Month: July 2009

We’ve been busy trying to reclaim the house from the clutter and untidiness – well, actually, Katy has been doing most of the work 🙂 . We didn’t quite make the target of 30 black sacks out of the house by Friday night (to the bin, recycling or charity shops) so stayed at home on Saturday to crack on, and for Katy to go to a SlingMeet at Truly Bumptious, which is a lovely place.

Sunday was the Festival of History, and unforecast rain. Fortunately everyone apart from me happened to have at least a jumper in the car already, but I did not and so got a bit cold and wet.

BZents were there as ever, and excellent too. They are on the children’s non-negotiable list for FoH and the St. George’s day thing that English Heritage do. J and L were 2/3 of the French army (which involved scary war cries, sticking out your tongue and shaking your bottom) and K was the black knight in a joust.

The other highlight of this year was the Agincourt / Azincourt re-enactment. I often feel underwhelmed by re-enacted battles, but seeing volley after volley of arrows from the English archers to the French at Harfleur was really effective. Katy saw the Agincourt bit itself, which was apparently very interesting despite camera problems.

There was a big dose of Britishness towards the end – a D-Day thing had a Hurricane zooming around just above the trees and looking amazing, and walking away from that we came to an excellent Beatles tribute band. Unfortunately, there was a period dancing group and their band next door, and the dancers had a hard time doing their gavotte (or whatever it was) to Love Me Do / hurdy gurdy music.

The childrens’ tent, beach and Punch and Judy show all went down well with the children. L got to dress up as a Regency lady, and they all made something or other (including A making a crown).

Fortunately we managed to bump into the Beans, Nic / Ady / Monster / Minx and half of the Porticos. Alison has gone up even higher in my estimation by not only being a Kentwell courier but also fixing an imminent sense of humour failure with a cup of tea 🙂 . Thanks too Alison and Nic putting up with me when I turned into a bit of a history bore while waiting aaaaages for the jousting to start.

I’d mentioned the FoH to Andy, who gives me a lift to work. He and his family happened to have a gap in their sports-filled weekends and came. They enjoyed themselves, joined English Heritage to reclaim their entrance fee (no commission for me though ;-), and happened to bump into me while I was queueing for the loo.

We braved the rain for the final parade, and I was impressed by how the commentator could recognise each of the groups (from Romans to WW2 soldiers) and tell you details about them. By the time we’d got back to the car I was tired, cold and wet. We’d brought a thermos of tea for then, but I’d forgotten the coffee whitener (we’d run out of milk). Fortunately I’d made it weak enough that we all could drink it OK, so that and chocolate cake largely restored good humour for the journey home.

Photos as ever on Flickr, plus bonus giraffe photos that will soon go onto the giraffe web site.

Yesterday Katy uncovered a seam of easily-dispatched stuff (clothes that we hope the RNLI will pick up tomorrow) and so we have smashed through the 30 bag target. Not content with that, she moved a couple of shelf units and some benches and helped me move a freezer. 🙂

J, K and to a lesser extent L and sometimes I have chats in the bathroom while I’m trying to get them to bed. These are often delaying tactics, but often I can’t help myself and the tiles get a bit more crayon scribbled on them. K is starting to ask interesting questions, in that they lead to interesting chats.

Earlier this week he asked “What’s energy?” J was around too, and we got talking about some examples like heat, sound, movement, potential, and how it’s converted rather than created or destroyed. So he said “So it’s just moving atoms then” to which I said “Not really. What about light – it goes through space and there are no atoms there?” And I reminded them how weird light was – they could each have a torch and cross the beams (hope they don’t work for Ghostbusters in the future 😉 and the beams would both be at the point where they cross, but then separate again afterwards. If they swapped their torches for balls and threw them along the same paths as before, the balls would bump into each other – you can’t have two masses at the same point at the same time. So light must have no mass (weird), but it has energy…

Tonight he followed that up with “What’s gravity?” I resisted the temptation to give a huge long explanation, but instead demonstrated the rubber sheet model with the T-shirt he’d just taken off, with his hand being a gas giant (his choice of big thing) and then told him there was a video Katy could show him tomorrow. Hah – no delay tonight!

Hmmm… a big gap since our last entry. What’s been happening? J has done a music theory exam (grade 3, if I remember correctly – not got the results back yet). He also did a recorder exam (grade 1) but had an attack of nerves.

The main thing that’s been happening is 3 weeks at Kentwell. This took loads of preparation by Katy making costumes, and we are just about caught up with the washing ready to put it all away ready for next year.

I’ll get the lowlights out of the way first, as I think there were only two that I can remember. The first was the children getting a stomach bug. Each of them managed to be sick in the tent, and without a washing machine or much spare bedding etc. this was even less fun than usual. Fortunately they recovered quickly, and Katy did the heroic job of keeping them out of other people’s way. As she was helping to prepare food for 40 odd people we had to be careful. On one of the days they escaped to Lavenham, which apparently was great, and on the other day Katy’s uncle and aunt were coming anyway to be escorted around by the children (in modern dress) but this turned into all of them.

