Venice 8th October
We've been here 24 fun-packed hours, the city is banging, charged up by the huge cruise ships which loom over the skyline towards the west and disgorge thousands of tourists every day, mostly American. It's a VERY long time since I was here (1962 I think) and it's cleaned up a bit but now must offer the most concentrated selection of shops selling decorated masks in the world. The nicest bits (apart from the stupendous palazzi, the cheerful boats on the shimmering water, the tiered footbridges and the carved stone) are the dead-end alleys and domestic courtyards. It is all stunningly beautiful and impossible to see more than a tiny fraction of things in any given amount of time. This is a great time of year to come, with damp foggy mornings (mesmerisingly beautiful to look at), and then warm sunny afternoons and musky hot evenings where eating out on the street is very attractive.
One great innovation is the liberal display of street names or arrow-based route guides, some of which are (amusingly) hijacked by shop owners who want to divert you past their windows, so you think you are going to (say) Piazza San Marco but you end up somewhere else instead.
During supper last night we struck up (as the saying goes) a conversation with two Londoners, David and Albert, who've been coming here for a week every spring and autumn since the early 1970s, always staying in the same hotel, eating every meal in the same resto, outliving the management of both hotel and cafe in fact, several times, because it suits them. Very constant.
Our camping is small and quiet-ish, very near a bus route into the city, and also near the conference centre which I'll be at for the next 2 days. Access to the site is precarious due to horrendous roadworks, all carried out with great Italian verve and completeness so that pavements, road, signs, fences, everything has been torn down and jumbled together in a sort of local chaos. Even the campsite management are unable to fully describe how we should reach the bus stop. We take our life in our hands when we walk out to the road.
We went into the Guggenheim museum this afternoon, what a treat, full of works she mostly had bought from the artists directly – the Futurists, Dali, Man Ray, Leger, Klee, Picasso naturally, Picabia, Antoine Pevsner, Miro, Mondrian, Malevich, Magritte, Giacometti, Kandinsky, Chagall, all, all the great names of the 20th century and then they've added a few more. We absolutely LOVED the Anish Kapoor in the garden, a big slab of black granite with two dish shaped polished out of one side, equal in size and slightly overlapping. These dents are like mirrors and give you a terrifying experience of seeing yourself magnified as you approach the stone, so that at one point you are forced to stop as your reflection apparently leaps out to meet you. A trio of young and happy German women sat on a bench beside this, watching the sequence of people like ourselves, all reacting in different ways...they understood this behaviour was as much a part of the art work as the stone itself. Wonderful.
Then a vaporetto (no 1) grinding its way back to the Roma (where we catch our bus back to Mestre and the camping)....in full glorious light, the boat crowded with schoolkids and commuters and tourists and grumpy old people, and on the water dozens of gondolas and water-taxis and boats carrying workmen and their stuff... all bobbing about and jostling for clear water.
Impossible to describe it all (and really you should come and see for yourself).
I just want to add a word about Como where we stayed on Tuesday night – a centre for luxury and brilliant design, not cheap but a feast for the eyes everywhere you look. We ate a light supper in a tulip shop – what they described as a pre-dinner snack but exquisitely presented in an antique building roughly and thoughtfully revealed and restored, with white painted walls and timbers, casually arranged bucket and bouquets everywhere, loads of things available to buy.... they neglected no chance to offer a spending opportunity to visitors and all so artless and subtle and accessible. Fantastic.
I'm sitting here now under the poplars with huge leaves falling to ground every few moments, and soft dusk light filling in the spaces between the trees. We're waiting for a friend who's flying in from London...her plane is delayed 45 mins so we have some extra time. Not sure whether to arrange to eat here or take her straight to the city. I can hear the end of the works outside on the road, and a factory hooter, and some dogs barking somewhere... It's very peaceful and calm.
The holiday has gone v fast...we've done about 1000 miles so far and have to race back the minute the conference is over, to make our crossing from Dunkerque on Monday evening. Texting friends in England has been fun, too, a sort of pepper-and-salt for the daily experience. I wish, sometimes, I could have all my friends with me on trips like this. When I am a multizillionaire I think I'll start buying ludicrously difficult modern art, put it all in a fab building in a faraway place, and then open the doors to see who comes. S Beckett told Peggy Guggenheim to only buy living artists' work. Our friend Alex in Lausanne would probably not agree with this, as he has a fantastic collection of art mostly created before 1750, but I think I can't afford that sort of thing. Yet.
Thursday 8 October 2009
Sunday 4 October 2009
Contrasts
When Caeser wrote the history of his wars against the Gauls, he described Vesontio in some detail - a settlement inside a deep loop of a river - about a kilometre wide, and with hills and mountains to one side and rich plains to the other. The name Vesontio transformed itself into Besancon,(cedilla on the c).
It seems to have been very rich for a very long time, with an amazing collection of wonderful building still in daily use dating from the 15th and 16th centuries, rather like Oxford, with cloisters and courtyards and hidden spaces. From the middle ages it had hospitals and refuges for women, children, the sick, and the poor and a vivid tradition of taking care of its people, so there are numerous public fountains, with elegant sculptural adornments. It claims to have the oldest public art collection in France. This may be true, but we have noticed several places such as Dijon where claims are made about public art.
It must be hard being in charge of building up a public collection, as your personal taste or judgement may be harshly judged in the future. These collections are historically formed out of the personal collections of some rich individuals by bequest, but here in Besancon there are some striking features. There are a lot of pictures of women being safe, doing safe things.... minding children, holding dishes, weaving, etc. There is also a picture from the late 18th c of a child (boy? girl?) holding a whip over a prostrate puppet...the picture is called 'Gratuite, obligatoire', very sinister. And another nasty piece called La Somnabuliste or something like that...a very gothic image, not Fantin-Latour (I think) but a horrid vision of femininity, dark and threatening.
This morning, disdaining breakfast costing 8 euros in the otherwise excellent Hotel Granvelle, we ate at a cafe round the corner for half the price and there on the wall was a poster/calendar of a naked girl lying on a scaled-up plate of spaghetti in a rolling landscape. Woman as food. How safe is that?
So, in this wonderful old place I am left with the feeling that they have a fine history of public maintenance but they have been terrified of their women, and still are, maybe.
It seems to have been very rich for a very long time, with an amazing collection of wonderful building still in daily use dating from the 15th and 16th centuries, rather like Oxford, with cloisters and courtyards and hidden spaces. From the middle ages it had hospitals and refuges for women, children, the sick, and the poor and a vivid tradition of taking care of its people, so there are numerous public fountains, with elegant sculptural adornments. It claims to have the oldest public art collection in France. This may be true, but we have noticed several places such as Dijon where claims are made about public art.
It must be hard being in charge of building up a public collection, as your personal taste or judgement may be harshly judged in the future. These collections are historically formed out of the personal collections of some rich individuals by bequest, but here in Besancon there are some striking features. There are a lot of pictures of women being safe, doing safe things.... minding children, holding dishes, weaving, etc. There is also a picture from the late 18th c of a child (boy? girl?) holding a whip over a prostrate puppet...the picture is called 'Gratuite, obligatoire', very sinister. And another nasty piece called La Somnabuliste or something like that...a very gothic image, not Fantin-Latour (I think) but a horrid vision of femininity, dark and threatening.
This morning, disdaining breakfast costing 8 euros in the otherwise excellent Hotel Granvelle, we ate at a cafe round the corner for half the price and there on the wall was a poster/calendar of a naked girl lying on a scaled-up plate of spaghetti in a rolling landscape. Woman as food. How safe is that?
So, in this wonderful old place I am left with the feeling that they have a fine history of public maintenance but they have been terrified of their women, and still are, maybe.
Some of the ways in which France is different,
It's a huge place. You drive for days, literally, and you still haven't covered quarter of it. The landscape arrives in huge swathes, and the occasional district of small fields and woods suddenly reminds you how tiny England is.
They have had a love-affair with concrete for decades, painted or more usually bare, so it forms the skins of their houses, their walls, fences, telegraph poles, bridges, road signs, lamp-posts, everything.
They still believe in family life and little children walk along holding their parents' hands, and it's normal to see the whole family out for a stroll, any time.
Everything stops about midday for lunch. You can park for free in any city centre from 12 - 2 because the whole world is having lunch.
When you go into a small shop, whether you know anyone there or not, you say 'Bon jour messieurs, mesdames!' and when you leave you say 'Au revoir'.
At about 7 in the evening, or when it gets dark, or before that, everyone goes into their houses and shuts the shutters and that's it. All street life ceases.
When you choose meat in a resto, and they ask how you want it cooked, always choose 'saignant' or very lightly cooked. All Frenchmen know that cooking meat 'well' means it goes tough, and only the English ask for it 'bien cuit'. They do not care if your meat is inedibly tough as you are an English person.
The French often have much longer to stand and chat than English people do at home. You can talk endlessly about very little - the weather, madame's dog, the local food, the rise of the euro, whatever you like - as long as you pronounce it properly. For the French, conversation itself is endless fascinating, an art form.
