Parents, kangaroos, and whipped cream

Uh-oh. Parents have hit again. They arrived on Monday in a week where I was already recording for a cd and trying to watch as much of the Weltmeisterschaft as possible. Perhaps not hugely surprising, then, that Timberblog hasn't seen any entries for a bit.

The band spent the whole of Monday and most of Tuesday in the studios recording the instruments for an albumy sort of thing. Result: nine songs done, and parents wondering whether they were actually going to see me at all. So I appeased them on Wednesday by taking them on an exciting trip to the Oise region.

In the morning, after another ticket-inspector-based near miss (cf. "A countryside adventure" from the June 2005 archives), but luckily happening upon the cheeriest SNCF employee I have met yet, who totally ignored the fact I was travelling on the wrong ticket, we took in Senlis, a town that goes back to Roman times and has that whole cobbled streets and medieval architecture thing going on. This seemed to please the parents, who don't get so much of that kind of action by the Patchway Roundabout. And yes, it was good to get out of the big city for a bit.

From here we caught a bus to Chantilly and headed to the château. On the way we passed the Grandes Ecuries (Great Stables). The Prince of Condé had them built in 1719, apparently convinced that he would be reincarnated as a horse. Hence their ridiculous size and luxuriousness. You can just imagine his consternation when he came back as a bathroom sponge.* Anyway, his château was destroyed in the revolution. The present day building was finished in 1881 and looks alright. So we walked around it a bit, found the place where they invented whipped cream, and made friends with some kangaroos.

* Information not historically verified.

On Thursday morning it was time for a visit to the Musée Carnavalet, which has the twin benefits of being just up the road, and free. The permanent exhibition tracks the history of the city of Paris from prehistory up to the modern day. The several scale models of the city as it was in the ( x ) th century were impressive, as was the sheer variation in exhibits - helpfully pointed out to us by the incredibly dull curator bloke in the 19th C art gallery section.



Finally, on Friday morning we went to the end of line 10 and walked to the end of line 9. This was rendered more exciting than it sounds by taking a diversion into the Parc de St Cloud, where you can get views like this, and where I will be seeing Radiohead at the Rock En Seine festival on August bank holiday weekend (woo!).

Parents have now been successfully shipped off to Nice.