Never mind the quality....

The room we had in Köln was lovely: light and airy, with those European windows that open by leaning into the room to let in some air, or which can be opened fully as NZ windows are with a switch of the handle. Plus there was a desk, a chair, two bedside tables, bedside lamps, curtains, a rubbish bin, and a wardrobe. It had a toilet and shower en suite. Note these things.
Even better, breakfast was a buffet, with a wide range of Continental and English options. Note this too.
For this hotel we paid 130 euros for two nights. That’s on the cheaper to middle range for b&bs.
Today we arrived in Heidelberg and found our hotel. Except it wasn’t our hotel. We’re being billeted in another building five minutes walk away. We’re on the second floor, and we’re paying exactly the same amount of money as we paid in Heidelberg. The only difference is that this is classed as a hostel, not a hotel.
The only difference in terms of nomenclature, that is. The difference in quality is astonishing. Our bedroom has no curtains, no desk, no chair, no rubbish bin, no lamps, no bedside tables, no wardrobe. It does have a hat stand. And nine power points. And a slightly sloping floor. For breakfast we will receive one hot drink and a croissant. Whoopee. The toilet is shared with three other rooms on this floor, as is the bathroom - which admittedly has a bath as well as a shower, and is very large. There is also a towel in there, the only one provided on the whole floor.
Celia isn’t feeling well, having got a cold overnight, so she isn’t terribly excited about this place. Certainly it’s in the middle of the Altstadt - the Old Town - the area Heidelberg is probably most famous for, but that doesn’t quite compensate for the minimalist approach to hotel rooms.
On top of that we had a bit of fun with the train this morning. We’d booked from Köln to Heidelberg, which should have taken about three hours. The train was a bit late - an unusual occurrence in Germany, I gather - and it somehow got later as it went along. In the end, as we were heading toward Mannheim, (known only to me because of Mozart’s links with it) an announcement was made in German telling us that the train wouldn’t be stopping at Heidelberg, because it was running late!
Fortunately, the German lady in our compartment picked this up on our behalf and went in search of the guard. He told her we needed to get off at Mannheim and take the train back to Heidelberg. Seems that Heidelberg would be sidestepped completely. So we got off the train at Mannheim, found platform neun and hopped on the Heidelberg train, which was a local one with not much room and a short fat girl going round asking anyone who was eating anything if they would give it to her. Still, our faithful Eurail Pass was perfectly acceptable to the guard and we arrived at Heidelberg a bit late, but none the worse for wear.
From there we had to get a number 33 bus to the Platz just down from where the hotel was (or was supposed to be). The driver must have forgotten to take his happy pills this morning, as he seemed to be all over the show, and since both of us had our backpacks on we were struggling to keep upright.
But here we are, Celia’s asleep, I’ve walked across one bridge over the Rhein and back across another, the day is lovely, the mobile connect is working perfectly and things could be far worse!


In the photo you can see one of the bridges I walked across - and in the background is Heidelberg's castle.

Nature calls...rather too often!

Second day in Köln and the weather was a bit cooler. Unfortunately I’d got it into my head that summer had returned and went out in short sleeves again without taking a jacket or jersey. Froze. We decided not to get one of the tour buses around the city because a number of the places were within walking distance anyway. Headed for the river - the mighty Rhein - and because I had a bit of an upset stomach, I needed to find a loo quickly. No such luck. There were three portaloos along the bank of the river, but each one of them had a hefty padlock on the door. The last public WC we’d seen (and used) had been quite a way back.

Things haven’t changed by the way, in terms of needing loos. When Celia and I were on our honeymoon in Rome some 33 years ago, searching for public toilets was an issue even then.
Anyway, there were a number of large river boats alongside the bank, and in the end, in desperation, we paid to go on a trip up the river so that I could be sure of finding a loo in a great hurry. Most expensive loo we’ve had to pay for yet!

Anyway the river trip was pleasant, and worth relaxing for an hour or so on.

