The final day of the holiday – oh no! But we made it a good one.
Over breakfast I asked the Boy Wonder whether he’d like to go to the stepping stones this morning, or – “Picture floor!” he said immediately. So R and I took him to Chedworth Roman Villa, where he began by making his own (temporary) mosaic from magnetised blocks on a large metal tray table, and then walked around the preserved section of the villa with us, looking at everything very carefully and trying to understand what was going on. He was partly successful, I think, though questions such as “Did the Romans have to be very careful when they came in here, so they didn’t fall down that big hole in the floor?”, and “Were the Romans allowed to unlock this gate and go in there?” made it clear that there’s some way to go yet before he can mentally reconstruct a ruined building. R’s favourite question of the morning, as B enviously eyed a chair lift, was “Were the Romans allowed to ride on this?” Still, he had fun, not least because he was allowed to choose his own treat when R and I had coffee, and got away with selecting the most toxic-looking ice cream in the freezer.
We couldn’t stay very long at the villa, because we had an appointment to keep back at the Water Park: it’s R’s birthday next week (a big one), and as they won’t see him on the day L and H wanted to buy him some pre-birthday cake, so we’d arranged to meet them at the Dragonfly Café at Lower Moor. I’ve been banging on about the excellence of the cake there for several years now, without any other member of the family having the slightest interest in testing my assertions, given that the cake lives in Wiltshire and comes with a nature reserve attached; but as Lower Mill and Lower Moor are less than five minutes apart by road, on a day when cake was required the Dragonfly Café was the obvious place for us to go. I suddenly found myself quite nervous about having one of my best places subjected to the judgement of the rest of the family, but I needn’t have worried: everyone agreed that the café was very nice and the cake was exceptional, and they even enjoyed the quick tour we made of the reserve afterwards to work off some of the calories.
After yomping round Lower Moor we had to hot-foot it back to the holiday village, where we arrived just in time to join G and the Baby Brother for our last family swim. At this point H, who is working tomorrow, set off back to the Frozen North, so he missed the drama that occurred at the swimming pool when the Boy Wonder, waiting in the water with his mother and me while R blew up his arm bands, lost his grip on the edge of the pool and promptly sank like a stone. At that instant I was looking at R, who was about to throw me an arm band, and I think it must have been a change in his expression that made me look down and see what had just happened. For an adult the water is only chest-deep, but the Boy was completely submerged – though luckily still upright, so all I had to do was reach down, grab him, and lift. He emerged coughing and spluttering, and not unreasonably inclined towards hysteria, but all the grown-ups gathered round and made a huge fuss of him, praising his bravery, and within a couple of minutes he was laughing and treating the whole thing as a big adventure. It took me rather longer to recover my own equanimity.
Before dinner I went off into the nature reserve for one last walk, and returned with the best dragon record of the week. Given that there are Lesser Emperors at Lower Moor and Sandpool, it’s not surprising that they should also be at Lower Mill – in fact it would be more surprising if they hadn’t spread this far – but assuming something and proving it are two different things, and when I realised that the hawker which had just extricated itself from a three-dragon aerial battle and dropped into the scrub a couple of metres in front of me had green eyes, a white face, and a bright blue saddle, I almost did a Crash Bandicoot dance on the spot. The vegetation is ugly and the light is horrible, so I won’t be expecting any awards for this image, but I’m still very pleased with it, and I think the County Recorder will be too.
