In Chelsea, on New Year’s Day morning of 1966, I woke up with a throbbing head and a general, self-inflicted unwellness. I was lying on a carpet in a sitting room, fully clothed. Beside me was a man whom I dimly recognised from celebrations of the night before; he still slept, clasping unto himself an opened tin of Ind Coope 5-pint Pipkin.
What January light there was from a large window threw itself onto a wall, illuminating, bizarrely, pieces of a Beetle: a wheel-guard, door, an outside mirror, that sort of thing. Between the wall and window was a grand piano, its key lid open. A young woman entered, barely glanced at us, sat at the piano and began to play, vigorously. The light played on her hair, on the varnish of the piano and I was transfixed; noteworthy also was that she was clad only in her undergarments. I never remembered what she was playing. My carpet-companion woke, we looked at each other, at the pianist, then back at each other in dumb incomprehension.
After a while she stopped, looked down at us, said her name was Phoebe and that it was time we left. We arose, stumbled a little out into the street, mumbled goodbyes and trudged off to rejoin our lives, mine in a shared flat in Fulham Road. I never saw Pipkin man again. Or Phoebe.
It was a year before Joni Mitchell wrote the song. When later I discovered Joni Mitchell’s seraphic voice and especially ‘Chelsea Morning’, I immediately associated my morning’s episode with it, and assumed that her morning and mine took place in the same city. A few days ago, I looked the song up and was a little deflated to read that it referred, not to my Chelsea, but to the one in New York City; that Joni’s yellow light was of an East Coast summer and her rainbow was formed by the prisms of mobiles, handmade from cast-off stained glass.
It doesn’t matter that our Chelseas are not the same. What I have is another wistful connection cast by song, a sweet, cameo memory of my London life, sore head or not.
‘We’re all going on a summer holiday No more worries for a week or two.’
So goes Cliff Richard’s carefree song of 1963, and for me on our first motor trip off the island since 2019, holiday meant strolling around Versailles, spending soporific afternoons in brasseries drinking ice-cold la Goudale, then possibly a gastronomic meal in a quiet restaurant.
Almost at the M1/M25 junction, I cried ‘Look, that car has a UK plate.’ Suzanne’s research on the phone revealed that we were unaware that British cars on the Continent now had to be plated UK and not GB, and, anxious that there might not be stock at the Eurotunnel shop, stopping at three motorway services I acquired a huge, magnetic, oval UK that I later realised was for vehicles the size of a juggernaut. And at Eurotunnel, which was selling the new UK plates galore, we also bought special covers for the GB bit to the left of the European number plate. Slight panic over and Sir Cliff’s sentiments returned to my breast.
Not for long. We endure a horror Eurotunnel crossing owing to passport control delays, queuing in the car in over 30 degrees, getting to the shuttle only to wait more than an hour before departure, owing to a ‘technical fault’. A dreadful experience and bollocks to Brexit, the act of self-harm voted for by only one-third of Britain’s electorate. We don’t get to the flat in Versailles until dark, slowed by a major-road closure that tipped us into the stop-start of the northern Paris banlieues, then into the grip of the Périphérique. Of course, with a new house there is security to learn, such as getting the garage-door remote from the flat, where the landing light is not working (and never worked) and in total blackness fiddling with an unfamiliar door lock. But this most-welcoming fourth-floor flat is, as the owners say on their HomeLink listing, spacious (above photo is from the balcony). Nevertheless, shut up for several days, it’s now as hot as hell. That was the arrival, but the exchange-home was of itself comfortable and good to come home to – not always the case with home exchange. Mornings were pleasant, opening windows to admit a breeze. We marvelled at the extravagantly displayed memorabilia mostly of things British: photos of the Beatles, Premier League football crockery, and walls covered with stars from French, British and American film noir.
The first day-trip was to Rambouillet, whose chateau was acquired by the ill-fated Louis XIV in 1783, but the temperature climbed to over 35℃, so sending us home. Anyway, the town was practically closed, as we expected for a French August. A better day was in Chartres, where the French Gothic cathedral was just stupendous, with a remarkable sculpted indoor frieze and its famous indoor 13th-century 42-ft diameter pavement labyrinth. But, sorry to relate, again the heat, roaring into the late 30s, drove us back home and lunch by 1.30 and sit quietly for the rest of the day. On Sunday, Suzanne went to mass at the Dominican Sainte-Jeanne-d’Arc a few minutes away where a hundred people turned up. Later, we walked locally again but Suzanne took the bus home. The sign at the bus stop admirably fitted my feelings.
Exchanging email with one half of the flat-owning couple, I found that his 18-year-old dual French–German father was conscripted into the Bundeswehr in 1944 but deserted and joined the invading Americans as a parachutist. I speculated with him that our fathers might have fought each other had not a shrapnel wound at Caen got mine shipped back to Blighty (he also trained as a para to drop behind Japanese lines in Burma, but the atom bomb put a stop to that). In the early afternoon, we revolved endlessly around the four quarters of the market square looking for a restaurant to suit my neurotic needs; that near-panic performance of mine has led me to hard soul-searching and consequent professional help.
The last full day, when the temperature mercifully dropped to the late twenties, was to cap the trials of the week. In the morning, finding ourselves in a deserted shopping-centre car park controlled by automatically lifting boom-gates, I crashed the car into one and we both agreed that to our eyes it had been a chimera that seemed to be much farther away. Shock and the trials of the week laid me out for rest of the day. The ‘illusion’ of the boom-gate reflected the holiday.
Next day was the longed-for, blessed return to England, but not until another unpleasant wait for the absurd passport-stamping, and, believe it or not, another shuttle with a ‘technical fault’. When it finally got going, after thirty minutes it broke through the tunnel at midday for my eyes fnally to savour this summers’ bleached fields of Kent.
Looking back, it was a mistake to travel in August; even without record temperatures it’s just too hot for people like us with a combined age of 164. On these supposed holidays, we sat around at home every day, trying not to stir without good cause. On the brighter side, it was nice and French for me, each morning before breakfast, to buy a freshly baked baguette from the corner Carrefour, and to Suzanne’s rather diluted pleasure we did manage lunch on three occasions. Oh yes, and the marvellous cathedral.
