Tuesday 14 December 2010

(Not the usual) Hardwick weekend, 11-12 December 2010



Every year we spend the first weekend in December at the Hardwick Hall basecamp celebrating Christmas… but not this year. The early Friday arrivals found a flooded basecamp kitchen (burst pipes in the flat above) and new plans had to be made. They returned to Manchester on Saturday morning and Daniel & Megan hosted the Christmas evening meal in Heaton Moor.

Charlie cooked the turkey – a lovely bird from Glossop – and Daniel and Megan cooked the rest. By 19:30 after glasses of mulled wine 16 of us had taken our seats around an extended dining table. Previously we’d not entertained more than eight! It was very convivial and everyone enjoyed the meal… and better than at Hardwick there was a dishwasher to wash everything up!

During and after the meal we played party games. The “team in the corner” won the quiz, Daniel won pass-the-parcel, Charlie and April won the cornflake box game and generally we had a lot of fun.

On Sunday some of us went for a walk at Styal and Daniel forked over the soil in his flowerbeds!

Daniel

(with thanks to Megan for welcoming 15 people into her home on a Saturday evening that she’d planned to spend rather more quietly, and to Judith, my mother-in-law, for all her help in fixing us up with extra dining chairs, crockery and a steamer for the Christmas puds)

Tuesday 7 December 2010

Communicating Doors, Wilmslow. 7 December 2010

We saw an excellent play at Wilmslow's Green Room this evening - Communicating Doors by Alan Ayckbourn. It's quite an intimate theatre and we had front row seats, so we felt as though we were almost part of the action. The play really has to be seen to be appreciated; we were certainly enthralled. One man was murdered just moments before he 'accidentally' fell out of a 6th-floor window 20 years earlier! Yes I have written that correctly.