old english fête

Last weekend Mum and Nigel (Mum's fiancé) and I

all went to a village fête in Hereford.

It was all terribly quaint, set in the grounds of this huge stately house,

with a magnificent garden and a pond that can only be described as a lake.

In fact the lake was so big it even had a family of swans living on it,

standard for any English manor house I'm sure!

At the fête there were games such as wooden skittles,

the well known Coconut Shy,

and the less well known 'Welly Wanging'

in which the aim is to throw a Wellington boot as far as possible!

It didn't take very long for Mum and I to track down the stall selling Pimms.

This is of course a staple in any self respecting English event.

It wouldn't be worth going to if not!

So we had Pimms, served to us by these lovely old men,

who spent forever faffing around trying not to give us fruit in our glass,

when actually, we rather like fruit with our Pimms.

But oh well!

Another staple of the British fête is the cream tea,

which consists of a scone, strawberry jam, cream and a cup of tea.

Nigel and Mum had a dispute as to which order the jam and cream go on your scone.

Traditionally it goes scone-jam-cream.

Nigel's goes scone-cream-jam.

But Nigel was defiant, and adamant that

a) his was right and

b) his tasted better!

My only opinion on the matter was that Mum's looked prettier!

The highlight of the day was the falconry display,

during which I was foolish to admit that, yes, I did have a camera.

So, the 'falconer' (to use the proper terminology!) called me into the arena,

he then explained how he was going to make the kestrel fly into the tree

and then land on his arm which he was going to place just behind my head.

And I was supposed to take a picture of it.

Now, whilst he was trying to make this happen,

the bird had other ideas.

First it flew off to the right and landed on the head of a two year old child!!

Second it flew to the left and landed on the head of an elderly man!!

Obviously this bird likes to land on heads,

and here was this guy encouraging it to land on mine!!

I was scared!

And when it came down to it, I panicked,

and the above picture is my effort at trying to photograph the bird in flight!

But that was not it. Oh no. He called me up twice more.

Firstly to demonstrate that the bird can pull it's huge wingspan in

whilst flying through trees.

How was this done?

My making the bird go in between my legs!

I closed my eyes!

And secondly, this was my supposed reward for traumatising me earlier.

He called the Hawk (which was called Dave) in to land on my arm,

which was actually pretty amazing.

For such a big bird it was incredibly light!

And even though I was a little scared, getting the opportunity to do

these three things was really fantastic,

and not something that everybody gets to do!!