Gainsborough

We got up extremely early this morning (5am or so) and breakfasted so as to be in time to be in Gainsborough to see the tidal bore at 7 am. Even though we waved goodbye to Macolm and Barbara around 5.30, we managed to miss the tide, probably only by around 10 minutes or so. Mum was rather disappointed, but Pip and I thought that seeing the sun rise over the river Trent more than made up for missing the tide.

We discovered we had several hours before anywhere opened, so we drove around Gainsborough and snooped. For most of mum's side of the family (through her grandfather - my great-grandfather), Gainsborough is the ancestral stomping-ground. Only one Kirkby seems ever to have left Gainsborough, and then only to pursue his love to Australia. Well, we drove past what we think was the same house said great-grandfather lived in, though it's been fancied-up since. A tiny semi-detatched, and yet he lived there with 5 other family members.


We also saw Marshall's Yards where world-famous tractors were made, and where my great-grandfather served his apprenticeship as a boilermaker. Today it's a large carpark, and the old sheds have been converted into cosmetics shops and hairdressing salons. Interesting irony, there.

By this stage it had passed 9 o'clock, and we visited The Canute for "second breakfast", to Pip's hobbity delight. There's an idea among some historians that king Canute made a show of trying to stop the Trent's tidal bore, and not the ocean at all, despite the way legend has it.

At 10, Gainsborough Old Hall was open for admission. It's a building that's been on the site since Medieval times, and all the subsequent owners have merely added their own architectural quirks to the place, instead of knocking it down and rebuilding. Thus there are half-timbered Tudor rooms grafted onto stone towers that date from hundreds of years before. The most fascinating rooms were the kitchens - Medieval period, and some of the best-preserved in the country. The chimneys were enormous, and I was amused to see that the kitchenhands' sleeping quarters were nestled in close to the main chimney for warmth.


We left the hall and set out for Sheffield before midday; luckily there was no trouble with the Gainsborough longing, and we didn't have to blindfold mum, or tie her to the mast. The drive went well until we actually reached Sheffield city itself. We got rather hopelessly lost (I suspect this comes of "saving money" by using a 30-year-old street directory, ho-hum) - and matters were not improved by Sheffield's roads. The city is really just a town that got too big for its boots, far too quickly, when the steel industry took off. As a result the houses are crammed even closer together than in some of the older towns we've visited... and every second street in this suburb seems to be one-way. (Pat? Sunbury has nothing on this place.)


We did find our B & B, though... "Coniston", which is a nice place run apparently singlehandedly by Deborah, our hostess. The room Pip and I are in has a bay window that looks right out across Hillsborough (our suburb of Sheffield). Sheffield seems an unbeautiful city - the hill we face is covered in slate-roofed houses that make it look scaly, or armoured.

Dad lived here for three years or so in his twenties, when he was a lecturer in Sheffield university's engineering department. Around midday he took mum and I by car to show us the grounds of the uni and where he used to live; all while we waited for our clothes to finish at the laundromat. The sightseeing was interesting (having worked at home's uni for a year, I like comparing campuses)... but the drive to and from was an entirely different matter.

It started off a little nervewracking, as mum was helping navigate a place she'd not even studied on the map; and because of the aforementioned problems with Sheffield's streets. What I haven't mentioned is that these streets were never built for cars. You're lucky if the road you're on has two car-sized lanes - and even then, parked cars have nowhere but the middle of a lane to sit. This results in a lot of instances of having to drive in the wrong lane, with careful gestural negotiations between you and any oncoming traffic. A dip of the headlights can mean anything from "you stay there, I'm coming through", or "no, you first"... to "what in God's name possessed you to buy a Landrover, you tosser?" To top it off, Sheffield is built across five rivers, which makes for a LOT of hills. And a place name like "Hag Hill" sounds like bad news to begin with, no? Try hill-starting on it, in a heavily-laden manual. The clutch nearly burned out.

The stress became greater and greater, particularly on the trip back to the laundromat. I couldn't decide whether it was better to keep my eyes open or closed. I must admit, I wasn't thinking "dear God, we're going to DIE", because that would have required rational thought processes in place of blind white panic. By the time dad stopped illegally and left the two of us so he could find somewhere to park, it was a choice for me between kissing the solid ground I was at last standing on, or bursting into bemused tears. I'm sorry to say I took the latter course, but at least I managed NOT to be sick. Believe me, that was a substantial achievement.

After retrieving the washing we returned to Coniston, where the shower had run out of hot water. Nothing can reduce me to homicidal rage quite like a cold shower does, and with that on top of everything else, I fear I threw a tantrum. A quiet one, but a heartfelt one. Whoops. Pip was wonderful, and cheered me up with hot chocolate.

I recovered after a short while, and we all went out for dinner with my uncle Ray and his partner Sheila. Sheila told us all about her work at the uni, and Ray told us about how difficult life is for an agnostic organ player (think about it). Believe it or not, he has his own pipe organ installed in his apartment.

Dinner was lovely, but went late, and by the time we'd caught the tram back to Hillsborough and climbed the hill, Pip and I fell into bed almost comatose.