Wednesday, August 13, 2003

Simple concept really. Take 300 plus people from, the Celtic Fringes + Leicester, Ealing and Tyneside, of a voluntary, co-operative educational organisation that believes in international friendship and peace, put them in a field together with visiting delegations of Latvian, Basques, Italians and Palestinian refugees from the Lebanon and let them live together in harmony for a week.

That was the plan anyway and pretty much that�s how it worked out. We had our irks and niggles, but on the scale of things, it achieved pretty much what it set out to. Particular highlights��there were a few, the Hiroshima Commemoration, The Burns Supper with the Piping in of and the Address to a Haggis, together with the accompanying �To a mouse� by young Neil, formerly of Irvine, �Recitation is an entirely different thing!����.legend, not forgetting tommyd�s fine singing of a �A Man�s a Man for a� that�, The Palestinian singing, piping and drumming etc.

There was millions more happening throughout the week, but thewife and I cleverly persuaded folks that we should be the keepers of the provender for the week. Was that wise? We will never know for sure, we spent the weeks prior to the camp devising tasty, nourishing menus for 100 plus people, both meat-eaters and veggie and then quantifying them only to discover some days in that there were significantly less than this number. That and the sheer size of the onions (I ordered large and got footballs) meant that there was more than enough to go round if people weren�t picky. People not picky???? We managed, Meat-eaters, Veggies, Vegans, Gluten Free, Non-Dairy and even Atkins. If I had brought electrodes, I may even have been able to cater for the special exclusion diet. The special exclusion part being that everyone bar the follower was excluded from discovering its make-up. Ahhrgghhh� and then of course �if you don�t like it we�ll find it for you� says I foolishly in the council circle, before thinking that frankly if it�s not covered by the above and you don�t like it then we don�t have it!

Further tip always have gherkins for the Eastern Europeans. I knew that from experience and boy did they go down well. Try offering gherkins to our own kids and they would not thank you. Perhaps that�s why the Latvian kids all had great complexions, were generally really healthy looking and were a happy hard working bunch of youngsters, who were a pleasure to know.

So that was the �holiday� then, a week of three meals a day for just under a 100 folks. By the time breakfast was over it was lets start lunch and the same for dinner. There was a rota system, but that depended on someone taking a leadership/or collective decision to do it and there were few volunteers. Glasgow being the extremely notable exception, where credit is due for effort above and beyond the call of equitable mutuality.

Well its over for another year but you might be able to find some interesting details here, once the young chap who made the site gets back from abroad. If any links don�t work, change the URL from upper to lower case, but don�t tell him I told you so.

Next year I want to be the official camp photographer!

Since then, been too knackered/busy to blog. But tonight�s the night. Things are happening going down etc. thewife and I are now booked in for a proper holiday while the reidboy et al head for Italia, we�ll be looking after their place in Lewisham, and much looking forward to it we are. We were thinking about hiring, don�t laugh a Daewoo Matiz from Arnold Clark for the week, so we could road test it in a variety of situations, urban, rural, Motorway, London etc and get a clue of what it was like. But at � 120 for 10 days plus fuel, we had a look at Ryanair instead and got 2 returns for the princely sum of � 61.00 guess what we chose?


posted by timesnewroman at 8:22 PM  

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