Tuesday 14th August

Last Olympic bit…maybe…

Jeff asked Leo (6) and Eva (4) what even they would choose, were they to be Olympic athletes.  After a lot of thought, Leo announced that he wanted something easy.  Maybe…diving.  All you have to do, really, is obey the laws of gravity, and go d-o-w-n…  And Eva said, brightly, that she would be a bike rider.  We were a bit startled – Eva is only just getting the hang of doing more than a few nervous centimetres on a bike without training wheels – but she said, “You know!  The bike riders who ride along the water next to the rowers!”  Good choice, Eva!

At dinner on Saturday night (oh so yummy, as Zoe would say…thank you Pauline!) Pete was telling us about his glory days with the Oatlands Drama Club.  He enjoyed his thespian years very much, and did a few stints on stage.  Mostly, I think, he enjoyed directing and generally busying about getting everything up and running, macgyvering whatever needed to be macgyvered.

Every year they would put on a major production and take it On Tour.  The tour always included a full house in New Norfolk, at Lachlan Park.  (Lachlan Park is what used to be known, in those totally politically incorrect days, as the lunatic asylum.  So glad those days are gone!)  One of the plays, probably an Agatha Christie adaptation, involved afternoon tea at a table, all nicely set with china tea set, biscuits, scones, cake.  Four actors sat around the table, and the hostess said, in clear and ringing tones, “Now who would like a cup of tea?”  At this invitation, about five members of the audience shuffled forward, clambered up onto the stage, and joined the actors for a treat.  The actors gamely kept on going with the script but I fear that the backstagers were in stitches.  Audience participation, before it had even really been invented!