Back From Culture

Within an hour of returning from our annual cultural visit to Stratford-upon-Avon, all three cats presented me with a poo.
'They've been saving them for you,' said Andy. 'Aaaaahhh, sweet...'
'No,not 'aaaahhh, sweet,' I said, scooping the pooping into a bag for disposal. 'But it is nice to know they're still all regular and our absence hasn't induced a stress-related constipation. Gillian McKeith would be proud of those samples.'

Luckily, the dangling cherry tomato plants occupying the hanging basket occupied last year by some dangling strawberries presented me with half a dozen samples of a more agreeable kind, which I had all to myself because Andy thinks raw tomatoes are the food of Beelzebub. Demonic influence or not, they were very tasty.

Usually, when we visit Stratford, we stay at 'The Swan's Nest' which is right next to the Avon and within comedy spitting distance of the theatre. But since they added a swanky new restaurant a couple of years ago, their prices have shot up to ridiculous proportions, so this year we decided to stay a few miles outside the town in an Olde Worlde Tudore Farme House...e. Our room was HUGE!! For a start, you could actually run around inside the bathroom. Properly run around, like in a circuit. Not that we did, well, not after the initial experiment, because the olde worlde floore was very creaky and, over the years, had taken on a bit of tilt.

And the grounds were beautiful. I mean, they had a gardener for heaven's sake. And when you listened for noise, you couldn't hear any, because there was no noise. Except for the minor family contretemps we heard last night through the olde worlde tiltey floore when basically the parents were telling their teenage son that he was a lazy little so and so and no, he couldn't have a day off from his holiday job because he wanted to.

There were two dogs at the B and B. Motto and Gertrude. Motto was a black labrador, who was very polite and very friendly and refrained from climbing onto the breakfast table to get a piece of breakfast toast, unlike some cats I could mention. And Gertrude was a black setter-type, also very polite, a bit more keen to play ball in the garden and determined to re-write the rules of playing tennis, which included ignoring line calls and running off with the ball. She disappeared periodically, and then would return sopping wet, so I assumed there was a pond or stream or river somewhere on the property that we didn't discover.

Andy and I made many speculations about our hosts because that is the kind of juvenile game we play on homeward bound journeys. Were they landed gentry fallen on hard times so had to take in guests? Was the olde worlde farme from his side of the family, or her side, or were they nouveau riche types who made a killing on the stock market and purchased the pile during the last recession for a song, did it up and were now rolling in it, using the B and B takings to fund shonky business dealings in Guatamala? Did their son look spaced out because he had partaken too much off the wacky-baccy, or because he was a teenage boy and they all look like that these days?

Well, we stopped playing the game after a while because we were distracted by an idiot in an Audi (I won't go into Andy's Audi-driver theory here, because it is very complex and not very complimentary.)

And then we arrived home. There will be more of our Stratfordian exploits later in the week, because there is much to tell. Like 'The Hathaway Tea-Roome Nightmare,' 'The Comedy of The Encore Eatery Error', 'The Tale of The As You Like It Big Head' and 'The Jolly Outdoor Theatre Frolic.'

I am bracing myself to write them a la Shakespeare style, but it IS going to take quite a bit of bracing, and I don't quite have the energy to start now, because, having avoided cooking for the last three days, there are people waiting for dinner to be presented before them which means I suppose I'd better get back into the swing of the domestic routine.

Luckily, cat poo duties are over with. For today, at least.