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.
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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.
|
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!
