Sunday dawned bright and sunny and cheerful. We were at The Swan in Stoford in readiness for taking Gwen out for the day, having come down on Saturday evening. We were meeting her mid-morning and heading to Stourhead, which is a National Trust House, gardens and parkland near Warminister. She had never been. The Builder said that he also had never been, although I am absolutely certain that he and I (and, I think, Barb) went for a (very brief) wander around the top part of the parkland three or so years ago. Anyway. No matter. None of us had had a proper mooch around and Sunday seemed a perfect day for it. Off we went.
Stourhead is wheelchair friendly, if a little steep in parts. Made The Builder puff pushing Gwen up the steeper hills!
As we were mootling along I paused to look at a sign which was quite clearly telling us not to do something. The only question was – what? Red circle with a line diagonally through it. Yup. But what are these pictograms? Look like pictures of watering cans to me, but that seems entirely unlikely. Why would anyone come to wander in the Stourhead parklands armed with a watering can? And if the gardeners wish to wander armed with watering cans, that seems only reasonable. Oh well. Whatever it is they don’t want us to do it’s unlikely to be anything we were planning to do anyway so it doesn’t matter.
On we trundled. The path we were going down became really very steep. Just as well we were going down rather than up, for it was also quite gravelly. In fact, strictly speaking it was stony rather than gravelly and the wheels weren’t turning so much as skidding. It would have been very hard to push the wheelchair up it. Not only that, the path was very uneven, there were pot holes. And there were gutters running across it that were Very Deep Indeed. Very, very hard to get the wheelchair across them - and we couldn’t get Gwen out of the wheelchair and ask her to step across the guttering because the path was much, much too uneven for her to walk on even a step or two. The path got steeper. The Builder held on hard, brakes on tightly. If at any point he had stumbled and let go, Gwen would have gone SWOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH and over, down into the lake – never to be seen again. I think we would have got into trouble if we’d completely lost her!
Eventually we got down to the bottom, to the wheelchair friendly paths. There was another “No watering cans allowed” sign at the bottom of the path. I went to inspect it. A VERY close inspection revealed tiny, tiny wheels at the bottom of the watering cans. They are clearly intended to be interpreted as a pushchair and a wheelchair. Still look like watering cans to me! I do feel that sign should have been a lot clearer. Fortunately, Gwen and The Builder thought it was a huge joke!
Thereafter we stayed on the nice flat paths around the lake!
What to do after lunch? The sun was still shining. We decide to call into Farmer Giles’ Petting Farmstead. I got to feed lambs and tickle a pig and talk to ponies and chickens and bunnies. We had a nice stroll around. But it wasn’t really very exciting. It was a pleasant enough way to spend half an hour but not worth anything like the £5.50 it cost to get in. For £5.50 I would expect to be there for a couple of hours and have lots of things to see and do.
We took Gwen home and repaired to the Swan where we passed a pleasant evening having a drink in the riverside garden and dinner in the bar. We did not, you will observe, go home to The Sidings. We went to bed upstairs at The Swan.
They’re refurbing the bedrooms. Carl gave us a sneak preview of the one finished one. It’s VERY swanky!
Monday was a holiday. And, in spite of the doomsayers’ predictions for rain, rain and more rain in the Portsmouth area, it was a beautiful day by the time we arrived and Jeanette and Matthew’s place for lunch. Such a beautiful day that we all decamped outside and had our lunch and conversation and merriment on their decking. Evie kept looking at me in that very suspicious way you watch people that you think might be about to eat you. So I took her shoe off and tickled her foot and that was OK.
And then we came back to The Sidings. And yesterday The Builder went back to work. I did not. The University was closed for an extra day. And the sun shone and all the washing dried and nearly all the ironing got done. I tried to weed the strawberries but was attacked by a bunch of pissed-off ants. I am mildly allergic to ant bites so I left them to it and went and weeded the (mercifully ant-free) asparagus bed. I pottered in the greenhouse and put the fish stickers up and meandered around the Internet and made rhubarb and custard party pies and generally had a nice time. The Builder came home and we went to the allotment for a bit. We had dinner and some wine. And now here I am, back in the office, about to try and do Monday, Tuesday AND Wednesday things all in the one day. Sigh!
Looking forward to August. I have August off. Can I have September, October and November off too? What? Yes – of course on full pay. Tut!
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