Dress Rehearsal

The three would-be bank (un)robbers rehearse a scene.

This evening feels like a welcome, if lonely, night off, all on its lonesome in what feels like weeks of play rehearsal nights and hosting visitors. That's me speaking and I've only been to a few of the rehearsals; Elizabeth has been to every single one and to the extra ones slid in on Sunday afternoon. Yesterday was the final Dress Rehearsal, before the 'Players' get tonight off followed by the First Night tomorrow (Wednesday). There are performances on Friday and Saturday too, and then it is all over for this time.

'Badger' gets 'Windy' ready for the action

I have said before that I will not do 'spoilers', so no detail till after Saturday but it is looking really well and promises to be a great success. The players are veering between elation, excitement and total panic as you'd expect. I know from previous years how the (2) debut actors will be lifted but also knocked a bit sideways by the crowd reaction, having to pause while the laughter dies down and getting that instant feedback from the audience. All the players comment that by now, having rehearsed the thing to death, they are numb to the jokes and surprises and they start to doubt whether this is funny at all. It is, of course. They will do fine.

Dan and Sarah about to do justice to a roast and some ratatouille

Meanwhile, as you will know, we have seen our first visit to its end and enjoyed the first half of our other visit; the former being Dan with his thesis writing break and the latter a one night stop over by first time guest Sarah M who is wrapping a week of touring round a midweek wedding way down on the south coast.

Sarah tales her turn at bottle feeding the lamb.

Sarah was with us over Easter Sunday night. She has hired a car at Knock for her touristing but I nipped out to Knock anyway to 'collect' her and guide her home. Simpler than trying to give directions through these lanes. Sarah is a long-term friend of Elizabeth through the Internet and they have met several times.

Elizabeth really is the Yorkshire Pudding Queen of all Ireland.
These may have been the best yet - they were tall, light, fluffy
 and golden and "shook from the tin".

I'd know her from Facebook but had never met, so we were able to enjoy that 'thing' where you finally meet the person you feel like you have known and been friends with for ages, and to find out they are just as delightful as you thought they would be. She was a lovely guest to 'host' and loved everything here, from us and the livestock, to the superb food served up by Mrs C. Very easy to talk to as well and the conversation flowed really well. She is now off on a 5 hour drive to the south and will return next weekend for another stop-over on the way back through to Knock. She is already promising to return for a "proper" stay when she can sort out more time off.

Beef rib roast.

We dropped Dan to the airport this morning in the pouring rain. He'd not quite completed the thesis but assured us the end bit was do-able within the deadline even with taking Mrs Dan to a promised "5th Anniversary" (of being together) Dinner. He has until 8 a.m. Thursday, (he tells us) so he will work all night after the dinner if needs be. What ever the case he made sure we knew how grateful he was at giving him the space to get stuck into it, saying that he'd never have got so near the end without us. Good luck Dan.... get that submitted and knock them dead. I am sure you will get the high marks and Distinction you are striving for. Dan has promised to let us know how he gets on and, like Sarah, has also promised to come back soon, with Mrs Dan, but without the laptop, for a proper holiday.

Meanwhile, little else note-worthy is happening (that's actually a relief!). The pigs, the lambs and the baby chicks are all thriving. The fox has taken only one more bird, unfortunately our ace broody and chick-rearer of the 7-chick family last year, 'Beeblebrox' (see for example post  http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2017/08/los-chicos-estan-despiertos.html ) This was a very quick attack as Beebs must have been right close to the boundary bank and Brer Fox nipped over the bank and ambushed the hen without being spotted (in time). The fox trap has now caught our own cat 'Soldier' but nothing else. Patience is the thing. More on all these stories in the next post.

Of Holm Oak and White Barked Birch

Would-be musician, Brian, tries to impress his Dad with his
latest 'number' in the Dress Rehearsal of Cupid Wore Skirts

When I last posted we were still awaiting the arrival of our latest group of guests, I was on the verge of a significant birthday and our most recent 'project' (The Village Play) was about to hit the Dress Rehearsal milestone. It has been a busy few days. We are now relaxing, recovering and sorting the house out between that and the next visitor's arrival. It is all going really well and we have been enjoying ourselves immensely.

Miss Stanfield puts her "purity" at risk by getting "flootered".
It is an old Roscommon expression which means "you fainted"
allegedly. 