Our next exchange is in October in Chester-le-Street, coincidentally French-sounding but firmly in my country.
Why spend five days on the Isle of Wight in chilly March? Two reasons.
First, it’s wise to avoid the holiday season, starting in April and ending in September when, to add to the population of 132,000 on an island 23 miles by 13, an extra 2.6 million ‘mainlanders’ ferry across Spithead or the Solent. That’s twenty times the number who live there, competing for ferry space, road space and any-place space.
Second, my own, less practical reason was driven by a visceral need to commemorate my grandparents’ deaths who died within a few months of each other in 1958, but I learned that no memorial was placed on their grave. For much of 2021, I had been attempting to correct this, corresponding with the council and stonemasons. From the former, I acquired ownership of the gravesite, but only until I am 116 years of age; from the latter, an inscribed granite tablet installed on the grave. In addition, two kind friends on holiday last year tried to inspect the site, but without a grid map of the graves couldn’t find the exact spot. In the end, the Friends of Newport & Carisbrooke Cemeteries helped by sending me a photo of the grave, so I knew what I was looking for.
On Sunday the thirteenth, after depositing Verity at her own cosy holiday cattery in Clophill, the Sunday drive down to the Island was without incident. Until Thursday, home was to be Dairy Cottage at Luckington Farm, Carisbrooke the village which we approached in the time-honoured way by driving up narrow windy lanes and through two fords.
Monday morning was taken up with paying respects to my maternal grandparents, Elsie and Ernest. Mum said that her dad was always in fine health but pined to death for his wife; they are together at the village cemetery known as Mount Joy, a high, sweeping elevation gazing on to Carisbrooke Castle. Armed with the grid map provided by the council’s bereavement services, I strode about the cemetery without success until I asked the only other human if she could help. ‘Better’n that,’ she said pointing, ‘why not ask those men over there?’ And over there, working on a grave, were two men whose van displayed the name of the very firm that had laid the stone the previous week. They helped me find the spot, only a few yards from our parked car. The photos cannot show my choking and tears when I first saw their grave and its stone:
Ernest & Elsie Gale Married 11.8.1920 Laid to Rest 1958
Ernest Wilfred Gladstone (yes) Gale was born in 1887 and served in the Great War as a sapper, ‘Cooked for 25 men,’ said Mum, ‘at the Battle of Ypres.’ A bricklayer by trade, as well as working at Quarr Abbey and Parkhurst Prison he built the family house in Alvington Road in about 1923. Known to my brother and me in the 1940s as ‘Dee Dee’, Elsie May Grist was born in 1892; the 1911 and 1921 censuses record her occupation as ‘home work’. No photograph of either of them survived the peripatetic life of their daughter’s marriage to a career soldier.
A few days later, I walked on my own to Mount Joy and stood for a minute or so at their graveside. My thoughts were those of contentment that the chapter was now suitably closed.
(Thanks to Suzanne for help, support and photography, and to Tony and Richard for diligent reconnoitring.)
Paul Monnelly b. 25 September 1947, d. 21 January 2022
We met in Stockport in 1967 when starting our Higher National Diploma in Business Studies. Whether by choice or at the college’s whim, I can’t remember how we came to be billeted together, in the propinquity of a one-bedroom room in Levenshulme. The terrace house of boarders was run by Mr and Mrs Czech, refugees from their namesake country. You cooked your food on a gas ring situated on a landing. It was a ninepenny train ride to the college; trains going in the opposite direction took you right into the delights of central Manchester.
Paul hailed from the town of Prudhoe, a few miles from Newcastle, and to his last he was audibly recognisable as a Geordie. Age 20, he was a hard-drinker, smoked like a chimney and held views close to Enoch Powell. Once, when that controversial figure was visiting Stockport to make a speech and students (university not college!) were gathered outside the town hall to protest, Paul steadily backed into the packed ranks, using his bovver boots (yes) to grind their feet. He explained that it was easy because the front rank could not retreat.
He was a defiant arguer. For example, when the paraffin heater in our room required replenishment, it always seemed to be my turn to go to the local ironmonger’s, and what’s more pay for it. In recent years, when we have been meeting in London pubs, Paul had not lost the ferocity of his point of view, and rarely gave ground to my pinko views. This might appear as if time with him was less than pleasant, but not the case. To be in the company of intelligence married to intellect is always a pleasure, and anyway I swear that he would soften after his third vodka.
One big night occurred in August 1968 during the holidays, when Paul usually went home and I worked as a delivery driver. It was my stag night and Paul organised the do. He travelled from home laden with a large leather suitcase which he opened with great ceremony to reveal several bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale. In those days, beer could not easily be bought out of its region, hence it was quite a treat, despite Paul’s reports of Newcastle hospital wards dedicated to patients suffering from delirium tremens caused by this strong beer. It was my first time with Newky Brown, and I was drunk on it before we and the others hit the pubs.
With my marriage, our room-sharing came to an end and my wife and I took a one-room flat in Heaton Chapel, a posher suburb nearer the college. At the end of the teaching part of the HND, in 1969 Clare and I emigrated to Australia where I did my year’s personnel work that was necessary to receive the diploma. Paul and I lost touch and he joined the Royal Fleet Auxiliary in 1974, later telling me that on one of his early voyages to the South Seas, he scoured Sydney in vain looking for me; we were not to connect again until the 2000s
It was then that I signed up for Friends Reunited and came across Tina McKay, née Wood, whom we knew at college and who put me in touch with Paul. I returned to the UK from Australia in late 2005 and the three of us – now with second-time round partners – were reunited. Paul invited all of us to his last ship, docked in Portsmouth, for a tour and lunch in the mess. He retired as Purser from the RFA in 2008 and lived in Spain with his wife Susan.
After his retirement, on his regular visits to the UK, he and I fell into regular pub-crawling across London. His tipple was vodka and coke, but although our pubs were the best that my Camra membership would find, he did not share my love of ale. He also, as fifty years before, never seemed to get drunk compared with my rapidly progressive stocious state.
