Page 324 - Demo

320jumped over them. One of the riders came off his horse and was towed about for a bit. This was all deliberate but when we saw him later, he was covered in the red stuff that the French put on cuts and abrasions. They did not appear to be any concerns with health and safety. Another favourite was donkey racing. There were usually about 6 donkeys that participants rode and then raced round a circuit. Actually, the word race is hardly accurate. Some donkeys trotted a bit, some took a lot of encouragement to move and all of them were liable to stop at any time. Riders often fell off and had to remount when the stewards got the animals back. It was fairly dangerous, and we did see one rider carried off once, but again no-one appeared to care, and it was all considered good fun. During the evenings of these events, there was a great firework display. One year John and Eileen Robinson, our friends from Tholthorpe, came down in their caravan in February to help do some work. The first year we dug a trench all around the back of the house and laid a porous pipe in it that we connected to another pipe that took the water away to a ditch by the side of the lane. We then filled in the ditch with the rubble that we had after Gabby and Eileen broke up the old cattle troughs in the barn. This was to reduce the rising damp in the walls. They also cleaned up and painted the front room walls white which made the inside of the house more cheery.Each visit involved a bit of working but was also a holiday and we had quite a few visitors. We quickly realised that our main sitting out area would be at the back and so we decided to replace the window in the backroom with french windows. We bought the windows from Lapeyre and subsequently replaced all the windows in the house with theirs which were well made and not too expensive. It was easy enough to open the hole beneath the window although at one point the frame fell onto Gabby%u2019s foot cutting it badly. We learnt a bit about health and