I’m back in Brighton after a jolly jaunt in the countryside experiencing Dunstan Orchard’s non-digital social networking experiment. His hospitality was second to none.
It takes a special kind of chutzpah to invite five complete strangers to your house in the country for a weekend. It was a most gratifying experience getting to know everyone better.
For instance, I never knew that Dunstan has no sense of smell. Seriously. As such, it was beholden unto the guests to inform Dunstan that Poppy the wonder dog has a flatulence problem.
Y’see, until we have scratch’n’sniff websites, that’s the kind of thing that still requires real-world interaction.
Given his olfactory handicap, Dunstan did a remarkable job serving up consistently delicous food. The breakfasts were particularly noteworthy; eggs fresh from the henhouse, local sausages and bacon as well as sausages made from boar. It was, in every sense, a meatspace gathering.
We took in the local attractions which consisted mostly of the appealing landscape. The rolling green hills were a sight to behold as was the large-scale geological pr0n carved into a nearby hillside.
Myself, Andy and Richard even managed to squeeze in a quick visit to Stonehenge on our way back to Brighton.
I’ve put together a photo gallery of the weekend although simple snapshots are but a poor substitute for fond memories of a very pleasant time.
Alas, our fears that being invited down to spend a weekend in Dorset by a lone web developer could turn out to be some sort of weird Blair Witch experience proved to be completely justified when Dunstan took us out in the fields in the dead of night and performed unspeakable experiments upon us.