Towards the end of our encounters before the pandemic, his progressive pulmonary condition slowed his walking, showing in a reluctance to cross even quiet London streets except at crossings. He drank a lot less as well, as I wanted lunchtime meetings and he wouldn’t touch alcohol until later in the day. We used to have lunches with Tina and the partners, where he would be gentlemanly and quiet, unlike at our pubbing when we argued to the cows came home, not bothering other people with our self-indulgent sparring.
Another feature of Paul was his generosity, at least towards me. A birthday present he bought me in 2014 was an old-fashioned, battered, metal paraffin-container, just to remind me of our ancient bickering over who should get the refill for the heater. Another was two weighty volumes of the OED complete with a magnified reading glass for the tiny print.
On Christmas Eve last year, he was taken to hospital and stayed in a coma for several days. Discharged ten days later to await recovery fit enough for chemotherapy, on our last WhatsApp videocon he told me how, on his return to hospital and in a crowded waiting room, the specialist had told him that his condition was inoperable with only a few months left. He was going to have his nieces and nephews over for what he called his ‘swansong’ in Estepona in March but he ‘Didn’t expect me to be there.’ That last was a nod to my fear of flying, and for him to say that in his state was his final act of generosity to me.
After his emails, Paul appended the following paragraph and I’d say it sums up his life’s outlook: ‘Of all tyrannies, a tyranny [sincerely] exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience’. From C.S. Lewis’s God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, 1979.
In March 1962 I bought my first wheels – all two of them on an olive-green, Vespa Sportique. My 18-year-old’s diary records: ‘Lovely and perfect, until I come to ride it. It behaves like a horse.’; a few days later: ‘This evening after going two or three hundred yards on the scooter, I have decided to take the plunge tomorrow and drive to work. Please don’t let it rain, God!’ And a day later, ‘changing down was much improved, but slowing down a little laborious, and I am wary of descending hills at speed’ until my near-death on 26 March, when: I ‘came out at Wootton onto the main road without stopping’. But, resplendent in a white-peaked crash helmet, astride 149 c.c. of power, I was a prince of the road, although my son reckons I must have looked like a nerd.
Despite the fact that I never got out of L-plates, having failed my driving test, that did not stop me once riding 920 miles to Edinburgh and back, still one of the most exciting things I have done, confirming me to the pleasure of travelling alone.
On the summer’s dawn of the morning of departure, I saw my scooter slung like a horse, hoist by crane from the quay on to the deck of the Ryde/Portsmouth ferry. I went via my grandmother in Bury and can see her looking out of the window as I drove up. Uncle Jack, recently back from national service in Malaya, got drunk (a frequent condition) and tried to get into the house, rattling the door, but she kept it locked, much to his loud-mouthed dismay. Going over Shap Fell on the A6 was so cold and wet that I sidetracked over to Penrith where I downed a glass of barely age-permissible whisky in a posh hotel bar.
A hundred and twenty miles and three hours later on Princes Street in the Scottish capital, I was pulled over and rebuked by a traffic policeman for not obeying his hand signals – well I was only a learner. I got a broom cupboard of a room in a hotel and spent a couple of days with two Boroughmuir School friends.
On the way back, at Scotch Corner I stopped in a lorry-drivers’ motel paying half a crown to attempt sleep in a huge dormitory with men coming and going all night. One of them advised me to put my shoes under the iron bed’s legs to avoid their being nicked when asleep (my shoes, not the legs). Then off again next day, only to come off the scooter near Oxford; not leaving enough space in front, I braked sharply to avoid careering into a car and catapulted over the handlebars, but the borrowed WWII RAF flak jacket and slow speed saved me from serious injury. Then on back on to the Island.
For all those glorious miles, unlike me, the Sportique had never missed a beat and used petrol like a miser. I loved it, my first tame combustion engine. But not enough love to prevent me selling it in November of the same year, when I joined the army. Nevertheless, the memory of my first exhilarating solo adventure has stayed. Nerd I felt not, my dear boy.
Norfolk is the northerly county of East Anglia which is a large, blunt bit of England pointing into the North Sea. Oundle to Norwich is about 140 minutes driving and mid-week in February was a good time to travel, even so, the commuter traffic on to and off the Peterborough orbital was thick and depressing in the early morning mist.
An interim stop, still in Cambridgeshire, was at Thorney, a town much encumbered with this traffic aggressively moving its dirty and noisy way through the main street. Signs by activists everywhere exhorted ‘Bypass Now!’. We stopped there because the guidebook noted that Huguenots, who fled from France in 1574, were buried in the churchyard. Mum’s ancestors were asylum-seeking Huguenots from the Revocation of The Edict of Nantes in 1685, so I have a sort of affinity for them. Unfortunately, the church door was locked against vandals and there were no recognisable 16th century headstones in the large churchyard, which was carpeted with snowdrops and early yellow and white crocuses.
The country soon turned from the urban to the famous Fen: flat, cultivated fields stretching to long horizons, the road raised many feet above the flood lines. This was welcome, because our last visit to the Fen, to Ely some thirty miles to the south, had been in thick ground fog. Soon, close to Norwich, the Broads showed themselves, rumps of windmills, canals and rivers threading the countryside under a watery sun.
Norwich is beautiful, with a handsome cathedral whose spire is higher than Winchester’s and whose mediaeval vault-bosses are wondrously individually carved and varied and can be viewed from the floor of the church through magnifying mirrors. Outside, within the Upper and Lower Closes, are lovely riverside walks and narrow lanes harbouring the wealthy housing of the established church’s overseers. A stop at the Red Lion delivered Woodeford ales and a cheese and ale pie with a crust to melt the sternest mouth. The city is built a lot from the flint which is ubiquitous in Norfolk, its unsuitability to smooth-knapping requiring the importing of building stone from all over England. Much of the stone for the cathedral (begun in 1174) came from Caen, a reminder again of William the Conk, whose good works we had seen a lot in Normandy the previous week.
In the late afternoon we beat up the east Norfolk coast through tiny, exquisite fishing villages, trying to avoid the oncoming darkness before searching for accommodation in Cromer. We managing to secure a B & B with two rooms, not so easy because many were closed for the season and the likeliest prospect, a hotel looking out from the high cliffs over the beach, had had electrical problems that past weekend.
