Calibration (Day Zero)

The Hobbling weekend began slightly later than planned as my “on time” train arrived about twenty minutes late. Fortunately, skit and biped were patient enough to wait for me and produce a surprise attack from behind as I left the platform of Weston Super Mare. With that as a greeting, we ambled on and out of the station to see a huge and brightly lit TESCO sign just across the station car park. “Oh,” realised skit, “that was why the station man thought I was mad when I asked whether there was a supermarket around here.”

The three Hobblings raced down the aisles of Tesco (well, biped tried to glide on the trolley but then skit took over before accidents occurred). Bypassing the world’s smallest pineapples, we debated over whether we needed six chocolate bars (I believe we settled for four?). Escaping with our shopping, we had a showdown with an evil trolley hell-bent on taking over the world, and vamoosed in skit’s car (after getting momentarily lost in Tesco’s carpark- those trolley sirens were messing with our minds).

Getting from Weston Super Mare to our Hobbling Hayloft (though we generally called it our cottage, I will go with the alliteration here) was quite remarkably easy (or at least skit made it look easy). As a town girl, I was unaware that an address comprising of just a village name (too small for road maps) and the name of the nearest slightly larger village would actually get us anywhere. But these villages only seemed to have one road in them and so it weirdly enough worked without directions.

After a long and narrow country road where skit drove remarkably well in the pitch black, we arrived at the farm with the little holiday cottages. The farmer (I assume?) showed us to our Hayloft which was a wonderful little detached cottage with The World’s Largest Door. There were beams everywhere and low windows and slanted ceilings. The kitchen was small but perfectly equipped for any task we could give it (it even came with flapjakes, lemon cake and crab apple jelly). Skit and I made ourselves at home in the little twin-bed room while biped got the adult room with a closet big enough to keep someone in. “With a bucket?” skit asks.

Biped and skit set to cooking the dinner: spaghetti bolognese. I bowed out of the cooking setting a trend for the whole weekend (eek, but only because the bogognese was so tasty that I wanted these talented cooks to make more. Every meal they made was divine and the one time I did anything I apparently burnt the sausages but that’s how I thought they were meant to be! They are always black for my family...). Instead I made sure I knew how to operate the tv and dvd player, an important role I am sure you’ll agree. At 9pm we watched HIGNFY, as is our way, and then at 9:30 we watched Armstrong and Miller with our dinner (which came with a salad remarkable to being delicious even when we forgot to buy dressing). Better than last week’s episode but the highlight of the evening had to be calibrating anal sphincters on QI.

I washed up and we all grabbed mulled wine and stood outside under the stars. There weren’t as many as we hoped. It seemed that there was some mist in the air but the warm and quiet night was still beautiful enough that we stood outside for quite some time.