Bee style busy

Friday was our annual trip to Ardingly for the South of England Show. Davies, Scarlett and I have been every year for the last 4 or even 5 years and this year Ady took a day’s leave from work to join us which was really nice :).

I’d managed to consume a whole bottle of red wine while getting indignant, despairing and all sorts of other emotions over the Badman review so we were not perhaps up and about as early as Ady would have liked but we were there just after 1030am, parked up and ready to go.

Last year it was just D, S and I and we had a really good day following a bit of a pattern so we started with the hounds again this year. Scarlett just adores them, Davies is slightly more reticent, I feel like Jodie Foster in that scene in Silence of the Lambs where she walks down the corridor lined with prison cells on either side trying not to look left or right and pretending that there is noone locked the other side of the bars! 😆

Davies and Scarlett collected loads of freebies including stickers, badges, fuzzybugs, pens and more. We tried samples of loads of things including soft and alcoholic drinks (cider mmm, toffee vodka mmm, locally produced wine mmm. Oh and freshly pressed lemonade, ginger beer, apple juice…), cheeses, oils, cakes and pastries, breads and strawberries and cream :). The kids sat on police and fire motorbikes,

took part in a magic show,
watched Punch and Judy and a Tufty road safety show,
cycled a bike to pedal power a blender to make their own smoothies,
made masks at the wildlife stall, sat in first and third class carriages of a Victorian train and got to ask questions of the guard including ‘why isn’t there a second class?’.

There were cows, pigs, sheep, llamas, ducks, geese, chickens, birds of prey, bees, ferrets and many more animals to coo over (not forgetting all the dogs Scarlett got to stroke).

Ady and I got to go all misty eyed with nostalgia over a big screen showing old road safety adverts including Tufty, Green Cross Code with the GCC man (who came to our school!) and Kevin Keegan, had a really interesting chat with a woman who operates the mobile speed cameras and the static gatso cameras about the criteria for setting them up, the measures including road layout changes and other traffic calming approaches used alongside cameras, the actual speed at which they take action (10% plus 3 mph) and the other options alongside fines and licence points for what they call a ‘lapse’.

I chatted to the newly appointed Education Officer for a local animal sanctuary about setting up some group visits for HEors and arranged to contact her to talk about the idea further. Nice to network ;).

We watched some of the horse jumping, some of pig judging and by chance were at the front of the fence when they closed off an avenue to let loads and loads of cows and sheep move from the judging area back to their enclosures so we got a really close up view of them all including the enormous prize winning beef cattle.

Ady had the highlight of the day though in the bee tent. We’d sat down with our icecreams to wait for the next hourly bee demonstration and I’d told Ady how last year I’d been offered the chance to volunteer to go in with the bees but had to say no as I was on my own with the kids and they were too small to abandon. I left Ady and the kids sitting down and went to buy some beeswax moisturiser from one of the stands and Ady went past me saying ‘go back to the kids Nic, I’m off to do the bee thing!’ and re-emerged suited up to be part of the next show. Envious is not the word! 😆

We had a lovely picnic lunch, Ady had even packed a mini bottle of sparkling rose wine for me to have, ice creams and more and a really, really fab day out. I love it there :).

We enjoyed looking round the food fairs, craft tents, loved the chicken, duck and turkey tent -did I mention we’re thinking about getting turkey to fatten up for Christmas this year? and the NFU stand is always good with lots for the kids to do. Davies and Scarlett love it all so much Ady and I were saying it’s almost a given one or other of them will do something in farming or agriculture or nature somehow one day, clearly some farming throwback thing from generations past coming out in them! 😆

I really liked the flower tent and this year there were some excellent displays on themes with some really imaginative interpretations of ideas. My favourite were the ones called ‘can you eat it?’



and some fab displays by WI members on the theme ‘Dig for victory – a war time cottage garden’ which we really liked and might have a go at making ourselves 🙂

The only lowlight was probably me nipping off to get a tea and coffee for Ady and I while the others sat down for lunch and coming back to them to discover David and his mother (thank you neighbours) sat talking to Ady, Davies and Scarlett. They probably only lingered for 10 minutes but long enough to have me starting to grit my teeth.

