The End of Easter

Monday I got to walk over my hills. I don’t actually own them but just feel like I do. We walked up to the top of Piquet and surveyed my kingdom. You can nearly see all the way to Bath from up there, you can see the Pewsey Vale, and you can see my house. I forget how beautiful Wiltshire is, especially in the spring sunshine, clouds scudding across the sky and the hillsides dotted with the white flecks of sheep. The Englischer Garten is lovely, but it doesn’t have a patch on my home.

I headed back Tuesday to my new home and felt sad to leave but glad that that is where I grew up and spent most of 18 years. At the time there were a thousand other, more interesting places I wanted to be, and I know that if I was there permanently now I’d be going slowly mad, but I’m glad that that’s one of the places I call home.

Easter Day

Easter Day was a proper Sunday at home, getting up late, leisurely reading the Sunday papers in my dressing gown in the kitchen with a mug of Earl Grey. We were only the three of us as my brother is currently gallivanting off somewhere in Croatia. As it was Sunday, and I insisted, we had a roast. My mother does good roasts. After stuffing ourselves we headed over to my aunt near Shaftesbury where part of my mother’s family had collected. Typical Sunday activities continued with a cup of tea and slices of Simnel cake around the big hewn table in their kitchen by the Aga. If I live in the country in the future I might have to go the whole hog and get an Aga, as Tessa and Phil always predicted I would. They saw me in wellies, with two Labradors striding over my fields back to my cottage with an Aga. I must admit that this image does not displease me but I’m only going to get an Aga if I can get one with a gas stove.

Anyway…after tea we went to visit the girls and the boys. The girls are the two pigs, Princess and Spiderpig, and the boys are the sheep. Princess and Spider are lovely, friendly, intelligent creatures and the boys are great. They are very much Tim, nice but dim. It was nice to be around animals. When living in the country I could take or leave animals but now I’m in a city I miss them periodically. I miss cows.

We finished our idyllic Sunday in the Fox and Hound, a pub in the middle of nowhere, which still retains rustic charm and which hasn’t yet been sanitised and chainified. It’s a really nice place and by rustic, I’m not being patronising and mean dirty but it has individuality, uneven floorboards and an open fire.

Tingle to Brownhill

On Saturday Hannah Tingle became Hannah Brownhill. I was appallingly late for the wedding as we managed to get lost in our own back yard but luckily so was the bride and when I dashed in breathlessly, trying to be calm, composed, and above all, invisible, they were only singing the first hymn. I was also sporting a bleeding foot in open gold sandals. Not a good look. I had spent the whole of the journey to the wedding with my foot resting on my father’s headrest. You’d be surprised how long a foot can bleed for.

Apart from that small hiccup, the wedding was beautiful. The bride looked gorgeous and they were both radiating happiness, just how a wedding should be.

If you have high levels of testosterone please feel free to skip this next paragraph. The bride was in ivory, with a corset top laced at the back. On the front were lots of crystal beads forming little flower patterns. The skirt (or apron as I believe it is officially called) had folds like the folds in whipped cream with clusters of the same crystal beads where it gathered. She wore a simple diamond and silver pendant necklace and matching diamond earrings. Her ring was plain white gold. She wore her hair tied up but falling over her neck and a simple veil. The colour scheme of the wedding was ivory/cream and emperor purple and the bridesmaids wore simple, purple Grecian-style dresses. She has two bridesmaids and a flower girl (a niece) in white with a purple sash. The groom wore black tails and grey pinstripe trousers. His waistcoat was diamond-patterned cream and wore a dark purple tie. I hope I have such good taste for my wedding.

Boys, you can read again now.

The location, Griddleton House School was lovely, and the kids that go to that prep school are very privileged children indeed. The wedding ceremony was followed by a wedding breakfast, which made me very happy. The food was traditional English cuisine: leek and potato soup, followed by a beef roast and lemon cheesecake for pudding. After pining for a roast for 7 months, this made my day, if not year.  On the table everyone had a little Lindt bunny and a present, which turned out to be a game of charades for us to play.

After the breakfast (!) we retired to drink tea and coffee and eat cake. By the time we had had a cup of tea it was time to start dancing. They had a live band and we attempted to work off some of the lunch by gyrating wildly. There was also a mahoosive evening buffet but by that time my loose silk belt was starting to feel rather snug.

The newlyweds snuck off at around 11pm as they had been up since 6 and were exhausted. As they were heading to Edinburgh for a mini-moon the next day they also needed to get their rest.

I had a great time at the wedding. It was a lovely wedding and a good opportunity to meet up with this group of friends. I got to know Hannah, Charlotte, Jo and John, (unfortunately the 6^th of our group, Bex, was in Paris and unable to make it) in Berlin, where we brought a taste of England to the multicultural metropolis. We all studied French and German so it’s really interesting to see what people are doing now. Charlotte and Hannah are doing their PGCE at the moment, Charlotte will be teaching the little ones, Hannah the larger ones. Jon (an amazing cellist) is doing a masters at the London Academy after finishing at Cambridge and is about to embark on the difficult career of a professional musician. Jo is doing Audits at Price Waterhouse Coopers and Bex is doing a Masters in Theatre and Opera (incredible singer) at RADA. And I’m embarking on a career in PR in Bavaria. So we don’t get together very often and I thought the least I could do was be around for the most special day of her life.

Weekend in Wiltshire

After 7 months absence I headed back to the UK to see my family and friends. For 5 days. In order to make the most of my time I my flight was at 7:45, meaning I saw in the dawn at the airport. Once in England, my parents and I went to do something you can’t do anywhere else, shopping. We spent the day in Bath buying clothes. It was an odd experience because getting the park and ride into town, having a pub lunch and wandering round Bath in a slight drizzle with my parents, I felt that I had never left, and that in fact I was about fourteen years old again. Reassuringly, very little had changed, and the West Country accent was music to my ears. Though in Bath West Country accents are few and far between, as most people are tourists or from the nearby public schools.

After an intense day of shopping two of my best girlfriends from school came over for the night and the surreal feeling over being fourteen continued as we giggled and talked about boys, albeit fourteen-year olds drinking an awful lot of rosé.