Simultaneous with the volunteers yesterday, we had a group of kids for the afternoon. They did a noisy nature walk, had a welly whanging competition, a festival of shouting and made bug hotels. When all that was over, we made butter.
Thirty hyped-up kids, screw-top containers, double cream, shaking…
What, as they say, could possibly go wrong?
Apart from one kid throwing up, one turning green (we blame the jumping up and down technique of shaking for this) and one lid leaking – nothing.
You can’t count the kid that sprayed himself in the eye with the automatic air freshener because that wasn’t caused by butter-making: that was, I confess, caused by me forgetting to screw the air freshener to the wall out of the reach of kids.
We then pass to Men in Sheds. We made more signs and welded up a bracket. We were also commissioned to build an adaptor to fit a square heater to a round tube in the grain dryer. There’s a song about that, isn’t there?
Actually, when I check the lyrics, there’s one line about that – There may be trouble ahead…
The rest of the song, with it’s moonlight and music and love and romance doesn’t really match with my experience of Men in Sheds.
Most memorable moment of the day was the one where the Man welding up the bracket turned and said “I’ve just welded it to the vice!”
It soon came off, with the help of an angle grinder, as we all tried to keep straight faces…