Tag: family

The annual family picnic

One day, many years ago, we were at a family funeral on my mother’s side when one of my cousins made a suggestion.

Instead of meeting up with our extended family only at weddings and funerals, why not have an annual family reunion?

Many people do something similar but it’s usually in someone’s garden or house, which can mean that one person or family spends hours getting the place spick and span and is then chained to a teapot all afternoon.

My cousin’s idea was to meet on the second Sunday in June for a picnic each year at Ham Hill Country Park in South Somerset.

This was always a favourite spot for us as children in the 1960s, back in the days when it wasn’t even called a country park but was just a place we knew where we could go and have fun, running up and down the paths or sliding down the hillocks in animal feed bags.

This ancient disused quarry, which was famous for its honey-gold hamstone, is now very popular, but there’s still plenty of space for everyone to enjoy.

My mother, who is 98, presides in a picnic chair over the proceedings, and hands around a clipboard for us to ‘sign in’. This year there were around forty of us in attendance.

Numbers have fluctuated over time – apparently seventy went one year -but there is no pressure. If you can be there, great. But if you can’t, it doesn’t matter.

All that’s required is for you to bring your own picnic, chairs or a rug, and make sure you’re wearing a hat, sunglasses and sun cream. We always meet in the same spot in a grassy hollow. Woe betide any outsider sitting there before the family arrives, like a Greek chorus emerging on to a stage in twos and threes and fours.

There have been years when we’ve shivered in the cold, sheltered under a gazebo in the rain or just chilled out.

This year, the weather was just right – cloudy sun, according to my weather app – and instead of molassine meal and cow cake sacks, the dog food bags came in handy for a bit of imprompt sledging down the hillocks

Every year I’m asked what time the pincic starts and every year I forget and have to ask my mum.

It’s a highlight of early summer, and I’m hoping that with new additions joining the extended family each year, we’ll all want to continue this very special tradition.

It’s very special to see second cousins being coy at first and then cosying up like they’ve known each other forever.

We are family.

The Light of Experience

Today would have been my father’s ninety-ninth birthday.

He died in 2016, not long after he was ninety-one. It was a year my family won’t forget. We lost three close members in almost as many months.

It’s a sombre, sobering experience when that kind of thing happens. Makes you count your blessings for happier times and live for the day rather than dwelling in the past or worrying about the future.

My dad was a second generation tenant farmer from south Somerset, the middle of three sons. He was quiet, wiry and strong. He worked so hard it did his back in. He had an unbreakable connection to and affinity with the landscape, which he passed on to me and my four older siblings through osmosis.

We didn’t have many acres but he knew those fields like a dressmaker knows fabric and thread. Our small herd of Friesian cattle all had names – that was my mother’s doing, naming them after Native American tribes, exotic flowers and women from I Claudius.

He bred poultry – the rare breed Plymouth Barred Rocks, Barnevelders and Welsummers. His calves fetched top price at Taunton Market and he could spot a good heifer from a mile away.

My father was a prolific trickster, doing that thing people do with their thumbs, pretending to have sliced off the tip of his nose and then putting it back on again. He’d frighten me with spiders and challenge primary school friends to punch their way out of a paper bag by putting them into an animal feed sack.

He never went abroad until he retired, yet he hankered constantly for adventure. My mother told me that Dad had wanted to emigrate to Tasmania before I was born, but he never did. Too busy on the farm and with his growing family, I suppose. His younger brother was a Ten Pound Pom and emigrated to Australia in the 1960s, where their uncle had lived since the 1920s.

In the 1970s, my father somehow got the romantic notion that he wanted to be a tenant farmer in Ireland. During this period, he was an avid reader of the Irish Farmer magazine and the cow stalls hummed to the sound of Radio Athlone. But Ireland didn’t want him.

I’d forgotten this but my father was into world music before it was a thing. He loved The Chieftains (naturally, they were Irish) and the Romanian pan pipe player Gheorghe Zamfir, who came to prominence in the mid-1970s for the haunting theme to The Light of Experience, a BBC religious programme.

Gheorghe Zamfir in a video that could have come straight from The Fast Show.

Years before, I remember being in the kitchen at home and asking nobody in particular who it was that was playing Tom Hark on the radio.

Without hesitation, my father replied: ‘Elias and his Zig-Zag Jive Flutes.’

He was great at baking cakes. And his grandchildren will tell you that his egg and chips were the best we’ve ever tasted.

His shoes were the shiniest I’ve ever seen – ‘you can tell a lot from people’s shoes‘ – and he always wore a German belt that my grandfather had brought home from the First World War.

He loved the comedian Dave Allen (Irish again), boxing and Joan Bakewell.

Happy birthday, Dad.