A night out in Cromer at this time of the year can only be described as variable. Some pubs had decent beer and some did not, and it was only with the help of the town drunk that we found two which would not have been obvious to the visitor: The Dolphin, overlooking a cantankerous sea, and another Red Lion; the former rather tacky and the latter, right posh. That night’s cuisine was a heady series of curry dishes at one of the two Indians in Cromer. For once, the Good Beer Guide did not come through because its only recommendation was a flea-bitten hotel bar full of short-haired young men with tattoos and drinking lager. They did not seem a bit like the long- and golden-haired Norsemen who had pillaged that part of England in the Dark Ages. Come to think of it, except for the lager, times have not changed all that much.
The next day was spent furthering the discovery of villages, some of which sent you drooling with delight. At Burnam Thorpe, Nelson’s dad had been the rector and his church has many flags from Her Majesty’s ships, the lectern made of timber from the Victory. At the next village, I had to spend an hour at a pub table correcting a distant Korean’s English; I don’t think Ms Kate L–– of Seoul will ever know where her piece on teacher education was dealt with, and that Chris Yates spent over an hour in a pub, drinking coffee.
At another fishing village we walked to the beach a mile away; many of the fishing villages are this distance because of natural changes to the coastline. Alongside the track, surprisingly full of walkers, were fascinating open-air aviaries enclosing varieties of duck, water fowl, swans and other water birds. Their cackling and honking were a jangling accompaniment to the distant crash of waves on shingle.
Now, the intention had been to finish off Norfolk and its rare beauties overnight in King’s Lynn, about which the guidebook extolled as having Dickensian architecture so good that Martin Chuzzlewit was filmed there instead of London. Well, the town did have an old bit of sorts but covering the entire old market square was a dirty great gaudy fun-fair setting up, and already the throb of inane beat music was competing with the deep humming of its own generators. So, KL was not the go.
Back to Oundle prematurely and a dissatisfying and slightly acrimonious dinner at the Talbot Hotel, relieved by the close attention given – we were the only people in the restaurant – by the chatty young French waiter from the island of Réunion who wanted to go to the Gold Coast to surf. Why does everyone in England, including foreigners, want to go to Australia? He hardly blinked, when, on informing me that the chef had told him that my highly anticipated sardines were ‘off’, I responded, ‘F***.’
Norfolk has its own quiet charm, I think, because it is off the motorway routes, free from their dulling of serendipity. In my childhood, two days was about the maximum for which my family ever went on holiday together and it got me thinking how little I know of my own country and how much I shall never see.
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I wrote that when house-exchanging between Australia and the UK. Sixteen years later, our 2020 Germany and France exchanges put off because of Covid-19, once lockdown restrictions permitted we forayed again to East Anglia on an intra-England house-exchange.
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Three Days in Norfolk 2020
‘Sticking it Out’
Late September, we arrive in the village of Ashwellthorpe for our third exchange at this house; because of Covid-19 the car is laden with bedding and towels in addition to the usual Aussie Esky and Waitrose bags of food and drink. It’s pouring, torrentially, and winds for the next few days are forecast up to 55 m.p.h. Lovely. We have four nights here.
Thursday morning (see featured image from my bedroom), the first of three full days, we go to Wymondham, a small town nearby, decant Suzanne for a 10 o’clock mass and afterwards have a look around the town. That we did, but the abbey was closed not for Covid but for repairs. After a couple of walks up and down the High Street past the same shops, with rain imminent we scuttled back to the exchange house for lunch. In the afternoon, to the seaside! We tried unsuccessfully to find seals, but did get to the Broads, Suzanne eating an ice cream while we gazed upon the big motor boats moored at Ranworth, on the River Bure. The beach at Sea Palling got us a brief, chilly, windswept walk. Again, a rush home to beat the wind and rain, where we found the awning ripped off the exchange partners’ gazebo, and rain dripping down the chimney onto the hearth, threatening the carpet. Out with their towels.
‘Bondi Beach, where are you?‘
Friday, truly the worst of the weather but we have booked for the Art Nouveau exhibition at the University of East Anglia’s Sainsbury Centre. For eight quid, it is the gem of the exchange, works by Francis Bacon, Picasso, Modigliani, Degas, Lafitte, Jisö Bosatsu. And we are going to have lunch in the café … no we’re not, it’s closed. Never mind, we got out of the house for about 90 minutes – a memorable visit, thank you UEA
Léon Solon ‘Resting’ 1896 Porcelain
Saturday. What a mess, setting out on 47 miles to Wells-next-Sea, cross-fingers the rain and wind was less than yesterday’ unholy Friday of the day before. We struggled up a couple of streets of winter-clad, all-white Brits (no foreign tongues here, you know). Jeans soaked within minutes, and your Tilley doesn’t stay on unless you wear the chinstrap which makes you look like an old, bearded Scoutmaster. Let’s get back to the car, along the quayside described in the 1971 Illustrated Guide to Britain as ‘gay’. We’ve had enough, but S wants to buy takeaway coffee, to which she adds a sausage roll (later she names ‘horrible’) and we push into the wind and rain to get back to the cocoon of the Prius in the car park, where I recover from my white-hot anger that almost threw the spilling, frothing coffee into the sodding road. Why the hell don’t we have a flask of coffee in the car? Instead of a planned coastal journey to Cromer we point the car back to Ashwellthorpe, where she plies me with a bacon sandwich and HP sauce on white bread – succulent and delicious (the sandwich). Another early afternoon of book-reading begins, me calming as I finish Sarah Moss’s finely written The Tidal Zone, chuckling my way to her bright and hopeful end.
Our exchangers (who are enjoying settled sunny weather, good luck to ’em), email us, offering to foreshorten the exchange but no, sticking it out is nobler than limping home.
The next day it’s home, to be enfolded by armchairs and Sunday martinis.
