…and three of The Gonch’s golden nuggets for twenty one dollars.
While driving my lactose-intolerant way towards the home of Blue Bell Ice Cream – Brenham TX, I saw a small sign in the grass verge announcing Sherwood Forest Faire. Jokingly I mentioned it to Mary, and she asked if I was serious. As serious as Friar Tuck’s rotund and publicly acceptable alcoholism, I replied as I saw three more signs.
“We should go!” she insisted, despite my protests that I was born in Nottingham, and that it would be like her visiting an American themed restaurant in Center Parcs, which is in Sherwood Forest itself. Which we did in December.
“It’ll be ironic.” she continued. Payback, no doubt.
I wasn’t much into the ice cream anyway – the drive was just an excuse to cruise in my Police Cruiser (intercept in my Police Interceptor doesn’t sound so relaxed) while we talked and avoided what passed for rain. We pulled off and I entered my first Renaissance Faire.
Blown away by the English accents and high proportion of medieval-clad pikeys, I really liked it. The hawking of pikey-ware was entertaining and well performed, and the chicken nuggets were perfectly over-priced, even with the positively European portions.
I had hurler’s remorse as Mary paid $3 for me to throw rotten tomatoes around the head of an insulting man 20 feet away. I genuinely didn’t want to hit him in the face, I guess that’s how he manages to turn up day after day to put his head through the wooden stockade.
On my second mini-meal the pikey at the counter asked me how my day was and we got to chatting while the kitchen stooge pressed five tiny falafel balls into a diminutive piece of flat bread.
“Yes, we were just driving to Brenham, and I saw the sign.” I explained.
“You mean you didn’t plan to come to a Ren Faire?” she asked incredulously.
“Er. No.” I admitted, and to try to make all her effort hoisting on what seemed to be a belly dancing outfit earlier in the day seem worthwhile, added, “I’m from Nottingham, so it seemed a good fit.”
As the conversation flowed until terminally punctuated by the arriving fried chickpea arrangement, it was apparent that in the pikey’s mind there was no relation between Nottingham, my birthplace in England in the middle of Sherwood Forest, and Sherwood Forest, the title of the Faire in which we all stood transported back many years into someone’s adolescent fantasy.
To be fair(e), when my American wife had dined at “Hanks…A lively venue for big appetites” in the real Sherwood Forest a few months prior, she hadn’t asked anyone the capital of Saskatchewan, or any other North American trivia. If she had, she would doubtless have received the same blank expression.
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