News from Nowhere

Once again, and despite two significant absences, the carol evening worked its magic. Both of the missing were long-term - maybe even founding - participants. One we knew in advance would not be there: he committed himself to a band a while ago, and has since then been even harder to pin down. But he was so appalled to discover that they had a booking for the night of the carol evening that although we muttered serves him right!, it was hard to men it. Anyway, he was much missed... The other had e-mailed to say that he would definitely be with us, but has for some time been finding socialising difficult, and we weren't entirely surprised that he didn't turn up (worried, yes, but not surprised). But there were new people, who fitted in admirably; there was another regular returned after missing a year for medical reasons; and there was someone so physically transformed since last we met that I didn't recognise him (until the singing started, and then he was unmistakeable).

The mulled wine mysteriously required much less honey than last year, but was still very good. Each year we consume less of it: we are getting older, more of us don't drink at all - and then, as boybear pointed out, those absentees are among the most enthusiastic consumers. Memo to self: the original four-bottle batch would probably have been enough. I refreshed it with another bottle at half time, and then worried that I am turning into my mother - but no, she would have insisted on adding the last bottle in the case. There were fewer mince pies than usual: as the person responsible for warming up the mince pies for the half-time break, I was happy not to have to find baking trays for additional contributions. M. had baked the usual supply, and I think they were ample, but certainly there were none left over.

This is all good, but it's all about the carols. We sang our way through our songbooks (compiled long ago, duplicated and illustrated by our absent friend). We seem to have given up arguing about the order of the carols (mostly as in the book, but starting with O Come Emmanuel because it's an Advent carol, and ending with We Wish You A Merry Christmas because we do), and entertained ourselves instead with the confusion of the musicians, whose books are in alphabetical order. We couldn't find the supplementary sheets (which turned up at the end of the evening under one of the music books) but we sang the Sans Day Carol and Shepherds Arise regardless. I would have said that I left Shepherds Arise to the musicians, who have a fine harmony arrangement, because I don't really feel I know it. But I woke up a couple of days later earwormed by it, so I must know it better than I thought. A. and I disagreed about the pace of In Praise of Christmas (I'd like to try it a little faster, she feels that people take it too fast), but agreed that we would like to sing O Come All Ye Faithful in Latin...

Bonus carols: we did not listen to Radio 4's Sunday Service that morning, even though it was about the Sheffield carolling tradition. But I listened to it today, and enjoyed it.

After this, we were ready for a very quiet Monday. It was cold and bright, and we took the bus to East Finchley, to lunch at Egg and Bake. It's a slow bus ride but a scenic one, through Highgate Village, and it was an excellent lunch, with a choice of vegetarian breakfasts (East Finchley has become trendy since durham_rambler and I lived there.

On Tuesday we visited durham_rambler's family in Essex. In complete contrast, the day was grey and dark, and I decided against taking my camera with me: I very rarely photograph people, so it's just a dead weight on family visits. This was a mistake, as durham_rambler's brother suggested a quick visit to a local nature reserve (the Essex Wildlife Trust Thurrock Visitor Centre), on a former landfill site by the Thames, in aptly named Mucking. The café - because we didn't explore beyond the café - is an impressive circular building, with a ramp around the outside so you can walk up to the roof and admire the view: the silver grey wood of the building, the hazy grey of the river, the darker smudge of Kent on the far side, the leaden grey of the sky. At the top was a poster, one of a series of 'Watermarks' artworks. Inside the building, another ramp leads up to the café itself, circling a shop and providing display space for some fun textile hangings by the Kite Spirit textile group (and I wish I could find some better pictures).

And on Wednesday we came home. That drive doesn't get any shorter, but it went smoothly enough, and we had time to eat and to read the last chapter of Swallows and Amazons for the pub quiz - which we won. So it's good to be home, too.

I said, when I encountered Esturiana on Ha'penny Pier, that Anne Schwegmann-Fielding's award-winning toilets at Colchester Arts Centre looked well worth a visit. Colchester was, after all, our next destination, and the Arts Centre was close to a stretch of the city's Roman wall, which we would surely want to visit.

I had it in my head that an Arts Centre must include some public exhibition space, and maybe a café, which would make access easy. I was wrong there: it turned out to be a converted church, not an exhibition space but a performance venue, open on selected evenings (for a programme including some folk music events we would gladly have attended, had we been hanging about for the next few months). But the Box Office was open now, so we went in. The staff within seemed a bit surprised to be told "I hear you have the best toilets in Essex, could we see them?" (I can't imaging why) but one of them was willing to give us the tour, and very generous with his time.

( Generous enough to merit a cut here... )

It is possible that the reason our motoring has not gone smoothly this last few days is simply that we have been driving about more than is usual for us; or perhaps the roads of Essex are cursed. Whatever happened to that useful feature of car radios, which would find the most local radio station, with news of local traffic? Now the radio offers us a choice of music stations, but won't tell us why we have been stationary on the A12 for an hour and counting...

