June 18, 2008

Dear all,

We celebrated Father’s Day in posh English style.  I might be able to get used to this lady-of-the manor lifestyle.  We spent the afternoon at the Greenway Hotel in Cheltenham.  This is the same hotel where we lunched after M and S’s confirmation.  Google if you are bored.  It is so lovely.  We booked tickets to an afternoon falconry demo (possibly the LAST thing I would have requested to do on Mother’s Day) and arrived slightly ahead of time.  We walked the grounds, in and out of secret gardens without M who lazily commandeered a garden bench in the sun.  Good thing.  Staff appeared carrying small tables and china service for five (R was away at a 24 hour “experience” at the senior school). We were served hot chocolates, tea and champagne out in the garden.  While enjoying our drinks, the refined waiter, looking like a butler, reappeared with a tray of scones, clotted cream, raspberry jam and an assortment of biscuits and cookies.  I mean, honestly.  Didn’t you think all that stuff was just a stereotype?  We gobbled the scones and battled aggressively with silver butter knives for clotted cream.  If I have learned but one thing during these past two years, it is this:  there is never enough clotted cream.  I could have sat in that garden all day, but eventually the falcon guy showed up.   

 

Falconry.  Yet another career for which I am not cut out.  It is unfathomable to me that one might actually enjoy spending each and every day, hours at a time, training birds to fly away and then return (Not to mention handling all that warm, raw chicken the birds tug and eat. You just know it has to smell terrible.).  Just the thought of the tediousness makes me edgy.  Argh.  Don’t get me started.  Anyway, as usual, it didn’t take long before the kids jumped in to volunteer to hold all the birds.  J even had a go.  Not surprisingly, I took a pass.

 

With love from England,

T-Ann