In any town or city it is worth seeking out the Musee des Beaux Artes, or d'Archaeologie, as these places are very well-funded and the exhibits are brilliantly presented and very educational.
Looking for a meal, we all know - follow the lorry drivers... the plat is always good value, and unlike in England, the cheapest thing is often the best.
The French label all their rivers as you drive over them, an excellent idea.
They also have wonderful cultural road signs in brown or shades of brown...telling you of the local sights and heritage. We should do this in England too.
They have had a love-affair with concrete for decades, painted or more usually bare, so it forms the skins of their houses, their walls, fences, telegraph poles, bridges, road signs, lamp-posts, everything.
They still believe in family life and little children walk along holding their parents' hands, and it's normal to see the whole family out for a stroll, any time.
Everything stops about midday for lunch. You can park for free in any city centre from 12 - 2 because the whole world is having lunch.
When you go into a small shop, whether you know anyone there or not, you say 'Bon jour messieurs, mesdames!' and when you leave you say 'Au revoir'.
At about 7 in the evening, or when it gets dark, or before that, everyone goes into their houses and shuts the shutters and that's it. All street life ceases.
When you choose meat in a resto, and they ask how you want it cooked, always choose 'saignant' or very lightly cooked. All Frenchmen know that cooking meat 'well' means it goes tough, and only the English ask for it 'bien cuit'. They do not care if your meat is inedibly tough as you are an English person.
The French often have much longer to stand and chat than English people do at home. You can talk endlessly about very little - the weather, madame's dog, the local food, the rise of the euro, whatever you like - as long as you pronounce it properly. For the French, conversation itself is endless fascinating, an art form.
In any town or city it is worth seeking out the Musee des Beaux Artes, or d'Archaeologie, as these places are very well-funded and the exhibits are brilliantly presented and very educational.
Looking for a meal, we all know - follow the lorry drivers... the plat is always good value, and unlike in England, the cheapest thing is often the best.
The French label all their rivers as you drive over them, an excellent idea.
They also have wonderful cultural road signs in brown or shades of brown...telling you of the local sights and heritage. We should do this in England too.
Saturday 3 October 2009
Dijon
Dijon
I'm writing at the end of a day wandering round Dijon... a lovely place, very lively and full of young people thronging the antique streets. Yesterday (Friday) we spent a day driving gently south from Chalon, had a picnic by a canal, saw a menhir (at la Haute Borne) which was tightly railed in to prevent the farmer from knocking it down..whoever did the negotiations obviously drove a hard bargain as there is barely a foot around it. It is quite something, limestone and eroded, it may have been much taller when put into place. In England one would associate this with stone age or maybe bronze age people, but here it is labelled Gallo-Romain, so who knows?
We arrived at Dijon in the late afternoon. Again the campsite is now surrounded by roads, rail, etc. but has the most marvellous collection of different trees of all kinds. Lots of bean trees, pines, things I have never seen. They are mostly losing their leaves so we get lots of crunch underfoot.
Sadly no WiFi as in the last place, though the man in the accueil says we can get it if we sit on the ground outside the cafe, which is now shut, but claims to be a hotspot.
A couple checking in at the same time as us asked us to go and play cards with them later...in the event our supper was too late and I was too tired but I was relieved at this, wondering if they were in fact professional wandering cardsharps. Silly.
We walked out of the site to the nearest local supermarket – an old-fashione shop by modern French standards, with relatively little choice. It was a Spar in a slightly tatty district and just as in so many English supermarkets there was a child being smacked by its very young harrassed mother, and wailing for a while afterwards.
Still we got a few bits and bobs and came home to the tent to make a shrimp risotto, with a salad including our own home-grown tomatoes. Very nice too.
Then bed – and oh, it got cold. Down to 5 degrees. Cold noses, cold anything not buried in duvet or rugs.
And explosions – really loud bangs, presumably fireworks though we saw no flashes. And being so near the railway we had goods trains passing all night.... so not restful, but somehow an adventure and we got up this morning in good humour. It turns out you can make v good toast using a heat-spreader if you move the slice of bread about a bit.
The bus into Dijon leaves from very near the site, costs one euro and is a modern bendybus. Once in Dijon you can use the free navettes which whizz around, so access is easy. The town is great fun, wooden and stone buildings, lots of pride, history, carving, statues, huge churches, a palace or two, lots of shops, hustle and bustle and masses of young people. We did a bit of a walking tour, went into les Halles (huge cast-iron covered market), bought fruit and spinach for supper tonight. I bought a long cardigan, we had lunch in Cafe Kent which was thronging with locals, went to the Musee d'Archaeology, the Musee des Beaux Arts, the cathedral, etc etc etc. Wonderful expensive medieval architecture, crypts, tombs, church organs, etc. Bought a new card for the camera as I had somehow inadvertently put the file size to 8Mb which meant I filled it up without realising, dammit.
At lunch, Andrew told me he's invented a new pudding, called Boue Meringue, with some sort of chocolately sauce... which comes back to you.
Wearily back to the campsite, quite tired. I fear this is not a very interesting blog, because I am so tired, but I am soaking up the sounds and sights and we are having a lot of laughs. My dreams are also interesting: arranging a rendezvous for all my schoolmates at my granny's house, but fixing no food and making 2 of them do a radio interview against their will. Now, bugger it, I've forgotten the other two which were really good. I will try to recall them, but this is a very interesting area of fragile memory.... at one moment they are clearly held in the mind, and then pouf! gone!
Now I will go and try to load this sitting on the ground outside the shut cafe.
Aha! it works!
I'm writing at the end of a day wandering round Dijon... a lovely place, very lively and full of young people thronging the antique streets. Yesterday (Friday) we spent a day driving gently south from Chalon, had a picnic by a canal, saw a menhir (at la Haute Borne) which was tightly railed in to prevent the farmer from knocking it down..whoever did the negotiations obviously drove a hard bargain as there is barely a foot around it. It is quite something, limestone and eroded, it may have been much taller when put into place. In England one would associate this with stone age or maybe bronze age people, but here it is labelled Gallo-Romain, so who knows?
We arrived at Dijon in the late afternoon. Again the campsite is now surrounded by roads, rail, etc. but has the most marvellous collection of different trees of all kinds. Lots of bean trees, pines, things I have never seen. They are mostly losing their leaves so we get lots of crunch underfoot.
Sadly no WiFi as in the last place, though the man in the accueil says we can get it if we sit on the ground outside the cafe, which is now shut, but claims to be a hotspot.
A couple checking in at the same time as us asked us to go and play cards with them later...in the event our supper was too late and I was too tired but I was relieved at this, wondering if they were in fact professional wandering cardsharps. Silly.
We walked out of the site to the nearest local supermarket – an old-fashione shop by modern French standards, with relatively little choice. It was a Spar in a slightly tatty district and just as in so many English supermarkets there was a child being smacked by its very young harrassed mother, and wailing for a while afterwards.
Still we got a few bits and bobs and came home to the tent to make a shrimp risotto, with a salad including our own home-grown tomatoes. Very nice too.
Then bed – and oh, it got cold. Down to 5 degrees. Cold noses, cold anything not buried in duvet or rugs.
And explosions – really loud bangs, presumably fireworks though we saw no flashes. And being so near the railway we had goods trains passing all night.... so not restful, but somehow an adventure and we got up this morning in good humour. It turns out you can make v good toast using a heat-spreader if you move the slice of bread about a bit.
The bus into Dijon leaves from very near the site, costs one euro and is a modern bendybus. Once in Dijon you can use the free navettes which whizz around, so access is easy. The town is great fun, wooden and stone buildings, lots of pride, history, carving, statues, huge churches, a palace or two, lots of shops, hustle and bustle and masses of young people. We did a bit of a walking tour, went into les Halles (huge cast-iron covered market), bought fruit and spinach for supper tonight. I bought a long cardigan, we had lunch in Cafe Kent which was thronging with locals, went to the Musee d'Archaeology, the Musee des Beaux Arts, the cathedral, etc etc etc. Wonderful expensive medieval architecture, crypts, tombs, church organs, etc. Bought a new card for the camera as I had somehow inadvertently put the file size to 8Mb which meant I filled it up without realising, dammit.
At lunch, Andrew told me he's invented a new pudding, called Boue Meringue, with some sort of chocolately sauce... which comes back to you.
Wearily back to the campsite, quite tired. I fear this is not a very interesting blog, because I am so tired, but I am soaking up the sounds and sights and we are having a lot of laughs. My dreams are also interesting: arranging a rendezvous for all my schoolmates at my granny's house, but fixing no food and making 2 of them do a radio interview against their will. Now, bugger it, I've forgotten the other two which were really good. I will try to recall them, but this is a very interesting area of fragile memory.... at one moment they are clearly held in the mind, and then pouf! gone!
Now I will go and try to load this sitting on the ground outside the shut cafe.
Aha! it works!
