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ventaAs mentioned in my last post, this weekend was a weekend of rapper and very little else.
On Saturday I declined to join in the workshop, and volunteered myself for Serious Kitchen Duty. Even so, I reasoned, in the gaps between, say, tea-break and lunchtime I'd have bags of spare time. I took my laptop along to give myself the opportunity of doing a little work on Mabel's website.
Wrong. Wrong wrong wrongy wrong. It turns out that catering for upwards of fifty people is a lot more time consuming than you think. You make tea and coffee as people arrive, then you wash the mugs up, then it's time for a tea-break. So, you make tea and coffee, wash up the mugs, and discover you're just in time to start slicing bread, chopping cheese and heating soup for lunch. Etc. Repeat until bored.
Incidentally, slicing around 3kg of cheese is actually quite hard work. Particularly with a bluntish bread-knife. Obviously, I didn'y find Katie's lethally sharp Sabatier knife until considerably later (at which point I was actually seeking a fork with which to prick baking potatoes. It was like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife.)
Worse, I'm not used to catering for that many people. You look at the cheese and think "that's enough to feed the 5,000 - we've bought way too much", then realise shortly afterwards that it's all been eaten.
On the other hand, I display a worrying facility with a tea-urn. I fear I have a long and prosperous career in front of me as pillar of some WI somewhere. I can practically feel the gingham overall coming on.
It's also interesting to note that I appear to have at least a GNVQ in Village Halls. Some things appear to be a standard fixture of any village hall anywhere in the country, and if you grow up helping out at various fundraisers from an early age, you learn their ways. As well as tea-urns, I can operate the mysterious boiler-thingies that do duty for hot taps (and very useful they are too with all that washing up), predict reasonably accurately what will be in the cupboards (ok, I was wrong about the cutlery but I was right about the mugs commemorating a royal event of some kind) and locate the broom cupboard. I also operate hooky window poles and coerce reluctant heaters, though neither of those skills was required in this case.
Saturday evening, for a change, we went out and danced some rapper for the surprised peoples of Woodstock.
Sunday was a day of hard practising for the Mabels, and much eating of leftovers. We're polishing one of our dances for the national competition next month, and had managed to persuade one of Stone Monkeys to stay on for the day to offer us some advice. Of course, it only dawned on me later that Ron, and his wife Jenny, who were offering us tips and criticism will be dancing against us (he in Stone Monkey Silverbacks and she in Triskele) in the same competitions. I wonder if we should trust their suggestions :)
On Saturday I declined to join in the workshop, and volunteered myself for Serious Kitchen Duty. Even so, I reasoned, in the gaps between, say, tea-break and lunchtime I'd have bags of spare time. I took my laptop along to give myself the opportunity of doing a little work on Mabel's website.
Wrong. Wrong wrong wrongy wrong. It turns out that catering for upwards of fifty people is a lot more time consuming than you think. You make tea and coffee as people arrive, then you wash the mugs up, then it's time for a tea-break. So, you make tea and coffee, wash up the mugs, and discover you're just in time to start slicing bread, chopping cheese and heating soup for lunch. Etc. Repeat until bored.
Incidentally, slicing around 3kg of cheese is actually quite hard work. Particularly with a bluntish bread-knife. Obviously, I didn'y find Katie's lethally sharp Sabatier knife until considerably later (at which point I was actually seeking a fork with which to prick baking potatoes. It was like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife.)
Worse, I'm not used to catering for that many people. You look at the cheese and think "that's enough to feed the 5,000 - we've bought way too much", then realise shortly afterwards that it's all been eaten.
On the other hand, I display a worrying facility with a tea-urn. I fear I have a long and prosperous career in front of me as pillar of some WI somewhere. I can practically feel the gingham overall coming on.
It's also interesting to note that I appear to have at least a GNVQ in Village Halls. Some things appear to be a standard fixture of any village hall anywhere in the country, and if you grow up helping out at various fundraisers from an early age, you learn their ways. As well as tea-urns, I can operate the mysterious boiler-thingies that do duty for hot taps (and very useful they are too with all that washing up), predict reasonably accurately what will be in the cupboards (ok, I was wrong about the cutlery but I was right about the mugs commemorating a royal event of some kind) and locate the broom cupboard. I also operate hooky window poles and coerce reluctant heaters, though neither of those skills was required in this case.
Saturday evening, for a change, we went out and danced some rapper for the surprised peoples of Woodstock.
Sunday was a day of hard practising for the Mabels, and much eating of leftovers. We're polishing one of our dances for the national competition next month, and had managed to persuade one of Stone Monkeys to stay on for the day to offer us some advice. Of course, it only dawned on me later that Ron, and his wife Jenny, who were offering us tips and criticism will be dancing against us (he in Stone Monkey Silverbacks and she in Triskele) in the same competitions. I wonder if we should trust their suggestions :)
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Date: 2006-02-15 09:43 am (UTC)