Firstly, whilst sailing through the Solent on our cruise a few weeks ago I played the game which has to be played whilst heading East between Fishbourne and Ryde, and that is to spot, and then photograph, the house that we all went to for our summer holidays back in the Eighties. I'm not sure who started the trend (maybe it was us, I'm sure Dad will tell me who found it first) but it wasn't just us who went to Boulders Leigh (not sure if that's the right spelling) in Binstead for a couple of weeks - I clearly remember waving to the Hills as they came off the ferry as we were waiting for it to take us home!
Boulders Leigh was huge, or at least seemed it when I was small. It was still a minute or two in the car from the front gate to the house, which I assume was once one single truly enormous house but which had subsequently been divided into three separate properties. On the Western end was Tower House which was a separate family home, and then in the middle was Boulders Leigh, which itself was a huge three storey five or six bedroom house, and on the other end was the Boulders, where the MacKenzies lived - the couple who owned Boulders Leigh and rented it out to lucky families like us.
Out the back was another huge garden, with a lawn perfect for ball games, woodland paths, and if you kept going long enough you arrived at the sea, and just after that, Mr MacKenzie's boat!
Everyone came on holiday with us to the Isle of Wight at some point or other. Apart from the four of us, I remember fellow holidaymakers including Nanny, Poppa, Rew, Frances, Uncle Fang, Robin, Bec's friend Sue, and my friend Dave (after our first year at the Math in the summer of 1985, so I guess that must mean I've known him for 25 years now).
Anyway, I think that I bagged a decent photo a few weeks ago, and I've just emailed it over to Dad for verification.
As well as being the location of some fabulous family holidays, IOW was also home to some memorable choir holidays. I was reminded of them this evening by my tea, when I revisited the taste sensation first enjoyed at choir holiday teas many years ago. For tea, plates of bread and butter would be put out along with a selection of fillings from which we could make our own sandwiches. The normal choice of fillings would be cheese, jam, and pilchards. No doubt egged on by my fellow angelic choirboys I decided that the only sensible thing to do would be to make a sandwich with all three, and to my great surprise it was actually really tasty! And so, this evening, for the first time in quite a while, I had a cheese, jam and pilchard sandwich, and yes, still scrummy! Took me right back!
The final IOW link for the day stems from our trip to the cinema this afternoon (where we watched Dinner with Schmucks - which gets a mildly amusing three stars from me). We went to the Odeon at Dockside and once we'd got our tickets we had a few minutes to spare and so went into the outlet shops and picked up a few snacks for munching through the movie. One thing that Nicky picked up was a bag of honeycomb, and this got us to talking on the way home about the IOW, partly because I remember getting it on Boulders Leigh holidays, but also because Jake remembered it from a rather marvellous sweet shop that we found in Shanklin a couple of years ago. Anyway, somehow from honeycomb we managed to get onto an idea of Jake and I having a boys' trip to the Island staying in a retro VW camper (available from Isle of Wight Campers). Jake seems keen, and seems like fun to me too!