and each bought several Christmas presents. After lunch at the café 
also went to the Larder and the butchers' there and picked up good things to eat, including some extremely nice Berkswell ewes' milk cheese and some Italian stuff which looked like Chaumes, but was tastier... After that we went off to the Christmas Market at St John's, Waterbeach; we drank mulled wine, bought some extremely cheap CDs and books (Aerosmith's Pump, anyone?) and watched the molly dancers.
Molly dancing is an East Anglian thing. This is the molly side of the Ely and Littleport Riot; there are some stranger black-face molly sides made up of both men and women such as the Ouse Washes. The musicians here were a banjo player, a violinist who looked like a cross between the local vet and Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman (neither of which is a bad thing), and a bodrhán player. Worked fine...
The Sunday went less well, entirely due to my shower-head's successful attempt to leap off the wall and maim my mother. All those things you hear about scalp wounds bleeding a lot... believe it; it's scary. A visit from the ambulance/paramedics and a trip to A&E for general reassurance and head-glueing later, and we were all back at home 3 hours later attempting to calm down. In the end, the stove was lit, a picnic lunch was had, Dad went into town with the shopping list for Christmas and we sat around having a Quiet Day while beef stew bubbled quietly in the slow-cooker.
Someone was happy at this turn of events...
I hope your mum is ok
ReplyDeleteA friend of mine gouged open her head once, and blood poured out like crazy! She had to get hers glued together, too! I hope it heals fast.
ReplyDeleteShowers, blood...sounds like a horror film. Hope your Mum is much better now.
ReplyDeleteAnd I thought that all Molly Dancers had black faces, but then I do come from King's Lynn! A friend of my sister's danced in a morris side called the "Ouse William Morris?" (geddit!. They had Morris patterned aprons.
Pump was the first album of P's that he felt moved to share with me ... in my opinion, it's the last of the "good" Aerosmith (pre-power ballad days)! Oh dear ... the memories you've brought back ... We saw them live in 1989 ...
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