Finally managed to get rid of the hippy layabouts camped on the croquet lawn yesterday. Carruthers brought the light cavalry down from the hills where they had been waiting in case the continentals got past the herbaceous borders and in a pincer movement involving RSM McNulty leading a bayonet charge through the orangery, drove them off ones land. One would like to say that it was a magnificent sight of burnished chest plates and well groomed stallions sweeping across the plains but as Carruthers cavalry consists of half a dozen farmworkers and the verger on bicycles one would be rather over stretching the truth. However, it was quite glorious to see the morning sun glinting on lance tip and bayonet as the great unwashed scattered across the lower meadow.
Unfortunately if one was expecting a good nights sleep and a lie in, undisturbed by nocturnal twangings one was rather disappointed as one was woken in the early hours by a hideous moaning and several explosions from the vicinity of the gardens. Gazing blearily from ones bed chamber one was rather shocked to see Sir Humphrey and his pagan chums cavorting stark bollock naked around the rockery. One feels that Clackthorpe should have signposted the fact that the rockery is heavily mined as since this morning one has learnt that the vicar was quite perturbed to find several naked druids clinging to the spire of the church when he went to open up for morning bell ringing. One also needs to have a word about how much explosive Clackthorpe has used as well, can't have him flinging Johnny Foreigner around willy nilly. Make the place look untidy. One thought one had seen the last of Sir Humphrey leaping about with his bits all a dangle when Luigis' topiary peculiarities had been finally destroyed earlier in the year.
Accosting the naked peer from the window one demanded to know what was going on only to be informed they were celebrating the summer solstice and that "it was a free and democratic country where citizens have the right to do as they pleased without interference!". One pointed out that the solstice had in fact fallen over a week earlier and they were a little late in their naked jiggling only to be told that they had not been able to make it as they were all up in Parliament supporting the governments recent identity cards bill.
