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A proper day out at last for half term as we headed to the Midlands to
Kirby Hall to meet up with my niece and her husband and their new baby. I am already a Great Uncle, but now I have two great (what's the non-gendered term for niece/nephew?) neecephews. I am just blotting that fact out of my mind though, because somehow Great Uncle feels older (more archaic at least) that Grandad (thankfully due to my poor life choices and arrested development I am unlikely to live to be called that to my face).
Anyway the important thing is that there is a brand new member of the clan and she is a beauty and has the most sparkly eyes I have ever seen in my life. They are allegedly brown but in the summer sun they shimmered and seemed to have flecks of light blue and green. I think our family might be enchanted. The baby looks like my Grandma Doris, I think, but then maybe all babies look like Doris.
Kirby Hall was conveniently sort of halfway between us and was picked a bit at random from the English Heritage book (I've been a member for two years but this is the first time I've used the card, aside from the time I signed up) and I didn't know what to expect. It's an Elizabethan house and I assumed it would be in one piece, but it's mostly in ruins (though the shell of the building stands so it looks complete from a distance). Apparently it fell into disuse because the family that owned it preferred their other two houses, which says a lot about the rich. This amazing huge house in 50+ acres of land was left to fall down because they had better places to be (I see to remember from my Rasputin research that the Yusupov family had a county home that they simply forgot about).
I loved looking round and so did my kids, especially Ernold, so it was a proper family day out. It's been a tourist spot for a good 300 years and my favourite bit was the graffiti from the 17 and 1800s. Obviously it's wrong to desecrate a monument like this, even if the owners don't give a fuck about it, but the bold seemingly chiselled initials and dates add an extra layer to it. Someone in 1788 or whenever thought I want people to see this in hundreds of years time and their wish came true, even if their initials (or even their full name sometimes) is as meaningless as can be now. It still worked. We're still connected. I'd later find a quiet corner and very gently chalk our initials on a stone too. Not in a way that will survive 300 years or even really the rest of the year, but it meant we took part in tradition. The vandalism becomes history in itself.
Ernold and me did some exploring later and found a kitchen in an even more fallen down bit, which included parts of the spit mechanism from the 1600s in the chimney and an amazing self-supporting staircase leading nowhere (though presumably it once did). Peacocks tried to eat our picnic, Ernold got a blood blister and the new baby didn't seem to cry at all. The older kids chased each other round the lawn in the sunshine. It was a terrific day out and we then went for pizza, so what could be better?