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These bedraggled five days got me thinking about the passing of the in-between years, how much about ‘my [unvisited] country’ I now need not lament. Within ten months after that first visit to East Anglia in 2004, in order to chase after the grandchildren, we had leased out the Sydney house and moved to England, ostensibly for ‘two years’, giving it a try as it were. As the two years have multiplied, through 20 house-exchanges we have seen a great deal of the British Isles in addition to France, Belgium, Germany and The Netherlands, so that reasons to lament have gone. Any regrets about leaving the faraway country in which I spent 35 years, however, are a different kettle of fish. More on those at another time – regrets, not fish.
Just before 10, Richard and I left our cars at Bulbourne (top right, about 1 o’clock; our path in green) in the car park of College Lake Wildlife Trust and stepped north-east onto the Grand Union Canal.
At about 4° with a cloudless sky, it was perfect walking weather, at least for us. The plan was, vaguely, to get as far as Drayton Beauchamp and return, perhaps eight miles in all, and Richard, getting over a bout of bad flu, asked me, the map-keeper, for an easy walk. That was my intention as well.
We turned off the Grand Union at Marsworth reservoir, through Little Tring and onto a disused stretch of the Wendover Arm. Here, we stopped to look down at several high-vis-jacketed workers bricking up bits of the drained canal. When we got as far as Drayton Bridge we stopped for a cuppa and to agree on how we were to return to base. The map showed that we were on the brink of circumnavigating the ancient settlement of Tring (pop. c.12,000), something we had failed to do last year on account of inadequate map-reading. A short discussion ended in agreement that we should get on with the latter, despite Richard’s earlier wish for a shorter walk. I was at pains to check and double-check his unequivocal agreement
We had to get through the horrors of a huge housing development just after Beeches Farm and over the B468. Though the noise, ground-scarring from earth-movers and general mayhem we were able to cross the Roman Road of Akeman Street which once linked Watling Street with the Fosse Way. Under the A41 took us to the beginning of a steady climb past West Leith Farm, trudging up to the high point of about 800 ft. When we got to Hastoe, we were on familiar ground and celebrated our success by having lunch at Hastoe village hall, our backs to the wall sitting on gravel in the sun. Oh, what difficulty we had standing up afterwards!
Although decently refuelled, we spurned more heights on the nearby Icknield Way and took a more level path past Wick Farm into Wigginton, crossed Hemp Lane and into The Twist. Off to the right, we took The Ridgway that afforded glorious views to Aldbury,
back north-east over the A41 and Akeman Street to descend through Chestnut Wood onto the Grand Union, near Tring Station. Here, we picked up the towpath north-east, getting into Bulbourne at a quarter past two, chuffed to see on my walking app that we had packed in 11 miles, without the slightest hint of keeling over.
Of what does one talk about on such a walk? Well, I can report the gratifying near-absence of Brexit-natter, both of us, like many citizens, exhausted by two and half years of it all. Although staunch Remainers – of different political hues, him being decidedly blue against my oscillating pink to red – we shared a quick Bollocks to Brexit, lamented the consequential state of our democracy and left it at that.
Tuesday 8 October Two-hundred miles of road journey to North Wales were uneventful, but beautiful once we had got to the Welsh valleys on the A5/A470. Another pleasure was not having to spend much time on the wretched M6. Perched 300 feet above the village, the exchange house was built in the mid-19th century, now nicely developed into a three-bedroom, modern residence. It’s not new to us as we had visited it briefly en route to the Ireland exchange in August. We settled in, then I walked a little towards the village, quite a walk back up those three hundred feet. Llanfairfechan, Welsh for ‘Little St Mary’s parish’, has sat on the North Wales coast at least since Roman times in 2nd century AD, and has a population of 3,600 of whom 66% speak Welsh. It’s twinned with Pleumeleuc, Brittany.
Wednesday 9 October Squashy, body-moulding mattresses are not to my liking but I seem to have had a half-decent kip. On the menu today was ‘Looking at the local area’ and this we did on Llanfairfechan’s wind-blown seafront; at a seafood stall against the wall of Conwy Castle; and topped off with a mindless journey in Llandudno, actually getting lost looking for Asda, even after asking pedestrians way. Back for a slap-up lunch, after which I spent 90 minutes up and down mountainsides that reminded me that five miles on the flats of Bedfordshire is worth two miles of those closely woven, wavy brown lines on an Explorer map. Left up the lane, left at the first footpath then a circular around Lls-y-gwynt Covert, picking blackberries on a puff-draining way back. A heart-stopping text from the exchange people: Verity’s cat-flap does not let her in, moving them to invoke Sod’s Law of Exchanges: things go wrong that have never gone wrong before.
Thursday 10 October After a rain-pelting night, we set out for Beaumaris, a pretty village on Anglesey. And the morning turned out, after a sunny start, to be just as wet as the day before, heavy showers throughout our visit. The primary activity was the castle, started by Edward I in 1195, but not properly finished because his financial attention was turned to invading Scotland instead of Wales, and he couldn’t afford to do both. Boasting 16 toilets or ‘latrines’ as the notices call them, the castle overlooks the Menai Strait and is one of the stoutest that I have seen, including its own receiving dock in order to offload goods direct from seagoing craft. After Suzanne had her resting coffee and I had wandered the streets, we looked at the parish church, where I was amazed to see a marble wall-slab commemorating, in Welsh and English, an ‘Obscure Man’, not one of the posh or titled folk whose names normally get slapped up for all to touch forelocks. But there was one in memory of Sophie Wellesley, a great-niece of the Duke of Wellington, so that more than balanced the one for the peasant. Back for (my) lunch of homemade soup, slice of bread, tangerine and coffee; Suzanne had no lunch, owing to her earlier cake and coffee. As I type, she is doing her French devoir. A walk across the golf course down into Llanfairfechan this afternoon was instructive; not a great deal going on in the village, with boarded-up shopfronts and a Co-op supermarket but there was a Guardian left in a newsagent, so we got the latest on the insanity of Brexit. Best bit was the cemetery, with a Commonwealth War Graves sign on the gate, and two Portland stone headstones within: one for a 24-year-old killed in 1941, buried in the same grave as his parents who died some 40 years later; the other for a young man killed in 1918 a few weeks before the Armistice. Weather warmed up by a degree old two and I puffed back up the incline.
