Many Happy Returns

The Prisoner nearly appeared in The Village on Sunday 29 July as the paddock was the scene for a splendid party. I made an attempt at dressing up which sort of worked and certainly blended well with No 53, otherwise known as Adrian, who also has actually met and quite resembles the chap who played No 53 in the TV series. We had several large white balloons which spent most of the day in the air looking fabulous and rather more friendly than Rover in the series. A couple of balloons did occasionally land in the pond which required a combination of fishing and acrobatics by Katie and Russell before the coots living there became too concerned.

The scene was captured by Richard in the photos shown here, none of which have required any adjustment, straightening or editing at all which just shows how good he is. (Just as soon as I get some from another guest that include him then I'll add some of the good fellow to that album!)

Graeme made a splendid job of producing large volumes of sausage, burger, kebab, chicken, steak and variations on that theme not just for lunch but also firing up the barbecue again in the evening for seconds all round.

As if rehearsing for the forthcoming Paddock Party 8, Penny, Maggie, Sarahs B and D, Sue and Kathie came armed with wonderful bowls of potatoes, prawns, salmon, salads, home-made bread and desserts galore including some particularly fine pineapple, orange meringue pavlova and chocolate cake. Now most of the words in that sentence are in the wrong order but they'll know who did what. In addition, Katie came from the West and William from the far far North, commonly called Scotland, carrying yet more food and Bryony, Kirri and Matti helped entertain everyone by running around quite a lot and looking cool or, in Matti's case, quite wet, for some time. Steven, Karl, Stuart, Mark and another Steve joined in the celebrations, usually with a glass in hand, and represented that dependable bunch of men that you like to have around should a gazebo suddenly blow away or a bottle need opening.

Other guests, including Amy, relieved neither to have had to bring her piano into the paddock or even perform on her clarinet, also helped us devour some of the food that Graeme was still cooking in large volumes.

Kirri had spent most of the night before transferring 200 music tracks I had selected for the party to an iPod which played continuously for 11 hours on Graeme's super BOSE device which few realised until the next day had, in fact, been running on battery power throughout. Despite my printing some quite incorrect track lists the choices went down really well and my rather strange mixture from seven decades worked well.

A huge downpour sent us all running for shelter in the early afternoon. My umbrella totally gave up and we just got used to getting wet for a while. Remarkably, the rain stopped after half an hour or so and the sun reappeared and dried off the grass and furniture in time for us to sit down and eat and then play an approximation to cricket. William had never experienced cricket before and, to be honest, still hasn't as he was out first ball! A friend of Amy's called Joe hadn't warned us beforehand that he was someone the England team may well want to call up before long and his second shot soared over a far away fence. We were about to toss Matti over the fence to recover the lost ball but another was found so the match continued and ended with a win for one of the sides, probably the Outsiders, but no-one was entirely sure quite when.

Adrian delivered a speech and reminded everyone how old I was and thankfully steered clear of most of the topics I was worried he might have amused people with. More than that, though, he delivered a brilliant present in the form of a day with a Caterham 7 car which he and I will fly around the country with some time soon. This is a truly splendid idea and we should be able to provide yet more great memories for the village and friends when we bring it this way.

I rambled on a bit after that and I do hope that I remembered to thank everyone but, if I did miss anyone or anything out, then let me say once again - thank you all.

As the sun set and the moon rose, logs burned contentedly in a battered old chimera. Sparklers scattered stars across the sky and two big white balloons had survived, one being thrown into the air at intervals by Matti and Kirri and friends to confuse anyone who happened to look out of their windows in our direction. There was port and more cheese than the parson preached about and no-one should have left hungry. I finally got a chance to open more presents and cards. Oh, did I not mention it was my birthday?

The Age of Richard

An Extraordinary General Meeting of the Paddock Party (Planetary Pandemonium Sub-group) Committee was held today, indeed is still going on, to mark the achievement of Richard, the astronomer, in completing sixty years on Planet Earth.

Held at a Thai Restaurant some considerable distance north of the village but still on the right side of the A5 (for reasons not totally clear but possibly associated with the good food there and pretty waitresses) the sexuagenarian (not a word you encounter often these days and quite difficult to pronounce without causing offence) was supplied with vast quantities of Thai beer, gifts and cards.

The proceedings commenced with the presentation of a large cake resembling the rings of Uranus (again, careful if reading this aloud) and featuring Earth and a spaceship. Uranus appears to have a couple of inhabitants, at least, 6 and 0 being mounted at its uppermost pole.

The Chairman spoke warmly and loudly in praise of Richard's achievements and was going to direct the singing of Happy Birthday but decided to leave that until a little later when whistles might be wetter and the higher notes less painful. He did, however, remind those present that Paddock Party 7 will be on 7 August 2010 and we need to start thinking about tents.

