A picnic in the forest

We had friends over last weekend (Huw and Gill), who brought their daughters who are eight and ten. I love it when kids are still kids at that age. Our house has a loft space under the roof - carpeted, with a skylight and electric light and all. You reach it by climbing up a retractable ladder through the manhole in the spare room. You should have seen the looks on their faces as I pulled the rope that releases the ladder... I've read descriptions of kids hopping with delight - now I've seen it, complete with choruses of 'oh wow. Oh Wow!' They were up the ladder and claiming their hidey hold lickety split - although it didn't take them long to realise that if they pulled up the ladder, there was no room for thm to sleep haha! But that was by no means the main attraction. There's a roman villa near our place, ruined, but with some amazing mosaic floors still intact. You can also see bits of underfloor heating (hypocausts) and the remains of the baths. Amazing. Some of you may remember that, after my friend Dan showed me this place (yes, it's the one Bill Bryson writes about in Tales of a Small Island), I vowed to come back with a Roman picnic.

And we did!

No dormice, I'm afraid, but certainly plenty of crazy roman goodness. Cheese pastry bites, made by rubbing flour and cheese together to look like breadcrumbs, then adding an egg, frying in oil, coating in honey and rolling in poppyseeds. 'Savoury fritters': take red chicory (or other bitter leafy lettucy thing) and chop finely. Add flour, red wine, salt and pepper to make a batter, then fry in olive oil until it looks for all the world like hamburgers. Then make everyone guess what's in it! We also had ham in a fennel and red wine sauce, feta cheese with honey and pepper, creamy cheese with herbs, asparagus, honey cake... oh, and lashings of beer, wine and cider. Mmmm. The sun obligingly shone all afternoon, taking the temperature to a balmy 21oC! The girls wrestled Anthony in the grass (he let them win... or so he says), and I took them paddling in the stream and to find wild garlic in the woods. (It's 14 and raining today, but hell, it's Englandl That's how it works here.)
Last but not least, it turned out to be a weekend of random coincidences. We'd worked out a little while ago that Huw and Anthony share exactly the same birthday - both born April 28, 1972. I figured that with that, and the fact that they're both tall hairy men who love history and folk music, they were bound to get along. Even more uncannily, Gill grew up about 500 metres from me in Knoxfield (mum, if you're reading this, Rickards Avenue). That put her on the wrong side of the boundary for my primary school, and she went to Knox Park. But she went to high school with most of my old crew, and we had some funny, funny stories to share.

Wish we'd had them up here sooner, and more often. But it's one helluva weekend worth of memories to take away with us! Thank you.