Shaker it all about

We spent the day at the beautiful Hancock Shaker village, an hour away just over the State border in Massachusetts. It's a collection of dwellings, work buildings and meeting houses previously occupied by Shakers but now preserved as a museum dedicated to the history of that small but influential sect.

The one thing widely known about the Shakers (apart from their name being synonymous with a style of furniture) is that they embraced celibacy. Not just the ministers, the whole lot of them. It is therefore not hugely surprising that they have more-or-less died out, though there are still a handful up in Maine.

I'm afraid we have no pictures of the idyllic setting because technology has failed us again (or we've failed it). Our children, who'd been hoping to go swimming, were reluctant visitors at first, but were won over eventually - the Boy by some farm animals and a sudden desire to see inside every single building even though none of them was a train station; and the Girl by a weaving loom in the activity centre. She sat down, learnt the basics quickly and proceeded to spend the next three hours weaving a rather nice herringbone pattern and giving free demonstrations to other Hancock visitors. We practically had to drag her out off her Shaker chair when the time came to leave the village.

A central tenet of Shakerism is simplicity. Our own recently simplified and uncluttered lifestyle is soon to come to an end: we've had word that the container full of our British junk has made it across the Atlantic (damn!) and through customs (double damn!) and will be delivered to us in a few days. The children are delighted at the prospect of seeing their toys again, but the Man and I are frankly dreading it.