The guests, whom friends of the blog will have met (some of) before were Dan and Dan(ielle) plus Danielle's brother Jake. We tend to refer to them as "the children" because Danielle and Jake are the children of Liz's closest cousin when they were growing up (Cathy) but what ever way it is they were, as always, pure joy to 'host'. They love this place and the way they can relax here and they adore Liz's cooking. Liz, of course, gets a lift out of this and always goes the extra mile to lay on special, spectacular menus which we know the guests will enjoy - Dan loves his pies and his desserts for example, Danielle her 'dippy' goose egg breakfasts and Jake anything which isn't the 'student food' he gets back at his shared flat.

A 10" diameter Jaffa Cake

I will not bore you with a full menu list but I will note some high points which definitely hit the spot. There was a haggis and sausage pie. There was a meltingly tender lamb roast. There was a superb, 10" diameter 'Jaffa Cake', Madeira sponge on the bottom, the obligatory layer of double-strength orange jelly and a covering of chocolate mousse. There was a superb fish pie.

Left to right, Dan, Dan and Jake.

There was a top-rate trifle which included REAL custard made with eggs, dried fruit soaked in brandy and 'proper' trifle sponges. There were dippy goose eggs and Liz's unbeatable scrambled (duck) eggs. Drinking was restrained and sensible but included some Irish craft-beers and tasters of my birthday present 'Teelings' whiskey. There was, inevitably plenty of sleeping it off after meals.

Breakfast for the sheep. Danielle serves. 

Danielle's main reason for coming though, I suspect, is the chance to wrangle some livestock which she loves and dreams of owning herself one day. She is now at the stage where she can do morning rounds and lock up unsupervised but we like to lay on something new each time and for this one she was determined that 'baby brother' also get involved.

Shepherding the 5 ducks from night-quarters
to day-time pen.  Morning rounds.

Between us we rounded up the sheep into a hurdle-pen in the cattle race, I gave the three 'grown-ups' their annual (Clostridium) jabs and we trimmed feet and dagged the worst of the 'lady garden' bits while copping a quick feel of some udders to see if there was any bagging up happening. There isn't. We are beginning to be convinced that we will have no lambs this year; we may have to go out and buy some like the old days.

At one stage we were out admiring the night sky (as we do) and we discovered that this star-gazing thing is also a passion of Jake's. He was as excited at the clear, pollution-free and LIGHT-pollution free clear sky as we were and still are. I showed him the book (2017 Guide to the Night Sky) to which I have referred in previous posts and he showed us the modern electronic equivalent. This is an 'app' on his smart phone which detects where you are 'pointing' the phone in 3 dimensions, re-creates the stars and planets you are therefore looking at, draws in the constellations with more fancy graphics and names all the significant bits. Very clever. It even "sees" down through the earth to show you what celestial bodies are about to clear the horizon or have just fallen below it.

A good time was definitely had by all.

The perfect gift - new trees!

The Birthday was also a highlight and thank you very much to all those blog-readers, Facebook and Twitter friends and 'real people' who contributed to that. At risk of upsetting everyone else I will just select one present which was a real highlight to the day, a gift of such genius and appropriateness that we are both (giver Liz and Birthday boy) still amazed and delighted at it. This was, quite simply, 2 trees, a holm oak and a white-barked birch. If you know me, you will have some idea why this was such a good choice, but I suspect that Liz would be the only person in my entire orbit who would have known that and known why.

Trees do it for me anyway - I love the gardening side of them, lending your plot some vertical element, all that digging holes and then staking them safely against the wind-rock. I love the sustainability of them - the idea that you are planting something which you are unlikely to see mature in your life time, in the hope that anyone owning or using the garden way after you're dead will appreciate them.

An allowable mistake. I never could write
14-4 on a cheque without making it 14-4-57
instead of the real year. 

The choice of species was also spot on. We had a lovely white-bark birch in our Faversham garden which was 20' tall and just starting to look the part as we left. When I go back now to visit the former neighbours and peer over the fence I am delighted that the new owners may have "bulldozed" most of our garden but they have kept the birch and it looks splendid. A birch, then, is part of Liz's and my joint story and harks back to the Kentish chapters.

