Friends and family (except Frankie and Anya who arrived later!)

Mum’s Surprise 60th

This Bank Holiday weekend we gathered this lot:

Friends and family (except Frankie and Anya who arrived later!)
Friends and family (except Frankie and Anya who arrived later!)

into one enormous cottage in the small Essex village of Thorpe-le-Soken:

Perfect weather for mass deception
Perfect weather for mass deception

for my mum’s surprise 60th birthday party!

Tash and Katie deserve the credit for planning this all while I was travelling, and on Saturday morning they drove mum up for their ‘mystery weekend’ together while Randi, Cormac and I hopped on a train from Liverpool Street and joined a bunch of friends and relatives for the surprise. We all then enjoyed a long weekend together of amazing (and plentiful!) cooking, inappropriately early-morning games of Cards Against Humanity, confusing country walks along Essex ‘footpaths’ which are falling into overgrown oblivion, a trip to the seaside (with top-class dodgem driving) and Cormac’s incredible rendition of The Jungle Book’s I Wanna Be Like You on the guitar.

Team Self
Team Self
Randi wished we had just stuck to the road
Randi wished we had just stuck to the road
The beach!
The beach!
Our winnings from a very successful game of Let's Bounce
Our winnings from a very successful game of Let’s Bounce

Oh, and some of us shut ourselves away on Sunday night to watch the European Election results. Others just danced instead.

I took this on the way to bed in our adorable garden caravan
I took this on the way to bed in our adorable garden caravan

My sisters and I also finally got the chance to present our mum with a book of childhood photo recreations. This is a project which we’ve been putting together over the past year whenever we’ve had the chance, and it has been worryingly easy to locate many of the props from photos which are now several decades old, from duvet covers to garden chairs to a fancy dress gorilla hat. But I’m pleased that our inability to throw anything away made it easier to get the perfect matching shot, and we were all sufficiently proud of this book to order extra copies for ourselves too.

Looking through the photo recreations
Looking through the photo recreations
At one point all of the partners formed a support group
At one point all of the partners formed a support group
...you can see why
…you can see why

Just before the weekend we also made very good progress on our collective job+flat hunting. But I will save that for the next post 😉

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3 Comments on :
Mum’s Surprise 60th

  1. Beth says:

    Love the photos and narrative! Happy Birthday again Gilly, this is one you will never forget.

  2. Amanda says:

    Do you have ticks there? That was my first thought seeing you traipsing through the wild countryside. It looks like an amazing birthday party though. All the best elements. What seaside did you guys go to? It looks beautiful. Did you go swimming? Also what exactly is Let’s Bounce? Obviously you’re very skilled at it and had a hidden talent I never knew about (hence why I called it hidden). Or you could be like me and pick games that are pretty much guaranteed to spit out tickets for the simple action of putting in a trillion tokens. The most important question though is what prize did you get for all your tickets? A cute shaped eraser maybe or the classic plastic mini slinky perhaps? Also the last two photos of this post are absolutely brilliant. Enough said.

    1. reddalek says:

      To answer the most important question: we donated our tickets to my sister who kept going and won on several different things. And she got one of those gooey aliens which become pregnant with another gooey alien unless you keep them in the fridge!

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