For the last ten years
the second weekend in June has been Teston kite festival. But not
this year. A greedy council was only prepared to run the festival in
June if they could be assured to make hundreds of pounds profit.
Attendance at the festival had been declining for the last few years
anyway, and the decision to only have one kite weekend at Teston this
year could well be the end of the event. Which would be a shame. A
bunch of kite flyers had arranged a protest fly-in for the coming
weekend, but that struck me as somewhat daft. The council has said
that they won't pay for the kite festival so we put it on for free as
a protest..... how does that work?
But we've got used to
going camping during the second weekend in June. And so with Teston
not happening we've arranged to camp out in Smarden. I was planning
to be up at silly o'clock this morning, and to be loading stuff into
the car. But I wasn't. I kept putting off getting up, and thinking
I'd have another five minutes in my pit. I eventually finished
packing the car just as the Folkestonians arrived, and together with
Martin we set off to the farm. And rather than cracking on with the
work we drank coffee. Eventually we got the camping gear out of
storage and got it all to the camp site.
Last year "Daddies
Little Angel TM" had labelled all the
poles of our communal tent so that she would be able to put the thing
up this time. It's all very well going camping mob-handed, but when
only two of us know how the tent goes together there can be problems
for the others. So "Daddies Little Angel TM"
tested her labelling, and it worked very well. And with the communal
"Brown and Smelly" in place we put up our personal
tents. Not that we believed weather forecasts, but the good weather
was supposed to give way to rain at 1pm. And as luck would have it we
got the last tent up at 12.45pm, and the rain started at 12.50pm.
Finding that most of the
day's newspaper had been used to line the guinea pig's cage (they
come camping with us, you know), we salvaged what was left of the
newspaper and did the crosswords over a cheese and bacon roll and a
bottle of beer. And with little else going on we all dozed off. Apart
from a minor episode when the Rear Admiral ran over his brolly with
the car, all five of us were asleep for most of the afternoon.
During a lull in the rain
"er indoors TM" arrived, and tea
was cooked. Beef Stroganoff. We don't muck about when we go camping.
Camping is about having an enjoyable holiday, not roughing it in a
tent (!) And with the washing up washed up we played Jenga and
drank blackberry liqueurs and port until the early hours.
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