My family is lucky enough to have a small retreat in the wilds of Eastern England. It has become our tradition to celebrate Christmas there rather than in London. It is absolutely great there, it’s like being on another planet. I get culture shock every time I go: people smile and say hello to each other on woodland footpaths, people are not obsessive about shutting, locking and quadruple-checking every door and window when they pop up the road to the shops, at the local pubs the staff bother to notice whether they have seen you before or not. Going East really feels like a getaway. While only a hundred miles from London, it is sufficiently far away that even a couple of days up there is enough to recharge the batteries and blow away the cobwebs. The local produce is amazing value and to die for.
But. Getting back from there is a right royal pain in the derrière. The East of England is renowned for its poor infrastructure. The train line to the town was ripped up by Herr Doktor Beeching in his wisdom in the 1960s. The nearest station is ten miles away and is served by about four trains per day. Over Christmas the geniuses at Network Rail close down the London end of the line making any journey home an utter misery of replacement buses and missed connections. 100 miles becomes a full day of public “transportation”.
The alternative is to throw myself at the mercy of someone prepared to give me a lift back. This has its own problems. I have an apparently unusual attitude to travel. Once I have decided that I want to go somewhere, I want to go somewhere now and via the quickest and least inconvenient route. I have been told that this is not how other people see the world. Other people turn up much later than they intended, having overslept and not felt in a hurry. Other people want to have another cup of tea before they set off. Other people want to stop off somewhere for a lazy pub lunch en route. Other people want to go Geocaching.
This is a game where you log into the site and tell it where you are. It then tells you the locations of the nearest “caches”. You download those to your GPS device (or iPhone or whatever) and you seek them out. There are basic clues to find what you are looking for. The caches are hidden in public places away from view so that casual passers-by will not find them by chance and inadvertently skew the game. Once found you can leave a note or a calling card in the cache (which can be a small box or weather-tight container) to show that you have found it. You then update the website to say you have found it.
The guy who kindly drove me back to London this morning/afternoon/evening is really into Geocaching. Perhaps for him traipsing round unfamiliar towns looking for small tins containing damp bits of ephemera is a fun thing to do on a Bank Holiday Monday. Perhaps it is a fun thing to do when you don’t have anything better to do. But it really is an effective way of turning a three hour journey into a five-and-a-half hour journey. I haven’t felt so unable to control my own destiny in a long time. Maybe it’s time I got my own bloody car.
Geocaching – really? Not since staring out the rotting progress of compost heaps usurped train spotting, has there been a more serious contender for the Globe’s most pathetically boring hobby.
That’s why it’s so nice. Inaccessible.
Sounds like an electronic version of letterboxing.
Now. I don’t know what it is but your comments box triggers migraines for me. Any way of changing format ?
“…people are not obsessive about shutting, locking and quadruple-checking every door and window when they pop up the road to the shops…”
Oh oh! BigGov isn’t going to like that…
Tight-fisted sod. Get a car!
Ah, Adnams country again? We are still keeping an eye on places down there, but I fear the A12 may be a problem unless we can get well clear of said piece of tarmac torture.
As for the cache, now at last I know why there is a tupperware box stashed under a sandstone slab by the babbling brook along which I walk our muttley from time to time. The box is filled with matchbox toy cars and other detritus. I found it 2 years ago and very nearly treated it as 1) An IED (quickly discounted by its location) 2) someones suicide message (also discounted by way of a search for any hanging corpses), 3) Salman Rushdie’s sandwitch drop-off point and 4)litter. After casual obs over several days and the occasional night walk, I chose option `4` and decided to take a bag along to dispose of this box of rubbish, as I often do when finding the crap that people dump wherever they roam, until I forgot about it. Total time expended, outside my normal walk, amounted to about 2 minutes. Now you’ve enlightened me as to its likely purpose I feel I ought to re-establish a covert O.P. and then quickly dispatch any approaching `geocachers`, for the greater good of humanity.
Hire a car.
Lack of infrastructure! Where is your sense of adventure?
Quite often, I need to travel a long distance on business.
Occasionally, I will consult one of those websites that let you plan your journey by rail (which I will admit, I find quite enjoyable.)
The problem is that, unless is something as straightforward as Oxenholme to Euston, the journey will invariably involve 3 stop overs, all day to get there and a bleeding big bill for the ticket.
Which is why 9 out 10 times, I still use my car. Using public transport for business travel is a myth.
XX Herr Doktor Beeching XX
I am sorry. I was not aware he was German. Care to eleborate?
Being as I live in Stoke, I have never been in East Angular. I’d like to but I don’t drive & nor do most of my mates, so I only go where I can talk my parents into taking me or sometimes on a train. I get by but I probably miss out on a bit of stuff.
My back yard is the Staffordshire Moorlands, the Peak District, South Cheshire, Shropshire & if you’re lucky Wales. I think I’d move out into the moors if I ever left the city, as it would be close enough for me not to get homesick. But I do have an ideal house, just outside Church Stretton in Shropshire, where I like to daydream about living, as unlikely as it is to ever happen. Maybe the ideal woman is waiting there, eh?
Which part of the east is it? You might relate to Akenfield/Return To Akenfield- portraits of a Suffolk village in 1968 & 2006 made by speaking to the villagers & also by academic research to back it up. The author of Akenfield is a Suffolk man who is of similar stock to the people he interviewed, while the author of Return To Akenfield is Canadian. I liked the marriage of theory & practice- similar to the life of Robert Roberts, who grew up in the industrial slums of Salford & then became a writer & wrote about them, making detailed statistical research & that to back up what he knew & felt.
Just a little bit of a suggestion. They were very rooted in that Suffolk land, so maybe it will mean a bit to you. It looks to me as though they had a fairly shite life (interesting that there were a few incomers in 2006, & not one of them had been attracted by reading about the place, because while it sounded interesting it also didn’t sound like much of a place to live), & in general I don’t consider the old days to have been good at all, but I think it’s important that we keep a detailed record of them. Say what you like about our society being so information-saturated but at least 2009 won’t be forgotten like prehistoric times are.
100 miles becomes a full day of public “transportation”
Seems an appropriate term for it… you’re sent on a crowded vessel for what feels like a round-the-world voyage, to be abandoned with the scarcest provisions in barren and inhospitable territory where the natives are seldom seen and probably don’t speak English. No chance of return for years, so your only hope is to start a new life and invent words like “g’day”…
Clearly the best way to improve the service was to tell NXEA that they’ll be stripped of the franchise in 18 months – that’ll motivate them no end!