CERTIFICATED INSANE

On day four, we ended up in a field in Wynyard, near Hartlepool. This is what the Caravan and Camping Club calls a ‘certificated site’ i.e., a field with no amenities except a fresh-water tap, a sunken and sinking cesspit into which to empty chemical waste, and grass soaking-wet and six inches long. The book said that the access from the A689 was ‘easy from either side of the dual carriageway’. I drove past the entrance three times in either direction, clocking up another 8 miles, before I found the way in. At least I was able to erect the awning, as the number of visitors had dwindled to ourselves and one other, and he was a football pitch’s length away at the other end of the field. The awning went up after two hours for a ten-minute job, yet even then it had a distinctly lopsided look, and one of the side entrances wouldn’t unzip due to the cloth being far too tightly pegged out. As soon as I had erected it, monsoon rain fell and thunder rumbled as if we were in the Cretaceous period. Rainwater started collecting on the awning roof. It threatened to bring down the whole shoddy edifice, so I had to stand underneath the roof from the inside and periodically poke it with a stick to discharge the rainwater down the sides, until the rain stopped two hours later. We visited Seaton Carew, Hartlepool’s resort. The place looked rheumy-eyed, sad, tired. It seemed to be trying to relive past glories on a budget of very little – a modicum of paper over a very large crack. The view from the sea front was of a futuristic tangle of pipes, retorts and vessels, the machinery for refining oil and chemicals, disgorging their thin exhausts into a darkening sky. Amazingly, in that dystopian vision called Seal Sands, I espied several seals basking on a shallow spit in the bay. On returning to the Wynyard site, I received a good tip from a bald, fat and jolly man, the other occupant. I was rolling the fresh-water barrel in its yoke three acres uphill, to the solitary tap. “You don’t want to do that,” he wheezed, “just hook it over the towbar of your car and pull it along.” He demonstrated with his own vehicle, an elderly Nissan Primera. The technique seemed to work. I am learning more and more about this caravanning business every day. We left Wynyard and its monstrous windmills at the end of day five. I had explored the cerificated site from end-to-end. I had seen Hartlepool, Stockton and Yarm-on-Tees in their full glory. There didn’t seem to be much left to do, so I headed south into Yorkshire.