Thursday 1 October 2009
Citadel and Municipality
Day two. We passed this last night at Chalon en Champagne, in a municipal campsite which must have been created in a rural setting but is now surrounded by fast roads. suburban houses and hypermarkets – a bit depressing on arrival but with such superb facilities and service that we are enjoying it. The sun is coming up as I write. I bought two foaming coffees from the booth across the pathway half an hour ago. Four small mosquito bites in the night (we didn't zip the 'bedroom' curtain into place last night) and two daddy-long-legs ejected before went to sleep. Magpies chattering in the plane trees, and some distant woodpigeons. This site has a lake apparently, but as it's the end of the season, it's been locked off along with most of the pitches, so we are all huddled near the gates, loos, etc. Freezing a water bottle for our coolbox was gratuit.
Andrew has just put on one of his recent charity shop buys – a huge pale grey sweater. He says it's 10 degrees outside now, and already warmer than an hour or so ago. At night he feels the cold more than I do, so he had extra sleeping bag and blanket layers on him in the night,
I must mention Reims, where we did not stop, but where we saw a new tramsystem being installed. Gaston and his wheelbarrow had some help for this project – the whole of the Roman road entry to the city has been dug up and they are installing this wonderful service, all with European money no doubt. Why can't our towns have these upgrades?
Our main discovery was the citadel town of Laon. A few years ago I was very tempted by the online chance of buying a lovely old warehouse in the town very cheaply but it seemed so far away and irrelevant. Now I wish I had at least come to do a recce, as the place is magic. A great block of (presumably) limestone rises out of the huge Picardy plain, and on it is a vast church with myriad towers and columns and twiddly bits – not exactly Gothic but almost Classical in style, very odd and interesting. Once you get closer to look at it you can see it is halfway between Romanesque and Gothick, what they call Transitional, but – my word – it is gorgeous. The town itself is polished and cleaned up, with one-way systems for the traffic and lots of antique shops and architectural practices specialising in conservation. The view from the terrace road around the top is spectacular. There is also an ingenious and very funny funicular system between the top and the railway station down at the bottom with a single wagon whooshing along a track every two and a half minutes, costing 1.10 euros single or return and excellent value.
OK – today we are heading for Beaune, I think.
Had a shower - whoosh! Lots of hot water and a well-designed cubicle with somewhere to hang your dry stuff.
Had breakfast, chatted to various English - all in caravans and heading home. All say it is much warmer down south.
Was thinking about my shower on Tuesday morning...it was at the headquarters of the Boy Scouts Association at Gidwell Park, where I went on an overnight course. The house is lovely, white, historic, Georgian, set in 200 acres of woodland and camping fields. There are modern additions for conferences etc. and we were allocated to the old part of the house for our accommodation and workrooms. How lovely.... especially the so-called crinoline staircase, the alcoves, mouldings and elegant rooms. The paintings are amazing, mostly showing beautiful young boys in scout uniform in various casual-but-purposeful poses: talking earnestly to a starving child whose mother is trying to earn money making paper flowers, poring over a map with friends also in uniform, interviewing a nervous but upright scout-candidate while adopting a lordly posture and with a Union Jack draped prominently in the corner (this was exhibited at the RA in 1914 so presumably most if not all the boy models were wiped out before a further 4 years had passed). All these paintings which are beautifully painted, are by E Stafford Carlos, who might, these days, be nervous about his constant subject matter - lovely blond boys in knee-high socks and lace-up shoes and with keen dedicated faces. How odd that in this liberated age we should still have these fears. When the paintings were made, quite likely no-one stopped to question any of it.
Anyway,back to the shower... The wonderful thing about it was that the water-part was held to the wall by a magnet, so it could be easily moved. The room was comfortable, reinstated as a proper chamber having once been divided into booths. Being in the old part of the house, the corridor outside was a shambles of doors, steps up, steps down, corners, angles, more of all of those... Fawlty Towers is by no means the only place with such mad architecture.
We had a lovely time there, including a session on the High Ropes, in which exercise I did not do very well, only reaching the third hanging pole while others scaled to the 30? 40? foot dangling contraption. (Though I did well on the written test). Luckily, on a camping holiday the only ropes I have to worry about are the guyropes, only one in this case, tied to little tree, as the weather though autumnal and cooling, is very calm and mild.
Camping first day (bloody French keyboards)
Wednesday's Times (30th sept, p 19) said customers in a china shop in lavenham were surprised when a woman (described as being 15 stone) fell through a skylight into the shop, onto a table dispay. She had stepped out of her flat upstairs onto some sort of ledge or balcony for a fag. This kind of thing is less rare than you might think. Last Sunday while we took our daughter Lucie out to supper in Finchley, a similar accident took place at her flat. Some people in the apartment upstairs had been drinking when their guest went out for a pizza. Coming back without a key and unable to wake them from their torpor he decided (of course) that the best thing to do was to climb up the back of the building to get in. It was pitch dark and he was carrying pizza, so he did well to get up above the glass roof covering the groundfloor patio (outside my daughter's room). However he fell through the glass and who knows how badly injured. When we came back from supper the ambulance was there and a crowd of coppers. We had to wait to get our car out while they patched him up for the journey to hospital. My daughter and her flatmate were left with blood, broken glass, smashed patio furniture and shock. So, beware people falling through your ceiling.
Here we are in fine autumn weather east of Arras, at the beginning of a long week's camping holiday heading down to Venice for the Juice Plus conference. Norfolk Line crossings are excellent, business like, calm, etc. First call for me in France was to take some photos in the bizarre chemical/industrial landscape just east of Dunkerque, in a place called la Grande Synthe. You have to keep heading for the back road near the sea, crossing unmanned level crossings, and going through this mad area which has tiny farmhouses and willows and harvested fields on one side, and huge steel furnaces, flares, spheres, retorts, fences, stacks, flues, hoppers, tanks and spoil heaps on the other. To your left is the old history of northern France – land reclaimed from the sea, feudal farms, peasantry, obsessive care of the terroir, then wars and rebuilding. To your right is newer France – chemical industry, huge-scale metal working and aggregates, massive lorry-loads of materials, filthy air, brown smoke, stinks, nausea, and this absolutely fantastic landscape. Then, as you drive away, it all goes back to quaint, pretty, orderly farming again.
One field very amusing... the onion harvest had been made, and all and sundry had arrived to glean the leftovers. We saw cars driving as fast as possible into the field and people scurrying around snatching up the left-over onions.
Tuesday 16 June 2009
The man walking in the river
When we walked along the towpath towards the Paper Mill Lock, we were very surprised to see something never seen before. You know already what it is from the title of this essay. We saw a man walking steadily along in the middle of the river, downstream as it happened. Immediately what came to my mind was the Betjeman poem about Matthew Webb, the Dawley man, who went swimming along the old canal which carries the bricks to Bawley (not sure of the spelling at this precise moment).
This man was about 50, maybe, and slightly bearded and solemn and steady. He had a short haircut and was wearing some sort of special clothing with an inflated patch across his shoulders - some sort of life-saving device, I suppose.
It seemed so extraordinary. It looked almost medieval, or even mythic. I don't think I have ever seen such a thing, so solemn and so unexpected. Here we were in the middle of open countryside, with tall ashtrees and willows along the banks, and the river running bright and clear, and quite deep too I guess, but with a man processing very vertically through the water right down the middle of the stream. He did not look as if he were trying to swim, or was lost, or had fallen from a boat.
A group of people further along on the bank were talking to him.
We said 'Are you alright?'
'Yes' he said.
'What are you doing?'
"Training dogs.'
We listened as he explained to the others. There is a group called Lowland Search and Rescue who use dogs to track and trace missing people. These dogs need to know how to find people who may have fallen into the water and he was setting a scent for them. We said we thought water was the way to put dogs off the scent.
'No,' he said. 'They can find a person even in deep water. The main scent from people comes from the oil in their hair, so I am letting some of my hair scent get into the water like this.....' and he wetted his head and then trailed his hands into the water again.
He said "The police in Essex don't like us much because we are volunteers' (can this be true? maybe I misheard). 'We found two people recently - one was a young black guy, you remember?' He thought we were local. We did not remember. 'And one was a young girl, committed suicide. Very sad'.
We all stood in silence.
'But mostly, it's for Alzheimer's people. They go for a walk, maybe in the woods, then they get lost, and we help find them.'
We walked on and later found not one but two of the young dogs in training. The first, called Indiana, is owned by a German lady who loves living in England and works in a care home. She let us take a picture of the two of them. The other dog is called Folly, owned by a local guy called Richard. These two had met at dog training classes. Folly was more experienced than Indiana, and very hyped up, waiting for his turn.
When we met them again later, we learned that they had each found David - the man walking in the water - quite easily. The dogs had signalled with their barks where he had gone into the water. Then much further along the banks they had been able to pinpoint his hiding place to within a couple of feet.
It seemed absolutely amazing that the dogs could focus in on the right scent, with so many people - probably dozens within the space of an hour or so - passing by while David was walking in the river, and distracting smells from horses and other dogs. They can do this work without being given any kind of object to work from.
These two young dogs are to be tested soon, so their training was timely. Both are Belgian Shepherds - like our Alsations in some ways, but lighter and smaller. All the work is voluntary.