I first thought this on Monday, returning to Colchester from Mersea Island. Perhaps it was unwise of us to drive back into town at five o' clock, but that doesn't explain why the traffic lights were red for such long stretches. What Google estimated at ten minutes took over half an hour, but we survived, and made it to Waitrose in time to buy a picnic to eat in our hotel room, watching Monday night's quizzes on television.

Yesterday we drove down to Basildon to spend the day with durham_rambler's family: and had a pleasant, gentle, lazy day too. But driving back in the dark we found the A12 closed against us, and were just too late to spot the signposted diversion, which was not the way the satnav was bringing us. So we ended the day with an unexpected diversion along what would have been the scenic route if it hadn't been dark...

Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times... This morning, on the way from Colchester to Saffron Walden, to the last hotel of our holiday, we found ourselves as described above, on the A12 again, in traffic that moved only from time to time to pull aside and let an unmarked emergency vehicle through. The grapevine claimed that someone was on a bridge and threatening to jump; searching the internet now, I find police statements about a woman being cared for by the ambulance crew, so the grapevine probably had it pretty much right.

Eventually we emerged, and made our way to St Andrew's church, Greensted, which was very soothing:



I vividly remember visiting it as a child; today I found myself wishing I could tell my father we had been there. It took me a long while after his death to stop filing things mentally must tell Tom about... but this was the first in quite a while. (I wonder if he knew bout the connection with the Tolpuddle Martyrs?)

( Two museums in Harwich )

From Harwich to Colchester, where we are spending the next few days, is only a half-hour's drive, so although we had planned to come straight here, we allowed ourselves to be distracted by signs pointing to Mistley Towers. I didn't know what this was, but I thought I'd heard of it somewhere...



It turns out to be an English Heritage property, two ornate classical towers which are all that remains of a church built by Robert Adam for a patron with more money than sense (call it, The Only Way is Essex 1776). In order to visit it, we had pulled off the main road and parked alongside a goods yard bordering the River Stour. Further along the river we had a view of something massive which, if I had been in Yorkshire, I would have identified as a mill (but we aren't in Yorkshire). It seemed very incongruous, this extravagant classical folly and this industrial not-quite-wasteland - and then I spotted some chimneys (domestic, this time, not industrial) which turned out to be Mistley House, at the near end of a very pretty High Street, and followed the street through increasing rain to the Swan Fountain. Blame the rain, or the aroma of coffee coming from a barn-like structure beyond, but I took this unexpected and lifelike bird for some sort of post-modern construction - but no, it is a remnant of Adam's planned 18th Century salt-water spa development.

The barn was Mistley Quay Workshops, an impressive timber structure which houses both the café and Cooper's Gallery, a shop packed with pretty things, some of which looked very familiar: had I come across James Dodds before? Yes, it turns out, I had. This was an unexpected find, and I bought some cards, plus a little book (so I have at least partially observed National Bookshop Day).

What did I want from a holiday in Essex? Well, this, among other things: to discover places as unexpected as Mistley.

Where to start? Hartlepool's as good a place as any.



For some time now we have been plotting an autumn getaway, nothing ambitious but with a definite intention to leave the country: which meant that we were waiting until durham_rambler had a final meeting with his cardiac specialist, at which point he could tell the insurance people he wasn't awaiting any appointments, and things would get cheaper. And then we would book the ferry to Belgium... Instead of which, the specialist confirmed what we had been told, that everyone is very pleased with durham_rambler's progress, but they are curious about what caused the problem and would like to do an MRI scan. And the insurance people didn't simply raise the price, they declined to cover us.

After a bit of cursing, we came up with Plan B, to holiday in the UK. Our first thought was to head for Scotland again, and we had some specific ideas that had distinct possibilities. But then I remembered a conversation that GirlBear and I had had, a year or so ago, and suggested a visit to Essex instead. There are reasons why this strikes me as a really good idea, and reasons why I find it quite absurd, and perhaps some of them will become apparent as our ten-day break unrolls. But for the moment, here we are in Harwich.

We had protected those ten free days in the calendar, without making any plans or bookings: now they were almost upon us, and we had to organise a holiday in between work and laundry and two separate visits to the GP for three separate vaccinations (each) and did I mention the Hartlepool Folk Festival? If the picture above is a bit confused, it's because it was taken at a moment when there was a lot going on: I was sitting in a deckchair, enjoying the (October! in Hartlepool!) sunshine, eating chips and listening to the Wilsons, while the giant fish and crow and skeleton puppets chased each other back and forth... Another highlight was more sedate, Sunday morning with Alistair Anderson in the Fishermen's Arms. These are old friends, of course, and it would be nice to have stumbled over something new and thrilling, but it's a lot to ask, and there was plenty of interesting stuff without it.

We gave ourselves Monday and Tuesday to pack, and needed both: even so we weren't away before midday yesterday. We stayed the night with D. and valydiarosada in Ely, always a pleasure, and today we visited Sutton Hoo. About which I will say only that a picture is worth a thousand words:



Then we crossed the Stour into Essex, and here we are at the Pier Hotel in Harwich. And there's a shanty festival about to start happening. We had no idea, though it does explain why we weren't able to book as many nights here as we wanted. Perhaps tomorrow we'll find some shanties.