Dear Sir
You are cordially invited, along with your partner, to attend the opening of the grand old dame of the village, The Royal Oak Public House.
The occasion is to celebrate a new, albeit somewhat minuscule, chapter in its life and we hope that you will accord it the honour of your attendance.
We look forward to seeing you blah blah blah
That is what I should have wrote I think. Instead it was rushed as the time draws near and I hope that I conveyed my message to the local people who have been invited. How do you encapsulate and do justice to nearly 600 years of known history into an invitation to the reopening? I don't know the answer but let me try and put this into perspective. Before Vasco de Gama sailed around the Cape and landed in I think 1492, people were staying, eating and drinking on this site. It is written into the history books that in 1459, Queen Margaret, wife to King Henry VI. visited this inn to encourage support before the battle of Blore Heath during the War of the Roses. I think its incredible that people went about life here, and recorded it in a fashion during the middle ages when the rest of the world was yet to be discovered. If the walls could talk, you would wonder what other stories they could tell.
Anyway, on a lighter less philosophical note, today was an expensive day as it was shopping day. No, not normal food shopping type of day...this was the buy all the stock you can afford so you don't have to run around on opening day and look like a fool and be embarrassed when you find you don't have everything sort of shopping. With two kids it was envisioned that it was going to be even more that the usual nightmare. But today the children God was smiling on us because our offspring were remarkably well behaved. Fortunately the wholesaler was pretty much deserted so there were no crowds to deal with and we wondered around dragging four industrial size trolleys that really the manufacturer should only put three wheels on, because the fourth wheel never works. And then we tried to stuff the whole lot into the back of the car, by the feet of the offspring and on their laps. But we got it in. Hilux bakkies couldn't carry as much stuff as we carried today. Taxi's travelling to the Transkei before Christmas would have been in awe of our overloading today. Had we been stopped news and pictures of this would have gone onto You Tube. Millions of people around the world would have tisked tisked over their tea as the inadvertently found pictures of this overloading amongst their porn.
But yet we made it home and filled a commercial kitchen up with stuff so that hopefully we shall be able to sell it and make some money. For those of you reading this who work or have worked in commercial kitchen you will probably appreciate just how many little things there are in a kitchen. Not only is there a shake shake there is also three or four tubs of spices in a store somewhere that need to be kept so that the shake shake shakes!
And if you haven't worked in a kitchen before, then all you have to think about is what the plate of food looks like when it eventually hits your table, bought to you by the ever smiling always whining waiter.
Anyway, only a few more sleeps. Talk soon. Will post some photos of the pub this week.
Until tomorrow.
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