This man was about 50, maybe, and slightly bearded and solemn and steady. He had a short haircut and was wearing some sort of special clothing with an inflated patch across his shoulders - some sort of life-saving device, I suppose.
It seemed so extraordinary. It looked almost medieval, or even mythic. I don't think I have ever seen such a thing, so solemn and so unexpected. Here we were in the middle of open countryside, with tall ashtrees and willows along the banks, and the river running bright and clear, and quite deep too I guess, but with a man processing very vertically through the water right down the middle of the stream. He did not look as if he were trying to swim, or was lost, or had fallen from a boat.
A group of people further along on the bank were talking to him.
We said 'Are you alright?'
'Yes' he said.
'What are you doing?'
"Training dogs.'
We listened as he explained to the others. There is a group called Lowland Search and Rescue who use dogs to track and trace missing people. These dogs need to know how to find people who may have fallen into the water and he was setting a scent for them. We said we thought water was the way to put dogs off the scent.
'No,' he said. 'They can find a person even in deep water. The main scent from people comes from the oil in their hair, so I am letting some of my hair scent get into the water like this.....' and he wetted his head and then trailed his hands into the water again.
He said "The police in Essex don't like us much because we are volunteers' (can this be true? maybe I misheard). 'We found two people recently - one was a young black guy, you remember?' He thought we were local. We did not remember. 'And one was a young girl, committed suicide. Very sad'.
We all stood in silence.
'But mostly, it's for Alzheimer's people. They go for a walk, maybe in the woods, then they get lost, and we help find them.'
We walked on and later found not one but two of the young dogs in training. The first, called Indiana, is owned by a German lady who loves living in England and works in a care home. She let us take a picture of the two of them. The other dog is called Folly, owned by a local guy called Richard. These two had met at dog training classes. Folly was more experienced than Indiana, and very hyped up, waiting for his turn.
When we met them again later, we learned that they had each found David - the man walking in the water - quite easily. The dogs had signalled with their barks where he had gone into the water. Then much further along the banks they had been able to pinpoint his hiding place to within a couple of feet.
It seemed absolutely amazing that the dogs could focus in on the right scent, with so many people - probably dozens within the space of an hour or so - passing by while David was walking in the river, and distracting smells from horses and other dogs. They can do this work without being given any kind of object to work from.
These two young dogs are to be tested soon, so their training was timely. Both are Belgian Shepherds - like our Alsations in some ways, but lighter and smaller. All the work is voluntary.
Monday 15 June 2009
Camping in Essex
We had three days (2 nights) camping in Essex. Brilliant weather, a very pretty part of England and a couple of small pilgrimages to make. We knew (see earlier postings) we had to check on sites before leaving home, as the ones signed on the road or in the roadmap are so depressing you'd never venture anywhere if that was your only choice.
We did in fact look at quite a few of these along the way, in case they were miraculously alright, but I can report that they are not. Someone somewhere thinks that lots of long lines of plastic boxes up on breeze-blocks, with a cheapo bar and the smell of chips wafting over, makes for a decent place to relax. It does not. Even with a spectacular view and a peaceful area, this kind of setup is poor, intrusive, insulting, hostile, ugly, and mercenary. How come the owners and the planners think this is OK? What on earth do people do in these places? How come the French and the Germans and the Italians and the Americans can get these places to look ok, and offer basic decent civilised conditions and services to their customers, and we cannot? Why does anyone stand for this?
Anyway, through diligent researches on the net (thanks mainly to the Camping and Caravanning Club) we had a list of alternatives with us... no electricity needed, but we did need a WC on site. We wanted somewhere quiet and with something going for it.... and at last we found it, as I will explain later.
Meanwhile we drove through the amazing lanes and byways of that part of Essex between the River Crouch and the Blackwater. It is a low-lying marshy peninsular, little populated but with pretty towns and villages along the way. It is not all that different from tracts of Kent where we live, but on a bigger scale, and clearly people have more money to spend in Essex than in the Jutish peninsular.
As a result, the houses are mostly done up to the nines - with railings, gates, walls, twiddles, paint, gold trim, lions, driveways, security systems, new windows, pargetting, topiary, extensions and more. Another very noticeable difference is that barns and stables and sheds belonging to old farms are not, in the main, converted to houses, so each establishment still has its appurtenances and supporting outbuildings and very handsome that is to see. In Kent, sadly, the pressure of space and money has allowed most of these lower buildings to be made into separate households, which almost always looks squashed and awkward, and is a diminishment for the main house.
But it has to be said - there is something very funny about the degree of upkeep of the Essex houses - as if the owners expected to be on telly any day now and are in readiness. They really do go in for every kind of aggrandizing embellishment, of which the gold-topped but still rather spindly railings are the silliest.
The message everyone seems to want to send is that the owners of these houses are rich, and have a lot of money, and a lot of stuff to protect and keep secure, and therefore they need all these railings and electronic gates, and even if they can't really afford much stuff inside they will make sure the outside looks as if they can.
My word, the houses are very very smart and grand. Indeed. If I were setting up as a builder, I would go and do it in Essex. I cannot imagine where all the money has come from, but I kept having images of the WAGs (wives and girlfriends of footballers) all keeping up with each other. This is not a modern phenomenon, either. As we went to the furthest outflings of the area, the number of tiny, poor, single-storey shacks and originally humble dwellings increased, even though they were mostly very 'done up'. I imagine that for a hundred years or more, enterprising youngsters made their way away from the rural poverty of their homes to London, and sent money back when they could. The nearer they were to London, the more money flowed into these old villages - and commensurately, the further from London or transport, the poorer these old communities remained. There are very few similar buildings in North Kent that I know of - I think they were cleared away long ago. It would be interesting to know more about this aspect of social history. But the architectural heritage of Essex is bold and distinct and clearly people love their houses. It is wrong of me to mock.
We had lunch in Burnham-on-Crouch, in bright sun. Fish and chips in a shed on the quay.
So - we made our way with some difficulty out to Bradwell, where there is an ancient old nuclear power station nearby. The difficulty getting there arose from the fact that a stretch of road leading to the village across the marsh farmland is apparently in private hands and closed off, without any warning, and necessitating a 15 mile detour. Silly.
The nuclear power station was not our destination. We were heading for an even more ancient powerhouse - St Peter's Chapel, out on the sea wall. This is an amazing place, one of the oldest churches in the land. It doesn't have a complicated history, but writing it down makes me almost quake to think of how long it's been there, and how things have swung around - how quickly great civilisations come and go, and how they can leave so little behind.
First we have the Romans gloomily deciding they need to defend Britannia from the menace of the Saxons - so as everyone knows they built a chain of fortresses round the south east coast - the forts of the Saxon Shore. The one they built here on this marshy spit of land may have been the one called Othona, but the name is not 100% certain. Anyway, it is described as being typically late 3rd century in style. Some of its outlines are still detectable but a large part has washed into the sea.
Roll on a couple of hundred years... The Roman history has faded away and we have Saxon England, divided into Kingdoms, and what is now Essex (East Saxons) had King Sigbert in charge who wanted to make his people Christian. He asked the Celtic Christian community at Lindisfarne right up the coast for help. They sent a missionary, an unusual man from what must have been an unusual family. He was one of 4 brothers and not only did he become a bishop and (later) a saint, but so did one of his bros - the famous St Chad. They had been part of a set of 12 Saxon lads taken on by the Celtic monks to help spread the word of God, and he was able to speak not only English but also Latin and Irish.
Cedd arrived in Essex in 653, and one year later was building this chapel right in the gateway of the ruined Roman fort - you can still see the Roman terracotta in the walls. His first church was probably made of wood but once Cedd had seen how stone could be used, he set to work, creating this tall, dark, stately and simple structure. Unusually, its diagonal measurements are identical to the inch, which is difficult to achieve and very rare, showing that he (or his chief mason) really did know what he was doing. A few tantalising fragment-details of the earliest period remain, such as a tiny piece of painted plaster, as well of course as the overall shape which is elegant and plain and very straight. There must have been a veritable village of buildings and activities round the Chapel - for the men and women who came to work there including a hospital, library, a hospital, a library, a school, an arts centre, a farm, a guest house and a mission base. From there Cedd established other Christian centres at Mersea, Tilbury, Prittlewell and Upminster. Another example is Southminster which is now a town of considerable size - much bigger than the deserted area around St Peter's. The church at Southminster (St Leonards), by the way, is a truly hilarious hodgepodge of building styles and materials, and well worth a visit. In 654 Cedd was also consecrated Bishop of Essex, but ten years later he died of plague while visiting another of his new Christian communities, at Lastingham in Yorkshire. 30 of his monks from Bradwell went to see him when they heard he was dying, and all but one caught the plague and died too. The only one to get back to Essex was a young boy. St Peter's Chapel was taken into the diocese of London and became a minster for the surrounding countryside.
No records remain from the time of the Vikings and the Danes but standing where it is, it must have suffered heavily. You can only imagine the terror, the violence, the fire, blood, book-burning and destruction. The whole site is so vulnerable.
More time passed.
