Godshill rocks!

Seriously out of blogging practise. Not sure where to begin? A good day was had?? No, that sounds a bit lame. But a good day it was I suppose in a very ordinary way.

On our previous visits, I’ve always been incredibly manic and driven – insisted that we get out and ‘do’ holiday stuff every day. But this time I’ve slacked off. Partly because I’m too knackered, partly because I’m mellowing out, but mostly because we’ve been and seen and done just about everything there is to see and do! (we have been tourists here 7 times after all).

Today though, we all needed to get out. Having called in at the stables for Ali and Annie to sort out the horses – one with a nasty leg injury oozing pus – we headed over to Godshill for a short walk. Incredibly, it was about the only twee thatched-roof village we’d not visited before now.
The walk was suitably picturesque and uneventful; we clambered up to the top of the monument hill for the view, then ambled back down for icecreams – as you do. Afterwards, strolled through the aforementioned twee thatched-roof village, popping into the shop part of the toy museum (the kids declining my generous offer to pay to actually go in). Instead we gawked at the tatty matchbox cars with price tags of £55 on them, and bizarre Betty Boop dolls etc.. Then they wanted to read out their keyring ‘names’ and what they meant – according to Rosie, Fiona means:

Really annoying, with stupid hair. Moans a lot. Has a tendency to stress out at nothing in particular.

The woman behind the shop-counter burst out laughing. Ha-ha Rosie, really good joke. Thanks.
A little further along we came across a hideously over the top ‘garden’ tea room, chock full of fountains, ornate waterfall features and fanciful topiary trees. Coincidentally, Rosie’s current photography project is on gardens, so she went to town running around taking loads of arty shots of all this weird stuff, and as I had my camera with me too, I had to join in on the photo frenzy.

In the chintzy swing, when we reached the Godshill Model Village (probably the only Tourist attraction on the Island we’d not yet experienced) I couldn’t resist. Had hoped we could at least just peer over the wall, but they were Colditz impenetrably high. Sod it, come all this way… forked out the £9 (although had managed to blag an extra 2 kids in on our family ticket) to enter and be amazed.

And actually, it was surprisingly brilliant. It really was a replica scale model of the village – and included a model of people looking at the model in 1/10 and 1/100 scales respectively. The detail was fab – every imaginably aspect of village life captured in tiny to model people, including a scout pack camp; a cricket match; pupils at a school for girls; people fishing, a wedding… Rosie went mad with my digital camera as hers had run out of film – trippy shots of us wandering around looking like giants by comparison. She should get an A* for this portfolio!

Back at the pad, it was back to the computer – tediously copying and pasting various bits of info supposedly to help with the presentation we have to do for features next Tues on Women’s Monthly magazines. Endless copying and pasting with not a great deal of real contact details as far as pitching articles to the various publications is concerned. Probably because I’m too tired to think straight – was up ‘til 4am writing Profile feature on Ali and her route to religion. Even more tired now.