So too (even more so?) does the holm oak. There is a fine example growing near the main church in Faversham but we also know this species from our trip to USA and the Deep South. In Mississippi, the holm oak or evergreen oak is known as the 'Live' Oak (say it Lahhhhve Oak) presumably because it keeps its leaves. They were everywhere in New Orleans, growing like the Plane Trees of London. There. The perfect gift. Thank you so, so much, the Lady of the House.

Finally, that Dress Rehearsal. It went very well. Not perfect; there were a few gaps where the prompter had to chip in, but these theatrical types have a saying "Good Dress (rehearsal), bad First Night" (and v.v.). Nobody is panicking, all are still confident that it will be alright on the night. If there's any justice then just by the sheer force of the amount of man hours and work that has gone into it, it should go well. First night is this coming Wednesday so more on this subject in a post after that.

A Thousand Painful Deaths

The fridge as a danger zone - on the left, embargoed 'posh'
paté. On the right the coarse stuff. Fill your boots.

"In the fridge is a glass bowl of finely sieved paté", advised the Lady of the House as she took off for yet another play rehearsal. "Touch that and you will die a thousand painful deaths. Next to that is a china dish containing the 'coarse' one you prefer. Knock yourself out!" This kind of food embargo will be very familiar to most Irish people who have seen all the joke cliché stuff about Irish Mammies keeping the 'good biscuits' for the guests and woe betide any children with 'sticky' fingers who might try to snaffle one. In England we had "FHB" (Family hold back) of course and we all remember being told that if you cut the cake at Grandma's then you choose your slice last.

All the spring time stages of larch - new tufts of needles (green;
larch is deciduous despite being a conifer), female flowers called
"Larch Roses" (pink) and the tiny drab brown male flowers. The
'cones' will form around the fertilized 'rose' flowers. 

Yep. We are looking down the barrel of a mad succession of house guest events and stop-overs. Not long recovered from our visits by Sparks and Kim, followed by our new artist friend (Brian John Spencer) with Senator Frank Feighan and local hero Tom C, and then my outbound trip to the UK, we have lined up three more sets in quick succession and a fourth at longer range. This weekend we have 'the children', cousin Danielle with fiancé Dan, plus Danielle's brother Jake and a possible 4th cousin, Dubliner Keith. They are closely followed by some nights hosting Mum-in-Law (Steak Lady) and she in turn is hotly pursued by UK friends Mazy-Lou and Airy Fox.

Play posters

It will all keep us busy preparing food etc and then doing all the blitz and laundry in between guests when we are already in the thick of the run up to the play. Most of these guests will get involved in the play by default (unless they want to sit here and wait for us!); with the first group coming to see the Dress Rehearsal.

My trailer becomes a 72 seater! Myself and
Director Tom C bring the stacking chairs round
from the school building. 

Director Tom C likes to let a few 'audience' members in for this to give his actors a taster of what to expect. Many actors are novices and take a while to learn the comedy timing thing of stopping talking after a good 'joke' while the audience laughter dies down. These audience members are friends, supports and family members who cannot get away on the actual nights to watch the real thing.

6 stacks 12 high. Roped down well but we still
"take it steady" on the short road journey

It is great fun to see the nervous actors suddenly realise that they are laugh-out-loud funny and that they might actually enjoy performing this play for the village. They get a real boost to their self confidence and the whole show starts to lift and buzz. Of course, it is also their first chance to do it in the costumes which makes them all feel like PROPER actors and Tom can nail down all his techie stuff - sound effects and lighting cues.

Birthday cards with a *significant* number
on them

Somewhere in the middle of all this mad malarkey, of course, I will quietly turn 60. Obviously, with all the play stuff going on, we can't do any of the usual birthday stuff, so it has all been a bit postponed and anyway, I asked for "no fuss" so it'd be my own fault if everybody lets it quietly slide by. I will find out tomorrow and over the next few days, I guess. My prediction is that I won't "get away with it" completely.

Delight for Liz at these first ever lilac flower buds - these
bushes seem to have been keeping us waiting for several
seasons. 