The Normans arrived as conquerors, took the Chapel on, and it fell under the rule of St Valery on the Somme - a very similar landscape, as it happens.
Still it was standing there, tall and plain, out on the sea wall, and approached by the old Roman road.....all through the middle ages, through the years of plague and war, and eventually being sold into private hands and falling out of ecclesiastical use. It was used as a barn, and great holes were knocked into its sides, for entrances. By the nineteenth century it could barely have been recognisable as a church, as it was housing cattle and grain. But, of course, someone came along to love it and after extensive restoration and study, we have it today as a particularly lovely old place. The great thing is, you can definitely get a feel for what early stone churches must have been like all over the country, before denominations and dogma got in the way.
The view north from there, over the Blackwater estuary, is absolutely terrific, by the way, but the view out to sea is now ornamented (or disfigured depending on how you see these things) by windfarms etc.
We were inspired to try to get a camp-place overlooking the Blackwater, but all suitable fields are occupied by concentration-camp style Holiday Parks, and they are too dispiriting to describe any further.
We tootled on, and stopped en route at the lovely and ancient port of Maldon, where there are a lot of sailing barges such as we have at Faversham and where the very old church of St Mary's down by the quayside has lovely modern stained glass windows. One is dedicated to lads who fell during World War I, and it is a truly beautiful piece of work.
The town's parish church on the other hand, at the top of the hill, has a very curious triangular spire and the vicar who we met told us he was recently widowed and about to retire when he will move out of his astonishing Grade I listed black-and-white medieval vicarage into a council house in Suffolk. It made me think of how Cedd had faced changes in his life, too. Maldon, of course, is where they produce sea salt though we could not find any for sale in the town. And it is apparently the place where the first Tesco supermarket was built. Maybe there is a connection between these two facts.
The sun was lighting all the land with brilliant gold and we went on our way, looking for our pitch for the night. We headed inland and eventually, after some more looking, settled at a privately-owned field at Retreat Farm at Little Baddow, in the gentle and glorious valley of the Chelmer-Blackwater Navigation. That waterway is one of the gems of England and everyone should go and see it.
Built in 1790 to assist trade in and out of Chelmsford from Maldon, the Navigation offers ten miles or so of clean, clear, swiftly-flowing water, and a lock every mile. There is a well-kept old towpath, perfect for biking or riding, or push chairs, come to that. Great willows, ashes and poplars line the banks, the fields beside the water are managed as old-fashioned meadows, the birds sing their hearts out, the fish dart through the water, and all is well with the world. Paper Mill Lock offers tea and scones and boats for hire. It is truly gorgeous. The campsite was more or less perfect. We had a delicate thoroughbred horse nibbling the grass in his paddock just outside our tent, and walks and quietude and simple decent loos and showers, and the sight of hot-air balloons on the horizon. St Cedd would have been astonished to see them, and we in our own way were astonished too.... that these places DO exist, if you can find them.
We did in fact look at quite a few of these along the way, in case they were miraculously alright, but I can report that they are not. Someone somewhere thinks that lots of long lines of plastic boxes up on breeze-blocks, with a cheapo bar and the smell of chips wafting over, makes for a decent place to relax. It does not. Even with a spectacular view and a peaceful area, this kind of setup is poor, intrusive, insulting, hostile, ugly, and mercenary. How come the owners and the planners think this is OK? What on earth do people do in these places? How come the French and the Germans and the Italians and the Americans can get these places to look ok, and offer basic decent civilised conditions and services to their customers, and we cannot? Why does anyone stand for this?
Anyway, through diligent researches on the net (thanks mainly to the Camping and Caravanning Club) we had a list of alternatives with us... no electricity needed, but we did need a WC on site. We wanted somewhere quiet and with something going for it.... and at last we found it, as I will explain later.
Meanwhile we drove through the amazing lanes and byways of that part of Essex between the River Crouch and the Blackwater. It is a low-lying marshy peninsular, little populated but with pretty towns and villages along the way. It is not all that different from tracts of Kent where we live, but on a bigger scale, and clearly people have more money to spend in Essex than in the Jutish peninsular.
As a result, the houses are mostly done up to the nines - with railings, gates, walls, twiddles, paint, gold trim, lions, driveways, security systems, new windows, pargetting, topiary, extensions and more. Another very noticeable difference is that barns and stables and sheds belonging to old farms are not, in the main, converted to houses, so each establishment still has its appurtenances and supporting outbuildings and very handsome that is to see. In Kent, sadly, the pressure of space and money has allowed most of these lower buildings to be made into separate households, which almost always looks squashed and awkward, and is a diminishment for the main house.
But it has to be said - there is something very funny about the degree of upkeep of the Essex houses - as if the owners expected to be on telly any day now and are in readiness. They really do go in for every kind of aggrandizing embellishment, of which the gold-topped but still rather spindly railings are the silliest.
The message everyone seems to want to send is that the owners of these houses are rich, and have a lot of money, and a lot of stuff to protect and keep secure, and therefore they need all these railings and electronic gates, and even if they can't really afford much stuff inside they will make sure the outside looks as if they can.
My word, the houses are very very smart and grand. Indeed. If I were setting up as a builder, I would go and do it in Essex. I cannot imagine where all the money has come from, but I kept having images of the WAGs (wives and girlfriends of footballers) all keeping up with each other. This is not a modern phenomenon, either. As we went to the furthest outflings of the area, the number of tiny, poor, single-storey shacks and originally humble dwellings increased, even though they were mostly very 'done up'. I imagine that for a hundred years or more, enterprising youngsters made their way away from the rural poverty of their homes to London, and sent money back when they could. The nearer they were to London, the more money flowed into these old villages - and commensurately, the further from London or transport, the poorer these old communities remained. There are very few similar buildings in North Kent that I know of - I think they were cleared away long ago. It would be interesting to know more about this aspect of social history. But the architectural heritage of Essex is bold and distinct and clearly people love their houses. It is wrong of me to mock.
We had lunch in Burnham-on-Crouch, in bright sun. Fish and chips in a shed on the quay.
So - we made our way with some difficulty out to Bradwell, where there is an ancient old nuclear power station nearby. The difficulty getting there arose from the fact that a stretch of road leading to the village across the marsh farmland is apparently in private hands and closed off, without any warning, and necessitating a 15 mile detour. Silly.
The nuclear power station was not our destination. We were heading for an even more ancient powerhouse - St Peter's Chapel, out on the sea wall. This is an amazing place, one of the oldest churches in the land. It doesn't have a complicated history, but writing it down makes me almost quake to think of how long it's been there, and how things have swung around - how quickly great civilisations come and go, and how they can leave so little behind.
First we have the Romans gloomily deciding they need to defend Britannia from the menace of the Saxons - so as everyone knows they built a chain of fortresses round the south east coast - the forts of the Saxon Shore. The one they built here on this marshy spit of land may have been the one called Othona, but the name is not 100% certain. Anyway, it is described as being typically late 3rd century in style. Some of its outlines are still detectable but a large part has washed into the sea.
Roll on a couple of hundred years... The Roman history has faded away and we have Saxon England, divided into Kingdoms, and what is now Essex (East Saxons) had King Sigbert in charge who wanted to make his people Christian. He asked the Celtic Christian community at Lindisfarne right up the coast for help. They sent a missionary, an unusual man from what must have been an unusual family. He was one of 4 brothers and not only did he become a bishop and (later) a saint, but so did one of his bros - the famous St Chad. They had been part of a set of 12 Saxon lads taken on by the Celtic monks to help spread the word of God, and he was able to speak not only English but also Latin and Irish.
Cedd arrived in Essex in 653, and one year later was building this chapel right in the gateway of the ruined Roman fort - you can still see the Roman terracotta in the walls. His first church was probably made of wood but once Cedd had seen how stone could be used, he set to work, creating this tall, dark, stately and simple structure. Unusually, its diagonal measurements are identical to the inch, which is difficult to achieve and very rare, showing that he (or his chief mason) really did know what he was doing. A few tantalising fragment-details of the earliest period remain, such as a tiny piece of painted plaster, as well of course as the overall shape which is elegant and plain and very straight. There must have been a veritable village of buildings and activities round the Chapel - for the men and women who came to work there including a hospital, library, a hospital, a library, a school, an arts centre, a farm, a guest house and a mission base. From there Cedd established other Christian centres at Mersea, Tilbury, Prittlewell and Upminster. Another example is Southminster which is now a town of considerable size - much bigger than the deserted area around St Peter's. The church at Southminster (St Leonards), by the way, is a truly hilarious hodgepodge of building styles and materials, and well worth a visit. In 654 Cedd was also consecrated Bishop of Essex, but ten years later he died of plague while visiting another of his new Christian communities, at Lastingham in Yorkshire. 30 of his monks from Bradwell went to see him when they heard he was dying, and all but one caught the plague and died too. The only one to get back to Essex was a young boy. St Peter's Chapel was taken into the diocese of London and became a minster for the surrounding countryside.
