En Vaccances!

"No, I can't spell in French but I can order drink and food, so what else matters?"

A few days in France at the Centreparc just south of Rouen. A rest? A holiday? Well, a break, certainly! I haven't cycled so much, played tennis or done such generally sporting things for years.

We took the ferry from Newhaven to Dieppe on Friday morning: a 3am start. The journey was long and slow (though my son and I slept nearly the whole ferry trip) and we got lost in Dieppe and then Rouen, but we arrived at the Parc in time to have a couple of games bowling (I won the first, Alex the second) and a meal (over priced, not very nice, but hey ho).

When Alex and I collected our bikes the heavens opened - we were drenched in seconds. Still, it didn't matter. Thankfully Saturday morning the sun shone and for the rest of the weekend the weather was lovely.

I could list our activities per day - including tennis, swimming, walking, cycling, shopping, drinking, eating and golf (you know, I didn't miss the ball once on the driving range? What's all this swiping with the stick thing? The ball doesn't move for goodness' sake... it just sits there. Hit it!). But listing what we did on what day might get a little tedious for the casual reader - so here's some highlights.

We played a round of mini-golf that took us so long we abandoned it at the 15th hole. The most entertaining part of the game was a young lad of about four years old with his plastic club and plastic ball so intently lining up each shot and trying very hard. He was most engaging, patient and good natured (how many four year olds do you know would wait 10-15 minutes before 'their turn'?) and then he'd take the ball, put it next to the hole and tumble it in.

I played quite a bit of tennis with Mel - something I'd not done for years. She is young and agile, so I had to run around quite a bit, but after about three turns I managed to start hitting the ball with the centre of the racket instead of the edge, the handle, my leg... (I'm much happier when the ball stays still).

Bryan hadn't cycled in years but - well - it's just like riding a bicycle, isn't it? No one fell off, no accidents, nothing but good fun, exercise and lovely French cider.

The small apartment we stayed in was, like the rest of them, surrounded by trees. I identified birch, oak and pine and saw a tree creeper (cute little bark hopping bird). The lake, a central feature of all Centerparcs, was perfect for the paddle boats. When we went out in ours I just lay back and the kids did all the paddling. A lovely way to while away half an hour in the sun.

We packed a lot into our two full days there. We had to leave at the start of the Monday morning to catch a mid-day ferry home. We left at 9.00am and got home just about 8pm. A long day! The ferry journey was smooth again and though this time I didn't sleep the trip seemed very long. Mel and I went for a sunbathe and got told we were on a forbidden part of the ship! Well - no signs, what did they expect? On the way we caught a puncture too, it wasn't much fun unloading the car and having to change a tyre in the ferry port UK end.

Home at last we were tired and ready for a rest. The neighbour had fed the cat, the grass had grown at least six inches, but the sun was still shining and we were happy after our exhausting but enjoyable break.

Folkin' About

"I learn to pass at juggling and look at lots of old tractors, amongst other things"

Ah, the day of the annual Red Lion Free Folk Festival finally arrived. And with it - of course - torrential rain. At 8am that morning the skies were slate-grey and emptying the entire contents of lakes onto the earth it seemed. By 10am, however, I could walk down town to the bank in just a shirt as it was so warm and sunny!

The annual festival is a free event run by the regulars at a folk club near Cambridge. They save up all year with raffles and other fund-raising events and put on a completely free festival with singarounds, open mic, sessions, workshops, a concert with a guest band (Isambarde) and a barn dance in the evening. The dance is performed by local band Swindlers and Gentry who do it for free as many of them go to the club.

It started at 12 and though the skies were still cloudy, there was blue in between and no rain. However, the earlier downpour seemed to have an effect on the crowds who were somewhat absent to start.

The open mic in the marquee started with Bryan (my husband) and Penni. Later I played with my music partner, Shani. Though we'd rehearsed two of her songs and one of mine, we ended up doing four of her songs. I had tonsilitis and my singing voice was pretty shot. But we did ok despite the humid atmosphere wreaking its havoc on tuning.

My friend Carol came too, and bought me a plate of chips for my lunch. Earlier I put them on the table with Bryan and some others, and by the time I'd gone all the way back to the pub for ketchup and a fork... well, when I returned the plate was pretty well clean. I managed a few chips, but didn't really mind as singing (even though I was only doing harmonies) on a full stomach is not a good idea.