We’ve both been very tired today. Came back home after the river trip and slept - again. Think it’s probably all the sights and sounds and noise and travel. Whether we’ll get any better at it or not remains to be seen. How these old people who go on fourteen days on the continent type tours cope, I have no idea. Up at the crack of dawn, five hours in a bus, tramping round a city for another couple of hours, off again and then finally kipping down in a strange bed for the night. We like to take our trips a bit more easy.

Onto Köln

We went on our first train trip today, from Hamburg to Köln. We had seats in first class, in a carriage that was virtually empty - it was the first carriage behind the driver. There was only one other person in our compartment (six to a compartment), so we had plenty of room. The second class part of the train was much fuller, as I found when I went for a walk from one end of the train to the other. At the back of the train was half a carriage reserved for large luggage and bikes - there was none of either - and a few let-down seats. So I sat in the space for a while and watched the world go by.
The trip took four hours, but it didn’t seem long. Apparently this was the ‘slow’ train, if you can call anything that goes at a normal speed of 163 kph, slow.
It was just beginning to rain when we left Hamburg (after a beautiful day yesterday) and it had obviously been raining over most of the country we passed through. However, by the time we got to Köln the sun had come out and it was hot enough to change back into short sleeves and my faithful sandals - which I’ve worn most of the time we’ve been away. The pair of waterproof shoes I bought in Oswestry a couple of weeks ago are great, and have been useful during the rainy days we’ve had recently.
Which reminds me: we’re back in the land of toilets you have to pay for. England has pretty much got rid of this archaic notion - Oswestry was the only place in England where we had to pay - but Germany still regards it as the norm. At the railway station yesterday I went down into the gents and Celia went down into the ladies opposite. I put my money in the machine, went through the turnstyle, and then heard her speaking in the ladies, which was open to the men’s! Weird.
Our hotel in Köln is near the Cathedral, and the railway station. Which is convenient, except that the railway line runs along the back of the building, and the rumble of the trains is fairly loud. But the Cathedral (or Dom, as they call it here) is superb. How it survived the bombing in the War God alone knows: the surrounding area was mostly destroyed.
Furthermore, the Dom is free: you don’t have to pay to go inside. And it was packed with visitors, of course. It’s awe-inspiring: the vaulting soars forever above your head, the stained-glass varies from detailed 19th century pictorial to wonderfully mosaic-like modern. And it’s just vast. You could walk around in it for days, so it feels. We might go back tomorrow!
Just around the corner from the Cathedral is a street that leads into the shopping area, which goes off in several directions and was also packed with people. I don’t know whether it’s a late shopping night or what, but the people were out in droves, even though it was getting on for 5.30 by the time we went looking. We bought a few odds and ends for tea (we’d had a very late Thai lunch) and a new flask, since the one Celia bought only a month or so ago has gone kaput. And we were both struggling yesterday in not having a cup of tea/coffee handy. I had to go and borrow an electric kettle for our hotel room otherwise Celia would have gone home, I think. Fortunately they were happy to lend us one.
The holiday Germany was celebrating yesterday, I found out, was Reunification Day.

A few notes

When we were flying into Germany we could see several wind farms. From the air they looked like crosses in a military cemetery.
I forgot to mention yesterday that Johannes Brahms, the composer, has great links with Hamburg. He’s one of Hamburg’s beloved sons. And alongside the dedication to him in St Michael’s Church is one to Teleman and another to Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach, both of whom were Music Directors there.
Tagging - the art of painting on walls alongside railway lines, must be an international thing: there was mile after mile of tagging between Hamburg and Köln, today.
And tv advertising in Germany is just as silly as it is in England - or NZ.