No records remain from the time of the Vikings and the Danes but standing where it is, it must have suffered heavily. You can only imagine the terror, the violence, the fire, blood, book-burning and destruction. The whole site is so vulnerable.
More time passed.
The Normans arrived as conquerors, took the Chapel on, and it fell under the rule of St Valery on the Somme - a very similar landscape, as it happens.
Still it was standing there, tall and plain, out on the sea wall, and approached by the old Roman road.....all through the middle ages, through the years of plague and war, and eventually being sold into private hands and falling out of ecclesiastical use. It was used as a barn, and great holes were knocked into its sides, for entrances. By the nineteenth century it could barely have been recognisable as a church, as it was housing cattle and grain. But, of course, someone came along to love it and after extensive restoration and study, we have it today as a particularly lovely old place. The great thing is, you can definitely get a feel for what early stone churches must have been like all over the country, before denominations and dogma got in the way.
The view north from there, over the Blackwater estuary, is absolutely terrific, by the way, but the view out to sea is now ornamented (or disfigured depending on how you see these things) by windfarms etc.
We were inspired to try to get a camp-place overlooking the Blackwater, but all suitable fields are occupied by concentration-camp style Holiday Parks, and they are too dispiriting to describe any further.
We tootled on, and stopped en route at the lovely and ancient port of Maldon, where there are a lot of sailing barges such as we have at Faversham and where the very old church of St Mary's down by the quayside has lovely modern stained glass windows. One is dedicated to lads who fell during World War I, and it is a truly beautiful piece of work.
The town's parish church on the other hand, at the top of the hill, has a very curious triangular spire and the vicar who we met told us he was recently widowed and about to retire when he will move out of his astonishing Grade I listed black-and-white medieval vicarage into a council house in Suffolk. It made me think of how Cedd had faced changes in his life, too. Maldon, of course, is where they produce sea salt though we could not find any for sale in the town. And it is apparently the place where the first Tesco supermarket was built. Maybe there is a connection between these two facts.
The sun was lighting all the land with brilliant gold and we went on our way, looking for our pitch for the night. We headed inland and eventually, after some more looking, settled at a privately-owned field at Retreat Farm at Little Baddow, in the gentle and glorious valley of the Chelmer-Blackwater Navigation. That waterway is one of the gems of England and everyone should go and see it.
Built in 1790 to assist trade in and out of Chelmsford from Maldon, the Navigation offers ten miles or so of clean, clear, swiftly-flowing water, and a lock every mile. There is a well-kept old towpath, perfect for biking or riding, or push chairs, come to that. Great willows, ashes and poplars line the banks, the fields beside the water are managed as old-fashioned meadows, the birds sing their hearts out, the fish dart through the water, and all is well with the world. Paper Mill Lock offers tea and scones and boats for hire. It is truly gorgeous. The campsite was more or less perfect. We had a delicate thoroughbred horse nibbling the grass in his paddock just outside our tent, and walks and quietude and simple decent loos and showers, and the sight of hot-air balloons on the horizon. St Cedd would have been astonished to see them, and we in our own way were astonished too.... that these places DO exist, if you can find them.
Tuesday 26 May 2009
Britain's disgusting campsites
We have just had a week's camping holiday in southern England. Our planned destination was up on the Welsh borders near Hereford and Shropshire but bad weather there encouraged us to go south and we spent our holiday in and around Chichester, West Sussex.
'We' = my husband Andrew and I. If you don't know us, y0u can read about some of our earlier travels on www.mussettsatsea.blogspot.com
This time we set off on Wednesday afternoon May 20th, and had a brilliant day threading through the by-lanes of Kent heading for some unknown destination. We can recommend Truffles, the teashop in Henfield, where we sat in a sheltered spot out of the wind in their tiny garden with its potted olives and mirror wall, and ate scones and cream in the sun. We also bought a washing-up bucket and some other bits from the old-fashioned hardware shop across the road, and in their Budgens store we bought what turned out to be a pack of delicious fresh scallops - chilled and presumably fairly local. Excellent stuff.
We had not booked into a site for the night and called on several en route. These were shown on our standard road atlas, so we did not have any detail about any of them in advance. The first at the wonderfully named village of Small Dole some miles from the coast, was a broad open field with some caravans and tents dotted round the edge. It was pleasant enough and only £8 a night, with loos and washing-up facilities near the owner's house, but we craved the sea, so went on.
The next site appeared to be very prim and proper with clipped hedges and neat gravel driveways at the entrance. It had a lot of boxes on it - permanently-placed 'mobile' homes - some with gardens or decking alongside them. But it also had stretches of lifted turf and building works in progress, and nothing to say what was going on. We went deeper into this slightly unsettling community and asked a couple where the tents were allocated. "It's closed," they said. "New owners." Shame no-one had put anything up on the road signs or even at the gate.
We decided to head for the Arundel area, as a friend had recommended the river Arun as being a worthwhile destination, and we were in high spirits as the afternoon rolled along. But, we found sites were either closed or invisible. Maybe the English camping industry has suffered a catastrophic collapse in recent years - there is a mismatch between the information on these general road maps and the 3-D experience. There aren't that many of them, really a surprisingly few number. Ideas about finding small, quiet, green, natural sites are clearly well out of date, and we thought longingly of sites we have known in the past - especially Church Knowle at Corfe, the location for Mike Leigh's wonderful 'Nuts in May' movie.
Eventually we booked into the site at Ford, south of Arundel. Here, Helen the owner cheerfully took our money (£12.50 a night), bade us use the 'tranquil' lower paddock and gave us a slip of paper with a fierce key-code for entry to the loos and showers.
We had a small field to ourselves, screened by a 'hedge' of reeds full of warblers, and looking radiant in the late afternoon light. Our new tent was easy to put up. It was all rather exciting. We walked up to the river banks and strolled along to the amazing old railwaybridge (no longer able to swing open) where trains roll and clank past every few minutes.
We turned back south along the bank to the old Canal basin created early in the 19thC for the short-lived Arun-Portsmouth canal, and spoke to Jason living on his houseboat on the mud, and wondered if we should buy one of the moorings he has for sale. Around us the birds sang, we could see right across the marshes, the ancient church across the fields, the wild flower all around us. A rat ('vole' said Jason) blundered about, blind but still fairly active. Jason showed us an old photo of the boat next to his, 'Palatina', a G20 yacht of beautiful lines built in the 1890s for a rich rich gentleman. This gorgeous creature is now topped with a hideous set of boxes and cabins, her fine diagonal teak lines marred with flaking paint, and a sorry sight she is now. But 'home' to someone.
Back at the tent, ready to cook our scallops, we realised our 'tranquil' field was in fact a nightmare of roaring traffic noise... a fast commuter road was just behind the thick hedge and while we could not really see any of the tormenting traffic, we could hear every rev and screech as the bikes, cars, lorries and vans hurtled past. It went on quite late into the evening, well past our bedtime.
Even with the warblers singing just six feet from our tent, we could not hear them above the sound of the rush hour traffic.
We spent the next day exploring Arundel - the castle, the priory church with its unique divided denominations - like a patient with a partial brain-transplant... 'Look, here I am, this is ME! but that bit over there, well, that's me too, but it's different, it's not really me, it's .... (whisper) Roman Catholic!!!!!' (or from the RC side ' 'We don't talk about what's behind the grille...it's too painful.......').
We went to Littlehampton (warned off in advance by Jason who spoke darkly of Bosnians and other foreigners) but apart from a strict traffic regime, it seems like many other small English market towns: down on its luck, perhaps, but who is to say if that is due to the modern rage for internet shopping or the departure of its last great wave of enthusiastic incomers, now mouldering away in Residential Care Homes? We didn't meet any Bosnians, anyway, then or the next day.
We went to Bognor Regis - and what a surprise! Tiny, unchanged from the 1920s, really, with a few clubs and arcades, and all the heat drawn out of it by Billy Butlin's extraordinary double-decker chalet city half a mile away. I remember a holiday at Bognor when I was probably seven or eight (before BB built his holiday camp), and thought it would be a great bustling place like Brighton, but really it is like a tiny version of Deal, with a short stubby pier and a few pretty buildings and some slightly dispirited-looking neon signs. Another great film location, surely.
We did notice the huge proportion of Indian and Chinese restaurants everywhere, though, in all these holiday towns. We wondered how would you recognise an English restaurant these days, anyway, since we have all diligently pursued 'foreign' food for the last 50 years - curry, pasta, pizza, Tex-mex, etc etc. Jellied eels are hard to come by but Fish N Chips hold their own.
That night was our last at Ford, we were really driven away by the noise. But to be honest, I was also cast down by that keycode which had to be accurately remembered each time you wanted the loo, the 50p per shower (with its frankly tepid water), the tiny shower cubicle with nowhere to hang your clothes or put your shoes out of the wet, the stupid car barrier to stop people coming in (why?) which you have to open and close every time you want to leave the site or get back in, the terrier barking at you when you try to get into the shop to pay your fees.... It's all so bodged and stingey, somehow. The security is necessary no doubt to avoid the place being invaded by outsiders, or vandalised, but surely things don't have to be like this.