The other was the utter frustration at trying to get the Eee to work with a Vodafone mobile dongle. I think buying the oldest version of the Eee was a mistake – a lot of things on the various forums start with the 2nd oldest version. It’s currently waiting for me to buy a 4GB SDHC card and install Easy Peasy on it – it has no OS on it as I wiped it during an abortive installation of Easy Peasy. Apparently ‘works with the 700 model’ means ‘works with the 700 model once you’ve bought a 4GB SDHC card’. Grrrrr…

Other people had more to grumble about – one with a chopped toe due to an axe, one with chopped thumb tendons due to a billhook, and one with a badly infected insect bite. Health and safety? The people working on the forge, the foundry (working with molten bronze some of the time) and the wood pile seemed to have the scariest time of it.

As we were there more than a week we were given a day off per week. I spent my days off Kentwell back at work (with my laptop smelling of wood smoke) to keep the email mountain under control and get a shower and a hairwash 🙂 . Katy and the children used one of them to squeeze in one last trip to the Cloth Place.

I was very glad about the weather. Baking hot first week, occasional rain in weeks 2 and 3, but not as bad as last year when the camp site turned to mud. Having said that, torrential rain made us prolong our first day off and miss the Midsummer celebrations. We assumed the storm would carry on to Long Melford but apparently it did not.

There was a definite feeling of accomplishment seeing it from beginning to end, but not one I’m in a hurry to repeat. Two weeks is about a sensible limit for the time being. The children all coped surprisingly well with the many late nights, and didn’t get as badly behaved as I feared. We had to up the ante in getting them up in the mornings – a chocolate biscuit once you’re up turned into that plus a liquorice allsort to wake you up, and after that stopped working we’d send A in to administer it to still-sleeping bigger siblings 😉 .

It was nice to see friends visiting – a colleague and her family, a local HE family and the Making It Up crowd. The cod piece didn’t prove too embarrassing to me (sorry it was a distraction Jax) as it’s something you just have to go with or not bother at all. I think I might wimp out of one next time though, as it did get a bit boring trying to defuse the giggles during the health and safety talk. As did being buzzed by Apache Longbows from the local airbase – at one point about 40 feet up during the event (I had to shout over its noise while pretending it wasn’t there).

There was definitely a different feel to the weeks depending on who was there. The middle week had a group of old hands on the Military Pavilion and it got quite laddish. Some of them were pretending to be Landsknecht (German mercenaries dressed authentically garishly) and there was pretend bad blood between them and the gunners. This led to scuffles, some spilling out of the house and interrupting the Angelus, squabbles over a keg of gunpowder from the alchemists, and a full brawl at the ale house leading to ‘deaths’.

One of the old hands was kind enough to start schooling me with my fives, which showed how slow my reactions are and how quickly my arm and wrist tire. It also gave me something new to use when talking to visitors, which is always helpful 🙂 . As well as that it also showed a common aspect of Kentwell and I suppose amateur history in general – two people in a room will mean there are three, quite strongly held, opinions about what is right. In this case it was how to block a blow to your left leg – sword pointing down with the back of the hand towards you, or the same thing but with the arm twisted over as close to 360 degress as you can get.

Outside the middle week I was supposedly in charge, which was interesting but didn’t take much effort. (I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to 😉 ). We had to jury-rig a flag pole and flag on the first day using a pike and some string that was brought to build a trebuchet. I got to meet people who’d done it a lot in the past but not in week 1 (our usual week), people who’d done other things in the past, plus one completely new person.

One of the people I got to talk in the last week was new to the MilPil but had been a cook last year and so we had done pike drill together. He is one of the key people behind Mapumental and MySociety, and explained Dijkstra’s algorithm to me in Tudor-ese in between greeting visiting school parties 🙂 – a very interesting chap.

I got my first invitation to Low Board – like being at a wedding reception but not sitting at the top table, except the top table had gentry rather than people getting married. There was a play, a firework that sent out flowers, and some nice food. Most of us were authentically at a loss as to what to do, as we were all humble blacksmiths, cooks etc.

It was interesting to see the range of evening entertainments – we had only ever been in week 1 and so didn’t know what would be repeated and what different. There were two boat races around the moat (week 1 and 3), a Tudorvision song contest (give new words to an existing song), ceilidhs, a Cart boot sale, a village fete and some other things we didn’t go to.

I’m starting to feel more settled, and realising who’s related to whom a bit more. I do realise, though, that there are people there who know infinitely more history than I do and I have little in the way of useful skills other than what I’ve picked up while I’ve been there. Still, it was good fun (even though hard work) and we’ll be heading back next year.

I got to fire a small cannon, which was fab. It was part of an excellent station full of things taken from designs by Leonardo da Vinci – some photos of this and other things on Flickr.