First day in Hamburg

....and exhausted. We came home about 4.30 and slept.
Most of the day we’d spent in doing the hop on hop off thing on one of the double-decker buses that tour around Hamburg city. They take about an hour and a half to do this, and we got off twice. The bus we’d started out on was the 100, but the one we went back onto was the 200, and it takes a somewhat different route - in fact we wound up going over much of the route we’d already taken but approaching it from the opposite direction. Finally, somewhat desperate that we were never going to get back to point A, we got off in Rathaus Square (Rathaus is just the Town Hall - I suppose the ‘rat’ part has some links with ratification), and walked back along Monckebergerstrasse to the Hauptbahnhof - the main railway station - which is just near the hotel.
Doesn’t sound like an exhausting day, you say?
Well, our first hop off was at St Michael’s Church, and instead of going into the church proper, as we’d thought, we found ourselves climbing up the tower. At least 25 flights of stairs, if not more. By the time we’d got to the point where we’d both have preferred to have given up, we thought we might as well carry on. Certainly the view from the tower was amazing, but it took a while to get the breath back. We got the lift back down (yup, this is a church with a lift to the tower), and none of the passengers had quite figured out, when we got to the bottom, how to get the door to open. So we all went up to the top of the tower again, before coming down.
After this we finally got into the church itself, and it’s an amazing building. Wonderful curves everywhere to offset the usual straight lines of the architecture. It’s been thoroughly restored, so all the golds and whites are as they would have been. It just glistens. And because it’s Harvest Festival (here as in England) the church was full of decorations related to food: wreaths made of vegetables and stalks hanging from the balcony; breads in all sorts of shapes (such as a mouse and a snake); an enormous canopy affair hanging in the sanctuary made out of corn sheaves, and various statements such as Our Father (in German, of course) made out of bread on a baked backing.
Hamburg is an extensive city, with a large port and waterfront. We went past areas with houses that are worth several million euros - wonderful places on the street that’s closest to the large lake that’s within the city. There are embassies everywhere, and of course these are all large and imposing - and no doubt costing their home country a large amount of money. The buildings vary in their materials, but there are many that are made out of bricks, vast structures rising way above the street. The whole place has a very permanent air about it, an air of having survived a cluttered history. It’s going full steam ahead at present: there are acres of building going on, both office space and apartments, down by the water.
It was a holiday today (not sure what holiday) and the crowds were out in full force, but most of the shops were shut. Restaurants were doing an enormous trade. We went into the railway station first thing this morning to get our Eurail pass sorted out. We were hoping that they actually knew what it was all about, and of course they did. We’ve booked ourselves a couple of seats to Cologne for tomorrow - booked seats because of the holiday today, which apparently might affect tomorrow‘s travellers.
The railway station is large, as you’d expect, full of shops. There’s one area that’s given over to food shops, all within a kind of mall. You just wander from one food group to another. And there are plenty of other shops - including the ubiquitous McDonald’s where we went and had a milkshake (again) tonight, and watched while a couple of teenagers spent almost all the time we were there in a long, long kiss. A long kiss.
There was also a kind of large mini-market (if that makes sense) and Celia was in her element. I’ve come to the conclusion that English or Continental supermarkets are a kind of art gallery or museum to her. When I proposed this new theory, she smiled enigmatically.

We DON'T have senior moments

Before we left yesterday we had one of those senior moment crises. My sister-in-law was going to sort out the car registration, which is due while we were away, and she asked if we could leave the certificate of insurance to take.
Insurance? Surely we had insured the car, hadn’t we? We remembered doing a lot of investigating and sorting out before we came and thought we’d done more when we got here and had then gone ahead, but where was the information? Where was the insurance policy? Absolutely no idea.
I checked through my emails, and checked through the laptop files, and checked the online bank statements. Nothing.
And yet we were certain we wouldn’t have forgotten to insure the car after all the fuss we’d been through.
I rang the insurance company and found myself talking to a girl in NZ - at least I think she was in NZ; she had a NZ accent and said there were two New Zealand girls in the office and one English girl….
She found the policy details without any difficulty - so she must have been in NZ; if she’d been in England, such speed of finding the info would have been impossible! - and said she’d send a copy out.
And then, of course, I realised where all the stuff probably was. I knew we’d taken it on the tenting holiday with us, but I’d thought it would have been in the computer bag with all the other papers. Nope. It was in the suitcase we’d carried the bedding in, sitting there waiting for me. Wondering where I‘d been.

