I have definitely taken Stormy on some weird and wonderful dates, but last night was possibly the one of the strangest and as it turned out the most fun. I sometimes feel a bit weird that so many of our date nights land up on line when sometimes you want to keep a little bit to yourself ( actually we do, but still) it’s very occasionally I’d ask her to edit her blog to leave something out and yet here I am taking about one of dates so publically. After a long day with the kids, bless them, I managed to cobble a few ingredients and the bucket BBQ together and after packing the kids off we headed over to Worth Matravers. The idea was to have a BBQ inside the caves at Windspit.Once used as the abandon planet of Skarvo on Doctors Who’s Destiny of The Daleks (don’t worry this date get stranger). Anyway Windspit is a disused Purbeck Stone Quarry so all the caves are cut out its quite beautiful. It’s about a mile away from Worth Matravers and somewhere if you want just a little walk with some breathing taking views of the Jurassic Coast is really worth visiting. This did mean I had to lug a lot of stuff down the hill, being shockingly unprepared I have to carry real plates, glasses food, Olive oil etc and by the time I got to the cliff face my arms were about two foot longer.
It was while choosing a spot I noticed a guy asleep in my favourite smaller cave and so we decided to make camp in one of the larger caves, I say make camp we had a rug and a bucket BBQ. As I am a spectacular romantic I did bring about a hundred tea lights and after I’d set the fire! (Basically crumbled fire lighters everywhere) I spent at least twenty minutes trying to arrange all the tea lights into a heart shape, however even at 8;30 in a cave it wasn’t dark enough and obviously it’s not called Windspit for nothing and they kept constantly blowing out. It was at this point I remembered I also forgotten the top of the BBQ, the actual grill to place things on. It was at this point a hungry Stormy pointed out that I wasn’t really the outdoors type. Then the guy in the next cave woke up came over for a potential chat and I closed that one off quite quickly and he retrieved his giant water bottle from inside the back of our cave ( much to the relief of Stormy who honestly thought he come over to murder us both) . Then we got stalked by some weirdo in a leather jacket. I think maybe he was hoping we were going to rip each other’s clothes off (must have recognised us), anyway I glared at him and continue to half cook and burn everything. I made the decision to cook some massive jacket potatoes earlier in the day and wrap them in tin foil, sticking them in the fire we had enough heat to reheat them and bringing Boursin with me I set about putting large chunk of that in to jazz them up, rather lovely. The night was drawing in as I’d also failed to locate a torch so we packed up and headed up the hill to The Square and Compass a 16th Century hatch serving pub. Upon arriving there seemed an extraordinary amount of people there was a scaffold stage erected in the garden with twinkling fairy lights and a lovely little Sheppard’s hut serving local cider. 
A drummer was assembling a massive drum kit that nearly took over the stage and seven other musicians joined him and within half an hour they were playing some pretty hardcore dub reggae, an extraordinary setting for a dub reggae gig.
I don’t think you could have planned a night like this, certainly I didn’t, I guess my point is, that my girlfriends patience saved the day, she didn’t care that I’d forgotten most of the stuff to make the BBQ perfect, she didn’t mind frog marching up the hill or the tea lights blowing out and she’s not much of a fan of Dub Reggae, she made the night by still having a good time and thats why I love her.
THE BIG T ™ 