Mild Peril

Father’s Day and I got a lie-in. Students might be shocked to learn that a lie-in for me is 9am at the weekend. The 18 year old student version of myself would have been shocked. Getting up at 2pm is a student lie-in. Of course the 35 year old self thinks that getting up at 2pm is a huge waste of time.

Then we took a trip out for the afternoon to Windsor Castle. We completely lucked out on a car park space. There had been a road race or cycling race (update: actually it was both and more as it was a triathlon) and the roads near the castle had been closed. As we got there, the police were opening the roads up and as a result we were one of the first into the virtually empty car park near the castle. (When I returned later to bring some picnic bags back the car park was packed; and the clampers were out in force too).

We walked round to the castle and entered the grounds through the airport style security; in one of ours bags were some knives and forks from our picnic set. They nearly got chucked out and we didn’t even bother to use them. We had a picnic in the grounds prepared by Gina and Jeanie.

We did a tour and Ryan liked the huge walls, battlements and arrow slits and had good fun “shooting” the people coming up the path outside the wall. But the best part were the gargoyles. Ryan told me that he’d seen a statue and now it had disappeared which caused Jeannie to be a little bit scared every time we saw a gargoyle, which was often.

Ryan also liked the soliders that stood completely motionless except at seemingly random times, they’d slap their machine guns and move it around. Most of the castle rooms were closed, which was good because entry was much cheaper and the kids would have been bored by them anyway. You also could fill out a form and get free re-entry for up to a year when the rooms are open. As we didn’t know why the rooms were closed, we speculated that the Queen was about. Then we saw a woman walking a corgi in the grounds.

Only she wasn’t very queen like and anyway the Queen was at Buckingham Palace marking the 25th anniversay of the end of the Falklands War. Must have been a decoy.