The Oak Hall staff are made up of
a small core of salaried staff and also a large number of volunteers, usually
like students on a gap year. I received a warm welcome from the staff when I
arrived and instantly felt at home. We gathered in the large dining room for a
meal of baked potato with chilli and salad. Dave and I started to get to know
the group at dinner and were sitting with 4 of the ladies who were on the
walking tour. The small group consisted of two ladies who were Legal
secretaries and two who were Librarians. The dominant personality in the group
was very chatty and excitable. We exchanged stories about our holidays with
Oakhall and explained that our friend Steve was ill and couldn’t come on the
trip. This led to him being branded as “Lurgy Steve” by some of the ladies.
Dave and I did intend to rebuke them for this disrespect to our fallen comrade
but somehow decided that this did seem like a suitable nickname.
The dessert course of chocolate
pudding proved to be more appetising than the main course. As is the custom on
Oak Hall holidays, there was a quiz evening. Dave and I were quite bullish
following our quiz success on the Swedish holiday. We were joined by several
others in the group, including an older gentleman who was polite but a little
hard of hearing. It is not the policy of this blog to identify people against
their will, but as he had quite a rasping voice, we shall call him Zippy.
It was clear that Zippy was an
enthusiastic team player who had a real talent for identifying answers to
questions with 20:20 hindsight, usually about 10 seconds after someone had said
the answer to our note taker. He also lacked the strategic nous needed in group
quiz scenarios as team members would whisper or grab the answer paper and write
something down to prevent competitors gaining an advantage, but this would be
undone by Zippy who would blurt out whatever was written down.
We also had the inevitable Mr
know it all in the team, someone with an overbearing certainty of their total
righteousness in all things general knowledge. Unfortunately, this proved to be
totally misplaced as he argued for the wrong answer on the year that the first
test tube baby was born. Naturally, he was overruled him when he forcefully tried to tell us that Martina Navratilova won 11 Wimbledon singles titles instead of 9. The combination of intellectual ballast and gravitas
brought to the table by Dave and your Clogger’s seemingly endless capacity for
knowing a lot of useless facts proved to be irresistible, spurring on our team
to victory and keeping up our 100% record in quizzes. Indeed, we were so good
that we were right even when the quiz master said we were wrong as on guessing
the longest book of the bible. The official answer was the Psalms but I had
written down that the book of Jeremiah was the longest book as it had more
words, which is indeed the right answer. This incident shows the need for the
quiz equivalent of Hawkeye in tennis.
The evening ended with some free
time in the main lounge which set the scene for Dave to produce his party trick
of the card game. The game of choice was Dobble, where particpants have to do
picture matching. After building up the event at dinner time, we had a
gathering of several excited competitors. There are different variations of the
game including some that involve trying accumulate as many cards as possible to
others that involve trying to force your cards onto other competitors. As the
evening wore on the games of Dobble seemed to become more violent than an
Australian Rules football match.
Rather than staying at the Manor,
I was lodging with my friend Dave, who lived a few miles away in the popular
commuter town of Sevenoaks. The rather posh local community magazine noted that
the town has an average house price of over £425K and 4.5% of the population
are millionaires. This is mainly due to banking industry workers deciding that
they want to escape to the country. The affluence of the town was evident with
the presence of a Bentley and Lamborghini showroom near to the railway station.
The next morning we set out for
the Manor, stopping off at the supermarket for Dave to purchase a cycle helmet
since he had misplaced his normal one. He figured that he could just keep it in
its packaging as a spare and hopefully borrow one from the cycle shed at Oak
Hall. After finding a cycle helmet in the shed, the plan to return the new
helmet for a refund was quickly jettisoned when the new girl in the group
realised that she had forgotten her own head gear. Dave managed to remove the
packaging more quickly than the Red Bull F1 pit crew doing a tyre change and assist
the damsel in distress.
