren't likely to arrive much before midnight, so we were free to go and grab some dinner and have an early night, ready for an early start on Saturday.

So.  Saturday morning - having left the pub too early to enjoy the included-in-the-room-cost breakfast chiz chiz chiz - we drove across to Elvaston Castle, and this is how the showground looked:

As you can probably tell, it was a bit damp.  I did like the giant three-point teepee though.  It had a big tv screen in it.

Saturday was successful, there were a lot of people wandering around, and there were many demonstrations of various skills going on.  Flint knapping proved very popular, and drew crowds every time the knapper started working.

See how he knaps.  I asked him what he does with all the broken bits of flint once he's finished, and apparently they all get placed in a special spoil heap at a university, to ensure that the archaeological record isn't polluted with 21st Century flint arrowheads.

There was also a lovely lady making willow baskets and things.  I watched her for ages.

It made me want to have another go, after the excellent day Mr WithaY and I had last Autumn in Somerset, basket weaving.

There was also a chap there who had made several canoes and kayaks.  He told us how he'd travelled to Canada, visited some Colonial re-enactment type place and asked them if he could learn to make a canoe in their workshop.  They considered it, finally told him he could, but only if he agreed to dress as a Voyageur while he did it, and talk to the public.  He spent three months dressed up, learning canoe-making, and said he loved every minute.

Unfortunately, all day on Sunday it pissed down.  The rain woke me in the night - did I mention we were staying in a pub, not a tent? - and it didn't let up for about 36 hours.  The numbers of people coming through the show were correspondingly low.  As I hadn't packed my wellies, by lunchtime my feet were soaked and I was cold and miserable.

I think this encapsulates the mood:

Hopelessly optimistic, offering strawberries and scones in a sea of mud and cold, cold rain.

I took myself off to the car and sat there in the dry, if not the warm, reading my book, playing Angry Birds and snoozing intermittently until it was time to leave.  One bright spot was a phone call from some lovely mates who live nearby, who were:

(a) miffed that we hadn't thought to ask them if we could stay at their house, and

(b) seeing if we'd like to meet them for dinner later.

That cheered me right up.  A wet, cold, grim day was thus lifted by a lively and good-humoured evening with our mates, and several large glasses of wine.  Mmmmm wine. These are the mates we went to Cornwall with a couple of years ago.  When Mr WithaY fell in the river. Yeah, you remember.

Monday was much better.  The sun shone, there were loads of people, and suddenly everything looked cheerful and interesting again, rather than just rain-sodden and squalid.

We left at about 6 in the evening, having helped to take down the tents and so on, and had an uneventful and much shorter journey home in the bright evening sunshine.

One other highlight of the trip was travelling over to Matlock to pick up my clock.  Remember I said I'd commissioned a clock as a "Congratulations on doing 23 Years in the Civil Service" present for myself?

It was ready for collection last weekend, so we went and collected it.  Readers, it is a thing of beauty, and I am completely thrilled with it.

Look, here it is in the box, about to be put up on the wall in pride of place.  The brush is for dusting it.

And here it is in situ:

It is keeping excellent time so far, but my genius clock-making mate assures me it will need to be adjusted sooner or later.  In the meantime, I am enjoying the look of it, and the rather reassuring tick-tock it makes.

It's joined my Rickenbacker on the list of Things I Will Save In A Fire.








*Although if we get one of those funky circular tents you can fit a wood-burner in, I might reconsider

Meetings

I'm at my mate's lovely flat in Chelsea, full of fine Italian food and wine. Hurrah. I have walked bloody miles today, from Waterloo to Victoria, then from Victoria to Whitehall, then all the way back down past Sloan Square and all along the King's Road. My feet are killing me.

We're trying to persuade another former colleague to jump in a cab and join us for a nightcap.

He's just rung and told us to stop pressuring him. Heh.

And we've arranged a breakfast meeting for tomorrow instead. Marvellous.

Cocktails

Today has been a long and rather tiresome day, in the main.

This morning it took me 40 minutes to get my work laptop up, running, online and with all the emails etc downloaded, which was annoying. There have been complaints at work that the desktop machines are equally, if not more, slow, but my laptop has been pretty good up till now.

I am trying to get my head round a whole new chunk of work that I have taken on from a colleague who left last week, which is interesting. Trouble is, even after a couple of days of reading and re-reading I still feel like a bit of a halfwit. It'll come, but it's all a bit of a struggle, especially at the moment where my brain is still not quite all there yet.