Wir sind in Hamburg

Today was a day of chunks of travel. Two hours from Attleborough to Stansted Airport, by bus, with the weather becoming increasingly overcast (and the toilet on the bus, which we’d chosen to sit beside, giving off incredibly unpleasant whiffs every so often). The obligatory two hours at Stansted waiting for the flight to take off (decreased somewhat by the fact that we were late getting there, and there were queues for everything (but for some reason we were given priority tickets so that helped to get us on board a bit faster). They took my laptop off in the security area, and gave it a looking-over. Poor Alphonse! - the laptop - he was appalled to be considered a security risk. But at least we didn’t have to take off our shoes. Not sure what they’re expecting to find in shoes.
An hour and a half on the plane (virtually) with the usual Ryanair minimalist approach to service - not enough coin change when you bought something, no sick bags, no string bags on the backs of the seats to put your magazine in, no room to spread out in any direction.
And then an hour and a quarter or so from Lubeck airport into Hamburg city, again by bus - a very quiet bus, it must be said, so quiet that you weren‘t really aware of the speed you were doing.
And into Hamburg BusPort. Which is only a little way from our hotel. We had to go to the Hotel Keiler Hof to pick up our key from a very grumpy receptionist. She was friendly really, just liked to do the grumpy thing. The reception desk was on the first floor - I have no idea what was on the ground floor, but it wasn’t part of the hotel. And then we had to take our three keys to the building next door, Luebecker Hof, use the large key to open the building door, go up to the first floor again, use the blue key to open the door to that floor, and then use the third key for our room. I thought our room number was 213 until I realised that the label actually read Zi3 - or zimmer 3. (Zimmer being ‘room’.)
The room is quite large, with a private shower. The shower isn’t exactly en suite, as it’s in the room itself, next to the wardrobe. The toilet is across the hall, and serves all the people staying in rooms 2-6. (Room 1 seems to have vanished). We’re going to have our breakfasts in the Keiler Hof. On the first floor. This idea of having hotels on the first floors and upwards seems to be a European thing. It was the same in both the hotels I stayed in, in Rome. The ground floor is usually occupied by some other business altogether.
After settling ourselves in we went out again to get something to eat - it now being around 9 pm. Found a kebap place around the corner (yup, kebap), and had a very nice meal in the open air. It's been a very warm day in general. The area we're in seems a bit less than salubrious - ladies of the night are very visible, as is the sex sho (not sure whether it's meant to be shop or show) just around the corner.

Lack of fitness

Since we went on our road trip, tenting every night, I’ve found I’m suffering from a real lack of fitness. Before we came to England, we were going aqua-jogging a good deal, and I normally walked to work. But since we’ve been here we’ve done less and less exercise. There have been occasional patches when we’ve got up and going, like when we stayed with my sister-in-law and her husband. She’s a fitness fanatic, and enjoys taking a bus to the next village and then walking back. This can mean a walk of several miles. Naturally while we were with her, we got up and moving again.

But the long hours of driving while we were moving from place to place over the last month hasn’t been good for me at all. I don’t enjoy the bucket seats that most cars have (our van at home has straight up and down seating – much better for the back), and I find when I get out of the car at the moment that I feel as though I’ve got to unfold. Very unpleasant.

Twice in the last month or so my back has given one of those nasty clicks and I’ve felt very uncomfortable for days afterwards. At present I find getting something up off the floor makes my back cringe, and even sitting for too long at a table becomes uncomfortable. Don’t mention sitting in the average lounge suite. They’re killers on sore backs.

