Returning from the Game Fair late on Friday, I wondered why more post hadn’t built up. But, of course, it was only the day before that we’d left. It felt as if we’d been away for a fortnight. The reason? We’d camped.
How smug I felt on learning that some visitors had spent three hours in a traffic jam, waiting to get in. We’d been on site since first poking our heads out of the tent to gaze at Blenheim Palace our view in this respect being rather better than the Duke of Marlborough’s shortly after dawn.
The children could pack the maximum amount of clay-shooting, fly-fishing and tree-climbing into the day. (Although my favourite stand was one of the smallest: a section of Cotswold stone wall and its wildlife built by Warriner School, one of the very few comprehensives to have a farm and the largest of its kind.)
But on a hot day, they were beyond exhaustion by the time we had eaten the last steak sandwich being served on the showground at 8pm. We were comatose on Saturday. Going to a Prom, the youngest member of the family fell asleep just as Thomas Adès raised his baton. Why are the Proms held in the summer? The Royal Albert Hall has no air-conditioning. Couldn’t an arrangement be made to unscrew the dome?
