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August 22, 2004

Ashridge



(more pics)

I've been at this place twice now for training seminars connected with work. It's absolutely gorgeous. Ever since I first came to England, I've been waiting for someone to invite me to stay at a place like this.

The place even has a library with a secret door. There are bookshelves along all the walls of the room and the door is covered with a shelf of fake book spines. To open the door, you have to turn one of the book spines to the right and it acts as a doorknob. At one point there were about 20 of us in this room being taught some kind of management theory. A woman in our group had to leave to go to the toilet. Unfortunately, she couldn't work out how to open the door. In fact, at that point, I don't think any of us knew how to open the door. I certainly didn't. We all had just trooped in and plunked ourselves down as the teacher slammed shut the wall of books. The teacher was now too busy talking to us about the benefits of anarchy in the workplace to notice that one of her students was in a bit of a crisis. The poor woman scrabbled all over the fake spines trying to find the latch. She tried prying the door open with her fingernails. She gave it a bit of a shoulder check. For a while she just stood there with her legs twined around each other, hopping on one foot and running her eyes over every inch of the door. Finally, after a good five minutes, she fled out the French windows and into the garden where I presume she found another entrance to the building and relief.

Ashridge is now a Management College and it seems a fairly busy one. Several companies were running training sessions while I was there. They also do tours of the place. At one point I was in the main lounge engaged in one of several discussion groups that were going on in the room when one of these tours came through. Everyone in the group was elderly. When they first came in, I felt a compulsion to get to my feet and offer them some tea. I didn't but the feeling that I needed to somehow welcome or acknowledge them persisted the whole time they were there. I suspect most of the others didn't even notice them, however. Many of the discussions around me were quite animated. This was extremely upsetting to at least one old guy at the back of the tour group. The tour guide was trying to tell them about the room we were all in but he couldn't hear anything. He interrupted her to say, "Could you speak up? There are some very rude people talking far too loudly behind me!" The tour guide tried to explain that those people were supposed to be there and were actually working. "No!" he bellowed, "I still can't hear you! They're still too loud!"

None of the discussion groups paid any attention to the tour group. It was a somewhat bizarre scene. Personally, I would have been happy if everyone had stopped talking and we all could have listened to the tour guide tell us about the room we were in. Eventually the tour group moved on with the guy at the back of the group still muttering to himself about "insolent rabble" and saying things like "in my day we would have beaten them with tongs".

The best thing about the place, however, was the grounds, and, in particular (at least for me), the croquet lawn. I think I've become addicted to croquet. It's a lovely, genteel game which involves thwacking your opponents' balls as hard as you can. This last visit to Ashridge the weather was a bit crap and we were too busy in any case to have much time for croquet. Despite this, I managed to fit in a game. We had 20 minutes during lunch to play and it was raining but I still convinced a colleague to challenge me. We only took one very large umbrella with us so between every shot, we would sprint as a pair from one ball to another so we could each take a turn sheltering the other person with the umbrella while the shot was played.

The only bad thing about the place was that we had to leave. I'm still berating myself that I caved in to peer pressure and didn't just stay behind and make the most of it until I was forcibly ejected. If I ever go back I'm staying until they kick me out.

Posted by YandaMan at August 22, 2004 10:38 AM
Category: Britain (except for London)

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Comments

It's a lovely, gentile game? Goys only?

Posted by: Faceless Coward at August 22, 2004 3:03 PM

Whoops. Meant "genteel". Thanks for your alert spellcheckness.

Posted by: Yanda [TypeKey Profile Page] at October 27, 2004 7:19 PM