So, the last couple of mornings I’ve gone for a decent walk before everyone else got up (yesterday I walked for an hour). This hasn’t made my back less achy yet, but it will in due course. My legs are complaining that they’re on holiday and shouldn’t be made to work, but I tell them that if they don’t work they won’t work soon, and they grudgingly accept this.

Different links

We went to the local Attleborough Anglican church this morning. Think I’ve mentioned visiting it before, though I can’t find the post at the moment. (It has the grand title of The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, by the way, but I think is called St Mary's, locally.)

It’s full of history, as so many Norfolk churches are, and there is evidence everywhere of the many Christians who’ve gone before, from the faded paintings on the reredos to the almost as faded paintings high up on the wall above the altar; from the stones showing where people are buried beneath the stone floor to the extraordinary design of the ‘other’ pulpit (the one that was nicked from another local church, if I remember rightly).

There’s something about worshipping in a place that’s been inhabited by Christian brethren for centuries.

The other good thing about the Norfolk churches is that all seem to be open all the time; further north we found churches were more likely to be closed to the general public.

And, while I think about it, there’s the way England and NZ are so inextricably linked: everywhere you go you find someone who’s got a relative in NZ (think I’ve mentioned this before too). We were at the 30^th birthday party of our niece last night, and Celia spoke to at least three people who had relatives in NZ. This morning, after the service, we had coffee with a couple who’d travelled throughout NZ, and then met another group who all had connections, including one couple who’s son had studied at the Otago Medical School.

Quieter interlude

Last few days have been a bit quiet, but yesterday we took another trip back to Sheringham, Celia’s childhood home.

We typed Sheringham into the Sat Nav, and for some reason she took us all round the back roads. Fortunately, because it was a pleasant day, this wasn’t a big issue – just a surprise. In fact, we when we turned off to chase up a notice that said antiques at one point, we wound up going past the rest home where Celia’s former English teacher now lives. So we popped in to see him. And then a couple of miles down the road we came across one of roadside vans that sell food, so we stopped and had some lunch. (These vans are all over the place: they get towed to the site in the morning and the guy running it makes sandwiches and hot potatoes and buns and provides coffees and so on. Often they’re in the lay-bys on the motorways.)

It was exceedingly bracing at Sheringham Beach, but we survived. Though the streets weren’t as crowded as they’d been last time we were there, there were still a lot of people around.

Celia wanted to go up to Sheringham Woods as well; just as we set out it started to pour, but then it decided that we didn’t need any more rain, and by the time we’d had a cup of coffee in the woods entrance, it had cleared up again. So we had the pleasure of a glistening wet woods with the sun shining through the branches. Celia wanted to find some chestnuts, but they weren’t ready yet, even though she insisted on crushing a good number of them in the process in order to discover this fact. Chestnuts, in their little spiky shells look like baby hedgehogs might look; seeing Celia stomping on these was not for the fainthearted.

Today we’ve been trying to get our teeth into planning this train trip in Europe. It’s proving more complex than we imagined, even given the combined forces of the Internet, the various books we’ve got of timetables and ways to get around and the maps. Just when you think you’ve got it sussed you find you can’t get a hotel at a reasonable enough price, or that the train doesn’t go where you’d like it to go.

However, we think we’ve got the first leg of it sorted.

Just resting

The last couple of days have been rest days – mostly. Both of us were zonked when we got back from our tenting trip, more tired than we’d been for weeks. The tiredness had kind of crept up on us both, and we were both irritable, and just plain weary of traveling and erecting and de-erecting tents.

It’s nice to be back to a bit of normality at our ‘base camp’ and to have some people to talk to. In the campsites it’s been amazing how few people there have been who’ve stopped and talked, or showed any interest in us. Which means we’ve been thrown back on each other for all our resource: we both need other company as well as each other.

We’re now going to plan our train trip in the five European countries in more detail than we originally intended, because part of the problem with the tenting holiday was just not knowing where we might end up, and whether we’d have somewhere to stay. It meant that a certain side of the trip was unrelaxing, and almost unenjoyable.

