off to the past

To be absent from the keyboard for the next week, for our annual Living History demo at Fort Rodd Hill. (The photos at the link are from several years back, and the encampment is considerably more elaborate now. But the current photos are on my laptop, and the laptop and the desktop are not speaking to each other. Sigh.)
For the next week, I will be Linot Fitton, painter of the Peynter-Stayners Company of London, one of several artisans gathered for a fair in the year 1371. I will sleep on a featherbed over a straw tick, eat meals cooked over an open fire or in a clay oven, wear linen and wool, and stick my nose right up to whatever I'm working on, because I don't have 14th c. eyeglasses.
Fortunately, the strict interpretation is only required while the park is open to visitors. Once it closes, we can break our roles, and the Norse encampment or Cavalier encampment can mingle with the Plantagenet encampment. And those who wear eyeglasses can see clearly again.
Canada Day is the big day, and for that I expect to be writing children's names--Your Name Written With a Feather--for several hours. Harry Potter has been good for the business of writing with a quill. If it slows down (and during the week, when traffic is less anyways) there may be time to show how to cut a quill and for interested children to get ink on their hands trying one out.
Which pales before the thrill of seeing the guys working with wooden waster swords. That draws a crowd, always. As does the weaver (not the same crowd) and the cooks. "Is that real food? Are you going to eat it?"

The only accessible electricity is a plug in the women's washroom, so the laptop stays home. I will rediscover the joys of writing in a notebook (not tm) with a pen. I won't know what anyone is doing online until July 3d. Try not to get into trouble while I'm gone, okay?