One of these would do just fine

Adrian P provided this great snap of a lovely Sunbeam Alpine parked a mile or two down the road. If the owner happens to spot this and wants a good home for it then I'd be more than a little interested. And he or she doesn't have to look like Ria Bartok.

Chocolat

Love the film but that's another story. This is just to record an encounter with two dance floors in one day, a surfeit of chocolate and the inevitable music and laughter accompaniment.

The day started with a manic run to Dunstable at 7am for no reason other than my strange sense of duty and some belief that if a student turned up it would be more honourable for me to tell him or her that I'm heading East at 10:30 than their merely reading the post-it on the door. No-one did, of course, so it was M1 A1 and various other rain-soaked roads to help my brother extract my mum from a care home. Overtaking lorries through a haze of spray was the sort of thing that you wouldn't do if you really thought hard about it. I mean, you just assume that the lorry's lane and yours will run in parallel for long enough to get by and that there's not some massive puddle lurking in your lane further on. Job done, we were in need of refreshment and landed up in an inn in Whittlesey situated somewhere that you wouldn't ever go unless you were quite lost, as we were. Sauntered in through an open door and found ourselves on one of those wooden dance floors that I remembered from the 70s. Probably hadn't been on one since. "Look, there's even a glitterball!" I yelled. My brother didn't quite appreciate my enthusiasm but smiled before shaking his head and concentrating on the more important matter of finding the ruddy bar.

Now, normally a Friday lunch of the size that arrived would have been great news and enable me to cope with Saturday without any trouble or concern for breakfast. Just as I was finishing the last delicious bit of sea food and feeling decidedly warmer, I remembered that there was something called a candle-lit dinner chez Sarah & Adrian for several village inhabitants. One should not be fooled by either candle or lit. That may sound compact but I suspected that there wouldn't be room for the word lit even in a very very small font on the table, assuming that we ever made it through the mass of nibbles and aperitifs.

Made it home through ridiculous quantities of rain along the A14, A45 et al just in time to try and figure out what to take along and to change into some slightly drier clothes and trousers with room for expansion.

Great evening, apart from James Blunt wailing from a nearby speaker for a while but soon changed that to something else. In fact, I had a sudden and quite inexplicable urge to hear Paul Simon's The Only Living Boy In New York and managed to persuade Adrian to dig it out of his vast CD collection. The meal was vast and yummy but what has to be mentioned is the dessert. Two of the ladies had spent a considerable time in the kitchen and the fruits of their labours were simply massive bowls of ice cream, cream, rich, sweet sauces and chocolate galore. I mean if it hadn't been a warm sauce I declare that the whole dish would have solidified into a giant toblerone or elephantine chocolate fudge. It was delicious but I felt like apologising to my stomach for the space it was occupying down there.

Despite the weight and displacement inevitably brought on by the chocolate collision (as I feel it might be aptly named) two ladies decided to started twirling on the dance floor as the evening progressed . . . did I say dance floor? Yes, the house was, indeed, floored with almost exactly the same wood as the Whittlesey inn of earlier that day. Amazing.

It also snowed that night.

I woke up Saturday morning, turned on the radio just to check that it was Saurday and that it was morning still and this totally enchanting track was being played. 60s, French, female. Reminded me of Chocolat. Just had to find out who it was and discovered it was someone called Ria Bartok. Totally hooked now. The previous post has a grainy video. It's my latest craze.

So Much For Mary

I've got it. Heard this track by Jon as a teenager in June 1967. Loved it. Never managed to get a copy on tape and haven't been able to track it down anywhere ever since. 40 years on, courtesy of the remarkable Oldies Project, I now have a good quality recording and will probably play it all evening non-stop!

This has been a sort of lifetime ambition and achieving it is a quite amazing feeling that's as difficult to describe as it may be for most of you to appreciate.

The only search results I could come up with were, in fact, links to a Radio London BigL chart that the Oldies Project people had published. I thought that was all it would be, but that was nice and enough to make me glad that it wasn't something I'd imagined! To then realise that the charts were played every Sunday, and that the 11 June 1967 chart would be played today and that I could record it, knowing that it would be played, was just wonderful. (Otherwise I could have found myself listening to the shows with the mouse hovering over the recording button for weeks, months on end, and still not getting it.)

So everything stopped at 11am today and even an earthquake wouldn't have budged me. I took a chance that the internet connection would hold up. It did. They repeat the show on Wednesday so there'd have been a couple more chances coming up but I'm so, so pleased to have got it first time, now safely filed away in My Music. I'll put a copy on-line shortly so you can hear what has driven me mad over all those years.

I feel absolutely brilliant.