As we left on our journey, I set out on a nice Specialised full suspension mountain bike but completed the journey on a more user friendly Cube mountain bike after a temporary problem with the gears on the first bike. In our group, there was a diverse range of
characters including cycle bore. This particular individual can be found on
many cycle trips and are easily identifiable as they will talk a good game by
using professional cycling terminology and discuss the importance of locking on
to the wheel of the person in front. There were a few references to The Tour as
he clearly had an encyclopedic knowledge of the sport that began with Bradley
Wiggins and ends with Chris Froome. There were moments when our cycle bore was
caught out such as when he had to push his bike up some of a 20% gradient climb
but it was made clear to everyone several times that this was because he
couldn’t select the “granny gear”.
During the cycle, we learned that
the new girl had cycled from London to Istanbul, transiting through countries
like Romania, where she carried a stick to ward off wild dogs. It’s fair to say
that she probably encountered more rabid dogs from among our group than in all
of Transylvania. The group had a bit of a delay when our leader’s bike developed
a chain link problem, forcing him to call back to base for assistance. He gave
the satellite navigation system to Dave and he led us for the last 4 miles of
the first leg of the journey.
We arrived at our rendezvous
point which was the café at Trosley Country Park, where we discovered that one
of the staff sounded very much like Miss Crabtree from South Park¸ when she became angry. After staying for around 45
minutes, it was time to set off back on a 21 mile trip to Otford Manor with our
leader having now returned. The group halved in size on the return journey as
other opted for a gentler cycle back, one of the dropouts notably being cycle
bore. We set off from the country park, heading off down a small track then
down the side of a flight of stairs before hitting speeds in excess of 30 mph
on a steep downhill section. We were able to make good progress now that some
of the slower members of the group had departed although the last three miles
involved a steep climb up towards the Manor at the top of the valley.
Dave and I had the option of
waiting around till dinner but decided to head back to the house to get
refreshed and order some well-earned takeaway pizza. After our day out on the
road, this hit the spot and didn’t touch the sides. After our nice dinner, we
went back to the Manor just in time for dessert being served, so would’ve
seemed rude not to join everyone for a piece of apple crumble. After the
Saturday evening talk, our speaker, the fast talking and endlessly enthusiastic
Paul, decided to do some impromptu market research to gauge the reaction of the
group to the proposed idea of Oak Hall hosting a cycling, walking and camping
weekend on the grounds of the Manor. Unfortunately, he was met with a tough
crowd led by Zippy who rasped about some obscure camping incident from the
distant past and someone else who had a friend of a friend who had to beat an
adder to death with a mallet on a French cycle trip.
Saturday evening’s proceedings at
the Manor ended with a large bonfire in one of the fields. Considering the raw
ingredients of the spectacle were a few burning pallets, it attracted quite a
crowd. Flames lapped up around 20 feet in the air at its peak and everyone had
to stand a reasonable distance away though it was tempting to recreate the
dancing in front of flame part of the Tales
of the Unexpected opening credits.
Sunday morning began with a short
church service at Otford Manor, followed by an activity time. We joined an
orienteering course that had been specially set up for the group. We set off in
groups of 2 to find 14 points around the grounds, each with a piece of card
with a letter of the alphabet. Thankfully Dave proved to be the human GPS and
helped us to find all but one of the checkpoints. It was a nice way to get some
panoramic views of the garden of England and observe some curiosities like the
giant toadstools in the fields.
When the results were announced,
we were told that there were no particular losers from all those who went
orienteering. This was true, there were no losers apart from every other group
that went out apart from Dave and myself. We had a pleasant turkey roast at
Sunday lunch followed by a slab of cheesecake. After saying our goodbyes to the
group, we decided to toast the weekend with a nice glass of something strong.
It so happened that there was some of the new 2013 vintage of Irn-Bru in the
fridge, a truly thirst quenching and classy beverage before setting off for a
quick afternoon excursion to the grounds of Knole House. It is fair to say that
it was a fun-filled weekend that helped to highlight the delights of this
beautiful part of England.
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