All that comes with it

Amy checks the map

Yesterday we went to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. I must admit I wasn’t particularly impressed. It may well be “Europe’s biggest open air gallery”, but it just looks like a load of fields full of lumps of metal to me. I’m sure Henry Moore was a talented man, but I’m afraid he doesn’t float my boat. I’m not really an abstract art type of guy.

It was a pretty reasonable place to walk a dog however, or it would have been if it hadn’t been so muddy and we hadn’t got lost. We ended up walking through a marsh and then a field of carefully planted crops before we eventually found our way back to the beaten path.

Our only consolation was that we weren’t alone in our inability to follow signposts. Throughout our trudge through the wilderness there was a couple in their fifties about a hundred meters in front of us. They, like ourselves, were heading for a distant gate that separated the sculpture park from the farmland that we had inadvertently stumbled into.

We saw them arrive at the gate, stop, fumble with it for a while, and then unsteadily clamber over it, and our hearts sank. It was obviously quite a difficult obstacle - the woman in particular spent a good minute or two precariously wobbling at its summit, her legs straddling the metal bars as her husband tried to guide her down.

I of course was confident in my own abilities to hop over the gate like a limber gazelle, but Kerry has never really been into assault courses. In addition she had Evan in his baby carrier strapped to her chest so the odds were pretty much stacked against us.

As we came nearer we began to plan how we were going to get two adults, a three year old, a baby, and an overexcited dog to the other side in one piece. It was a similar conundrum as that puzzle where you have to get a fox, a hen, and a bag of grain over a river without them eating each other. When we eventually got there I had a quick desperate fiddle with the gate’s catch just in case and, despite all expectations, the gate swung smoothly and effortlessly open.

As we sauntered rather smugly back into the sculpture park the couple in front turned round to look at us, no doubt anticipating a fine display of slapstick gate climbing escapades. I don’t know what went through their heads as we shrugged our shoulders and gave them a cheery wave, but I half expected our tires to be slashed when we got back to the car park.