Oh What a weekend. On Saturday we celebrated Kate's 30th Birthday. Kate is my middle sister, one of three that I've been lucky enough to grow up with! She shared the party with a school friend, they had invited loads of people from all over the place, we had around 150 people turn up to the barn. The theme was Frisky summer fate. The girls did an excellent job of theming the Barn, and the yard in a summer fate style. There was bunting everywhere, along with stalls for tea and cake Jelly and Ice cream, skittles and splat the rat. Most of the guests turned up in fancy dress of some kind from vicars, to WI, and for a while we even had the only gay in the village, which proved a bit of an eye opener!

The Finishing touch however was the catering this was done by my younger sister Victoria who is studying at a fancy catering school in London, and me. The only thing I'm good for is a roast so it fell upon me to cook a roast for 150 people while Vicky to charge in the kitchen on all the green stuff! I discovered the only way to cook a roast for 150 people is on a spit, so that's what I did. I'd built a spit roasting kit for the Hannington country fair last summer so I used that. This is not just any ordinary kit this one is massive I reckon that I could cook 6 lambs on it, and with a bit more welding I could do 12. I was looking forward to doing this as its proper natural instinct cooking with fire to play with and whole animals to cook and carve up. In the end we cooked a lamb and two deer all locally sourced and well hung to get the best from the meat. When it came to serving the food it was too dark to do outside so me and Bandy (Kate's boy friend who was helping me) carried the meat into the barn and carved it up. It looked amazing the DJ played the meat in with "I've got a brand new combine harvester", then he arranged the lighting so that all the food was lit up, the guests just stood back in amazement.

After the food came the dancing and drinking. I had been of to my beer supplier and brought a cask of ale which we ran through the beer pumps on the bar, and we'd set up a water trough so that all the guest could put their drinks in to keep them cool. The DJ had an amazing light rig which worked really well on the white wall of the barn. The dancing carried on till 5 or 6 o'clock. Then came the shock of the big clear up the next day luckily there were plenty of people around to help and the barn was back in order in no time (it didn't feel like that at the time though).

At the same time we had two groups of people using the estate for their walks, firstly was the RSPCA Charity walk on Saturday which apparently was a huge success. Then on Sunday there was the Rogation walk which went around the Hannington parish. I love it when the estate gets enjoyed by so many people, it really make it all worth it.