Home from the Holiday

Well, home in English terms. We’re back to base after our tenting/travelling trip. Both exhausted, perhaps because we travelled too much and didn’t rest enough. We’ll try not to make the same mistake when we go to Europe next month.

Our trip today was from Kidderminster to Attleborough, some three and a half hours drive if we’d done it all in one go. We didn’t, as both of us were very tired from last night, and anyway, driving that far in one go just isn’t the sort of thing we do very often.

We were tired because we had the heaviest rainfall last night that we’ve experienced while tenting. It poured, and poured – and did I mention? It poured.

But not only that. Sometime between three and four, the wind came up out of nowhere, with huge force, and we were startled to find the tent rocking back and forth, as though it was planning to take off into outer space. We thought it was going to do itself some damage, but nothing got broken, and the worst that happened was that some plastic plates and stuff on one of the tables inside the tent got thrown around, and wound up on the floor. Celia got up and rescued the laptop, which was in its bag in the front section of the tent – the part that doesn’t have an inner skin. Where we were, things were perfectly dry, amazingly enough, but the front section does tend to get a bit of water inside.

I got quite agitated about the tent doing its crazy house thing; started praying loudly, rather like the disciples on the boat when the storm blew up on the Sea of Galilee. Of course Jesus told them to cool it – after he’d dispensed with the activity of the storm. Celia did much the same, finding my agitation somewhat amusing.

It turned out that various mini-cyclones (that’s what the radio was calling them) flickered throughout the country last night: we may have got the tail-end of one.

Wrapped everything up this morning. It had stopped raining by then, but because the tent was so wet outside and the grass too, we stayed in our pyjamas until we’d got everything sorted out, and then went and had a hot shower. I cleaned my teeth, and went to put my dental plate in. For some reason it seemed to catch on one of my other teeth, and next moment there was a nasty little crack as I shifted it in my mouth. The front false tooth had snapped clean off the plate. Great.

We went into Kidderminster and found a denture specialist, but he couldn’t do anything till four in the afternoon. Decided that it wasn’t the end of the world and that it would be easier to get it done back in Norfolk, so I walked around today with a gap in the front of my teeth.

Got ourselves some breakfast – on a takeaway plate (Celia had seen the place advertised at the camp, and it was just across the road from the denture place), and bought some lunch for later too.

Photo on the right is from a site called Dental Distortions. The teeth bear no resemblance to mine.

Sleeping Policemen

Keep meaning to mention Sleeping Policemen. We just call them something subtle like judder bars at home, but in England this phrase is a reference to those annoying humps in suburban roads which are meant to stop people hooning down the street.

Mamble and Crowl, Worcs

Finally got to Mamble, which was a bit of a disappointment, to say the least. A little place with its most open area on a downward piece of the hill, a pub and a church and almost nothing else. Plainly we’ll have to rewrite the song:
Now we’ve been to Mamble
That lies above the Teme,
And there’s no one much in Mamble,
At least as we have seen.
No doubt they breed and brew there,
Still lazy as the claim,
But I doubt that any song there
Sets the local pub aflame.
However, we also went to the other Crowle, in Worcestshire. This has a totally different atmosphere to the Crowle up north, which seemed run down and devitalised. Crowle, Worcs, is probably a dormitory suburb, but the houses are both old thatched roof style and modern, the church has a sense of quiet about it, and there’s a modern parish hall at one end of the village. No sign of any Crowls in the church graveyard, so maybe we’re a hardy lot!
This morning, however, we went to church at the local place just down the road, in the village of Wolverley. This was a fairly High Anglican place, seemingly occupied by widows (only a couple of blokes that I could see) and not very many of them. There was a choir, however, all in heavenly-blue robes, and there were a couple of guys in amongst them too, so that supplemented the numbers on both sides.
The minister was a woman, but she isn’t the vicar, apparently. He was away doing a service elsewhere. She spoke well in her short sermon, and made a good point about reaching out to others in her comments on John’s Gospel.
At the end we took a brief look around the place, and there was a list of former vicars, going way back to the 13th century. One John Crowle stood out among them. He was vicar around 1545, and had an alias: Yewes. Not sure what that had to do with anything!
Of course he may have no connection with my part of the family, but it’s good to see someone in the wider clan doing a good job all that time ago.
Anyway, both the Wolverley church and the Crowle church are named after St John the Baptist. The Wolverley one, which is in the picture, is built on a hill. This is probably a good thing, apart from its biblical significance, because in June this year, Wolverley's lower reaches were flooded twice. We saw a man digging out the stream that runs past his house, and replacing the rocks that had been shifted from his garden wall. He's planning on building a much higher wall around that side of the house, even though the stream is at present more than a metre below the foundations.