Other than that, not a whole lot is going on - there's no time left for one thing! I have been out to get straw ready for the arrival soon of some non-human guests, our piglets. One of the young ducks has started to quack like a drake so we no longer think we got lucky with a 3/3 female batch. For those who don't know drakes and ducks 'quack' quite differently. It'd be hard to describe phonetically, but a drake tends to do a 'squelch' a bit like if a person tries to make Donald Duck noises just using his cheeks, teeth and tongue ( kind of 'week week week', if you like) with no use of the throat or vocal chords. The females do the real "whack whack whack" hard syllable like a person saying "Quack" with their voice and throat. There's a bit of a guttural grunt in there. Now you know.

There. Next time you take the kiddies to feed the ducks at the local pond... you take a listen and watch who is doing what noise.

Ground Rush

Director Tom C and Lizzie fine-tune the set furniture prior to
a rehearsal. 

With the big Dress Rehearsal only a week away now, the village play team are starting to experience that parachutist's scary moment when you seem to have been drifting down to land very slowly but suddenly, in the last few feet, the landing moment starts to rush at you with terrifying acceleration. The actors and supporters have had this play (Cupid Wore Skirts) in the cross wires since the end of last year but suddenly there are only 7 nights till Dress Rehearsal and just over the week to First Night.

The action takes place in the home of an
antique dealer. All manner of weird 'pieces'
owned locally have been volunteered as
stage furniture. 

The tension is mounting, the set has now been beautifully constructed by the 'lads' who work at Liz's place, props and furniture are accumulating and the Players are racing to finish learning lines and stage directions. Director Tom C is hanging in there, convinced that the show will go on - they will be ready on the opening night. He has, though slotted some extra rehearsals into what was once a Tuesday and Thursdays schedule; there is one tonight for example. I went yesterday to see one such, and I am very excited about the real thing - they have a lovely piece there and I am sure they will deliver it really well.

Damson blossom

If you saw last year's "A Wake in the West" you will not be disappointed. This is slightly different - in the 'Wake' humour came in great, hilarious bursts, with more serious sections in between, 'Cupid' is funny in a lighter way but throughout. I am really looking forward to it. I got involved today helping shift the set and all the furniture and props from the back-hall of the centre (where the pictures above were taken) into the main hall and onto the newly built proper stage, where it could now be rebuilt once the Montessori pre-school had broken up for Easter.

Tulips in hotter colours. 

Also accelerating (more comfortably!) is Spring, which seems to have leapt forward in the warm weather while I was in UK for just 4 nights. Quite by accident, we have selected daffs and tulips so that all the early risers are in quite bland colours - yellow daffs, maybe, but also pale yellow and white daffs and tulips. Just as I was beginning to get frustrated by the lack of 'fire' in the spring garden, 2 huge tubs of tulips by the front door prove to be yellow streaked with bright red. When I went away, only one plum was in blossom in the orchard - I have come back to damson, pear (both white) and the start of pink apple buds showing colour.

A nice enough hellebore but I yearn for darker reds and purples

Elsewhere we have anenomes, hellebores and pulmonaria in flower as well as bud break in most shrubs and trees promising more to come. I love the horse chestnut buds which we used to call "sticky buds" as kids - they have gone from just starting to elongate last Friday, to 3 inch shoots with visible leaves and stems now.

With the snowdrops finished (foreground)
a pass of the mower tidies up our front bank

The grass is starting to 'motor' and I have been out with the mower, picking my way between the leafy left-overs of snow drop and crocus - gardeners know that you need to leave the leaves for at least 6 weeks to produce food for next year's bulbs. On the local farms this translates into it being time to scatter fertilizer on the grass prior to letting the cattle out.

Anenome

This is normally an NPK formulation in tiny round pellets - a friend down the road chooses, for some reason, to have his delivered in 50 kg sacks which he can't lift and his contractor/tractor driver struggles with due to a bad back. I get called in each time to help him '2-hand' the sacks up into the hopper on the back of the tractor - it is quite high so if we are lucky, the delivery pallet is set down on a stack of 5-6 empty pallets so that we can pass at least the first few bags DOWN into the spreader.

No ground rush for the wooly lawn mowers. They are taking
their own sweet time about giving us a clue to their in-lamb,
or not, status.

I will leave it at that for this post - a nice gentle one after the rather hectic pace of recent epistles. I have a rather nice whiskey here, bought in case of the visitors last week needing a dram but not actually touched at the time. It is sliding down rather well.

Pear blossom.

Sticky buds (Horse Chestnut) explode
into action.

Sláinte !