Two delights, but one week

I have a lot to thank The Stables for.

No, not the horse house. The Stables.

Jazz and live music outfit.

Thank you Stables! And Arts Council, MK Council, and performers. For creating the fantastic 2012 International Festival, Milton Keynes!

Thank you for your imagination, vision, and ambition, for procuring an international array of performers, creating a national event, and having the staying power to send a lot of organising emails. I bet it involved that.

Flipping through the IF programme with great excitement, I can choose a dozen things for the mini grits to do, from the quirky to bizarre.

Perfect.

Not so perfect, during the IF week: Team Grit isn't here.

We are out. In a field at Stonham Barns, Suffolk.

IF coincides with HesFes, the home educating festival. Magnet and exhibition centre for alternative educationalists, out-of-schoolers, part-schoolers, unschoolers, hippies, travellers, radicals, libertarians, autonomous anarchists, pink hair brigades, ferals, half-wolves, small people who know how to handle a knife, Cassandras in their own lands, and righteous principled harbingers creating your country's educational renaissance, if only you would bloody well listen.

I bet HesFes took a lot of vision, ambition, imagination and organising emails as well. 

My fingers flip the programme for IF. My greedy eye and arty heart catches the pleasure that is ahead, but it's too late! My principled soul and clapped out body must go to HesFes. And I am obliged to Dig's wallet. He paid for HesFes tickets already. The month he was safely in Brazil and didn't have to live in a tent.

The IF programme winks at me, seducing me with its loveliness. I am easily led.

After a struggle with my soul (takes fifteen seconds) I decide that Wednesday I will abandon HesFes and pop back for a tryst with IF at Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926). Can't miss that.

But for today, the junior Grits can experience the gorgeousness that is the beginning of IF.

Enjoy then, Sacrilege bouncy Stonehenge

 and Carabosse fire gardens.