Christmas Island
Dec. 28th, 2009 02:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
millionreasonsAs soon as we leave the London hinterlands it turns into a winter wonderland, slanting sun lights up the snowy fields, signs to The North Pole, cheery staff in our traditional first stopping-off point, the Bishop Stortsford Welcome Break. We singlaong to our Xmas CDs, passing frozen lakes and frosty trees as we hit the Midlands, a chimney holding static puffs of cotton candy ice cream as we enter South Yorkshire. A1 landmarks, the Harrier Jumpjet at Duxford, the zinc Ok Diner, the Little Chef shaped like a giant ray at Retford. Harworth pit.
We eat Xmas lunch at a carvery which is a bit like the Master's starving speech about fatty greasy flesh (Dr Who is too full of portentousness and special effects to be a true Christmas Classic), but it's not too bad as long as you wait for the re-up on the vegetables.
Later, the under-40s beat the over-50s at a pub quiz game - youth and guile beat innocence and age.
There's ice on the beach where we bathed
Driving into the sun. East is east. Into Lincs, the English Prairie: big beautiful brash blue and ice skies. The snow factories outside Gainsborough huffing up ice clouds. Over the brown and white Wolds. Wicker (snow)men, partridges pecking on verges, pigeons pecking at roadkill, signs for bags of potatoes (£3), firewood, hay bales, free range eggs from happy hens. Coach tours, tea shops, Hedgehog Care, caravan parks. Windy roads the Romans never came near.
Out for a walk to Sandilands along the chocolatey beach, ghosts of windfarms on the horizon, sunset beach huts called Seaview and Canute II.
We watch Pirates of the Caribbean III - a mixture of Lost and Monthy Python's The Meaning of Life.
Top to toe in tail-lights, I got red lights on the run
To Anderby Creek to have a look at the Cloud Bar, the Cape Cod-esque clapboard houses, the sewage output jetty, and the sea daisies. If this place were in Dorset, the Guardian would run a feature on it every week. As it is, there's us, a dog walker and a sea fisherman and the brilliant sweep of cove-light. The big expanse of sea, sand and sky. It's quite lovely. I pick up a shell to remind me.
Onto Chapel St Leonards (best forgotten) and then back on the road: fields of cabbages, fields of wheat. Onto Stamford, which I thought would be all Georgian tea rooms, but we end up eating in a wipe-clean tablecloth sort of cafe. It takes us an hour to do a 10 mile stretch on the M11 due to idiots rubbernecking an accident that happened four hours previously. I flick through the radio stations, trying to find a song to make me feel less frustrated; weirdly it's Chris Rea that does it, until we're 25 miles away and we can see London, Dick Whitington style from the top of a hill, shining ahead like the jewel it is.
We eat Xmas lunch at a carvery which is a bit like the Master's starving speech about fatty greasy flesh (Dr Who is too full of portentousness and special effects to be a true Christmas Classic), but it's not too bad as long as you wait for the re-up on the vegetables.
Later, the under-40s beat the over-50s at a pub quiz game - youth and guile beat innocence and age.
There's ice on the beach where we bathed
Driving into the sun. East is east. Into Lincs, the English Prairie: big beautiful brash blue and ice skies. The snow factories outside Gainsborough huffing up ice clouds. Over the brown and white Wolds. Wicker (snow)men, partridges pecking on verges, pigeons pecking at roadkill, signs for bags of potatoes (£3), firewood, hay bales, free range eggs from happy hens. Coach tours, tea shops, Hedgehog Care, caravan parks. Windy roads the Romans never came near.
Out for a walk to Sandilands along the chocolatey beach, ghosts of windfarms on the horizon, sunset beach huts called Seaview and Canute II.
We watch Pirates of the Caribbean III - a mixture of Lost and Monthy Python's The Meaning of Life.
Top to toe in tail-lights, I got red lights on the run
To Anderby Creek to have a look at the Cloud Bar, the Cape Cod-esque clapboard houses, the sewage output jetty, and the sea daisies. If this place were in Dorset, the Guardian would run a feature on it every week. As it is, there's us, a dog walker and a sea fisherman and the brilliant sweep of cove-light. The big expanse of sea, sand and sky. It's quite lovely. I pick up a shell to remind me.
Onto Chapel St Leonards (best forgotten) and then back on the road: fields of cabbages, fields of wheat. Onto Stamford, which I thought would be all Georgian tea rooms, but we end up eating in a wipe-clean tablecloth sort of cafe. It takes us an hour to do a 10 mile stretch on the M11 due to idiots rubbernecking an accident that happened four hours previously. I flick through the radio stations, trying to find a song to make me feel less frustrated; weirdly it's Chris Rea that does it, until we're 25 miles away and we can see London, Dick Whitington style from the top of a hill, shining ahead like the jewel it is.