It had been our intention to get back in time for Scarlett to go to Rainbows while we packed the car up ready for our evening adventure but when I looked at my watch expecting it to be about 330 to discover it was actually 530 we realised that wasn’t going to happen! Scarlett was philosophical about it though and shrugged it off okay.

We did get home at about 7pm and managed to pack overnight stuff, grab tent and sleeping mats / bags, put the protesting chickens away (very early for them, 930pm is bedtime at the moment normally) and head back out again to Ros’ to celebrate Ellie’s birthday.

We arrived stupidly late, but for once were staying the night so it didn’t matter :). We were utterly delighted to see Layla, Si, Claudie, Jasper and of course Nell there too so that was an added bonus 🙂 :). I got to have a lovely long cuddle with Nell who is perfect and beautiful and so tiny and delicate – at 3 weeks old she is only the size of my two at birth – Davies might not be doing much in the way of growing now but my babies have both been full size versions at birth! 😆 And most charmingly and endrearingly of all Nell appears to be showing signs of being a redhead – yay! 🙂

We all four had a truly lovely evening – Davies and Scarlett played with Claudie and made friends with another boy there we’d not met before, I got to chat to Ros and Layla, Ady got to have a beer for once as he’s usually driving home :).

Ady and Scarlett went to bed around midnight, I sat at the campfire with Ros a bit longer but mindful of needing to be at work this morning I went to bed just after 1am, collecting Davies from the TV on my way 😆 So happy with our little weekender tent again. It goes up really quickly and easily, is the perfect size for the four of us and goes down again just as efficiently :).

Saturday I woke at 530am and tried to work out why, registering it was noisy. It was a mixture of birdsong and preteens who I suspect hadn’t actually slept at all. I had a quick shower to wash the eau de campfire from my hair, the kids went straight from sleep to trampoline in under 2 nminutes, Ady and I took the tent down and Ros kindly supplied us with hot drinks. We were away at 8am and I was at work, bug eyed and a bit fuzzy well before 9am.

Thanks to Ros and Tony as always for a fantastic evening and fab hospitality 🙂 xxx

Work was a bit of a daze really. I spent the first hour in the workroom on ‘light duties’ thanks to my delicate state and my indulgent and amused colleagues 😆 I spent it looking through A Victorian County History, a reference book which one of my tasks for the coming year is to find out 3 facts I didn’t know before from along with Whittakers Almanac and The National Directory of Associations. I did Whittakers last week so today I was reading all about Sompting from 1066 onwards. Very interesting stuff.

I spent the next hour on the enquiry desk but the only enquiry I fielded was about a local lord from the 1800s and some of his antics. It’s been a local history-tastic morning :).

In the final hour I was on the counter and my colleague J and I were looking at an OED online quiz for library users which had us learning which fruits have been known as ‘bumblekites’ in the past among other things. That was my WWLT fact.

Meanwhile at home Ady and the kids did some gardening and then came to collect me from work at 1pm. Then it was over to Chris and Julie’s for a belated postponed birthday barbecue for Lorna who was 1 last Sunday. On the way over Ady learnt that telescope is also a word refering to the action of something telescopic aswell as the thing you look at the sky through.

We had a lovely afternoon with Chris and Julie. The four older children ran around the garden playing together while Lorna sat in the middle of the lawn just watching it all go on around her 🙂

I helped Julie change the settings on her laptop to keep up with having changed her ISP and struggling to send and recieve emails and then we came home. D and S had some toast and a few pages of Charlie Small before bed. Scarlett fell asleep on my lap almost as soon as she climbed up for a cuddle but Davies took longer as he was busy creating a time machine out of cardboard. I’ve no idea where his stamina levels come from :).

We’ve had pizza for dinner and now as I am falling asleep over my keyboard I need to go and make up some of my sleep deficit!