millionreasons | Now we're even further away

Out into the countryside with Allan, Daves 1 and 2, Heike, Jo, Jeff, Colin P and Mitzi, through cute thatched villages with tiny post offices, down hill and up dale, taking bridges over dry streams and stepping stones in wet ones, through woodland bursting with rowan, rosehip, elder and sloe berries, eating blackberries off bushes and sneaking pears from overhanging orchards. Passing decapitated pigeons, presumably mistaken for partridge by the idiots of Essex. To the active market town of Saffron Walden with its imposing church and to Audley End to eat our picnics in the brilliant end-of-BST-sunshine, by the side of the puffa puffa miniature railway. We don’t go into the stately home as we need our £8.95s for the pub. I have a natural dislike of National Trust and English Heritage houses. With some exceptions (for example, the rather striking Goldfinger home we visited during Open House weekend): the histories of said houses (and thus the aristocratic types that built) them are wholly dull and always end with “the family bequeathed the house to the nation in 1948”, failing to note that death duties and the price of a good servant were crippling the upper classes and they therefore did a deal with the government whereby they would go and live in Mayfair and the Inland Revenue would forget about that pesky tax bill that Lord & Lady so-n-so had overlooked (except Lord Longleat, who just got in some lions). And now the nation now has to pay £8.95 to see how our Social Betters lived.

After 13 km, we get to in the Roman village of Wendens Ambo - and the last kilometre is the hardest kilometre, my throat was dry and the sun in my eye, and I realised, I realised….that I am extremely unfit. We have local beer for local walkers in an Elizabethan pub, nipping outside to listen to the football on Allan’s digital radio and debating whether to get the 10 past or 46 past train for about 3 hours, before arriving back in London just as everyone else is going out for the night.