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Wednesday, April 27, 2011

To be honest, the main reason we went to Wiltshire was to get our hands on some carved ham...

Babe
That's Amelie upstaging another wooden performance from Miss Piggy. If you enlarge the photo, you'll see that she has a pocketful of stones, which I'd like to think is a subtle tribute to David Gilmour, but in reality is just an indication of her overwhelming obsession with grit. You only need to turn your back for five seconds and she's doing a pebble dash across a pub car park to the nearest patch of gravel.

The haul above was collected on Monday morning at the Woodborough Garden Centre, a rural plant shop which is conveniently situated at the arse-end of nowhere, about ten miles from the nearest plug socket. Sis took us there to look for some garden furniture to transform her back yard from a rough-looking chalkpit to an upmarket quarry with a couple of chairs. Obviously when I say she took us there, I mean she sat in the back of my car, sending us in the wrong direction. When we eventually found the place, I assumed it must be a mirage.

Having trekked halfway across Wessex to get there, it was mildly disppointing to find that they don't do any tables under two hundred quid, and Sis would have to sell her house before she could furnish her garden, but on the bright side, they did have a pig called Chops...

For the Chops
That's Chops in the background. The one in front doesn't have a name because he's about to be turned into sausages. We got the lowdown on local meat production from the young daughter of the garden centre's owner, who wandered past, introduced herself and let Amelie stroke next week's bacon before it was taken off for slaughter. It was a lovely moment.

Leaving Woodborough Garden Centre empty-handed (apart from the stones), we then made our way back across Wiltshire to the oddly named village of Seend, and stopped for lunch at The Bell Inn...

Seend it Back
I call that picture Seend 'n' the Clowns, although the best bit of humour was supplied by the staff of the Bell Inn, who managed to turn Big Sis's food order into some kind of slapstick comedy performance.

Sis ordered a Brie & Cranberry Panini, which duly arrived on a lovely china plate, with a fresh green salad, and stuffed full of bacon. Big Sis is a vegetarian, so she politely pointed that out, and sent it back. Five minutes later, it returned, cut in two, with all the bacon in one half, which is possibly the most bizarre bit of vegetarian cooking I've ever seen. Sis was forced to point out to a bewildered young waitress that for someone who doesn't eat meat, simply moving all the bacon into one side of the roll doesn't make it edible. I'm still not sure she fully grasped that.

But at the third attempt, Sis finally got a meat-free panini... served in two halves on two plates for no reason I could fathom... and settled back in the sunshine to find that she didn't really like it. The rest of us enjoyed the meal though, and had time to stare in open-mouthed wonder at the view...

Feeling a Little Horse
That's not a mystic haze over the horse's back, it's Amelie's thumb print on the camera lens.

4 comments:

Phil's Mum said...

I see Amelie is lifting up her skirt to show her damaged knees.  Is that a result of climbing up her auntie's wooden stairs?

Dave said...

I'm surprised you didn't offer to eat the bacon.

jon the bassist said...

Is that a masked mexican wrestling horse that amelies scared of?

Phil said...

I'm not sure, but there was another one just out of shot which was dressed as a bee-keeper.