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The idea was to get up early and go out. The weather this week has been fantastic and the forecasts for today put the temperatures up in the nineties. In the event, they were right, and the air was perfectly still, so it was stiflingly hot. I bought picnic stuff in Asda with Paul (why do people with any kind of a physical impairment think they can take 25 items through the 10 items of less aisle and pay by cheque. Why do they get served?) and motored up to Audley End House and sat in the shade of the trees.

I could quite easily have dosed off in the heavy warm air had there not been a stage in the ground on which a ‘professional’ orchestra rehearsed what sounded like karaoke, so instead I stared up at the leafy branches of the tree, and the more I looked at it, the less clumsy and more impressive it appeared to be. I don’t think I’ve ever really spent so long looking up at a tree before.

We scooted around the inside of the house, which wasn’t really worth seeing, and coming out we both said we were glad we’d got in for half price. Taxidermists would enjoy it. Vegans probably would not.

We couldn’t decide whether or not it had been the setting for Brideshead revisited. Paul thought he remembered a scene on the roof, and I thought I’d heard something similar before. Google, and the dozens of hits it returns, says it was Castle Howard, though.

Came home and made coconut haystacks. Mum had written down my grandmother’s recipe for me a couple of weeks ago, and they seem to have come out alright. We had some tense sticky moments when a couple left their bottoms on the baking sheet, but a little reconstructive surgery had them back in one piece and they seem to be holding. I’d bought ‘Lemon Flavouring’ (aka essence) for them in Asda this morning. The ingredients include ‘flavouring substances identical to natural substances’, which kind of makes you wonder why they didn’t just use the natural stuff from the off and save themselves some effort.

Met up with Trevor and Jon when Trevor came off shift and went to the Fox and Hounds. It’s the first time we’ve been there in ages. It’s so much nicer than the Army. The bar and door staff smile for starters.

I used to go there every weekend four or five years ago with Mark Parry and American friend Jon. I hate to think what that would cost in petrol, and we were trying to work out how many times we’d been this year. It can’t be more than a couple, which would explain why apart from ourselves and a couple of people we successfully avoided there was nobody we knew.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 28th, 2001 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Journal, Picture story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.