With a Little Help...

Three more days until Rockhill Rendezvous kicks off. Yesterday Pete and Carl went to pick up the Airstream stage that is being loaned generously once again by Vintage Airstreams. It always makes a cool and shiny feature in our lovely, old-fashioned marquee. We feel pretty well prepared this year. We always have to work around the weather and Carl's commitments on the farm. He has some very useful heavy machinery that makes lighter work of heavy lifting and  banging in of the giant iron pegs for the marquee. We have also been lucky this year to have some volunteers from the UK Airstreamers community. More are arriving early this week, and some are staying on to help with the clearing up. It's a  lot to ask of people. Everyone has their own stuff going on, we know that, so we count ourselves very fortunate that people have rallied around this year.

So, the stage is in place and getting wired for light and sound. We're having live music on both the Friday and Saturday nights - something fairly gentle and Hill Billy-ish on the Friday, and the return of the popular Cellar Boys, who got us all stomping and making merry fools of ourselves last year.

Now, it's an odd thing, perhaps, to be proud of your loos. Or is it? A couple of years ago we transformed two sheds into beach hut-style features, with actual flushing toilets in them. Every year they get a fresh coat of paint and look as pretty as a pair of outdoor loos can look. A bit incongruous in a field in Shropshire perhaps, and shamelessly using gender stereotyping by painting one pink and one blue. Who cares? Like I've said before, it's just a bit of fun.

A Lashing and A Pelting

It's one of those Sundays you just have to go with. Pete said he'd go out and do the chores when there's a lull. Lull, what lull? A lull is when it's drizzling instead of lashing. But you have to be quick.

Weather conditions can be evocative of specific moments, and this pelting is reminding me of a couple of times and places during our first year in the Airstream where we were holed up, keeping warm and dry. Everything, and I mean everything felt like part of a wonderful adventure during our first couple of years. About a month in, we were on a fairly exposed farm not far from Mevagissey in Cornwall, and storms picked up. We didn't know how much the trailer could stand up to, and like all our neighbours on the campsite, we didn't go anywhere for two days. We didn't dare. We didn't know if the Airstream would still be there when we got back. Now I'm not so sure we would have wanted to be in if the trailer had started to tip over. As it was, it just rocked a bit and kept us awake at night.

Later, during our Summer in Ireland, our loo packed up and we waited on a large, deserted campsite by the coast in County Sligo while a replacement was being dispatched. Like I said, everything that happened was part of this incredible time that we had set out to appreciate, no matter what. So, in the wind and rain, clad in waterproofs and Crocs, I relished my walk to the toilet block. And when I got there, there would be musac! It's a bit surreal. Pelted by grey wetness on the way, you negotiated a 'Wet Floor' warning triangle and walked into a discomfiting cocoon of industrial toilet cleaner aroma, yellowed wall tiles and unnecessary music. But I did enjoy the particular lived-in quality of this slightly run down, out of season site. I'm sure it would have been perfect hell during the holidays.

So these images of being marooned in the wind and rain are flashing back to me, I don't have to go anywhere, Pete thinks he has perceived a lull, and he's out there choring. Alabama Shakes are playing, freshly downloaded after seeing them on Later With Jools last Friday. Jack White was good, but Brittany Howard really reached down in her boots and rocked.

Better put the kettle on because that lull was a false one and there's one soggy husband out there.

Airstream Blush

Doesn't she look gorgeous, with the sunset making her blush and the little star lights showing from inside? When the sky or the weather does something interesting you have to be quick and leap out of the trailer, camera in hand. And by now I have taken so many photographs of reflections in the Airstream windows that I am experiencing deja-vu of a non-spooky variety.

The site where we have been staying for a little while has provided challenges to photography. The view from some of our windows is wonderfully bucolic, but we are also surrounded by tin barns, piles of gravel and an array of ageing farm machinery. Oh, and a couple of conventional caravans, and some strategically placed traffic cones. That's what cropping is for, right?