It was Toby’s cousin’s 21st birthday party at the weekend.

I woke up at a reasonable-ish time on Saturday, had breakfast, dyed my hair, you know, the usual. And then I packed all my stuff and Toby and his Dad picked me up on their way back from drink shopping. Toby and I played on his xbox until it was time to leave and we piled in the car and headed to their cousin’s farm in Arborfield.
We set up the tent once we arrived, having seen and been amazed by the traction engine that had cost the owner £500,000! Toby and I had been given permission to share one. We wandered around for a bit after the tent had been set up, and eventually the party started. We hung around with Sarah, their uncle, Gary, and their Dad for a while. Food was served, a hog roast. Yummy! Once people started dancing badly to engineer type songs we went over to the failing bonfire. Toby got his lighter out and we tried to save it. We were burning paper plates and trying to get it going for a while. Once we’d set a bag of rubbish on fire on the top and put logs over it it seemed to work. It grew massively and in the end we were throwing logs on the size of our legs!
It was really warm and cosy. Toby and I were sitting on a log and we got snapped by his cousin, Nellie, which you shall see in the slideshow.
Once it got to 2am we decided to go up to the house for milk to make hot chocolate. We did it one by one, sitting outside our tent by what looked like a converted chicken coop. The measures of the Aero hot chocolate powder were random, but it turned out well. We stirred each of them with Toby’s bottle opener as we’d forgotten a spoon, and when I was pouring Toby’s milk the bottle opener fell into my hot chocolate.. Fail. Once we’d had it, it was time for sleep, so we walked Sarah and Nellie back to the house and went back down to our tent for bed.
Unfortunately, the generators from the music system were still running until gone 4am, so we didn’t get to sleep for ages. And then I woke up at roughly 5 from a bad dream. It was getting light and we both needed the loo, so we got dressed and went, then returning to the bonfire to see what remained. It was still glowing, and Toby soon managed to get it lit again by prodding. We messed around with the fire for a while, getting out the bent glass bottles that had been chucked on the fire and melted the night before. Some bits were really artistic. We got a bit cold, so went back to bed for a bit, falling asleep soon. The next thing I knew, there were horns being blown and Toby’s cousin, Jack, shouted through the tent to let us know there was breakfast.
We got dressed and then went up to the house to find Sarah and then went to the farm shop where plates of bacon, sausages, eggs and beans were being served. It was really yummy. We then went for a walk down the road and got roared at by the guard dogs on the way back. I’m not joking about the roar, it sounded like a bloody lion!
We packed up the tent and stuff and chucked it in the back of Jack’s pick-up to drive back up the hill. We were lazy and tired, it was raining, and we had a lot of gear. We were loaded up with cake before we left as well.
Toby and I were heading back to my house for Sunday tea, so he wanted to change before we got there; he smelt of bonfires. We stopped at his house so he could do so, and were dropped off at mine to find my Dad back from his holiday in France. He’d been fishing for a week. We had lunch, and cake, and watched Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and then put Mythbusters on whilst we fell asleep. We had a massive roast dinner and went back to the sofa to watch Top Gear with Mum and Dad before we took Toby home, and then I went straight to bed. I think I went off as soon as my head hit the pillow. That makes a change. I suppose only getting an hour of sleep the previous night helped a little..

Here’s a slideshow of the weekend’s photos: