wayne's party tree

Just back from a lovely afternoon at my friend Wayne's who lives on a beautiful farm estate in rural Perthshire with his pregnant girlfriend, Cat, his 2 crazy bonkers dogs and his actual cat (who we never saw).

It's been around 2 years since we last saw them - when we randomly bumped into them at a festival and before that, the last time I'd seen Wayne had been about 8 years at a wedding. It's quite strange that our get togethers are so infrequent when we used to be inseperable when we were young.

Still, we picked up where we last left on and had a good gabber about this and that and everything and nothing. We went off for a walk round a pond near the house and scoffed some lasagne and salad and home made bread and Cat took Arlo for a walk up to see the tractors (his most favourite thing on earth). All in all he saw about 12 planes (they live on the Scone Aerodrome flightpath), 2 helicopters, a hot air ballon, a tractor pulling a ginormous trailer, 3 stationery tractor/digger/trailer thingies, a few motorbikes AND got to explore around a caravan, followed by a big slice of cake and a strum on a guitar. The boy was in his element.

As for us, well, now Bry is determined we are moving out of Edinburgh to have a house like theirs. I don't know if the open fire in the livingroom or the fire pit in the garden was the crunch point for Bry but either way - Bry wants fire so we'll have to see what happens!

Wayne's neighbour put this tree together. It's a ritual in the Czech Republic, according to his neighbour, where you construct a tree like this (usually with beer cans and other noisy things hanging from it), build a fire close to it and the whole village sits round the tree partying and drinking. At the same time other villages erect a tree like this and have their own party and the idea is that other villages come to chop down your tree, so you and your fellow villagers have to guard your tree to stop it getting chopped down and thus losing the game.

I love stuff like that!

Thank you Wayne and Cat for a really gorgeous afternoon xxx