Camp sites

The variation in camps is enormous. I still haven’t quite figured out the difference between the official Camp and Caravanning Association sites, where we get a little booklet stamped (ten stamps and a free night!) and where we get senior citizen discounts (even Celia) and where it costs virtually nothing for being here, and the sites where we pay twice the price, and where there are signs saying CACA people welcome and where the friendliness is far less. Oh, well, we’ll only be camping a few more days, and so the problem won’t bother me after that.
Some camps you have to pay for showers, some require a key to get into the toilets (!), some have laundry facilities, some have virtually no facilities - like the one the night before last near Chester, where there was one urinal and one WC for the men, one shower and one hand basin. Two WCs for the women, a shower and a hand basin. No hot water for washing up dishes. And other places, like the one here in Kidderminster, has so many showers and toilets and urinals and basins that you have to stop and choose which to use. It’s a bigger site, certainly, but not that much bigger.
And then there’s electric power. Most people can plug into a socket in the middle of the field and get their power from it. There may be a dozen of these units, with four sockets each, scattered around. Here at Kidderminster, we can’t get at one, unfortunately, so this may be the last message you get for a while…
But there is a ping-pong table here, so if you don’t hear from us, that’s probably what we’re doing. And resting.

One of those days

Saturday. Left Chester around lunchtime, visited Oswestry (which may be pronounced Ostry, but don‘t bank on it) and arrived in Kidderminster. Didn’t really explore Chester’s Cathedral or City Walls, or Oswestry‘s more interesting haunts. Did explore op shops and supermarkets. Bought a pair of waterproof boots for £7.99 in one of the op shops, as my other pair of shoes are letting the water through. Arrived in camp near Kidderminster, exhausted. All this setting up house, cooking meals over a gas stove, getting up in the morning, cooking meals over a gas stove, taking house down again, packing car so that everything gets fitted in, and driving somewhere, and then starting the whole process over has worn us out.

What is Mamble?

Mamble is the name of a fairly small place on the map, near Worcester. Our interest in it stems back a long way. I used to play for a singing farmer - he sometimes bought us large amounts of beef as a gift - and the song we remember him singing was:
I’ve never been to Mamble,
That lies above the Teme,
And I wonder who’s in Mamble
And whether people seem
Dum dum dee dumty dum dum
As lazy as the name,
And whether any song there
Sets alehouse wits aflame.
As you can see, there’s a line neither Celia or I can remember. I've just found the original on the Net, so you can read it as it was writ, and not as we remembered it.
Anyway, the name Mamble so struck us that we gave the name to a kitten we got not long after. Mamble was a family animal for at least a decade afterwards, until she vanished one day.

