Herding Alpaca with the WI

As I am yet to develop the habit of taking a camera with me every time I leave the house, (10 yr old mobile phone) you will just have to take my word for the fact that at my last Women's Institute meeting we were herding Alpaca.

Any WI member will know that this is a possibility at any given meeting because the range of events is wide and varied. It was the annual garden meeting and as well as touring and admiring (and envying in a quite unhealthy way) the garden of my fellow member who was the host this year we also had the opportunity to meet their next door neighbours, the Alpacas.

Not the surname of the people living next door, but the deliciously sweet tame and charming pets of the household. I think we all fell in love with them. They are pets, not bred for wool or farmed, so they are delightfully socialised and interact wonderfully with humans. They were perfectly calm when a chattering gaggle of 15 WI members stepped apprehensively into their field. We offered little bites of carrot and they became instant best friends.

They were such perfect animals; elegant and long necked, recently shorn, so soft but slender with tousled top knots. The WI membership here is really very sensible and businesslike, yet the noise we made was more like a gang of grannies at a nativity play, "Ahaaaa" "Ohooo" "Ooooh".

Their owners planned to move them into their new pasture, and had indulgently waited for our arrival so that we could help out. The little herd, minus the single male kept in another field, were encouraged through the gate onto their new plot, and were at once so thrilled to be on fresh grass that they abandoned their besotted  new friends and gamboled off like rather large elongated lambs.

We ambled back through the field past their chatty pigs (one of whom liked my cardigan so much he a tried to eat it, pig with good taste,) and chickens, to resume the meeting in the aforementioned garden.

You will have seen the sort of thing on an Alan Titchmarsh program, lush, manicured, lavishly planted, colour co-ordinated, but with the occasional misplaced red or yellow that makes it even more perfect because it isn't right out of a book on gardening, but something that a real person has done. The best bit, even better than the productive but well organised veg plot, was the area that has not been finished. The owner explained that it will contain a pond and a gravelled area and another place to sit. It is the best bit because it is potential, it is something to be planned and constructed and developed by the lucky gardener who will work surrounded on all sides by otherwise delightful planting.

The evening ended with homemade cakes of great fabulousness enjoyed by everyone but yours truly (dam all weight loss diets that rule out cakes) and the formal meeting. Insult added to injury, the next meeting is a demo and tasting of chocolate. Into every life a little rain must fall........

number 1 blog

First time, and rather foolishly apprehensive blogger here. I was introduced to the concept by my more adventurous friend Gill (AKADosie Rosie). She and I are exploring some vintage possibilities as we love Lavender, Linen and Lace, flowers, sepia gorgeousnes and girly stuff in any form.