A very English Picnic...

After a particularly difficult week for my husband and I, we decided to take our little family up the M40 to find a quintessential picnic spot by a river or lake with no one around. And that is exactly what we found, in the words of local Poet John Dryden:

Happy the man, and happy he alone, He who can call today his own

We shared a beautiful location with only one other family and hundreds of sheep. Being typical Londoners we left home with half the equipment we needed, including our picnic blanket so we spent some considerable time kicking away the sheep poops so we could sit on the grass!

It was the most perfect sunny day to eat my homemade Quiche Lorraine and potato salad followed by juicy cherries and strawberries, all washed down with Elderflower juice. Matilda loved it, running after the sheep and trying to climb down in to the lake (not so funny for us). We ran around, played games, ate food and talked.

The afternoon was rounded off by a visit to Canons Ashby, a beautiful Elizabethan Manor House, the home of said Poet John Dryden,  now a National Trust property, for tea and yummy Carrot cake in their marvelous courtyard garden. This was followed by a walk round the most beautiful Victorian Gardens filled with people playing Croquet and various other very English games.

It was a perfect family day with no computers or tv's or washing or tidying to distract us, it was just about us.