Yesterday was the first day of the bi-annual Open Gardens weekend. I have always enjoyed this event, but yesterday was more than slightly fraught.
I have just spent a happy half hour listening to British Sea Power and leafing my way through Menagerie Manor by Gerald Durrell trying to find a specific quote that seems ridiculously appropriate to describe the events of yeasterday. But Sod's Law applies (as it so often does), and I can't find it. But the quote reads something like this:
"Animals, like humans, get ill. But they seem to choose the worst possible time in which to do so".
Flump, the softshelled turtle who has been living quite contentedly at room temperature (in the summer) in my varied premises for five or six years, decided yesterday (in front of a party of old-aged-pensioners from Ilfracombe) that it was time to get a chill and become seriously ill. Luckily (for everyone involved) we had a couple of friends of mine from the zoo mafia on hand, and crisis was averted. This morning she is back to her old self, she tried to bite me, and has tucked into a dinner of prawns like they were going out of fashion. But it was not an auspicious way to launch the first public outing of the CFZ museum.
For, after two years of the top of the CFZ grounds looking like a cross between a particularly unsalubrious building site, and a First World War battleground, the CFZ Museum is finally open for business, albeit in a fairly rudimentary state.
We had about 40 visitors, and even sold a book, so we must be doing something right, and I am limbering up for day 2 of the Open Gardens weekend, which starts in about fifteen minutes..
Hey Ho, Let's Go!
