"Look, Mummy, the Roman centurions are hitching a lift in the Land Rover!"
I went to the English Heritage Festival of History at Kelmarsh Hall with a friend today, and we had such a great time. Random and utterly surreal, but great.
It's been a typical English summer day, which means occasional patches of sunshine in-between bouts of torrential rain. We found ourselves scurrying for shelter at various points, which meant we spent one half hour sheltering under an oak tree with three Romans, a Boer, a Redcoat and two Nazis, another fifteen minutes in a Saxon tent complete with slobbering wolfhound and another half hour in a mock-English pub with three flyboys and two medieval knights. Surreal is not the word.
It really was wonderful. It was celebrating 2,000 years of English history, which means everywhere you looked there were Romans, medieval squires, Saxons, Vikings. At one point Julie and I were watching the skies, transfixed by a Hurricane doing loops and dives, when a bunch of medieval knights appeared from behind a hedge, and then we had to scurry out of the way out of a troop of Napoleonic solders marching behind us. Then we saw Genghis Khan eating a burger.
And then I literally bumped into Jason Salkey, who played Rifleman Harris in the Sharpe series and got all tongue-tied and fangirly. I was nudging Julie and going 'OMG!', but she's never seen Sharpe so she was clueless.
It's been a typical English summer day, which means occasional patches of sunshine in-between bouts of torrential rain. We found ourselves scurrying for shelter at various points, which meant we spent one half hour sheltering under an oak tree with three Romans, a Boer, a Redcoat and two Nazis, another fifteen minutes in a Saxon tent complete with slobbering wolfhound and another half hour in a mock-English pub with three flyboys and two medieval knights. Surreal is not the word.
It really was wonderful. It was celebrating 2,000 years of English history, which means everywhere you looked there were Romans, medieval squires, Saxons, Vikings. At one point Julie and I were watching the skies, transfixed by a Hurricane doing loops and dives, when a bunch of medieval knights appeared from behind a hedge, and then we had to scurry out of the way out of a troop of Napoleonic solders marching behind us. Then we saw Genghis Khan eating a burger.
And then I literally bumped into Jason Salkey, who played Rifleman Harris in the Sharpe series and got all tongue-tied and fangirly. I was nudging Julie and going 'OMG!', but she's never seen Sharpe so she was clueless.