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Four Candles is how old?
28 August 2017 10:02


Something very odd with the weather this weekend. It’s a Bank Holiday and it’s warm – hot even. Here in UKland we never get good weather for bank holidays, especially the late August one. This is the fourth day in a row I’ve worn shorts. I very rarely wear shorts – and hardly ever on four days in a row.

Friday was one of my “you’ve done the work already so take the day off” days, so we (that’s me, The Future Mrs Barefoot, and CS3) took a day out. The elder two sprogs were working as stewards at the Reading Festival (that’s Reading as the place btw, not a festival dedicated to books and literature – even if that does sound more appealing) so CS1 has been playing at being “only child” all weekend.

We went to Cliveden, a National Trust property just over an hour away. The gardens are magnificent – probably the best NT gardens I have seen. The Future Mrs Barefoot and I visited a couple of years ago and thought it somewhere CS3 would love; it’s on;y taken us two years to organise a return visit. CS3 likes walking through gardens – “especially when someone else has done all the work”.

Thursday evening, we showed her pictures of what we would see. Her first reaction Friday was “wow, it looks even better in real life”

We walked through the long garden, the rose garden, various other gardens, across the parterre (apparently the largest in England), and down to the river where we hired a rowing boat for an hour.

Despite initial offers to have a go at rowing, once we got on the water the females decided that they would prefer to sit back and watch me do all the work. Though CS3 found a rare bout of bossiness and became a back-seat rower. “Left a bit ... right a bit ... no, not that way ... the other oar ... you’re going to hit an overhanging branch ... etc”

In the evening (back home) we went to a local hotels' health club. A friend is a member of the club and has a number of guest passes that she asked if we would like to use. The ladies thought a swim would be a nice wind-down from the day but I’ve already been swimming three times this year which is quite enough, so I went to the gym.

Wow, I’ve not been to a gym since leaving school, and they’ve changed a lot in that time. No climbing bars along the walls; no vaulting horses; no sadistic gym teachers. I did twenty minutes running on the treadmill, cycled 5 km on the bike machine, and spent ten minutes on some contraption where you move your legs and arms – it may have been called a cross-trainer, I’m not sure.

These machines show video, so you can see where you could be exercising, if you were actually exercising outside. On the walls there were TV screens tuned in to different stations, so you could watch TV while you exercised, which seemed a bit oxymoronic to me.

One of the screens was showing Coronation Street. I haven’t seen Coronation Street for many years, but the demonic child of the ugly woman was still there, and the storyline seemed centre on a few people dressed for a wedding but sitting in a pub looking dejected and miserable. Yeah, pretty much the same storyline from last time I saw it.

Saturday, CS3 got one-up from playing "only child" and got to play the role of "Abandoned child". It was a friend’s 40th birthday; she and her family were spending the weekend on Hayling Island and invited us and a few other friends to spend the day with them. It was a fun day: We had a bit of a sit on the beach; went on the small railway along the front; and had afternoon tea – nicely cut sandwiches, and more cake that should reasonably be eaten in one sitting.

In the evening, The Future Mrs Barefoot and I stayed on and had a meal with them in the hotel – long story short: there was already one spare meal, so we only had to pay for one of us.

Yesterday we went for a bike ride – doing one of our usual loops. We’d only got about 100 yards before The Future Mrs Barefoot’s type went flat. I pumped it up, but it was flat again after 200 yards. But we were close the the cycle repair shop by then, so decided that CS3 and I would continue the ride while The Future Mrs Barefoot took the bike to be fixed and, if they could do it quickly enough, would cycle the opposite way around the loop to meet us.

I put my phone on “non-silent” so she could phone us when ready. That only worked to a certain point – that point being when I could hear and recognise my phone’s ring. When I eventually did, it took me a while to work out how to answer it. That was when we discovered that we had missed each other. I’d thought there was only one way to do this route, but apparently not! Oh well; we were only a quarter mile apart so I cycled back to find The Future Mrs Barefoot – which meant I had to tackle the steepens hill on the route twice!

And so, to today. The Future Mrs Barefoot was up early to drive to Reading to pick up CS1 and CS2 at 0830, as arranged last night. At 0850, they had only just woken up – and it’s an hour’s walk from the campsite to the pickup point!

I’ve got some gardening to do. Let's be honest, I'm never going to bring the garden to the standard of Cliveden but I could at least attempt to fix the lawnmower so I can cut the grass.

I will leave you with this surprising fact – well, it surprised me, anyway. So much that I googled it to check whether it was true. The Four Candles sketch was first broadcast in 1976. I would have put it several years later than that. I guess I must have seen it on a rerun or compilation show, rather than originally.


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