We camped
at a pop-up site – Harry’s Meadow and every excursion took us through the village
of Woodgreen. I would slow the car to a
crawl and we would admire the many donkeys which, together with their foals
were hanging about in the middle of the mainstreet, occasionally browsing from
the grass verge with a studied insouciance as I slalomed round them.
But on the
second evening, we went through Woodgreen and saw not one solitary donkey.
‘That’s
odd,’ said Annabel, ‘I wonder where they’ve all gone?’
As we approached
the wooded road to the campsite our route was blocked by traffic cones. Puzzled, I stopped.
A
floppy-haired man stepped out of the shadows and explained in an upper-crust
accent that the road was blocked by a fallen tree. We told him we were headed for Harry’s Meadow
and he gave us directions, with repeated injunctions not to follow the Satnav
as it would take us into an un-surfaced wilderness.
As we
pulled away, Annabel and I both agreed that he had been the dead spit of Hugh
Grant.
We followed
his circuitous route – ‘Did he say left and then right or right and then left?’ And it was on this narrow road that we made a
discovery.
It was here
that the donkeys of Woodgreen spent their evenings.
And the cows.
And the ponies.
And none of
them at all was cowed by an approaching car.
‘Just give
that pony a nudge with your car,’ suggested Annabel.
‘No thanks,
it’ll be my number plate it kicks.’
But when
eventually we got safely back to the tent, we raised a glass to Hugh Grant and
his excellent travel directions.
No comments:
Post a Comment