Going back in time 2

Yesterday we spent a good deal of the afternoon at a wedding reception with a difference. Firstly, the actual wedding had taken place back in July - we’d babysat the house for the couple while they went on their honeymoon. Secondly, there were six wedding cakes. The bride had asked certain people to make a cake specially for the reception, and so each cake was quite different, and at least two of them were more like children’s birthday cakes. One of these had a little car and trailer on it, and the other was a large teddy-bear shaped cake with scrumptious soft icing.
And then the reception took place at a pub in what I would call the middle of nowhere. It turned out to be about a mile away from the main village of Whepstead, and had no other buildings anywhere near. It’s a lovely old building, in good condition, large enough for a few guests, but really what we would call in NZ: out in the wop wops.
Still, the day was hot (the English can no longer complain that they’re not getting a summer - today is too hot to go outside); the bride left some water pistols for the children to play with after lunch, and it was two adults (my wife and a lady vicar) who started the ball rolling. At different times in the day some people got completely soaked. In fact, the vicar poured a glass of water down her brother’s back late in the afternoon, something he took with surprising equanimity. I suppose he thought retaliating on a woman wasn’t the done thing, let alone a female vicar. More fool him.

Market

We discovered the Oxford market by accident: it’s similar in style to the inside market in Melbourne: lots of little permanent shops all crowded together under a permanent roof, some of them fully enclosed so you have to enter a door, some of them open (like the fish shop and the butchers) so you can buy straight over the counter, like you would in an open air market. One of the most appealing was a cake shop where they were doing the decoration of the cakes in full view of the public. They had dozens of things on display, cakes with people on them, and all sorts. And then there were hundreds of decorations you could buy to put on cakes, some of them edible and some not.
There was also a small café where they had free internet access, so of course we stopped there for a little while, as we carry the big baby, as it gets called to distinguish it from the little baby (the GPS), around with us most of the time for just such occasions. We only do this while we’re staying in places where we don’t have some internet access at home - we’ve been fortunate to be able to use other people’s broadband a lot of the time.