She is happy, honest.
Glorious sunset.
The hall is open to the public with tudors reenacting 1588 today (Sunday 23rd) and Monday 24th, and then next weekend as well.
Kentwell hall
Summer snippets part 2 – all about Joan
This is Joan. (With thanks to Mike and Allison for the picture. )
I’ve been Joan twice this summer. It’s peculiar – in the run up to Kentwell I do a lot of faffing and panicking, then there’s the actually getting there and putting up tents and then I just am.
Life is both simpler and more complicated. There are constant logistical challenges associated with having all the things you need for during the day and then the evening in the right place at the right time when some of them can’t be dealt with at particular times (when the flag is up to show there are visitors on the manor, we stay firmly in Tudor character). And yet, because I have such a clearly defined set of belongings and things to do I’m so much clearer in my head.
I come back ready for the modern world and also utterly dissatisfied with it. I miss my transient village of friends – speaking to people who are understanding of quirks of neurology, and tolerant of what would otherwise be regarded as unusual passions. I miss particularly the evenings sitting in the sun on the front sward while children play and we chat, or analyse Tudor books, or mend linen while drinking gin from camping mugs, or sometimes all of these things at once.
I come home to a virtual world where I feel more unusual and isolated than ever.
Part of what I’m gaining from Blogtember is a reaffirmation of community. That was what blogging was about in the first instance for me – the home ed blogring was our virtual village, our way of chatting over the garden fence about the things our actual neighbours wouldn’t understand. Now that everyone’s blogging it is oddly harder to maintain those community links.
I need to realign my blogging with my aims in life, but to do that, I need to work out what those aims are. I’ve watched endless webinars trying to identify business strategies I can follow, signed up to mastermind classes, enrolled in courses.
I haven’t found any answers. I know what I can do, and I know what I can’t. I can’t, for example, sign up to a drop shipping business that would facilitate more tat being shipped around the world. It just doesn’t sit right. I can’t be a coach, that idea is utterly laughable. I can fix your website, or explain to you how to fix it yourself, but I can’t market myself effectively to strangers.
It was much easier being Joan. I miss her.
Saturday snippets 21 August 2015
{putting} a tent up Kentwell Hall, ready for this week’s hands on living history reenactment. Forecast was for a very hot day, so I went as early as I could to get sorted before the heat set in. Still hot work, particularly putting it up on my own, but I have now cracked how to put it up alone.
{searching} for a missing page cloak and hat. We have enough hats for everyone to be decently covered, but I’m cross that the mystical safe place has expanded to eat cloaks now.
{packing} all the stuff I have found.
{thinking} about past, present and future. Reenactment is an odd way to spend your leisure time I suppose, and it gives an odd perspective on both the past and the present. Today I spent some time on my own on the barnsward, and it felt to me like the buildings were waiting for us. Very odd sensation.
52memories
Snapshot
Big is away at camp, which is very odd. Small is all ready to go for another stint of paging, Smallest is very much looking forward to catching up with some friends, and Tigerboy is ready for some outdoor time.
Mistress Joan and family
We finish at Kentwell hall midsummer tomorrow. Last chance to meet Mistress Joan until August.
Perfect moments
When the rain starts 5 minutes after you get back to your tent after a long warm day.
When your 3 year old picks up a diabolo lying on the sward and can almost work it.
When you speak to your other half and say a friend went on a supermarket run so you asked for crisps, and it turns out he did exactly the same with his friend. (We now have 42 packets of crisps. Minus the 3 the children ate immediately. Should see the week out anyway. )
When you lose a shoe lace and mention to another friend that it’s lost, and she turns up 10 minutes later with it in her hand.
When you’re walking back to the tent (before the rain) and someone comes up behind you and offers to help carry your baskets.
When you’re going through the speeches you’ve made 10 times before on a day, and you make a point and a visiting child lights up with understanding.
Kentwell days are full of perfect moments. It’s a place that holds the potential for perfection seemingly much closer to everyday normality than most places do.