Beaumaris Castle
Friday 11 October Lazy morning, late breakfast (Conwy-bought Manx kipper for me) since the rain tipped down until gone 11. On the menu was Bangor, for supermarket shopping and plugging in the Prius, followed by Caernarfon. Talk about chalk and cheese, Bangor is a run-down town with more boarded-up shopfronts, unkempt houses, sad-looking people on the streets; a lot of immigration; drunks on the streets at midday. But we got away about 1 into the white middle-class Caernarfon. When I climbed too high up one of the castle’s towers, I felt rather panicky with the old vertigo and got lower, quickly. But the best bit of the castle was the Royal Welch Fusiliers military museum, with really smashing exhibits and text panels, all within the castle walls. When I asked an attendant a question about the Welch Regiment compared with the RWF, I got a handy chat that revealed a little about my old friend, Alan Edwards, in that the south of Wales had the WR and the north the RWF, but they are now amalgamated, the WR with its own museum in Brecon. So there. Lunch of half a toasted cheese sandwich (white bread, ugh) each, coffee and I unsuccessfully tempted by the huge piece of fruit cake. Oh yes, and this morning’s kipper was gorgeous; it was even cooked for me, compared with home when I have to fumigate the kitchen after my preparing and cooking.
Conwy
Saturday 12 October A quiet but not really a rest day. At 8 this morning, I walked into the village for the paper. Later we journeyed to Bethesda, where I last visited some Mum and Dad 30 years ago. First of all, we decided to take the short route, which turned out to be miles of slow driving, fingers crossed into heart-stopping blind corners in the narrow lanes. At one point we had to follow an escaped sheep; I stopped and herded (can you herd one sheep?) the poor thing into someone’s driveway, allowing us our own getaway to the village of Bethesda, now much gentrified and full of cars, the unwelcome changes when you go back to somewhere heavy with memories. Despite help from the Post Office people, although we found the street, we could not with much certainty find the house, the best guess being one that had had its façade stripped. All to no avail, so we returned to Llanfairfechan to the second bit of Saturday excitement, taking Suzanne on a nature trail by another narrow road to the Three Streams. Here I got her down several steps to the fast-flowing stream and we took photos. I thought she did very well, considering how scared she can get when underfoot is poor. And it was. Now we wait until the evening when I take her to Mass. (Reflecting: now halfway through a lovely, unhurried exchange, with North Wales revealing itself slowly. A great home to come back to. Refused an emailed offer of exchange from Germans in Hesse, as we are determined not to make another one in school holidays.) On the beach, where I frittered away an hour before picking up Suzanne, I was able to walk a considerable distance over the flats and in the gathering dark it reminded me of child,hood walking alone on a beach, picking my way through stones, looking vainly for marine life caught in rock pools; loving the solitude. I wound my way back up through the village to the church, hanging about in the vestibule which I shared with a young mum and her fretting and mewling babe-in-arms. When the priest came out to prepare to glad-hand his departing congregation, he shook even my hand and muttered something pleasant but incoherent. He was Nigerian, and Suzanne said that his English was not all that good.
Llanfairfechan Flats
Sunday 13 October Rain. Again. It’s almost 2. Still, bacon and mushrooms for breakfast was all right. Best excitement so far today has been the putting out of the rubbish: a special council trolley of four levels of boxes has to be trundled down the twelve steps to the lane. Got started on my latest Mick Herron ‘Slow Horses’ novel but put it down after twenty pages and stared into space, not because the book was unattractive but because there is something to be enjoyed in doing absolutely nothing constructive. Still raining. But it stopped about 4 when I walked back up towards the Three Streams, but this time I found a woodland track on the south side that took me steeply up beside the torrents and cascades. Just before that I witnessed two dog-walkers sitting on the back of the laneside bench, their filthy boots on the seat. Back in time for martinis, which Suzanne had pre-mixed at home ready for this marvellous Sunday habit.
Monday 14 October To Portmerion, of The Prisoner Fame, some 40 miles away through stunning mountain scenery. Quite a performance ensued there, trying to find the charging point for the Prius, eventually with the kind and courteous help of no fewer than four employees in separate locations: the ticket issuer; a man sweeping out the information office; a young woman from accounts; a van driver. Lunch was a gigantic brown-bread ham sandwich and tomato soup.
The Whimsy of Portmerion
Tuesday 15 October A fair day dawns but still dark, several illuminated big ships out at sea, while closer in twinkle the lights of Llanfairfechan. The tide is in so that you cannot see the large sandbank in the middle of the strait, normally looking like a long, sleepy, half-submerged whale. Just over the lane is the golf course, across which is the handy shortcut to the village. I have seen few players so far, and I remember young days in Scotland where the links abutted the beginning of the Highland wilds of bracken, heather and exposed, mossy stone. Today we are in Llanberis and Suzanne has gone up Snowdon in the only rack-and-pinion train in Britain. A wonderful feeling, to put on your walking boots, set off late morning and have little notion of where you are going. Leaving the severely overpriced car park (£8) I approached the main drag of the village, but on seeing a big, brooding church I turned up its lane, merely to sit in a back pew and check the map. Well, it was steep and I climbed for half an hour. And up and up I went, over marshy fields with Snowdon a distant presence. Further down I was stumped with the map and backtracked over a field of sheep, one of whom with curly horns looked balefully at me, and I hurried just a little to the stile. Back in the village I was looking forward to my lunch of half of yesterday’s ham sandwich, tap-water, an apple and best of all, the Guardian. But although I sat on a bench in the sunlit churchyard with my eatable goodies, of my paper there was no sign. Ok, it’s sure to be in the car. On the way, I noted that the further you got from the little station and its huge rip-off car park, the cheaper it got; from the eight quid I paid, I could have halved it to four for the sake of a few hundred yards. Back in the car, I scrabbled about in. a furiously but futile search for the paper – Suzanne must have taken it with her up that mountain. Anyway, the short story, dear reader, is that I had forgotten that we had not bought a paper that morning.
