Holiday monday and visiting

Monday.

It's always an interesting day when it comes to bank holiday weekends that involve a large marquee and huge numbers of people. 95% of those people are really tired from long days at the tent and dealing with crowds they don't normally face. Friends getting irritable is pretty much par for the course on mondays, but it's still worth being there if I can.

Big downside to things, I have 2 mobile phones, and both of them ran out of power just after breakfast this morning. Given that I was camping, I'd decided not to bring chargers as I didn't want to leave the phones where I might lose them.

No doubt about it I was tired. 3 days later, I'm still tired! I got up at 7am having managed to tune out the dawn chorus - I was surpised I managed that so quickly - and packed up the tent before breakfast. No cooked breakfast today, that only arrives on sunday.

Flasks, cakes, rolls and flowers and back up to the tent - but we've forgotten to pick up Mavis, so back into Daventry to collect Mavis and arrive just 10 minutes before the start of the session. Thank heavens for the carload of event team people who went an hour ago and saved some seats really!

As is usual for a monday, this particular session pulled together the various threads of all the other sessions and put them into order for us, as well as having time for people to stand and speak of how the weekend had gone. There is also rather less in the way of singing on a monday, to allow time for this.

This weekend has focussed rather a lot on Noel's passing, but I think that was right, and only to be expected. He led the church for 40 years, and he was loved by a great many people, and was the catalyst for change in many people's lives.

We've sung a lot of songs that he wrote, or particularly liked or that he had requested in his will for his funeral. According to my Dad, he had set out much of the content of the bank holiday not long before his final crisis and surgery. It all felt very special, and was indeed a celebration.

As the end of the main session, as people picked up their things and headed out to their cars for coffee and cake and home, my family picked up the flowers from the garden and went to visit John and Grandma Win's graves. The burial ground is a place of peace. Some might think it a little morbid, but I find it a place of rest rather than a scary place full of dead bodies. It's the resting place for the bodies of people who were dearly loved, and on saturday another dearly loved person will rest there and give me greater reason to visit in August.

After visiting the graves we (mum, dad, David, Paul, me) climbed in the car to go to my house for a dinner and a break, but it was hot, and we didn't have much to drink, so we stopped off at a Tesco that we don't normally go to for some cold drinks. Then we missed a turn coming out of Tesco and got disorientated. We ended up going part way to Milton Keynes before finding the turn for Bedford. It was also noted by myself that when 5 big people need to go somewhere by car, its a good thing to have a people carrier rather than an astra size car!

We reached my house and promptly cooked dinner having sent Dad off to my room to chill with a Planet Earth DVD. To explain, Dad got really grumpy on the way back, partly because he was tired and partly because Paul acted up to him. Mum settled with a book, David helped me cook and Paul sat ignoring all of us with his laptop.

Once everyone was rested and fed the conversation returned to the normal banter. This is one of my favourite parts of a bank holiday weekend, the chance to chill with my family and chat about anything and everything. On kicking out time, everything was slightly delayed due to dad hoping he could steal my Planet Earth DVDs (he was already borrowing my British Isles Natural History set) and mum hoping she could nick one of my books! The DVDs did stay with me, but the book is on loan for a week...

Anyway, that's my bank holiday for you. I know the posts have been really long, but I didn't know how to make them any shorter and still be able to capture the essence of what went on. I do find these bank holidays special times; and this one was particularly special.