What I Did On My Holidays (by Eclair, aged 39 and a bit)
So, in our last exciting installment, I told you I had three days mysteriously blacked out in my diary. A complete lack of comments notwithstanding, I expect you are all dying to know what happened.
Well, it was my birthday on the Tuesday and the 10th Anniversary of our first blind date on the Wednesday and plaintive pleas of “What do you want for your birthday/anniversary?” have gone unanswered this year. Usually I will drop hints from around July onwards and by around September I am bookmarking online shops and attaching post-it notes to the fridge with missive such as “Dear Children, Mummy really needs a new purse for her birthday.”
Oddly enough, these clues are never enough and I end up buying my own gifts and handing the sellotape to Big Hairy Man the evening before when he asks if I really want him to bother wrapping the thing because I know what it is anyway.
So this year I handled things differently. He asked, he pleaded, he hurled himself to the floor in agonies of indecision, but I still wouldn’t name A Thing To Give Me. I told him I wanted to be surprised. I suggested he talk to my mother about it. Or my sisters. Or our travel agent. I didn’t mind what he gave me, I just didn’t want to know what it was until my birthday. Planning was made slightly more problematic by our anticipating chicken-pox eruptions on Littlest Daughter, she was grumpy but (still!) not a spot in sight.
He told me the evening before my birthday that it might be wise if I packed a bag “in case of earthquakes or something”. Apparently it is important to be nicely dressed during natural disasters so I was advised to put in my high heels. The next morning we put the bags in the car once my sister in law appeared on the doorstep (“Surprise!”) to babysit and he drove me… to the airport.
He had a mysterious brown envelope to give me once we were in the air but the check-in attendant let the cat out of the bag. We were going to Christchurch. (I can’t tell you how impressed I am that he managed to keep it a secret! And even more so that the children did!)
We’ve been in New Zealand for 3 years now and have hardly seen any of the country. This was our first trip to the South Island and it was wonderful.
We had a suite at a beautiful hotel, ate curry (Two Fat Indians, it was divine! I offered to marry the chef and have his babies but his wife objected) and took a wine tour with our many-coursed meal with live music at The Octagon. But the highlight?
He took me to the Royal New Zealand Show. There was wine, food, livestock and horizontal rain in gailforce arctic winds. Not that that mattered a bit as we spent most of our time in the covered area seeing beauties like these:
Little Known Fact About Me #1: I like chickens.
We saw what appeared to be Dress Like Your Cattle competitions:
and this splendid chap who really tickled my fancy:
Little Known Fact About me #2: I like beards.
(Hairy men in general actually, and one in particular.)
And, most divine of all, the sheep. These are prize-winning New Zealand pedigree merino ewes with their lambs. I fell in love. I nearly fell in the pen. BHM had to grab me as I upended trying to stroke them. (Okay, actually I was fondling the fleece, but the lambs were cute too!)
We also saw the Golden Fleece competition and I was hustled out of the arena before I hurled myself headlong into their crimpy goodness. I didn’t get any photos of those but was consoled by the wine tasting in the next shed.
So, now you know what has kept me from my blog (okay, it doesn’t account for the weeks of silence but I have more entries to come. With photos!)
We came home to our children and our youngest promptly burst into full-blown poxiness. Her timing was perfect.