On the other hand, I must say it was a pleasure to have bird-watching lessons from the owner and to hear and see Cetti's warbler frolicking in our reeds, so it was with some regret that we set off site-hunting again.
We were heading for the Bosham area and we set off again in high spirits. The sunlight was glorious and everything in England looked full and fresh, with cow-parlsey along the lanes and roses and valerian and aquilegias and peonies filling the front gardens. Again we needed to find somewhere for the night.
We just could not find some of the sites. They were completely invisible...clearly shown on a map but impossible to find on the ground. Some have enticing brown road signs giving you false hope....they too lead to nowhere. One was at Goodwood, somewhere near the races, where apart from all the gates and entrances for owners, trainers, buses, cars, etc. there is a country park but nothing correlating to a campsite. The other was near the divinely beautiful village of Slindon, and apparently somewhere near the National Trust lands there, but despite extensive searching we could not find it. We asked a lady walking her dog. "Campsite?" she said with a shudder and a rising tone to her voice. "No, there's nothing like that round here!"
We did manage to find the next one, which was not too far from Fishbourne, the Roman palace we hoped to visit, but - my God - what a dump. This had a sign bragging of new management but the frontage was a long, Tudor-bethan 1930s bungalow-portacabin hybrid, with dirty windows, sagging roof, and no sign of life. There was a sign saying visitors should call at Reception but there was no sign of any such place. The ground was an acre or so of dirty boxes and clinker. Old metal cow-gates were lashed shut with fraying binder twine, everything looked abandoned and neglected and if a starving dog had come out snarling I wouldn't have been surprised. All the 'buildings' on these places are square/rectangular/cubic but otherwise very Gothic in character - spooky, pikey, ghastly, grubby and somehow hostile. They have an unwelcome but palpable class quality to them - something very low or lowering, and you can detect rules, spoken or unspoken, hemming you in from the moment you arrive.
Further towards the Channel, we saw other sites - with no cover or windbreak, not a tree in sight, and again, the endless rows of 'mobile' homes up on brick props.
Can people really have holidays in places like this? Times to enjoy themselves, unwind, relax?
Do the owners of these grim places ever do customer-satisfaction surveys?
Have they ever tried to look at things from the point of view of a camper?
No wonder so many of them have gone out of business.
It's a crying shame, because the English landscape is so lovely, and the idea and practice of a simple camping holiday is so much easier these days, and it's all so beneficial to children, and so inexpensive and sustainable.
We finally settled in relief for a Camping and Caravan site at Westbourne - again a broad open set of fields, with a workman installing a new wooden boundary fence by the flowerbeds. He'd have been better occupied (we later found out) putting in a few more loos, or washing-up sinks, or even emptying the rubbish bins. There was a Boot Fair going on in one of the fields when we arrived and the cafe was doing a great trade in greasy full English breakfasts or sausages and chips. We signed in for 2 nights as there seemed to be plenty of space. However, this was now Friday night of the Bank Holiday weekend and the space was filling up fast. We hoped not to be too crowded, and in the end we did manage to retain a bit of open ground around us.
The best thing about this site was to see so many children playing - yes, playing! like they/we used to do in the old days. Throwing balls to each other, kicking balls around, playing some sort of cricket, flying kites, running about, playing hide-and-seek, spending time with their dads, laughing and larking about. There is a wonderful unmistakable sound to this kind of activity - children being happy, unselfconscious, calling to each other, arguing, helping each other, teaching each other the rules of whatever game. I haven't heard this sound for a very long time. It was like going back in time.
Walking to and from the loos and showers we heard and saw all these snippets:
"Seven, eight and nine, twice. That's nothing!"
"No, seven and eight are fifteen, two, And again, seven and eight, that's fifteen four... " (Ah, Crib!)
"Christian, swap ends!" "No!"
"Anyone got 20p?" (for the shower).
A girl with the family electric kettle plugged into the socket by the hairdryers, getting free electricity to boil the water for tea.
A man living solo in a HUGE American camper bus, putting his white canvas tyre covers on and off each day.
A naughty girl being made to sit cross-legged on the ground right up against the family car bumper for being bad (the naughty corner).
A long patient queue for the two tiny washing-up sinks after every mealtime.
A man putting up a bright green canvas tent and flysheet, with old-fashioned wooden pegs....when I asked him about it he said the tent was 60 years old and the flysheet at least 40. It had those two metal spikes at each end, sticking up about 3" above the canvas and reminded me of our camping holidays as children, especially in the Gower, with Daddy getting worked up in rages about hammering, guy-ropes, campbeds, etc.
Our outings from this site were exceptional - to Fishbourne with its mosaics, to Bosham and Dell Quay, round the Chidham peninsular, to East Wittering (where we bought fresh mullet from the fisherman) and West Wittering with its privacy and lovely sands, to the Weald and Downland Museum with all that timber-framed history, to West Dean with its stunning south lawns and gardens, to Chichester Marina and along the western end of the Arun-Portsmouth Canal (what an interesting history), where we saw a man working on his pinnace, the RNSP Fusil, another lovely boat in a sorry state but no doubt in his hands it will come back to elegant life again. (At the W&D Museum we heard a little girl say "But where is the open air museum?"). We had an icecream at the Canal Basin in Chichester itself and watched two small rowboats filled with teenagers make their unsteady and circular way out onto the water (£10 deposit per boat, £1 a head, maximum of six in a boat).
Finally, yesterday morning we heard the weatherman on the wireles say at 8am that a great line of thunderstorms was coming up to S England hitting Hampshire, Sussex and Kent - and that propelled us into a rapid departure. From being IN BED we had everything dismounted, roughly packed and flung into the car in 25 minutes. We drove away as the rain arrived, leaving behind us a queue for the loos, another queue for the washing-up sinks, the rubbish bin gates locked to prevent any more being put into the overspilling mountain of garbage, the smell of drains where the manhole had had to be lifted the night before to clear some blockage or other, the cafe firmly shut, yet more girls wailing that they need 20p for the shower, no-one on duty and a grim, British determination to stick it out because this was a holiday.
Surely, surely, we can do better than this.
They do in France, and Germany and Italy and America and even in some places in England.
WAKE UP CAMPSITES!!!!
'We' = my husband Andrew and I. If you don't know us, y0u can read about some of our earlier travels on www.mussettsatsea.blogspot.com
This time we set off on Wednesday afternoon May 20th, and had a brilliant day threading through the by-lanes of Kent heading for some unknown destination. We can recommend Truffles, the teashop in Henfield, where we sat in a sheltered spot out of the wind in their tiny garden with its potted olives and mirror wall, and ate scones and cream in the sun. We also bought a washing-up bucket and some other bits from the old-fashioned hardware shop across the road, and in their Budgens store we bought what turned out to be a pack of delicious fresh scallops - chilled and presumably fairly local. Excellent stuff.
We had not booked into a site for the night and called on several en route. These were shown on our standard road atlas, so we did not have any detail about any of them in advance. The first at the wonderfully named village of Small Dole some miles from the coast, was a broad open field with some caravans and tents dotted round the edge. It was pleasant enough and only £8 a night, with loos and washing-up facilities near the owner's house, but we craved the sea, so went on.
The next site appeared to be very prim and proper with clipped hedges and neat gravel driveways at the entrance. It had a lot of boxes on it - permanently-placed 'mobile' homes - some with gardens or decking alongside them. But it also had stretches of lifted turf and building works in progress, and nothing to say what was going on. We went deeper into this slightly unsettling community and asked a couple where the tents were allocated. "It's closed," they said. "New owners." Shame no-one had put anything up on the road signs or even at the gate.
We decided to head for the Arundel area, as a friend had recommended the river Arun as being a worthwhile destination, and we were in high spirits as the afternoon rolled along. But, we found sites were either closed or invisible. Maybe the English camping industry has suffered a catastrophic collapse in recent years - there is a mismatch between the information on these general road maps and the 3-D experience. There aren't that many of them, really a surprisingly few number. Ideas about finding small, quiet, green, natural sites are clearly well out of date, and we thought longingly of sites we have known in the past - especially Church Knowle at Corfe, the location for Mike Leigh's wonderful 'Nuts in May' movie.
Eventually we booked into the site at Ford, south of Arundel. Here, Helen the owner cheerfully took our money (£12.50 a night), bade us use the 'tranquil' lower paddock and gave us a slip of paper with a fierce key-code for entry to the loos and showers.
We had a small field to ourselves, screened by a 'hedge' of reeds full of warblers, and looking radiant in the late afternoon light. Our new tent was easy to put up. It was all rather exciting. We walked up to the river banks and strolled along to the amazing old railwaybridge (no longer able to swing open) where trains roll and clank past every few minutes.
We turned back south along the bank to the old Canal basin created early in the 19thC for the short-lived Arun-Portsmouth canal, and spoke to Jason living on his houseboat on the mud, and wondered if we should buy one of the moorings he has for sale. Around us the birds sang, we could see right across the marshes, the ancient church across the fields, the wild flower all around us. A rat ('vole' said Jason) blundered about, blind but still fairly active. Jason showed us an old photo of the boat next to his, 'Palatina', a G20 yacht of beautiful lines built in the 1890s for a rich rich gentleman. This gorgeous creature is now topped with a hideous set of boxes and cabins, her fine diagonal teak lines marred with flaking paint, and a sorry sight she is now. But 'home' to someone.
