It is Guy Fawkes day today, so Bonfire Night was celebrated across England last night.

We'd been told that one of the local villages always puts on a great bonfire celebration, so we went along. Here is the torchlight procession (Sophie's comment : I feel like I'm part of an angry mob!)



... which culminated in the lighting of the bonfire (and they don't mess around when it comes to making a bonfire; the thing must have been five stories high!)



and a huge fireworks display.



It was great. We had planned to get something to eat at the bonfire, but there were just too many people there, so we came back here and ended up at the only place still open, the local kebab shop. Now kebab shops have a rather bad reputation; they are generally sort of unhygienic and some of the food one can buy there - like the doner kebabs - looks extremely dubious. But, we got chicken kebabs and vegetable kebabs, and they were really delicious. Grilled chicken and veg, in a pita bread, with lots of chopped cabbage and tomato and other salady stuff. Of course it may be that, at 10.30pm when you haven't eaten since brunch at 11am, anything will taste good. So, a good evening.

Today the weather was beautiful again - it's been one of those stunningly beautiful gold and blue weeks, where it's frosty but the sun is shining and the sky is a deep, intense, blue - so we went to Box Hill for a picnic.



Sophie decided to roll down the hill.



The hill that had precisely one thorn bush on it.



Did you know that if you roll into a thorn bush at speed you disappear right into the middle of it, and it is then impossible to extricate yourself from it without help? We didn't, until we realised that we'd seen her go into the bush, but we weren't seeing her come out again.

No major damage done, luckily, except a scrape on her eyebrow. There was some blood though, which added to the drama of the event.

However, tea and ice cream (brrrrr) restored her equilibrium.



This weekend has gone really fast... Wish it were longer. But, we did all the chores on Saturday morning, so we are all organised for another work week. It'll be a short week for Bobby, though. He's accumulated a bunch of leave that he needs to take before the end of the year, so (as well as the time he's taking off over Christmas and New Year) he'll be taking every Friday till the end of the year off. He is almost indecently smug about this.