February Frolics

I am back in Brugge and delighted to be home where I need to be to recover from the family weekend recently ended. Our time together, 13 of us, from Friday to Sunday doesn’t sound so long but we managed to do lots of things and have such fun. My present fatigue means that an Ancient Person in the mid-eighties simply can’t keep up with a small pack of twenty somethings. Not that I tried to ‘keep up’ but just being together, talking, for the most part of two days plus, saw my energy exit on a tidal wave!

Our accommodation just outside Mayfield, a village near Tonbridge in the Kent Weald, was fabulous; several converted barns with luxurious accoutrements plus the Cock and Bull Pub, a games room and pub bar, which was a great hit with the youngsters. Almost the entire party watched two Rugby matches on Saturday afternoon in the Cock and Bull, with a great deal of emotion and distress expended at the results.

Professor Peacock, Misty Visions, 

,the clairvoyant, and Cinders, the maid and
illegitimate daughter of a Lord!

  Shady, leafy, muddy walks.
Photograph by the slowest walker of the group.

As details of other people’s family get-togethers are pretty boring I shall restrict myself to mentioning a super country walk ending at the village pub, on Saturday, to get everyone in shape for the afternoon Rugby-watching. And the marvellous evening meal, courtesy of Cook in Bury St Edmunds, interspersed with a Murder Mystery which was wittily scripted and required everyone to dress up as a character in the drama. The dressing- up provided welcome scope for imaginative, not to say, outrageous, costumes to which much thought had been given, while the script seemed to release each person’s Inner Drama Queen or King and there were some Amazing Sights. Great was the over-acting and the guffaws; it was indeed a melodrama fit for a Victorian audience and each scene was interspersed with more wonderful Cook food, processed and presented by the oldest grand-daughter and her partner. What amazed me was that these two girls could prepare and present a fabulous meal as well as dress and act their scripted parts AND orchestrate the narrative. Oh to be young! Indeed, they were both magnificent, red in smiling face and purposeful in eager gait, as the rest of us, in a selection of bizarre outfits, lazily ate and drank and chatted, occasionally leaping to our feet to declaim or defend. The little dog slept.

The wonderful organisers, the chef and the white-coated

doctor, to the right.

Others are some of the amateur drama group

who never let authenticity stand in the way 

of fun.