a couple days in the country

k and i were invited out to her sister louise's out in the country. below are k's own words about this dreamy weekend of exhausting relaxation, also found at her rather extensive journal pages. we took rather a lot of pictures, and a number of those alongside this is of details from visiting Lavenham. more pictures of doors and buildings in Lavenham are available for viewing pleasure.

scritch scritch itch itch. nice souvenir from the weekend: a mosquito bite that is -right- under one of the seams of my bra. owie. not a good place to be scratching and scratching, well, not in public anyway. perhaps i will become one of those crazy old ladies talking to imaginary cats on the bus while digging nails into my skin in inappropriate places, chomping my false teeth and farting gently.

but it was a good weekend, out in the back of beyond, in a house that stands at the edge of a garden that stands at the edge of a shivering cornfield under a sky that blew from baking august sun to thick dark storm and round back again. it was a good weekend of sprawling on the grass, and stomping through crunchy long yellow grasses and blue cornflowers to see the chickens, and sitting back-to-back in morning sun with newspapers.

it was a lazy weekend of reading and kitchen table chattering with my sister, sitting smoking and sticking my fingers into cake mix as she told me tales of school-teaching, and village life, of baby rats and weird ideas of children, and tales of crazy awful boyfriend and crazy wonderful friends.

it was a noisy weekend of a babbling shouty hyperactive three year old niece charging around and demanding attention, more stories, telling tales, throwing dolls, throwing hissy fits, bursting into tears and radiant smiles in the ticking of a heart. it was a weekend of warm amazement seeing how cool and clever, and how oddly polite my eleven year old niece is growing up to be, talking with all seriousness about scholarships for vet degrees one minute, giggling over her new sparkly nail varnish another.

and it was a good weekend, wandering around an insanely pretty village of wonky half-timbered houses from the 14th, 15th century...dozens somehow still standing, unchanged, still wonderful. amazing bulging walls and skewed and falling floors, liquid windows and bright paint colours. and eating fanchy-shmancy cream teas in a hotel of the same sort, while watching a portly gentleman in a white dinner jacket play a harpsichord (or perhaps it was a spinnet) in the cross-cross reflected glow of a leaded window. heavy heavy silver teapots, thick white linen napkins, rich yellow butter, crusted, crystalised layer on the clotted cream (slightly tarnished by the tired squeals of the three year old when told off for demanding sugar lumps again. and again.)

and it was a golden weekend cycling along tiny country lanes with snarl and my sister (and the littlest niece along for the ride, perched in a purple seat) to the end of the peninsula, through fields of bundled rolled wheat, and rolling happy grunty stinky pigs, and head-shaking horses, and glittering almost sunset water to the crumbling 13th century church that echoed soft and smelled of ancient damp. the church at the top of the hill, sitting in a churchyard full of sadness.

and it was a weird weekend of village fetes, with stalls and stalls of bizarre and boring stuff that no one could possible want. hell, would you like to win half a box of tea bags? no? perhaps a bag of rusted nails instead? and it all smelled of burning beefburgers, and of the beer tent, and little old ladies pushing and elbowing each other away from the tables with the best stocks of readers digest condensed books. but we bought pretty 50s drinking glasses with feathery stars painted on them, and an asteroids like game shaped like the millenium falcon, and we poked about, fascinated, in the heaps of detritus and piles of unwanted stuff.

and it was sleepy, so sleepy full of fresh air, and drinking beer in a yellow painted room, playing cards and listening to broken sleep wailing of children, and realising that nowhere on this earth could i find the reserves of energy and patience necessary to live happily with a small child.

and returning to london, and the different set of sounds, and the different set of smells, and the bright lights of late night shops and the indistinct shouts of the wandering, staggering scanty crownds i was yawning and blinking and ready to be home. and sprawling across the bed and into each other's arms after a delicious homecoming i fall asleep thinking of the wonderful warmth of snarl and i reading, silently, all curled up in the same armchair, a cat nesting sprawled across the two of us, and the squeaking of a mystery nightbird out side in the blustering rustling evening, and the scent of tobacco and of sun-warmed skin and i realise that i am almost impossibly happy.