The weekend was a roaring success. Three days was not enough.
Saturday
A late morning. What do you expect? Mum rather kindly did some laundry for me, we all went to Cowes, Allie bought herself a 'Girls from the Blue Stuff' top from White Stuff, and we ate baguettes out the back of the Fountain Inn, next to the ferry terminal, but in view of the Honda Power Boat festival and large groups of Mods who regularly head over to the Island for massive scooter rallies. We prevailed back to Ventnor, where much Sitting was partaken in, and then went to the beach for an early-evening dip before the sun went down. I later discovered that my return train ticket was in my shirt pocket when Mum washed it. It had survived only partially due to the sacrificial mulching of the ticke for the outward journey, which had shielded it, despite them both falling into two bits.
Sunday
Another late morning. You could say that this was something of a pattern.
All hands on deck for BBQ central, with Keith stoking up the barbecue, Mum preparing salads etc, and Alice and myself standing around and trying to look useful, which we eventually managed to be by going into town and buying 400 cubic metres of chips and sixteen cans of beer. People started arriving at about 1pm, and the final guest was eventually ejected from the garden semi-forcefully at gone midnight, mumbling about hard-headed firemen from Wisconsin and the need to catch a ferry to New York in the morning.
About 24 people attended, all told, including a couple of people walking past in the street that my parents knew, who were invited in and had drinks thrust at them. Amongst these were a startling number of old school friends, including Dave, Fossy, and Sharon. Add to these lovely people the marvellous Alice, my bubbly sister Jemma and her boyfriend Tom, as well as fresh-from-his-GCSEs-and-drinking-like-there's-no-tomorrow Jason from across the road, and you could say that there was a veritable youth BBQ going on. This was probably best shown when we decided to leave the more wrinkled contingent of the party to their own devices and head on down to the beach to continue drinking whilst standing in the sea.
Jason fell off his chair and spilt wine everywhere, I messed up a spur-of-the-moment speech to congratulate Keith on his degree and Jason on his results, but everyone cheered anyway, the parrot showed off shamelessly, drinks were drunk, cake, steak and chips consumed, and the upshot of it all was that a good time was had by all.
Except possibly the parrot, who felt a little left out but made up for it later in the evening by whistling the first few bars of the theme to 'Indiana Jones', and hanging upside down rather a lot.
I gave away a lot of books.
Monday
A late morning...
Allie and I had a wander out along the cliffs to the Botanic Gardens, with me taking excessive numbers of photgraphs with my phone along the way. We had an ice cream in Steephill Cove, watched a bit of cricket, explored the new Japanese Garden took photos of a random totem pole, and rounded things off with soss+chips on the seafront.
I managed to get back to London on my rather bleached and bifurcated train ticket. My heartfelt thanks to employees of this nation's rail networks.
Selected pictures to the Photoblography soon.
27th of August:Only 2 pics so far, but more coming...
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