Chester to Bath

We had a disorganised start this morning, because I had gotten my times for breakfast mixed up and made Pip and I late. Still, we wandered out to see Chester in daylight. There is a particularly garish clock set up in the town centre, and when I had stopped to photograph it the night before, a man had stopped me and said "if you like the view, go up on the city wall tomorrow morning - there's a man who sits up there and sells his drawings of Chester". Well, I doubted I would want to spend money on views of Chester, but I thought I ought to have a look after the random recommendation. We climbed the staircase to the level of the clock, and sure enough there was a man just beyond us, hanging up his prints on the fence.



When I went up and took a good look, there was a hilarious surprise - the artists drew views of Chester, alright, as well as the surrounding countryside, and various famous English landmarks. But he put a spin on each picture, by inserting Dr Who characters into each scene. The idea is tacky, I'll admit - but I am a huge fan of Dr Who, and the drawings were well-done, and it seemed kinda pop-arty. I struck up conversation with the artist (name of John), who grinned sheepishly and admitted that he'd "sorta made a living from Dr Who pictures". By this stage mum and Pip had joined me, and when he discovered we were Australians, he grinned again and asked us to hold on one moment. With a flourish he produced two pictures from his portfolio folder - the first one of Daleks at the Sydney Opera House, and the second of Cybermen climbing the Harbour Bridge. I was so taken by the first one that I bought a print. I love the weirdness of blending English pop culture with somewhere so close to home. Pip bought a view of the Chester clock, with Tom Baker and David Tennant raising their eyebrows at one another in front.

We strolled on, going further than we had the night before. We took a look at the site of the Roman amphitheatre (Chester's a Roman town originally) - it was interesting, but not very well-preserved. There's a road straight through the middle, for instance.

Back in the town, Pip bought herself a scarf at a little street stall. When we started retracing our steps so as to be off and driving again before midday, it suddenly became apparent that Pip had dropped the scarf somewhere behind us by accident. Argh! She and I rushed back towards town, with mum and dad following more slowly behind us.

Unfotunately we couldn't find the scarf - someone must have picked it up quite quickly. Pippo was upset, but dad took her back to the stall to buy another (happily it hadn't been an expensive thing to lose). Mum and I decided to wait at the point where we'd all caught up again, on the upper level of the shops. But something had been lost in translation in the rush, and after half an hour there was still no sign of dad or Pip. We had both the working phones, as well. Eventually mum and I began walking back to our B & B out of desperation; we were getting later and later, and we had wanted to be in Bath before dark. Happily the other two had come the same way, and were waiting for us on the bridge out of town. We bundled into the car, and finally drove out of Chester, into Shropshire.



Mum was excited to be driving through the area, because A. E. Houseman is one of her very favourite poets, and he wrote mostly about the area where he'd grown up ("A Shropshire Lad"). Unfortunately in the scramble she had ended up as the driver, and there was nowhere to pull over and swap. Yet another bungle on our part - we seemed cursed today. The final straw came when my blood sugar levels went belly-up and I started feeling carsick. We stopped at the first roadside pub we came to, in a place called Lembotswood, and I wobbled around the carpark until my stomach had settled. Judging by the historical photographs in "The Pound"'s loos, Lembotswood has remained exactly the same for the last hundred years - it's just gained cars. The pub's roof is thatched, complete with birds made of straw above each gable. We went in and had a drink each, and watched the tallest of the waiters expertly navigate the low ceilings. I thought one of them was going to knock himself senseless several times, but he'd mastered the quick duck under each roof beam, even when carrying drinks.



The last few miles into Bath, I swapped seats with dad. He can't see well in the dark, and someone had to help navigate by reading signs in the falling dusk. Well, the trip was fairly scary and horrible in the dark - we were following very good directions provided by our hosts for the night, but the roads into Bath are windy and narrow, and have no streetlighting. We descended the last steep hill into Bath, and inched around the edge of the hospital. Finally the sign for Apsley House came into view. We prised poor mum's hands off the steering wheel, and went inside to check in.

Here came the crowning mini-crisis of the day - mum had accidentally booked the wrong night, and our hosts were expecting us to be staying in the gatehouse the night after. Thankfully they soon figured out what had happened, and generously offered us rooms for the night in the main house, and at the cheaper rate - even though it really hadn't been their fault. Poor mum only asks a travel agent to help book flights, because she likes to organise car hire and accommodation herself. She had been juggling so many different things on our long and complicated itinerary that it was little wonder a changed date had slipped through the cracks. She was embarrassed, but I'm just impressed that she makes so many other things WORK, without making mistakes...

No harm done in the end, though, and a serendipitous result. The rooms we had been given for the night were sumptuous - mum and dad had a four-post bed, and Pip and I had an enormous suite of rooms to ourselves. This is probably the first and last time I'll ever stay in 5-star accommodation, and it was kinda fun. Pip and I made sure to sample all the exotic soaps and shampoos that were arrayed in our gigantic bathroom. She got the double bed, and I slept in a little side-chamber of my own. You should've seen the embroidery on the fabric of the curtains. Whee...



At the suggestion of our host, we went out for dinner at an Indian BYO restaurant not far down the hill, named "The Desh". I had chicken Biryani, but each of us shared our meals around the table. I'm afraid I got tipsy on wine, and we headed back for bed soon after we'd eaten. Good grief, those beds were comfortable!

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.