In the time before a heliocentric view of things…

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.