Baz, the drummer Penni, Bryan and I play with when doing the airshows (see previous posts) joined us too on snare drum. He'd never even heard Shani and I, let alone played with us, but did a grand job. My friend Steve, who I'd sent a CD so he could learn our final number and join in on harmonica, ended up stuck in traffic and arrived just after we'd finished our spot. Next time perhaps.

I'd been doing some publicity for the festival (not as successfully as I'd like given the low numbers) and also invited a few people. My boss and her mother came, along with a trainer called Kate. They seemed to enjoy our performance and after watching the morris dancers, came and joined us with Baz. He had another, vitally important role at the festival. Baz was the circus act. We joined Baz and I learned to pass at juggling, we did something odd with balls in socks - called poi I think (I managed to hit myself on the nose, the legs, the back... not a natural talent I fear) and even tried the hula hoop. I don't think that I'd been any good at that as a kid either.

Bryan meanwhile had been put on the sound desk in the marquee where the open mic was, so he didn't get to see me embarassing myself with the poi or see that I could actually use stilts! Even though they were only very little ones.

Though the festival was due to continue to late in the evening, and Bryan was playing in the dance band (and I do like barn dances), I had to go home. My daughter wasn't well and needed a bit of TLC so I bought her a fast food meal (and some for myself too) and drove home to her, leaving Bryan, Shani, Nickie and the now growing crowds to the rest of the day.

When I got home my daughter was in a sorry state, but pleased to see the food. So was her friend, who was with her still, so they shared what I'd brought. I made myself a cheese sandwich. It seemed the fates were steering me away from chips at every turn!

I couldn't go back to the festival because I had a gig too. I was playing bass with The Brookfield Band at a birthday party in a small village near Ware. The sun was still shining and when I arrived at 6.30pm, there was a huge hog roast being set up, a bar so laden with drink that it looked like it would collapse, a bouncy castle, and the most huge Union Jack I have ever seen. It must have been about 30 feet wide and created the backdrop to our tiny stage. I was first and set up, so whilst waiting for the others I went for a little walk round the farm who's barn we were playing in. Yes, a barn dance in a real (tin) barn for a change.

The farmer was a collector. There were about 25 tractors and lots of other ancient farm machinery of all kinds. The tractors were mostly Fordson and International (not a New Holland or John Deere in sight) and in various states of dilapidation or restoration. There was one weird machine from a company called Brampton of Uttoxeter and for the life of me I couldn't figure what it did. Two huge rollers, a funnel to pour something in and then two routes - one directly down to the rollers, and another to some weird enclosed section. I was curious, I have to say. It was too small to sort vegetables, and surely grain would have just gone all down the one chute? I couldn't work it out. I guess I'll never know, but I'll survive not knowing.

The crowd danced and danced - it was good fun playing with so many people dancing and having such fun themselves. Later we took a break to enjoy the food and I ate so much hog roast that I couldn't manage any desert. Ah well, good thing I'd not filled up on chips earlier.

When I got home at around 12.45am, I was only minutes ahead of Bryan. His gig finished earlier, but they had to clear up their stage (his seven piece band has a lot more equipment than the little four piece I play with) and help clear up from the day's events. We did catch up though, for what seemed like the first time that day. It had been rush for him from the moment he got up to go and get stuff for the festival, till the time he came home after having helped shut down at the festival (as well as having started the session, played with Penni, run the PA for a while and then played in the dance band).

We had a cup of tea and a chat, comparing notes on dance bands and how the day had gone. We aren't sure if they will have a festival next year as the pub are intending to build an 80-bedroom hotel on the land where we put the marquee up. We shall see.

Now it's Sunday morning and Bryan has gone back to the festival to help with the final clear up. I shall finish this blog, wake my children and then go for a swim.

How well read are you?

The US list of the top 100 books - those I've read are in bold, those I want to read italics, and those I love in square brackets.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 [To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee]
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I read lots of 'em, but not all!)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - does audio book count?
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams]
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 [The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini]
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie-the-Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 MISSING - missing? Is that a book??
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 [The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon]
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 [Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Want to join in a game of 'tag'?

