June/July 2007

It has been the wettest May and June in England since 1738 - which is when records began, so it may in fact be the wettest May and June since the Cretaceous Era. The rain just hasn’t stopped falling out of the sky and half of England is underwater. Fortunately, we are on a big hill so we’ve been spared the horror of sewage flowing through our living rooms which has happened to thousands of people from the Cotswold’s to Hull. Friends on holiday from the UAE have grimaced and thought to themselves, ‘God I’m never coming back to this.’ We’re constantly apologizing to them for the rain, just like my mother does whenever we visit her in the west of Ireland (where it really does rain all the time).

Last week we spent a night at the Village Pump Folk Festival which is just two miles from our house on a farm by Farleigh Hungerford. The rain actually stopped for a few hours so we could put our tent up and wander across the lovely farm land to the performance area. There after getting the obligatory plastic wrist bands we enjoyed music by Martin Carthy, The Levellers and some very good local acts. Isobel and Tom danced to a 10 piece Madness style band until one in the morning and then we walked back to our tent just before the rain started again.

It rained all night and at 7 in the morning we decided to pack up before the fields turned into a Glastonbury-style disaster zone. We took down our fiendishly complicated tent around the sleeping children and then put them and the sodden canvas into the car and drovc gingerly out of the waterlogged fields. Later that day they had to use tractors to tow the cars out of the festival. The joys of summer.

In other news Tom was an extra for a day and dressed fetchingly as a 19^th century country yokel for a BBC production of Lark Rising to Candleford, so watch out for a glimpse of a long-haired bumpkin in a cloth cap amongst the crowd of villagers if it ever reaches your screens.