Slate Mines at Llanberis
Wednesday 16 October The last full day of an exchange, with cleaning up and rubbish to take care of is often a let-down and, on this occasion, a little mixed. Although we had a good plan to tour Anglesey using the Michelin Green Guide and the Rough Guide, after an interesting museum of Anglesey history the day threatened to fizzle out. We did, after false starts, manage to find a prehistoric tomb in the middle of a field of sheep but not possible for Suzanne who can’t walk on the sort of surfaces that sheep manage easily. Then we headed for National Park sand dunes on the west coast, where again we were frustrated by hostile walking surfaces. After refusing a £12 per head charge for a visit to a stately home where all we wanted was the garden walk, we returned to Llanfairfechan for ice cream and a stroll along the promenade. For once, no rain and no wind.
A little while before leaving for the overnight stop before the Holyhead ferry on Sunday, we received a call from the hotel: ‘Sorry, we have overbooked you and you are offloaded onto the Travelodge’. The booking was made three months ago, expressly to have an evening in Bangor at the Bryn Mor hotel on the sea front, however, it turned out that it wasn’t such bad news after all. Although the Travelodge was all right for a one-night stopover, there with no food outlet, so we took advantage of the Bryn Mor’s guilty offer of a complimentary meal. If being sat alongside a coach tour of noisy drinkers from Liverpool wasn’t bad enough, the fish and chips was so awful that we both reckoned to be the worst meal we had eaten in a restaurant. Terrible. Back to the Travelodge, with dogs in the corridor and giants’ nocturnal stomping on the flimsily constructed ceilings. Earlier, we visited the October exchange-house in Llanfairfechan, a few miles east of Bangor, a house alarmingly but spectacularly built on the side of the beginning of the soaring Snowdonia National Park.
Day Two Sunday. Bangor–Holyhead–Dublin–Crecora/Manister
Splashing out on Club Class proved to be correct, from the priority boarding to the booked seats facing the front and the complimentary finger food. Crossing at 10.40 took two hours and a quarter, with nary a wave-bump, and soon we were on the motorway to Limerick and the House-With-No-Address. I had managed to eke out the address from our fellow exchanger via the boat’s Wi-Fi and WhatsApp, but with no street number, no postcode and no house name, it was bit concerning. The seven-bedroom house sits in a very rural area south of Limerick, which is only 20-minutes’ drive but a world away.
Day Three Monday. Adare–Croom–Crecora
Disused Church
First irritation of the day is that my iPhone external keyboard will not work, although it did when I tested it at home, two days earlier. Took a short drive for orientation to the ‘Prettiest village in Ireland’: Adare. Discovered that there is no safe walking from the house, but we did amble down a cul-de-sac lane to a disused church, but pretty boring, ten minutes out, ten minutes back. I wasn’t game to walk along narrow, winding roads along which vehicles speed at 50 mph. Also, there are no footpaths as in England; a major disappointment. Crap sleep.
Day Four Tuesday. Limerick
Castle Street from the Battlements
Limerick is slow-paced and pleasant, and that feeling was to extend and deepen as the days went by. We visited King John’s (the one forced to sign Magna Carta) Norman castle built in 1210 by him to help subdue the Irish. Also saw the stone believed to have been rested on in order to sign the Treaty of Limerick in 1691 which helped to secure the English throne for Protestant succession. Very enjoyable, and I also liked Thomond Bridge where a siege was set up by Irish rebels against the British, called the Limerick Soviet and lasting for 12 days in 1919. In the evening, the first of the arguments developed on how to play the DVD, thoughtfully placed by the house-owner on video through, yes, you’ve guessed it, WhatsApp
Day Five Wednesday. Adare Got my pension from Oz as usual with three ticks on an app that moves any currency into any other. You have to trust thousands of pounds to something you cannot ‘see’ and people you will never meet, but it avoids the tiresome procedures that British banks wield against anyone moving their own money in and out of what should be publicly owned institutions. Lunch at Adare. Walked up and down the cul-de-sac again. Yawn.
Day Six Thursday. Cliffs of Moer–The Burren
The Burren
An early departure at 8.45 got us to the Cliffs of Moer in 90 minutes, where there were only seven coaches in the car park. The steep paths difficult for Suzanne. When I struck out on my own on the cliff path, there were just too many trippers to enjoy it as a nature visit, especially with people climbing over slate fences onto the dangerous margins of the cliff face. Stupid. After an hour there were thirteen coaches in the car park. After that, the best bit of the day was the excavated hillfort (there are 45,000 in Ireland) showing life in the country in pre-Christian time. In particular was an elderberry bush that had grown out of a break in the drystone wall; apparently it was left that way and the wall not repaired because elderberry had magical powers of saving you from bad things, or something like that. The Burren is quite spectacular, devoid of soil, vegetation, only heaps of stepped rock, at one time anyone’s for the taking as building material. At the Neolithic standing-stone called the Poulanbrone Tomb, we saw further Pagan evidence. There are stern warnings not to pick flowers because of the delicate environmental balance, but there you are, an American was ostentatiously and painstakingly taking posed pictures of his wife, while their son put wildflowers into her hand. Pagan enough?
Day Seven Friday. Ennis–Bunratty–Quin
Franciscan Friary, Quin
As a consequence of another dreadful night’s sleep for me, owing to rain battering on the Velux, I have moved again, having now slept in three bedrooms. Ennis, county town of Co. Clare is further confirmation of the delicious, slow pace of Irish country life. At Bunrattty Castle, we eschewed the €17 a head entrance to the castle and ‘folk garden’, especially when we saw another coachload of odd fogeys piling in. At Quin, the Franciscan Friary remains were lovely, with swifts darting in out and around the tower. A victim of the 1520s Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII, it was quite lovely, with a little cloister allowing shafts of rain-interrupted light. I walked almost around the whole thing, inhaling a warmish day beside a brook with water-meadow approaches.
Day Eight Saturday. Limerick
‘Now, where is that wire?’
