Bells & Labs: 01/2018

Tuesday, 16 January 2018

A winter camp, lovely weather apart from Hurricane Ophelia...

Autumn 2017

Haywood Farm - Ross on Wye

Long overdue on a blog post, so weaning myself back in slowly

The forecast seemed unusually warm for this time of year so a perfect excuse to escape for a few days. I perhaps should have read the small print that the dregs of Hurricane Ophelia was demolishing Ireland, and just semi demolishing the rest of the UK.

The sky turned a lovely shade of orange, from the sahara desert dust evidently (no idea why it didn't send a bit of a heatwave with it, as well) and facebook was predicting Armageddon

So a minimal pack as usual, Tillie (the veedub), a tent, a sofa, three million candles and enough electric to power blackpool tower.

Despite the warm temperatures forecast, I packed three heaters. Two of them never came out of the bag. I like to play safe though. Admittedly the electric blanket was probably a bit OTT in hindsight as well.

So after 15 minutes the tent was up and everything was in place for the next few days (it may have been longer than 15 minutes, but I'm not owning up to it)

Gruffatent gets an outing

As I had a few days solo camping, I treated myself to some gin. It cost an arm and a leg, but being a gin connoisseur, it was obviously worth it due to my highly trained and unique palate skills (In truth, I thought the bottle was pretty, so i bought it)

So I tried a glass neat first. After picking myself up off the floor, I decided to try it with tonic water. Much better.
So I had a few glasses to ensure I could give a precise and accurate review.

Verdict was, it was very nice

The next day, we decided to go for a stroll through the woods. The campsite owner gave us the cautious words 'here's a map, its all marked trails, so you wont get lost. Although some people still do'

Tut. What imbeciles. How hard was it to follow a clear path to the lake and back?. And so, me and my trusty hound, and the compulsory orange squeaky ball set of, looking for the tunnel under the M5.

In awe at the autumn colours, and natures best, it was a lovely and straight forward stroll to the lake

Tarq divebombed the lake, inhaled his usual quote of killer algae, and we set off back

I decided to take the stroll back around the lake, so that Tarq had a bit of a longer walk. Bloody stupid idea. 2 hours later, i had thrown google maps in the hedge, and still couldn't locate the poxy m5 tunnel. Creeping round the golf course was also a wasted trip, as there was no escape.

So after our 20 minute stroll turned into 2 hours, we headed back to our haven of cream cakes and coffee

With dreams of being the next shakespearean writer, illustrated with a bit of van gogh, and the philosophy of Socrates (i googled 'greek wisdom people' and this was the best i could come up with), I decided to start a journal...

It would educate people with the wealth of my knowledge, for years to come, be adopted by schools everywhere for their curriculum, and go down as one of the greatest novels, in the style of Anne Franks

Sadly the reality turned into a load of random splodges, doodles, and very little useful information whatsoever....

So we waited for the Sahara desert dust to blow us back to Asia, going out in style with a campfire blazing, food cooking, and more gin

And nothing happened...zilch....nada...not even a gust....so we basked in the facebook comments of 'be careful', 'take care', 'just take the tent down if it gets too bad', 'thinking of you' (obviously someone wanted us dead), and lazed around in the unnaturally lovely summery type day.

Next morning was glorious sun and packing up day. Bored doing nothing, Tarq generally tries to drag me into his games....

You ready yet?

So I decided to take a quick walk with my furry child, and we wasted an hour on the climbing frame (out of season camping is invaluable, never anyone around)