Party Time! August 23rd-24th 2013

FRIDAY AUGUST 23rd - BANK HOLIDAY WEEKEND  - in spite of the fact it isn't the last weekend in August.  Bureaucrats have a lot to answer for, would anyone really have minded if the Monday had snuck into September? Of course not.
There are some things you have to do to avoid worse things, so we left home on Friday evening to duck the Saturday traffic, but we forgot that the days had shrunk since Cornwall. Like the price of a loaf in old money, the length of a day is now only worth half what it was 8 weeks ago, so by 8.30 dusk hadn't just fallen, it had thundered down leaving the Duchess and some giant combine harvesters struggling in the dark. They had a whole field to play in and floodlights borrowed from Mansfield FC. On our side we were wondering how we'd tell a  layby from a ditch. We came on a long straight single track road with wide cropped verges, and by unusual good fortune managed to find the short flat bit. There is nothing worse than a tipsy Duchess in the night, feet or neck braced against her ribs. The trick is to put water in the sink and see which way it tilts, then use the rear stabilisers ( nothing to do with tiny bike wheels) to level the Old Girl off. But do we do that? We didn't get where we are today by winching metal legs in the dark, and should we need to move on in the night it would be impossible to retract them whilst in flight. There is nothing more embarrassing than driving off with your legs carving chunks of turf out of a field.

We pull over, hoping those combine harvesters really are transformers and can squeeze past. Too tired to care, we make a picnic and feel pleased. There is something very liberating about just stopping in your snail shell, with everything you need for comfort through the night. Perhaps it is the closest we get to being cows. There is also an added feeling of Christmas Eve when you stop in the dark - what will you find in the morning? If a cow, with luck, plenty of grass. We found a rural traffic jam.

Rural Okey Cokey 

We had narrowly avoided parking across a crossroad, and watched as a giant hay lorry reversed up the road, brushing our windows in deference to an approaching Leviathan. They did a mechanical dance at the crossroad whilst we ate toast. It was a very satisfying start to the day, the view was fields, sadly no windmills to liven it up, but we felt suitably smug that we'd Done the Right Thing in choosing this particular 20 foot strip of verge out of the millions of other feet that were angled towards bogs and fens.

Now on to the party, a Ruby-do!  I had downloaded the address and postcode into my gizmo's contacts - something I announce with some pride as a demonstration of forethought and competence. BB is suitably impressed - until we find there is no such entry under Contacts, not a whiff of our hosts to be found. BB's expression is quizzical. (That is a polite way of putting it - I can see he doubts my memory, and probably my gizmoid ability,) but I'd had to write out the address on paper ( yes, paper) in order to transfer it from the invitation  email to the address book, so I know it is true Why, you may well ask. The email was cunningly devised with an icon, which when clicked revealed its contents. A genius idea until you tried to copy and paste this coded information. Probably owing to high security needs for  a Ruby-do, copying and pasting just achieved the trans-location of the icon itself, with no content, hence the need to resort to pen and paper. What should have taken me five seconds to achieve took a full five minutes, and then I'd forgotten to press 'save' before exiting. So now we must trawl through a month of emails, but only the first week is visible onscreen. The Duchess is no more equipped with WiFi than she is with a crinoline. Therefore we must align the mobile with the gizmo, something akin to aligning Mercury with the moon, and hope ancient emails will reveal themselves. They do, but the icon - sadly not Byzantine- still refuses to reveal its content.  Molly, our long-suffering navigator prefers a standard Post Code  to mere prayer and supplication so BB is forced into some intricate technical astrology, something he is very good at owing to his legendary patience and intricate knowledge of Ipad-ology ( pronounced ippidology) and WiFi-nautics (pronounced whiffinautics). A connection is finally made via our friends in space, the icon is cracked and we have a Rosetta Stone epiphany as the Post Code is revealed.
Molly is primed, but then we read the rest of the  invitation which says the party runs from 12 noon till 12 midnight. We don't want to outstay our welcome, and since we would like to stay overnight, we need to arrive in time for tea, not lunch, so we make for Stamford, home of those Players from the Minack Theatre.
If you haven't been to Stamford, go. It is a charming town along a river: Continental in that the buildings are all made from the same colour stone, but quintessentially English in design.


Not one building jars, and there's a river, a secondhand bookshop, an entire street of interesting shops with a selection of the very best reflections to be found on this Sceptered Isle. Not the sort of reflection that involves navel-gazing and non-rhyming lyricism, no, the sort that's found in a pond, the very best sort of pond, clear, shiny, and duckfree.
 We are simple folk. We see a reflection and before you can say 'shutter,' our cameras are firing from the hip. How often do you get a compositions like these without spending whole days arranging objets d'arts and waiting for the right light?

They are big on flowers, big on buildings in Stamford

Insideout

If you aren't enchanted then please consider becoming so in the next few seconds because our Gallery of Unusual Reflections is about to  be revealed.

This might be a Stamford nude

As you can see, you get double value from a Truly Reflective Town. The buildings and their doubles, juxtapose things that will never make sense, but enhance life in the way that marshmallow enhances a pointy stick and a bonfire. A ludicrous idea of course, but it somehow makes getting a cold bum and frosty fingers seem brilliant fun. We guess that window cleaners retire to this town just to enjoy the gleam of glass they haven't had to polish themselves.