You are supposed to:
Look at the list and:
1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) [Bracket] the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list on your own blog.

I'll 'tag' Nick because he introduced me to it. You can see his top 100 read, not read etc (he's read more than me).

London Eye

"Going up! And round - and down..."

Saturday I took my 14 year old daughter and her boyfriend to London for the day. It was a surprise for his birthday. We drove to Cockfosters and then took the tube into Waterloo. Then began the queuing!! The London Eye is a huge wheel with 'pods' all round it. You have to jump on while it's still moving and then, over the course of around 40 minutes, you do a 'circuit'. One turn of the wheel.

OK, so queuing 45 minutes to go on a 40 minute trip in a glass bubble stuck on a wheel might sound a bit odd, but in fact it was terrific. Although my younger companions were perhaps slightly phobic of heights, in fact everyone was fine in the pod. You just looked out and there was a terrific view across London. St Paul's, the 'Gherkin', Canary Wharf, the Houses of Parliament... all could be seen. The higher we went, the more amazing the view. And close up there were strange sights too - in a central courtyard (which you could not see at ground level) was a weird octagonal building that looked like some weird secret headquarters.

When we reached the top, my daughter gave her boyfriend his birthday present - an engraved silver bracelet. Sounds girly, but it wasn't - it was very cool and he was very pleased indeed.

After our trip we headed into town for a pizza - but there was a problem with the trains. The Central Line was closed (body on the line...) and thus the trains were absolutely packed. My daughter and her boyfriend are both slightly claustrophobic so it wasn't the most comfortable of tube journeys. What made it worse was one fellow getting his head shut in the train doors. No serious injury, thankfully.

After pizza we did a quick bit of shopping. I took them into Selfridges but we couldn't stay in long - it was so hot! The shop was so warm we felt unwell. And then we went back into the underground and got squished and boiled even further.

By the time we got home it was gone 7pm and I sat down, exhausted but happy. We'd all had a good day. The phone rang. "Where are you?" came the cry - from a band expecting me to be there playing bass with them! My pal Cathy had mentioned the gig, I'd told her I was free but never heard anything more.

The worlds quickest change and loading of the car and I was off again. We were playing at a wedding in Harpenden and, as often happens, the speeches had overrun. So by the time the guests turned up for dancing I was nicely settled on stage, plugged in and ready to play.

They danced, we played, Adrian called the dances. At the break we looked at the remains of the buffet. Lots of things 'on sticks'. Prawns, reformed meat of some kind and a few other odd things like mini sausages. No salad, no cheese or stuff like that. Adrian looked crestfallen, being vegetarian. No problem! I was his official taster and found that some of the stick things were actually vegetables, and the odd looking ball things were onion bahjees.

We finished the dance and I drove home very tired, but quite happy. From up the in the sky on a huge wheel in the afternoon to playing at a very happy couple's wedding in the evening. Sunday would be a day to take things easy!

(In fact on I swam 24 lengths, went for a walk on the heath and did the ironing. I also tried an experiment with dinner - chicken stuffed with cheese and wrapped in bacon. A success, thankfully.)

New directions

"A new venture for an old hack"

I've been in marketing for ... oh, far too many years for me to mention here... and in training (in the industry, not 'in training' - you know what I mean!) for more than four years.

So my new venture is at a tangent to training - it's publishing training materials. I'm 'in charge' (though of course I report to the two big bosses - big as important, I don't want to be had up for libel here ladies!) and one of the things I've done is set up a 'partner' web site whilst waiting for my all-singing, all-dancing e-commerce site to be complete.

So - take a look and let me know what you think! www.trainersworld.co.uk. I built it using the totally free Microsoft (TM) Office Live system. It's pretty darn good for small businesses (though not suitable for my e-commerce project).

I'm enjoyin gthe responsibility and the freedom to get on with my own work, but the quantity of work is daunting. I am hiring freelance trainers to help with editing and even have a summer-time assistant.

It's keeping me busy, happy, paid and - in due course - I hope it will be a great success and a real money making enterprise. Darn, shame about the recession (what recession? Yeah yeah, I know - don't talk it into existence, but we can't pretend it ain't here). Never mind, I think I have a good niche market going here, so I'll keep you posted.