Chester

Overnight it poured, so by this morning the tent was soaked - only on the outside, thank goodness. But that was enough to make it something of a task trying to get it down and shaken off without covering the inside of the car with water. As it was, I donned my swim shorts to go to the loo: it was easier than getting my pyjamas wet.
Anyway, we left the campsite by the river Ouse where we’ve been for a couple of days and decided to head for Worcester, once again to try and get to see Crowle (and Mamble). Before we left York we stopped off at a café for some breakfast, as neither of us had managed to have more than some muesli, with all the dampness around. We were sitting there waiting for our order, sorting out the most recent lot of photos we’ve taken, when my son Ben rang! And then we realised we’d forgotten it was his birthday, although that wasn’t why he was ringing. Celia explained to the young lady who was witnessing that we were talking to one of our children in NZ, but she looked as though she had no idea where NZ was and if she did, hadn’t a clue how we could be talking to anyone anywhere else.
After breakfast we headed off for Manchester, as a first port of call, and though we thought we’d put the city centre in, found ourselves outside somewhere in a suburb called Heywood. There was an indoor market there, and so we went in and had some lunch: it wasn’t very busy inside, probably because it was still raining a good deal, and the young feller behind the counter was interested in our being from NZ, wanting to check whether it was as dry as Australia. We assured him it wasn’t. It’s constantly interesting how many people have relatives in either Australia or NZ, or who have a desire to go and visit one or both of the countries. There are still many links between the places, even though the European Union is such a dominant force now in this part of the world. I don’t think most English people really think they’re part of the EU, and they wonder at all the Europeans coming over to find work, especially the Poles.
There was a long slow patch on the motorway heading south, so on a whim we decided to head for Chester, as the road was clear. Chester is near the border of Wales, and at one point, while we’d taken a wrong turn in looking for a campsite, we found ourselves crossing the border - while I was typing an email, as it happened.
We’re camping in Chester - the rain has stopped for the most part, although it was extremely heavy in places on the way - and we’ll see whether we spend any time here tomorrow or not.

Bridlington and Scarborough

Today we got off to a bit of a late start: Celia wasn’t feeling 100%, so I drove into York to meet my nephew, who was up on business, and had offered to take some of our excess baggage home. Thought I wasn’t going to find the place we’d designated as a meeting point, but suddenly at the last minute it was there.
In the early afternoon we drove to Bridlington, a seaside town, because we’d been feeling landlocked and were missing the sea. The place was still fairly busy, although it’s well past the holiday season. On the spur of the moment we decided to move onto Scarborough, and that was more impressive altogether. A really pleasant looking town, probably about the same size as Dunedin, from what we could gauge while standing inside the old castle up at the top of the city. Like Dunedin it has great stretches of beach and sea extending away from it in both directions, plus plenty of fishing boats, and all the usual conglomerate of British seaside towns. But it has more style than many of those, and has obviously been a prosperous place in its time - maybe it still is.
There has been some sort of lookout on the site of the castle since long before the Romans came; they were merely one of many to make use of it. Now all that’s left is a long wall, and the ruins of the keep. The Chapel has long gone (it was almost on the cliff edge) and the only ‘modern’ building is the master gunner’s house (now the tea rooms).
The Roundheads destroyed a lot of the old castle - they seem, like Mao Tse Tung’s Red Army, to have had little inclination to do anything else but destroy. Their legacy of destruction is everywhere throughout the land.
The thing that remains is the sense of space, and the wonderful vista in every direction. I don’t know how high the castle area is, but certainly ít seems far above Scarborough’s town and above the ocean.

Beningbrough

Because we were staying in York yesterday we went to another National Trust place, a few miles out of the city. This was Beningbrough, a place built in the Georgian period. It now acts as home to a large number of portraits, in conjunction with the National Portrait Gallery. It’s a rather unusual place, as the portraits are what dominate it: there’s much less furniture and fittings than in many of the NT houses, although there are a couple of very grand beds with their original furnishings. We listened to a lot of info on the audio phone-thingees, which made it more interesting. It’s not a very appealing house, in a way: the grand hall that you first walk into, is three storeys high, and very white and cold. It doesn’t have much of a sense of ever having been lived in, although it passed from one family to another from the time it was built - but it was different families, rather than successive generations, and that may have made a difference.