Sheep on my pillow

It is a truth, universally* acknowledged, that, place me in something resembling a stately home, and I will start to behave as though I’m in a BBC costume drama, and leave all sense of reality behind. So I was in my element at Kilworth House Hotel. As we sat in the Davies** Room drinking afternoon tea, I launched into my best faux posh voice, and sounded, according to Cat, like someone out of Oscar Wilde.

It is a fab place. Recently restored and redeveloped, and it has a theatre in its grounds. In my world, if I had money, I’d build a theatre in my garden too. Just imagine…

We’d booked a package which included dinner, bed, breakfast and theatre ticket, and it was wonderfully civilised as they took interval drinks orders during dinner. It was slightly less impressive when our drinks failed to materialise in the interval, but we forgave them as they’re new.

We returned to our room between dinner and the show, to find they had turned the beds down, and I had a sheep on my pillow***.

The weather was as good as we’ve had this summer, i.e. rubbish. So much so that there was a little golf buggy to ferry guests down to the theatre. We’d dressed for the occasion, rather than the weather, which meant I was frequently extracting the heels of my shoes from the cracks between the paving slabs, and the gaps in the boardwalk to the theatre, and that my not so tiny hands were frozen by the end of the show. But this was all about the experience, and I wasn’t about to let little things like wind and rain stop me dressing up.

They’d also built a log cabin in the grounds, which served as post show bar. Bizarrely it looked like it belonged in Heidi, and was like an après ski lodge – we felt we should have been drinking gluwein rather than Pimms (but as it was free, we were hardly going to turn it down!)

As we wandered back up the hill to the house (no buggy this time, as we’d pretty much seen everyone else out of the bar), it had stopped raining, and although the ground was soggy, the lights were on, and the wind rustled through the trees, and there was just a little bit of that theatre magic in the air. It’s not a bad life.

*By this, I mean in the universe inhabited by anyone who knows me
**All the function rooms, and suites are named after writers, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Goldsmith, Dickens, Sheridan (yes, there was a Byron Room, too!) So, just who is Davies?
***A small fluffy one. of course.