Minor disaster, as the power to the electrical sockets had gone off in the night, and that spawned frantic calls to the house-exchangers in Ampthill but they would not answer and we had to ask a neighbour to go down and bang on their/our door. All fixed, eventually, by dint of the arrival of Pat, their electrician-neighbour who did the business but not before he alarmed us by balancing on the arms of a wooden chair to get at the fuse box. In the interim, we bypassed a visit to the RC cathedral [remember the Prod one, earlier on]? because of a funeral, and a dirty great one with hundreds of cars. While Suzanne sat in a Lebanese café, I walked to O’Connell Street, discovered the Apple reseller, O’Mahony’s bookshop and a neo-Romanesque Augustinian church built there in 1942, now in the middle of a shopping area. But the big find of the day was a charge point for the Prius, and free at that. According to the attendant ‘They were going to charge for it, but hadn’t got around to it’, and in answer to my statement that we would be parked more than the time it would take to complete the charge: ‘We close at 6. I don’t care if you are there all day.’ And so we got 65 km’s-worth for free.
Day Nine Sunday. Limerick
Rain prevented the original plan now pushed to Day Eleven, so we went to the Limerick Art Gallery by Pery Square. On view were only paintings by Mary Swanzy and Robert Ryan, not too bad but not too good either. I walked for a bit, enjoying a growing appreciation for the slow, quiet life that this town of 84,000 people exudes, at least for me, and has swamped my feeling last week that ten days is too much, and ‘I want to go home’. Bought a Sunday Timesbelieving it to be Irish, but sadly it was British and Murdoch’s.
Day Ten Monday. Limerick
The Hunt, Limerick
We tried to do another country tour but gave up in the face of torrential rain, although it turned out nice later in order to mock us. To the city’s Hunt museum we went, near which the same car park afforded us another 25 km of free electricity. The exhibition of Sir John Lavery (1856-1941) and Walter Osborne (1859-1903) Osborne was tacky. Came home and now I am doing this. Which reminds me: I have read Storm and Steelby Ernst Jünger with great pleasure and am now on Ali Smith’s second of her season quartet,Winter. They are, of course, real, second-hand paperbacks, but my other reading is via the great cloud in the sky: New Statesmanand The London Review of Books.
Day Eleven Tuesday. Cleaning up – Glenstal Abbey – Killaloe – Mountshannon – Graves of the Leinstermen–Killaloe – Lough Derg
Killaloe Cathedral
Another fine sleep! Cleaning up took very little time but the knowledge that it is doneis the trick of it. A tour to Lough Derg through three counties was pleasant enough but didn’t actually see the graves of the Leinstermen, as there was poor signage on top of the mountain and Suzanne was again, as yesterday, thwarted in her bid to sail the ten minutes to the Holy Isle. The Prod cathedral in Killaloe was impressive inside, with a tall Celtic cross and Romanesque door. Lunch was a cup of machine coffee and a biscuit at the rather nice tourist office, beside which a much-needed public toilet swallowed my 30 cents and refused to open; a little later the lough benefited from my contribution. Another unruffled (almost) not straining for world records, and it did not rain on our parade until we had reached home and shelter.
Day Twelve Wednesday. Dublin
Similar to the accommodation let-down on Day One, a 7.15 a.m. text message informed us that our 1.50 p.m. ferry was cancelled and would we like to leave at 9 that night, getting in to Holyhead gone midnight. Wonderful. All because the weather had prevented our smaller, faster ferry from sailing and the bigger Ulysses could better cleave the Irish Sea. We opted to leave the crossing until 8.05 Thursday morning; with hindsight a bad decision. Staying in a horrible and overpriced Dublin B&B overnight almost ruined our holiday, but we did manage a pleasant hour or so at Dublin’s National Gallery of Ireland and had a fine evening meal, drowning our sorrows with two bottles of Sauvignon – yes that’s right, one each.
Day Thirteen Thursday. Dublin–Holyhead–Ampthill Sailed and drove all day to reach home after 5, a draining, door-to-door journey of ten and a half hours. My unbalanced dosha now correcting by drawing on reassuring familiarity – home.
She had passed away in a nursing home on Saturday 8 June a few weeks after her 92ndbirthday. Lily was my last aunt or uncle. Well, there were only three to begin with.
Yesterday the 20th, we drove the 177 miles to Bury leaving at six in the morning getting to the funeral director’s just in time to be second car following the hearse. Through the busy streets of Bury the route took us past Uncle Jack’s old house in Bell lane and a few seconds later past Lily’s in Bond Street, in which she had lived the last 40 years of her life. (Both these houses are owned by the council.) At one point as passed, a man walking a dog crossed himself. Our gentle procession left Bury for Radcliffe – broken only by having to give way to the siren and flashing of a fire engine – to get us to the crematorium and some fifty other mourners, including my sister and cousin. Since she was a lifelong non-practising Catholic it was a non-denominational service led by a beautifully-spoken Scottish humanist celebrant, who read out the eulogy written by Lily’s close friend, a local Conservative councillor (but I don’t hold that against her). The Lord’s Prayer did manage to get in somewhere. I also said a few nervous words ‘representing the Yates’ and declaimed Henley’s ‘Invictus’ as typical of Lily’s own indominable persona; I had read the same poem at Dad’s funeral.
What you have to know about her is that despite her mother dying when she was a child, her first husband in 1948 a bad lot, her second man (Uncle Jack) no better, never having owned her own house, occupation barrow girl, predeceased by son Christopher with schizophrenia so bad that he had been in a secure unit for it when he died age 53, despite all that she was an energetic leading light in charitable movements for the mentally ill and their carers. For this she was awarded the MBE in 2007 and one of the highlights of my life was being with Lily at Buckingham Palace when the Queen pinned the gong on her. Lily lit up any room she entered; she was one of the loveliest human beings I have known, and I loved calling her ‘aunty’.
Afterwards, at Elton Liberal Club’s Sinatra bar (how she loved Frank!) we handful of cousin-survivors from Mum and Dad’s marriage gathered. There were never cousins on Mum’s side but from Dad’s only sister came Joanne who lives and works in Melbourne, and Melanie, sisters of John who died two years ago, age 48. So, aside from a couple of spouses (no disrespect) there were three of us present, in age order: Chris, Amanda and Melanie. Thin pickings when you compare with other families.
(Our day had not finished. On getting back in the late afternoon, I received am email from a good friend to say that his 44-year-old-son had that morning been killed in a car accident. Grief upon grief.)
Chris Yates 