Back at the tent, ready to cook our scallops, we realised our 'tranquil' field was in fact a nightmare of roaring traffic noise... a fast commuter road was just behind the thick hedge and while we could not really see any of the tormenting traffic, we could hear every rev and screech as the bikes, cars, lorries and vans hurtled past. It went on quite late into the evening, well past our bedtime.
Even with the warblers singing just six feet from our tent, we could not hear them above the sound of the rush hour traffic.
We spent the next day exploring Arundel - the castle, the priory church with its unique divided denominations - like a patient with a partial brain-transplant... 'Look, here I am, this is ME! but that bit over there, well, that's me too, but it's different, it's not really me, it's .... (whisper) Roman Catholic!!!!!' (or from the RC side ' 'We don't talk about what's behind the grille...it's too painful.......').
We went to Littlehampton (warned off in advance by Jason who spoke darkly of Bosnians and other foreigners) but apart from a strict traffic regime, it seems like many other small English market towns: down on its luck, perhaps, but who is to say if that is due to the modern rage for internet shopping or the departure of its last great wave of enthusiastic incomers, now mouldering away in Residential Care Homes? We didn't meet any Bosnians, anyway, then or the next day.
We went to Bognor Regis - and what a surprise! Tiny, unchanged from the 1920s, really, with a few clubs and arcades, and all the heat drawn out of it by Billy Butlin's extraordinary double-decker chalet city half a mile away. I remember a holiday at Bognor when I was probably seven or eight (before BB built his holiday camp), and thought it would be a great bustling place like Brighton, but really it is like a tiny version of Deal, with a short stubby pier and a few pretty buildings and some slightly dispirited-looking neon signs. Another great film location, surely.
We did notice the huge proportion of Indian and Chinese restaurants everywhere, though, in all these holiday towns. We wondered how would you recognise an English restaurant these days, anyway, since we have all diligently pursued 'foreign' food for the last 50 years - curry, pasta, pizza, Tex-mex, etc etc. Jellied eels are hard to come by but Fish N Chips hold their own.
That night was our last at Ford, we were really driven away by the noise. But to be honest, I was also cast down by that keycode which had to be accurately remembered each time you wanted the loo, the 50p per shower (with its frankly tepid water), the tiny shower cubicle with nowhere to hang your clothes or put your shoes out of the wet, the stupid car barrier to stop people coming in (why?) which you have to open and close every time you want to leave the site or get back in, the terrier barking at you when you try to get into the shop to pay your fees.... It's all so bodged and stingey, somehow. The security is necessary no doubt to avoid the place being invaded by outsiders, or vandalised, but surely things don't have to be like this.
On the other hand, I must say it was a pleasure to have bird-watching lessons from the owner and to hear and see Cetti's warbler frolicking in our reeds, so it was with some regret that we set off site-hunting again.
We were heading for the Bosham area and we set off again in high spirits. The sunlight was glorious and everything in England looked full and fresh, with cow-parlsey along the lanes and roses and valerian and aquilegias and peonies filling the front gardens. Again we needed to find somewhere for the night.
We just could not find some of the sites. They were completely invisible...clearly shown on a map but impossible to find on the ground. Some have enticing brown road signs giving you false hope....they too lead to nowhere. One was at Goodwood, somewhere near the races, where apart from all the gates and entrances for owners, trainers, buses, cars, etc. there is a country park but nothing correlating to a campsite. The other was near the divinely beautiful village of Slindon, and apparently somewhere near the National Trust lands there, but despite extensive searching we could not find it. We asked a lady walking her dog. "Campsite?" she said with a shudder and a rising tone to her voice. "No, there's nothing like that round here!"
We did manage to find the next one, which was not too far from Fishbourne, the Roman palace we hoped to visit, but - my God - what a dump. This had a sign bragging of new management but the frontage was a long, Tudor-bethan 1930s bungalow-portacabin hybrid, with dirty windows, sagging roof, and no sign of life. There was a sign saying visitors should call at Reception but there was no sign of any such place. The ground was an acre or so of dirty boxes and clinker. Old metal cow-gates were lashed shut with fraying binder twine, everything looked abandoned and neglected and if a starving dog had come out snarling I wouldn't have been surprised. All the 'buildings' on these places are square/rectangular/cubic but otherwise very Gothic in character - spooky, pikey, ghastly, grubby and somehow hostile. They have an unwelcome but palpable class quality to them - something very low or lowering, and you can detect rules, spoken or unspoken, hemming you in from the moment you arrive.
Further towards the Channel, we saw other sites - with no cover or windbreak, not a tree in sight, and again, the endless rows of 'mobile' homes up on brick props.
Can people really have holidays in places like this? Times to enjoy themselves, unwind, relax?
Do the owners of these grim places ever do customer-satisfaction surveys?
Have they ever tried to look at things from the point of view of a camper?
No wonder so many of them have gone out of business.
It's a crying shame, because the English landscape is so lovely, and the idea and practice of a simple camping holiday is so much easier these days, and it's all so beneficial to children, and so inexpensive and sustainable.
We finally settled in relief for a Camping and Caravan site at Westbourne - again a broad open set of fields, with a workman installing a new wooden boundary fence by the flowerbeds. He'd have been better occupied (we later found out) putting in a few more loos, or washing-up sinks, or even emptying the rubbish bins. There was a Boot Fair going on in one of the fields when we arrived and the cafe was doing a great trade in greasy full English breakfasts or sausages and chips. We signed in for 2 nights as there seemed to be plenty of space. However, this was now Friday night of the Bank Holiday weekend and the space was filling up fast. We hoped not to be too crowded, and in the end we did manage to retain a bit of open ground around us.
The best thing about this site was to see so many children playing - yes, playing! like they/we used to do in the old days. Throwing balls to each other, kicking balls around, playing some sort of cricket, flying kites, running about, playing hide-and-seek, spending time with their dads, laughing and larking about. There is a wonderful unmistakable sound to this kind of activity - children being happy, unselfconscious, calling to each other, arguing, helping each other, teaching each other the rules of whatever game. I haven't heard this sound for a very long time. It was like going back in time.
Walking to and from the loos and showers we heard and saw all these snippets:
"Seven, eight and nine, twice. That's nothing!"
"No, seven and eight are fifteen, two, And again, seven and eight, that's fifteen four... " (Ah, Crib!)
"Christian, swap ends!" "No!"
"Anyone got 20p?" (for the shower).
A girl with the family electric kettle plugged into the socket by the hairdryers, getting free electricity to boil the water for tea.
A man living solo in a HUGE American camper bus, putting his white canvas tyre covers on and off each day.
A naughty girl being made to sit cross-legged on the ground right up against the family car bumper for being bad (the naughty corner).
A long patient queue for the two tiny washing-up sinks after every mealtime.
A man putting up a bright green canvas tent and flysheet, with old-fashioned wooden pegs....when I asked him about it he said the tent was 60 years old and the flysheet at least 40. It had those two metal spikes at each end, sticking up about 3" above the canvas and reminded me of our camping holidays as children, especially in the Gower, with Daddy getting worked up in rages about hammering, guy-ropes, campbeds, etc.
Our outings from this site were exceptional - to Fishbourne with its mosaics, to Bosham and Dell Quay, round the Chidham peninsular, to East Wittering (where we bought fresh mullet from the fisherman) and West Wittering with its privacy and lovely sands, to the Weald and Downland Museum with all that timber-framed history, to West Dean with its stunning south lawns and gardens, to Chichester Marina and along the western end of the Arun-Portsmouth Canal (what an interesting history), where we saw a man working on his pinnace, the RNSP Fusil, another lovely boat in a sorry state but no doubt in his hands it will come back to elegant life again. (At the W&D Museum we heard a little girl say "But where is the open air museum?"). We had an icecream at the Canal Basin in Chichester itself and watched two small rowboats filled with teenagers make their unsteady and circular way out onto the water (£10 deposit per boat, £1 a head, maximum of six in a boat).
Finally, yesterday morning we heard the weatherman on the wireles say at 8am that a great line of thunderstorms was coming up to S England hitting Hampshire, Sussex and Kent - and that propelled us into a rapid departure. From being IN BED we had everything dismounted, roughly packed and flung into the car in 25 minutes. We drove away as the rain arrived, leaving behind us a queue for the loos, another queue for the washing-up sinks, the rubbish bin gates locked to prevent any more being put into the overspilling mountain of garbage, the smell of drains where the manhole had had to be lifted the night before to clear some blockage or other, the cafe firmly shut, yet more girls wailing that they need 20p for the shower, no-one on duty and a grim, British determination to stick it out because this was a holiday.
Surely, surely, we can do better than this.
They do in France, and Germany and Italy and America and even in some places in England.
WAKE UP CAMPSITES!!!!
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