I'm back in the office tomorrow, and I see from my sloooow inbox that we are having a summer party at the end of the afternoon, in the conference room.

Aah, nothing says Summer quite like corporate furniture. I'm not completely sure, but I think it's more likely to be a few drinks and nibbles and speeches by the top of the shop about how well everyone has done, rather than a wild drink-fuelled orgy of destruction. Not a real party.

Speaking of which...

We had a bit of a hoolie last weekend. On the spur of the moment we invited some of our lovely neighbours over for dinner on Saturday night, after a Friday night pub discussion about how we weren't doing anything much for the weekend.

I wanted to make cocktails. We watched some TV show in the week where they were drinking cocktails from proper martini glasses, and I thought "We've got some glasses like that! We should make martinis! Why don't we do that*?"

And from that, it is but a short step to having a few mates round for dinner.

Mr WithaY and I are trying to make space in the freezer, as we are expecting to take delivery of a lamb (dead, butchered, to be frozen, in case you were wondering) from some friends who have been rearing them this Spring, so we've been eating Meals That Time Forgot over the last few weeks.

We have also been unearthing some rather great stuff, like sea bass that Mr WithaY caught when he went sea fishing a while back. And frozen octopus. It made a rather fine seafood salad, a grand end to a glittering career. Sorry Spence.

I made some mini bread rolls, from a recipe on Nigella Lawson's website, which were, though I say it myself, bloody great. I also made chocolate truffle cake, and shortbread to have with strawberries for pudding. My plan was to offer our lovely guests a choice of things in an elegant restrained manner, but by the time we got round to eating we were all off our heads on martinis, and I think everyone had some of everything, possibly all on the same plate at the same time.

Cocktails, though. Don't they get you drunk fast?

We started with the classic gin martini: Bombay Sapphire gin and dry Martini, shaken with ice, served with an olive. Mmmmm-mmm. Goes surprisingly well with chicken flavour crisps. You're welcome.

Then we made Vodka martinis. Sadly, thanks to the gin martinis, I was unable to follow the recipe and ended up mixing together vanilla vodka and Bombay Sapphire gin, completely leaving out the dry martini. Again, shaken with ice, served with an olive, and then later with an additional splash of martini when we remembered. Not nearly as bad as you might expect.

Obviously, that was before dinner. With dinner we had some** truly splendid white wine.

The evening is a bit hazy after the second cocktail, but I'm pretty sure there was a lot of laughing, shouting, eating of fine food, and the gracious hostess falling asleep on the sitting room rug as her guests departed to crash through the garden hedge, as is traditional after a WithaY dinner party.

Sunday was a quiet day.






*The whiny small child that lives in my head tends not to demand sweets and comics these days, but opulent cocktails and expensive jewellery instead.

**a lot

Still tired, but a bit pissed as well

Ahaaaaaa. Back from the pub, with a glass of wine to hand. Marvellous.

My lovely mate Bill the Spill is here this evening, having called up earlier today to say he was on his way out West, and could he stay over at ours tonight.

Why, yes of course.

He was here in time to witness my guitar lesson, and to make him happy we played a couple of Lynyrd Skynyrd songs. Marvellous.

In fact, what a great reason to go and have dinner in the pub, and some gin. Beer for the lads. I had gin though. Mmmmm. Gin.

Am still very tired, but this is partly due to Mr WithaY getting up at 5am to go out fishing for the day, and despite his attempts at quietness, waking me up too. So, my plans for a bit of a lie-in this morning and an early night tonight have both been thwarted. Ah well.

No plans for tomorrow at all. Other than sleeping as much as is humanly possible.

Training stuff

In my rant about the whole car fiasco yesterday, I neglected to post some of the highlights from my week away.

First: Seeing all the guys on the course again, and having the time to catch up each others' news and lives a bit. Very nice, I hope we stay in touch. Well, at least the guys in my group, who are all completely great.

And yes, they have the address of my blog so I daren't be rude about them.

Other stuff: The drumming thing. I mentioned this in brief, but it deserves a bit more explanation. On the course programme for Thursday evening it said ominously "Drumming with Umbanda". I googled Umbanda. I found their website. I looked at what I found in blank dismay.

