Lavenham and our first party

Saturday turned out to be quite the blustery day. We decided to head towards some closer villages as we had to get back for our first party in the village. More on that later. The first stop was to be Lavenham. The guidebooks list this as one of England's most perfect small towns. It is a picturesque timber framed village that dates to the 14th century. We dropped into a little tea room that was part of a B&B. The chap who ran it was retired from London and he and his wife came to run the tea room. They decided that they had so much room in the house, they they would convert some of the rooms into a B&B. Between the 5 of us, his dog and cat, we almost filled the place. Nice lunch time. The house on the right is the crooked house. It is basically famous for being crooked. Our next stop was the Guildhall of Corpus Christi (Corpus Christi means the blood of Christ). This contained a great museum and the man in the front hall took a shine to the kids. He gave us quite the explanation of the house and sent us into the cellar in search of bricks. Come to find out, the foundation of the White House is made from white bricks that were made in this region. They were used as ballasts on ships and were piled up in America. When Cornwallis burned the Whitehouse, they noticed that the foundation bricks were different and they traced them back to Lavenham (this is another detail that I have not been able to authenticate but it makes for a nice story).


From there, we headed off to Colchester. This is the oldest recorded town in Britain. It dates back to 43 AD when the first permanent Roman colony was established. I would love to launch into a grand and descriptive story of this adventure but the complications of modern life decided we would have a different adventure. It just so happens that the Roman wall and the Norman keep are also in the commercial center of this quite large and developed town. So picture the 5 of us in the Merc driving 50 miles an hour into the center of this town where there is not a single parking spot for miles. Vivian has her head buried in the map and I am driving like a bat out of %$&* (sorry, I needed to use the language here because it fit the moment). We basically made it all the way through town with barely seeing a wall. From there, we voted and decided to head for home rather than make an attempt at seeing this. We would regroup and would tackle Colchester another day. Well, the stars did not agree and despite our best efforts, we were caught by the pull of the black hole that is known as the center of Colchester and we made one more run through hades before being spit out on the other end of town.


I would love to say that our tale for the day ended there but this cartoon we call life had one more chapter for the day. We then came home to attend our first soiree in the area. A friend of Vivian's from the primary school(Jayne and Alex Gingell) invited us to what turned out to be a wedding party. It was a very nice couple and there were more kids than adults at the shindig. The kids mostly stayed out of the way and the parents enjoyed prawns (shrimp to those from the Carolina's) and champagne and many other delightful treats. There was even chocolate fondue. We realized that John has adjusted to life well and was comfortable in this new setting when he showed up in the center of the party dressed in jockey goggles and a skirt. Rather than type on, I'll just stop as an explanation would come up short......