Spent much of Saturday at Leigh’s 30th birthday party in Derby.  It was intended as a garden party with a barbecue and a whole lamb spit roast.  The weather had other ideas, and the party only managed to carry on thanks to an enormous tarpaulin tied to the top of the house and spreading down over most of the garden, which let us still spend most of the day outside.

Highlights included the world’s toughest Piñata.  This video starts after several minutes of Leigh trying to break the thing:

Eventually he gets  fed up and gets his aunt to take over.  In the post-mortem afterwards, it was decided that the thing was too high up, and too full of sweets, making it harder than usual to break.  I was sitting directly underneath it and got showered in sweets.  Which was nice at the time, but it wasn’t really until this morning that I realised I’d also been showered in shards of broken boiled sweet, which gently melted at body temperature, and in the heat from the chiminea, then cooled to form hundreds of lumps of sweet on my clothing.  Interesting.

We were there from 4 in the afternoon to gone midnight, and it’s a testament to how good the party was that we didn’t really realise how much time was passing.  The food was ace, with special mention for the lamb roast.  Leigh borrowed a spit from friends that slowly turns the carcass over a split oil drum full of barbecue charcoal – it got through multiple bags as the day progressed.

Topics of conversation – all the usual, plus the Wuppertaler Schwebebahn. Naturally.

Here are my photos of the day.

All this sets me off thinking about what I want to do for my 30th next year.  I do want to have a big party – it’s been a while since we’ve thrown any party at all. It’ll probably be the day before on August 2nd next year – put it in your diaries now!