I’ve never really liked Status Quo. Their music annoys me. Yet I can’t seem to help but hum along.
In the same way, the status quo with The Funny Little Bungalow is annoying me. But still, we hum along.
Of course, we have no choice. There’s no going back! And poor Big Seymour is working his absolute hardest to keep things humming along, but with no magical cloning machine, and therefore, just him, progress is slow.
From the outside, it looks good. If you can ignore the building site debris and all the things we might possibly just one day potentially could sort of perhaps need (like miniature Roman columns, concrete cones, pallets, assorted wood/plastic scraps and a set of optics), then it’s quite pretty. Big Seymour has even decreed that he wants a wisteria growing along the front elevation. A white one. (Is there such a thing?) How splendid!
But we are way off wisteria.
The Four Little Seymours are muddling along as usual. And with the current domestic situation, I have decided that the best thing to do is to send them all away at every conceivable opportunity. I was reluctant to let Boy Seymour go to the impending Cub camp – he wasn’t going. But with a little bit of thought and consideration, I have seen the error of my ways.
Should I keep him here in The Shed, wobbling into his sisters, screeching periodically, meddling, fiddling, resisting homework and sniffing out the hidden iPad, or should I let him go where there are other boys, rules, tents and space…? It’s a no-brainer really.
Number One and Two are off to Brownie camp this very weekend. Arguments about homework can wait until Monday evening, and the The Shelf will be less congested with limbs. Maybe nobody will get kicked in the head in the night – what a novelty!
It will certainly make a change from the other weekend, when Little Seymour Number Two had to dress up as a rotund dragon and roll over and die as part of the parish weekend festival. We set off in time to get to the church, only to discover it deserted. Wrong church! We trudged back to our car in intense heat with Boy Seymour dressed entirely inappropriately in his current favourite garment, a fleecy red sweater with elephants on it, and thick jeans. I would like to say we ran back to our car but we couldn’t. Boy was melting, and Mini Seymour was trying to cajole him. Meanwhile, we had nine minutes to go until the fat dragon was due to make its appearance.
Luckily, after I managed to remember that my mobile data was turned off and that was why my phone map wasn’t working, we realised where we needed to be. Ish. And off we set, driving uncomfortably close to the upper level of the legal limit (I’m rubbish at speeding) and wishing the minutes would just slow down a while.
And oh! What a gem we found! We discovered the parish church of St George in West Grinstead – the most beautiful place! With a healthy congregation of all ages and stalls of all different types. Plants, cakes, junk, plus a bouncy castle for 50p and as many goes as you like – my kind of event! But before we could be distracted by the festivities, we had to find Little Seymour Number Two’s fellow Thespians. But could we? Could we heck.
Picture the scene; a limping loon of a mother, hot and stressed, herding three smallish Seymours with only the power of my voice, one racing ahead to find her friends, one a hundred metres behind because a)he’s melting and b)he doesn’t do running, and a mini one somewhere in between. We ran around the churchyard, dodging cheerful, cider-swigging folk out for a peaceful afternoon, avoided stalls, swerved dogs and respectfully circumnavigated gravestones until we almost gave up, at which point, a nice man put two and two together and asked us, “Are you the dragon?”
Rude.
In the end, Number Two made it by the skin of her teeth, and the rest of us gratefully rested in the cool pews, behind 27 beautiful silhouettes of the parish’s lost soldiers and watched Number Two’s sketch, as St George slayed her and rescued the maiden.
Then we nearly stole a display poppy (Mini Seymour is like a magpie for pretty stuff), bought a gooseberry bush, had a bounce on the castle, a quick look at some engines(!), and a gawp at the most amazing houses I never knew existed a mile or two from our own house, before we had to get back to provide Big Seymour with his afternoon dose of moral support. And a cup of tea.
What a palava.
We returned to The Funny Little Bungalow slightly dishevelled, but full of awe and wonder at what normal people do on summer weekends in our region. Maybe one day, we too will be able to attend such events for pleasure, drink beverages in the shade of an ancient yew tree, and watch on as our children bounce convivially on the inflatables with their peers. Big Seymour will be there too, in loafers and a casual shirt, and I will be in something stylish from Boden.
For now, though, I will be the banshee disturbing the peace on my broken knee, rocking up late and stealing poppies with my band of feral shed-dwellers. It’s not ideal, but it’s the just the way we roll.
And in truth, it probably always will be!
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