Owl or Crow?

Mike standing in the Market Square at Crowle, under a specially provided cover. Note that the toilets are to hand, as is a telephone box. Full marks for the people of Crowle.

We finally made it to Crowle today - or Kroll, as the locals pronounce it. Seemingly even the locals have a bit of difficulty deciding which way to go on the pronunciation side of things: we spoke to two or three people and got mixed responses.
Anyway, this isn’t the Crowle we originally aimed for a few days ago - that one was in ,. This one is up north, closer to Scunthorpe. We’re camped at the only Crowle site listed in our book, although in fact, the site is three or four miles away from the village of Crowle.
Crowle is not a small village, but I’d suspect it’s a dormitory suburb for some larger town - the aforementioned Scunthorpe, for instance - rather than a town that survives by itself. At first sight, it’s not that appealing: there are quite a lot of run-down buildings in the centre of the village, and there’s a kind of uninspiring look to the buildings that aren’t run down. None of the charm of some of the country villages we’ve come across, not helped by the colour of the bricks they use here.
It didn’t help either, perhaps, that it’s Sunday, and so most things were closed and most people weren‘t out and about. We’ll go in again tomorrow, and check it when there’s a bit more life on the streets.
The most lively thing were the hoons: motorbikes roaring through the main street (so narrow at one point it has to have lights so traffic going one way doesn’t bang into traffic going the other), or youths on three-wheeler motor bikes doing wheelies, or open-top cars trying to do full speed in a 30 mph area. Or the boys playing football in a car park with a huge sign: No Ball Games.
There’s a canal going past Crowle, and a large water area surrounded by caravans and permanent holiday homes. Again there wasn’t much life there, but it is well after the summer holidays, so no doubt in season, the place is humming.
We stopped off at Derby on our way here. It's quite a large place, at least the size of Dunedin, I'd think. The service at the Cathedral was just ending as we arrived outside the door, and so we went in, to see what the building looked like. And joined in the queue for a cup of coffee. One woman asked Celia whether she'd enjoyed the service, and Celia had to say, Yes, she had.
The Cathedral isn't one of the old 12th or 13th century places that abound in England. It's obviously been rebuilt at some point; the style is 18th century perhaps for the most part, although the front of the building appears to date from a lot earlier. Consequently it's a very light building inside, clean and with bright colouring. The congregation appeared to be a good mix of ages, and there was a good sense of fellowship going on.
We walked further into the town, and came across the Australian bar, but the young man putting signs out didn't seem quite to appreciate me asking him if you had to be an Australian to work there.

God is Good!

Yesterday we travelled down from Cambridgeshire to London. We made a long stop on the way at a National Trust house, which I’ll write about in another post.
Our trip into London was both what we expected and more than we expected. We haven’t really driven in the capital much, apart from our trip to Rochester, and this time we were actually having to go through areas that were very built-up and traffic-heavy. So it was stop-start, brake-accelerate, in and out of first and second gear (we could well do with an automatic) and in general rather stressful (though to give me a modicum of credit, I kept my cool - and I wasn’t even driving!)
The trip took far longer than our poor little Sat Nav had estimated at the beginning, because there were so many blockages and hold-ups (a normal London day, it seems). In the end, we were about five to ten minutes from our destination when Celia suddenly yelled that the brake had given up the ghost (well, she communicated that without words almost), grabbed the handbrake and we swerved to the side of the road. Fortunately we weren’t going fast, so it wasn’t a completely awful moment. We held fire for about ten minutes, while I suggested that perhaps with all the braking we’d been doing the brakes had overheated and given up temporarily. Celia gave things another go, tentatively, when we thought it might be safe, but they were still kaput.
Frazzlement.
We looked up the number of the AA on the Net: our little mobile connect friend was working wonderfully at full speed, as has done so everywhere in London. There was a number to ring for mobile phones, so we tried that. After some discussion as to who we were and why we should be ringing them, we were informed that there was no reciprocal agreement between the UK and NZ, as we’d been informed, and that just to get someone to come out would cost us £99! To join, according to the friendly lady, would cost even more. Meanwhile Celia was looking at the AA page on the Net where there was no indication that the price was anything like that. In the end we said we’d think about it.
By this time I was needing to go to the loo rather desperately (it’s one of the hazards of travelling) and because I’d seen a boy talking to the a man in the house we were parked outside, and because the bloke had seemed friendly enough, I thought I’d try and see if he’d let me use his toilet.
He was extremely friendly, and when I’d done my bit, he asked what the problem was with our car. I explained. He said, just give me a minute to get the kids in bed, and I’ll come and see if I can do anything. While we waited he must talked to his wife because she appeared and suggested we come in and have a cup of tea and that she was just ringing her Bank who covered her family for roadside mishaps to see if they would help us.
Amazingly that was fine: as long as she was with us when the RAC driver arrived, we’d be covered. Isn’t that extraordinary? We sat in the couple’s front room and talked about who they were and who we were (he’s a publisher of little children’s books - Little Tiger Press) and apart from the fact that we were still feeling rather frazzled by the incident, it couldn’t have been a more pleasant experience. (We’d called to the place we were going to, to tell them we might be running late - and they rang back suggesting a similar approach to the problem!)
But the two virtual strangers were like a couple of angels sent from heaven. Bless ‘em, as they say a lot over here.
Anyway the RAC man arrived, and of course the brakes were fine. No oil on the road, no obvious problems except that the brake fluid was hot. He recommended we get the car to a garage in the morning and have the fluid flushed and changed. And then followed us all the way to where we were staying for the night to make sure we got there safely. And we got there at the time we were supposed to!
This morning we went to the garage our overnight hosts recommended and they did the job within an hour! We thought we might be looking at a matter of days. Since then, we’ve driven twice through London traffic with the same stop-start issues, and the brakes have held.
Good old God.

Traffic Jams

As I write this I’m sitting in a deckchair on the side of the A34. We were stuck in a very long queue of cars and trucks and decided to stop for a while to let the traffic clear. Of course, as soon as we pulled over (and I’d found some bush to go to the loo behind) the traffic got moving, and has been moving ever since. Never mind, the rest won’t do us any harm; it’s very tiring driving at 7 mph for half an hour on end.
We had the same problem this morning, driving to Oxford. The roads were chocker - on our side of the road. People going the other direction were away laughing. Now the people going in the opposite direction - again - are zipping along, and our lot of traffic has just come to a standstill once more. Frustrating way to drive, but I guess you get used to it.
When I came to England for the first time, some forty years ago, my uncle took me and his wife and daughter out on a Sunday afternoon drive. It was lovely on the way to wherever we went, but the return journey consisted of one long traffic jam that crawled along in the same way we’ve just been crawling along. I thought, if this is what a Sunday afternoon drive consists of, I’ll forego the pleasure from now on.
Forty years on and things haven’t changed, except now queues are a permanent feature of travel here. When we came down to Northampton from Norwich last week, we got caught in a long queue - there’d been an accident on one of the roundabouts - and were stuck in it while thunder thundered overhead and lightning flashed.
It’s been fine when we’ve gone on the quieter roads, of course, but our GPS likes to take us on the main roads, having the mistaken idea that they are the quicker roads. She’s refuses to take traffic jams into consideration.