Tuesday 19 July 2011

The Great British Weather - NOT!

It's been a bad week and if you are feeling down then don't read on because I am going to have a bit of a moan unless of course my situation makes you feel a lot better because there is always someone worse off out there!
The weather, it is a British topic that comes up in most if not all conversations and for good reason. There is too much of it, not enough or the wrong type of weather for most people. When it's sunny for any length of time people miss the rain. For me I like sun, lots of it, blue skies and a gentle breeze and I'm often told I live in the wrong country to want that! Is it too much to ask for it to rain all night if it must and be sunny during the day?

I had high hopes for my event this weekend. It was in aid of EllenorLions Hospice - a good charity, at Chevening Estate - a beautiful venue, during July - a month for sun during the afternoon so I had a lie in, all good things!

The variable and utterly unpredictable element of weather is what turned an event with huge potential into a drama. By the time we got there all the spots under the trees were taken, with good reason, except that on second glance they were in the 'wind tunnel' and experiencing rain being blown toward them at full speed. We took a spot next to the Falconry Display and proceeded to set up in the rain. I begged hubby to wait it out, I even thought for the first time of just doing a runner, who would notice?

The poor birds were utterly dejected and convinced this was not right for majestic birds of prey. If only I had brought my camera, I could have shown you the steam rising off the gazebo in the tiny gaps of sunshine inbetween the torrents of rain and taken some gorgeous close up shots of these beautiful birds because there was no one around them.

Once set up, we braced ourselves against the gazebo to stop it taking off, only for a bunch of people to scuttle in dripping their umbrellas everywhere, with their backs to our display generally just clogging up the space without the decency to even look at my work. A couple commented several times at how sunny and glorious it was last year and so many people too! Now where was it they wanted to place their umbrellas?

One woman rushed in, dumped her camera and batteries on my table and proceeded to sort them out as she didn't want to do that in the rain and her and her hubby went on to take pictures from inside our gazebo. So glad they couldn't read my mind!

We sold a few bits, took our dripping selves off home to dry out and promised never to do an outdoor event again! But more disaster awaited, my laptop had fatally crashed and the only way to get it to work again was to restore it to factory settings, which means a loss of many photos, all my files and settings. It has been threatening for a while so I wasn't completely surprised and had done all the repair disk blah, blah which is why I knew there was only one last ditch attempt.  It is limping along, clearly not going to be here for long and has an inability to type 'n' a lot of the time. I even missed Handmade Monday,  some items on Ebay and didn't scoop £160 euromillions, not even a tenner!

I wont bore you with any more 'how bad is my life' stuff but to end on a plus note I was the closest to 'guess how many balloons in the car' and won £90 M&S vouchers!

1 comment:

Ali said...

Sorry to hear your weekend event was so affected by the horrendous weather (as you will know, you were not alone!). I hate it when people just use your gazebo for shelter - I had one woman actually block our table off by leaving her child asleep in a pushchair under the overhang so she could have a look around the stalls without him getting wet! She got pretty annoyed when I found her and told her to move the buggy before I did! Unbelievable.

Well done on ending on a high note though!

Ali x