Saturday 7 August 2010

Country roads take me home...

...To the place I belong.

This particular monkey of a blog monster is written on the behalf of a certain Monsieur le Lindley, after his comment about my general rubbishness with regards to keeping this updated. I must concede that given the multitude of dastardly adventures upon which I have embarked lately, he might be right. However, I would like to point out that to a certain extent these escapades have prevented me from having the time and sanity to record them.

The next concern is trying to recall all of the spiffingly-marvellous things which have be
fallen me of late.

I will begin on a certain Monday, a few months ago. It was, in fact, just another manic Monday. Several of my
readers will be familiar with the photographs from the day (there are MANY). Upon finishing our degrees, my beloved housemates and myself saw it particularly fitting that we visit a certain childrens' playground of which we were aware but had yet to visit. The outcome was a lot of startled parent
s and small people, and three very satisfied sort-of-e
x-students. If I could figure out how, I would post the video of Jayne making a spectacular entrance down a slide, followed by her headbutting the camera due to her overly-enthusiastic descent. All in all it was an excellent outing, probably in my top three highlights of the summer, up there with a trip to Co-op.

Possibly one of the most daring of my escapades of late involved a forray into the adult world of car hire. Yes, I know it is pretty overwhelming to imagine, but I am no
w starting to pretend to be a real grown up pusson. Avec le Megan and le Jayne, I went on an in-depth expedition of the Northern part of our beautiful nation of Mexico. We went forth into the unknown (in our lovely,
shinyshinyshinyshiny hire car),
and made it in three distinct pieces to the Umbria of the North. There was a suspicious absence of sleeping in a borrowed tent, a little bit of swimming in the North Sea (which nearly ended in death from frostbite on several counts) and the odd bit of poking. We poked high and low, including Bamburgh playground and castle, some public toilets and the Holy Island of Lindisfa
rne. Aidan seemed to be doing OK, so we left him well enough alone, and came home via the land of Go Ape! For anyone who is unfamiliar with Go Ape! it is basically a playground for big people. There are really big ladders, tunnels to crawl through, swings, and zip wires and all sorts.

Sadly, I don't have the dedication to my small collection of readers to write down detailled accounts of all of my adventures, so I have to skip over a few, including the time w
hen Jayne ate an entire two litre tub of ice cream in 45 minutes on live radio which was being broadcast from our house.

But I move ahead to the very beginning of probably the last long summer holiday of my life. It began incredibly well, with a collection of peculiar creatures squashed into a fairly small car, on their way to the Isle of Wight. It just so happens that I was one of those creatures. And I did actually know all of the others, they weren't just strangers that I picked up along the way. To recount all that we did over the course of a week might just take a week, so I will just include the highlights:
1. Trip to Co-op. Nuff said.
2. BEACH! With multitudinous beach toys including buckets, balls, bats, boards and a boat! We did manage to play with all of the toys over the course of the day, and the English Channel was far superior to the hypothermic North Sea.
3. Church at St. Catherine's with Graham the Great who thought we were from Sweden. (We weren't, by the way).
4. A visit to Vicky and Bert at Osbourne House.
5. The Needles Old Battery and Alum Bay. N.B. I am not including the chairlift in the list of highlights as it was almost as terrifying as being savaged by seagulls whilst eating fish and chips on the beach near Bamburgh Castle. I still retain my eyeballs, but it was a close call.

Obviously there were a lot of other magnificent moments, including the wonderful food, the rather peculiar company, and mine and Jayne's ability to wake up Megan with our collective snoring. Also, there were a lot of public toilets, which is a definite bonus.

Upon returning from the Isle of Wight, my life was thrown into disarray as my friends were from their mother's wombs untimely rip'd. Or something along those lines. I did that silly graduation thingumy, and visited the Brontes. Then there was an Ellen, and there was Brighton, and there was London, and there was the M25.
My most recent adventure, however, has been to the North, i.e. Carterton, near Oxford. I went on an expedition on a train, and was collected from the station by my soon-to-be-boss, to take me to Carterton Community College. I was not, in fact, going to college, but was going to play with lots of kiddies and to pretend to be one for a week. It seems that there are few things better than a week of kayaking, football, basketball, dressing up as a thug, and doing arts and crafts. Not necessarily all at once. We also had some fantastic conversations about God with the kiddiewinks, including all sorts about suffering, free will and the Holy Spirit. The food was incredible, the people were almost as crazy as me, and I got to sleep in a tent. Our theme/verse of the week was John 8:32: 'Then you will know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.' Life (or lice) just keeps getting better and better, seeing as I get to spend the whole of next year hanging out with the same crowd, doing much the same things. Feel free to quote this back to me when I am complaining about life-saving in a lake in January. I got back late last night, and am slowly returning to humanity, and may reappear in the real world sometime next week.

I appreciate that this is the first reference to the title of this blog post, but thought that it was a good note to end upon. After a very busy year I am home once again, both physically and spiritually, and very excited about it! In writing this I was reminded of a shopping bag from FatFace that I kept from a while ago. It turns out that I am not actually completely insane, as it did have writing on it, which fairly aptly sums up my view on life: 'Just living is not enough, I must have fresh air and freedom.'