Blessed

I'm not sure how I'm going to do this. This chapter has nothing to do with
anything to do with the stable and will be more of a collection of pictures than of words, as our Health & Safety Czar might put it. But I want to put this together, because I'll enjoy looking at the collection of photographs, even if no one else will. The problem, of course, is that the layout of the blog means that there has to be a certain amount of words to accompany the photos, so that the illustrations don't all come on top of each other. So I'll have to waffle a bit, but I don't suppose that that will be too much of a problem.
Anyway, the gist of the chapter is that I was fortunate enough to spend two days on the Norfolk Broads last weekend, and I was blown away by how lovely they are. We were extremely lucky with the weather because we saw the Broads at their best, but basically I ended up ashamed to discover that I have lived within 70 miles of the Broads for 22 years without ever exploring them or knowing what I was missing. I am so pleased that that omission has now been put right.

The reason for the excursion was Rupert Erksine-Crum's stag weekend. Rupert is due to marry Emma Candy on St Leger day, and I was honoured to be called up for his pre-marital excursion.
In one sense I shouldn't be putting any of this on the blog, but basically there was nothing for anyone to be ashamed of, so there's no need to draw a veil over the festivities. There were a dozen of us in total, with two boats hired for the weekend to house us, and we spent all of Saturday and the better part of Sunday chugging along in convoy in these two vessels. Rupert, who is now the proprietor of Weyhill Horse Transport, is ex-Army, having been in the Scots' Guards for several years, and the largest contingent of revellers was the military one, comprising two active soldiers and several former ones.
Other than Rupert, I didn't know any of these, but it was a pleasure to meet them all; in particular, the two serving soldiers, Lt-Col Giles Taylor and Maj Tim Hutchinson, were men of such patent competence and strength (physical and mental) that it was easy to conclude that the country is in safe hands with men such as these guarding it, despite the machinations of their political overlords.


As these photographs will be showing, we were incredibly lucky with the weather. It's been a fairly good summer, but the latter stages haven't been as good as the first part. Last week wasn't great, and we headed to Norfolk on Friday evening at the end of an overcast and not particularly warm day. However, Saturday dawned cloudless, and we were treated to two idyllic summer days, with a lovely evening and very warm summer night between them.
Sunburn was a bit of an issue on Sunday, and we returned home on Sunday afternoon in some of the hottest weather of the summer - and then come Monday morning, the good weather was more or less gone again. Absolutely incredible. When we had our dinner in the Falgate Arms in Potter Heigham (where we picked up and subsequently deposited the boats) on Friday evening, where our captain was delighted to find some bottles of Mann's beer, it was a chilly enough evening, but from the next morning onwards sweaters were needed no more.


So that's it really. Many of you will be familiar with the Broads. For those of you who aren't, they are pools of water which are linked by the river system in low-lying north-east Norfolk, just inland from Great Yarmouth basically, which probably would have been just one large marsh had not vast quantities of peat been excavated 1,000 years ago (by an amazing coincidence, soon after I arrived home on Sunday evening, BBC1 aired a programme of Gryf Rhys-Jones wandering and boating around East Anglia, including on some of the stretches of water we had just been on, in which he gave me some enlightenment about the area's history) but which is actually now just and area of the most wonderfully tranquil and rural waterways, with thousands of little motor boats (Rupert disparagingly described our two craft, which he'd renamed the 'Prince Of Darkness' - after Peter Mandelson - and the 'Bobby Dazzler', as the two worst boats on the Broads, but that was more than harsh) and a far smaller number of beautiful small sailing boats, and an even smaller number of magnificent traditional Norfolk wherries (a splendid example of which illustrates this paragraph). The small hamlets next to the rivers are idyllic, with plenty of small thatched cottages; windmills (very Norfolk) abound; and farmland is lovely; and the bird-life (swans, ducks, geese, kingfishers etc) is superb.
The fact that there are a hell of a lot of boats around doesn't spoil it - in fact, the friendliness is very heartening, with great courtesy being shown among the water-users, and with very little rowdy behaviour in evidence, as witnessed by the fact that we only saw 12 people in the water (and you can probably guess which 12 they were) - and really I couldn't be happier to have, belatedly, discovered such a lovely place. The only worry about going back would be that, having seen them at their very best, I'd be worried it might be downhill from here. But back I will go, I hope.