You can do the same... http://www.umbanda.co.uk/

I have never considered myself the kind of person who does percussion for fun. Or for anything, really. The last time I used any kind of formal percussion instrument was at primary school, where I think I was an unskilled and unenthusiastic triangle player.

I play guitar, I make jokes about drummers.

Q: What do you call a guy who hangs out with a group of musicians?

A: A drummer.

See?

And being British and therefore hugely repressed, I was dreading the whole thing.

However. Come the evening in question, we had successfully completed a huge complicated team exercise which had left everyone in a pretty good mood, and there was the promise of free booze and a barbecue after the drumming, so things were looking up.

It was being held in The Fernery (and isn't that a great name?) so we trooped in there, spotted the booze and all latched on like drowning men onto a barrel. Amazingly, after a few glasses of wine, the vast assortment of drums, shaky things, clangy things, whacky things and scrapy things all looked less daunting.

It was hilarious. Being a bit pissed helped, obviously, but the guys running the session were brilliant, and everyone joined in.

And as a footnote to that, while we were all sitting having our barbecue afterwards, we could hear another group doing their drumming session. They sounded shit. We mocked them at length amongst ourselves, even finding out from our course tutor who they were. Turned out they were a group of Germans from some Big German Company.

A little later, a couple of chaps wandered into our field of vision, both looking in some indefinable way, well, German. One of our group (a sweet, mild-mannered lady) bellowed at them:

"Hey! Are you from Big German Company?"

They stopped, looking rather startled and replied politely "Why yes, we are."

"You're CRAP!" she shouted.

There may have been a degree of pointing as well.

The rest of us dissolved in laughter, whilst trying to explain to the bemused polite German chaps that she was referring to their drumming efforts, not to the whole German nation. Well, we assume that's what she meant.

Heh. Glorious.

Back...

...from my hollerdays.

Which, to be fair, were rather strange. CenterParcs is now full of chavs, it appears, and thus has lost even the frail and shallow pretence it used to have that it was NOT a holiday camp.

It so is.

They've added dozens of new villas (NOT chalets!) to the place, and increased the number of customers who can stay there, but the actual footprint is the same, and the facilities are still about the same size too. So what you get is more people crammed into a finite space, all trying to use the same facilities at pretty much the same time.

That in itself wasn't too big a deal because we had booked one of the top of the range villas which has a decent amount of accommodation, a hot tub on the patio, and a sauna and steam room. There was also a half decent CD player and TV and DVD player so we were kept amused while we were there.

And I took my guitar so was able to get a load of practice in, as well as play some songs for the girls to sing. I don't think any record company executives who happened to be in the area will be scouring the woods for us, somehow.

I got bollocked! Yes I did!

We all went to the Spa place on Monday night for a session. You pay about 30 quid or something and get 3 hours where you can use all the various spa facilities, turkish baths, saunas, relaxation rooms, all that malarky. Anyway, my mate Sally and I were sitting in the "Reflexology footbath" bit in the middle, along with a couple of other ladies, all of us chatting companionably.

Much to my astonishment, a middle-aged bloke suddenly came right up to me, leaned in and said nastily "Any chance you "ladies" could keep it down? All we can hear is you talking over the noise of the baths." And yes, he did say "ladies" in inverted commas.

I was taken aback, not least because he invaded my personal space (which is iffy if you're in a funky and revealing swimsuit), so I went all British and said "Oh, sorry." He glared at me and stormed off.

The other two ladies who were sat there looked astounded and said "We couldn't hear you!" and we had a short "What the fuck was that all about" kind of conversation, till lo and behold, back he came, still glaring.

"Is there a problem with keeping it down?" he asked, before storming off like a sad old drama queen.

Git.

Now I was quite upset by this, not least because I have a soft, well-modulated voice which all men love to hear (well, I think so, anyway).

One of the other girls came up with a great riposte, much later on, back at the villa, over several glasses of wine. We should have said "No. Is there a problem with keeping it up?" to him.

Bugger.

I also really really missed male company. Obviously the adorable Mr WithaY was pined for night and day, but I also missed just chatting to blokes. I love my girly mates dearly but by Wednesday I was starting to get selective pitch deafness...anything that got too shrill was filtered out and ignored. Heh.

So. Am back. And yeah - the "Pay as you Go" internet machines at CenterParcs blocked my access to my blog because it is apparently a site with a high porn content. I am obviously missing out there big time.