Possibly lifted from a church

 Like marshmallows on sticks Stamford manages to enhance an already visual feast into a photographic symphony of unexpected fireworks.

Town & Gown

If you can follow that analogy you deserve a mug of hot chocolate.  Please feel free to make one before the next chapter. I would offer a Twix or a Bourbon Download to go with it, but Ipadology has yet to make itself really useful. Online shopping I am sorry to tell you isn't really what it says on the tin. There are postmen involved, and banks, Bank Holidays almost certainly, and the small matter of actually being at home when your delivery arrives. So you're better off nipping out to the offline shop if you need a biccky for that mug of cocoa. If you don't want one, let this fella have it. He's as old as the houses, and as you can see, is the New Look of Stamford.

Fortified by a really rewarding afternoon we set off for the rest of the day. Molly takes us to where still perky balloons hang from a lonely gate post in the depths of God's Flatland. We have a theory He stood here whilst fashioning the bumpy bits further West, and He was heavy. We suspect He also liked a good view with no distraction. For those who live near the Bumps, it is a naked experience this land, nothing betwixt you and the horizon. A full 180 degrees of sky. Good thing we like naked, and clouds. Because yes, it is overcast. Sun yesterday, sun tomorrow, never sun today.
So here we are, crunching up the gravel drive, wondering who and what we will find. There is space for a whole tiara of Duchesses, stables for horses, ( damn why didn't we come in the phaeton?) two little dogs and an invisible cat. How do we know? We have a cat detector on board. BB has the best cat-detecting nose in the business and he wastes no time in setting it to work. A fine run of sneezes and a pill later we are in the bosom of the family. My family, the plains dwelling Sauroses are grazing happily amongst the plates. Magic plates actually. No sooner do they empty than the same food reappears. The sheer genius of endless profiteroles manifesting next to Coronation chicken, coleslaw and strawberries is something intriguing. I never see how the trick is done. Whoever is responsible probably has a relative with a turban in the brass lamp business.

Cousins are a wonderful invention. You can either admit to having them, or pretend you have none. They are the optional extra of family life. Now I happen to collect them, yea truly until the 4th generation ( once removed. ) And, in case you are one of those people who doesn't understand how cousins work, let me first say, they work very hard, and second, anyone who is your own generation is either a first, second or third cousin, etc, their kids however, are all once removed. How hard was that? If you need further clarification ask someone else.
So here we are, BB knows almost no one, but is putting a brave face on it. After greeting those I am actually related to, I make my way towards people I have never met, ask what connection they have to our hosts, explain I am a first cousin of the 40-year-bride. If they look confused, I point to a handsome black and white photo and say, 'my uncle, her father.' Then we're in business. The other guests are a good deal more interesting than me, so I extract information about their lives, careers, specialities and then introduce them to BB. There is the one who is a vet - well there's a small tribe of these, the ones who hail from north of the border who refuse an invitation to spar with BB over Independence, the one who declares himself socially inept but is happy to chat away about his mathematical research and demonstrate a nifty ability to sketch on my iPad. And no, it isn't me, but the lass from Scotland.
There are the ones who go to Cheltenham for religion not racing, the smiling young lovers, the man who trips down the stairs into my arms, and looks horrified. (I try not to mind.) There are those who ride horses, those who'd never dare, those who are band members not only from the sixties, but in their sixties, a sort of square root of musicians, but none brought their instruments so we have only their word for this musical pedigree. There are those who are coming, those who are going, the very young, the very old and the very firmly in the middle - although most with rather less-than-firm middles. There's the  one who buries the atheist dead, the one who regrets buying a laptop, the one who gave birth to a Chihuahua. She is a bitch. A Yorkiehaha by all accounts. Her son is a Security Guard, he has an American accent and a vest to prove it.

Yorkiehaha Mother

And  Son (Once removed)

The variety keeps us intrigued for hours before it is time to repair to our luxurious bed aboard She Who Motors. As we curl up, the heavens having been quite restrained all day - a Good Thing since Le Booze was in a tent thirty yards from the house - decided it was time to drench late drinkers. The rains gallops across our tin roof for hours with a steady reassuring drumbeat. Under canvas it's the one sound which will drive you to sell your tent and trade it in for something more substantial. That is why we are not just smug, but gratified, knowing we didn't waste our money after all. Sorry campers, but this is just the way we all evolve: In adolescence we camp in a tent no bigger than ourselves, in our twenties we acquire rucksacks, a cooking stove and a partner, in our thirties we acquire children to go with the equipment, cooking stove and partner. Our tent now becomes a three bedroomed sprawl with tables, chairs, and a porch. And we need a trailer for all the gear. With relief we now move on to glamping where someone else puts up the tent, provides the beds, fridge, sun loungers, and swimming pool. After a few more fraught summers dealing with teenage parties in the one-man tents next door we finally lose the sprogs, pull a muscle crawling about on all fours and surrender to the very grown up idea of an entirely furnished and equipped house on wheels. That way, if we don't like our neighbours we can up-gearsticks and drive off. Therefore rain has for us a particular sweetness that never fails to make us feel snug. (If you read that as smug, well done.)