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.

Interneting in the Rain

Yesterday we tramped around in drizzling rain trying to find one of the pubs in Northampton that has internet access available via The Cloud. The first place we went to was under new management, and the staff knew nothing about Internet access. One of the blokes at the counter suggested another public house a street away: this turned out to be only BT (British Telecom) wireless access, which wasn’t any good to us. We only discovered this after we’d bought a coffee and tea. (Strong, strong coffees and teas.)
Finally we made our way to Abington St and found two Cloud access places opposite each other. If it hadn’t been raining so hard we could probably have sat out in the street between them (it’s a no vehicular traffic area) and picked up the signal. In the end we chose Lloyds No 1 over the Wedgewood, because the music was too loud at the latter.
Lloyds No 1 is part of a chain of pubs around the country, and provided us not only with great tea and hot chocolate (covered in cream, the latter was) but with inexpensive meals. We got through some business on the Net and some blogging, but no Skyping. However we were back in town this morning because we wanted to look at the Market in Northampton (where some woman was selling very good DVDs, but changing the price to suit the customer!) so we skyped two of the kids and had a conference call with them.