“You haven’t written a
word for a month.”
“Nothing to write about. Nothing ever happens. I’m as bored as a Spitfire pilot who spends his time mowing lawns.”
“You saw that chap trapped upside-down in his Land Rover the other day.”
“That’s nothing much to write about. I drove past, sharpish.”
“You could have stopped.”
“And done what, precisely? Said ‘Good Morning, would you like a cup of coffee from my flask whilst you’re waiting for the emergency services? I know it’ll be difficult for you to drink it upside down, but if a three-toed sloth can do it, so can you.”
“We’ve been on holiday.”
“Oh, yes. People are bound to find that riveting. A week in an old touring caravan in theYorkshire wolds.”
“You could try to make it interesting.”
“Right. I will. The caravan is made of glass fibre and marine plywood which has been dipped in an anti-rot compound…”
“You know what I mean. Make the holiday sound interesting. People like reading that sort of thing.”
The caravan site is at a village called Slingsby. We had been there before. It is a nice secluded site in a picturesque and charming village where everyone says ‘Good Morning’ and sells jam and tomatoes from their doorsteps. The only change that was apparent in the five years since we were last there was that the Volvo dealership had moved from the main street, leaving the premises vacant and ripe for redevelopment into housing. In Slingsby, house prices start at half a million pounds and work their way upwards.
It rained all day on the Monday, but cleared up and the weather was fine for the rest of the week.
On the Tuesday, we put up the awning. The pamphlet said that any two moderately fit people could erect it in 15 minutes. It took us two hours. None of the poles were marked and it was years since we last used it, so it took a long while to figure out which pole went where. A wind blew up from nowhere, which kept lifting the canvas and disturbing the frame, which then invariably fell onto the top of my head. When we had finished, I saw that the awning had adopted a rhomboid shape, rather than a true cube. I didn’t care.
The caravan site is next to the old railway station, which is now a building selling posh and fancy cakes with prices to match. The station closed in 1964, when British Railways realised that no-one had boarded a train there since 1956.
The branch line is now a railway walk, which is where I took the little dog for exercise three times a day for a week. It was always the same walk – half a mile of track, then turn left into an apple orchard, along a public footpath, past a derelict caravan and a white horse in a rudimentary stable, turn a corner past a few hens in a wire-mesh enclosure and a rotting box that said there were free-range eggs for sale and leave your money in a tin, except there were no eggs and no tin, past Pamela’s garden, or so a sign declared, full of sweet peas, wisteria and buddleia bushes, and finally past the sports field with its agricultural cricket-square, and finally the twee little Saxon church that was rebuilt in 1856.
It was on the sports ground that I had an altercation with a plump, middle-aged woman who looked, and sounded, not unlike Captain Mainwaring, though, thankfully, without the moustache. She berated me loudly for allowing the little dog onto the rough grass around the sports field when there was a clear notice instructing me not to. I was ready to reply in kind when I considered that she might have had three sons who were passable cruiserweights, so I declined.
Apart from that, the holiday went swimmingly and the days passed in a haze of visiting other quaint little villages, eating unspeakable fish and chips on a bench outside Morrison’s whilst ingesting carbon monoxide from heavy traffic at Malton, drinking coffee at £4 a head next to a bunch of guinea-fowl pecking away near a ford in Hovingham, and travelling to Pickering station to see a trio of red fire-buckets and a British steam locomotive, perhaps the preserved J27 or Q6 classes, members of which used to roll across the Seven Arches Bridge with great loads of coal long into the night when I was but a young boy. Instead, we were treated to a beastly American 2-8-0 built byBaldwin with a Westinghouse
pump on its smokebox door and a set of meretricious cast-iron, spokeless
wheels. All that was missing was a
cow-catcher on the front.
We left promptly on the following Saturday and rattled our way home in six hours. It took another hour to get the van back into its rightful place at the caravan storage park. I couldn’t reverse it into such a tight space at a ridiculous angle, especially as some fool had parked a small Peugeot in the only place I could turn, so I had to disconnect the van and manhandle it backwards up a slight gradient. I had the disadvantage of wearing rope-soled espadrilles on my feet, so I slipped violently on the loose scree and twice I almost fell down. The laws of gravity would have then ensured that the van rolled over me. I eventually managed the manouevre at the expense of a slightly dislocated right shoulder and a recurrence of my tennis elbow. Thankfully, the holidays were over for another year.
“I thought you were supposed to be making it interesting.”
“Well, I thought it was interesting.”
“It doesn’t seem very interesting to me. All that stuff about Baldwins, J27s and Westinghouse pumps. Bill Bryson would have made it interesting.”
“Bill Bryson doesn’t have to travel in a 22-year old caravan and stay in highly regimented caravan sites where the managers put you on a fizzer if you drop a Club wrapper on the grass.”
“Well, I don’t think that you’ve made it very interesting.”
“Well, that just proves my point. Nothing happens around here that is of the slightest interest to anyone.”
“Bill Bryson would have made it interesting. So would Michael Palin. So would that politician chap with the rubbery face who keeps getting on and off trains.”
“Well, we’ll invite one of them on our next trip and let them write up the results.”
“There’s no need to be sarcastic.”
“Ironic. I was being ironic. There is a difference.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter – no-one will read it, anyway.”
As Eric Morecambe would have said: “There’s no answer to that.”
“Nothing to write about. Nothing ever happens. I’m as bored as a Spitfire pilot who spends his time mowing lawns.”
“You saw that chap trapped upside-down in his Land Rover the other day.”
“That’s nothing much to write about. I drove past, sharpish.”
“You could have stopped.”
“And done what, precisely? Said ‘Good Morning, would you like a cup of coffee from my flask whilst you’re waiting for the emergency services? I know it’ll be difficult for you to drink it upside down, but if a three-toed sloth can do it, so can you.”
“We’ve been on holiday.”
“Oh, yes. People are bound to find that riveting. A week in an old touring caravan in the
“You could try to make it interesting.”
“Right. I will. The caravan is made of glass fibre and marine plywood which has been dipped in an anti-rot compound…”
“You know what I mean. Make the holiday sound interesting. People like reading that sort of thing.”
We set out on a
Sunday. As usual, I had great difficulty
in attaching the caravan to the towbar.
The breakaway cable is too short for the vehicle chassis, so I had to
attach it to the spare wheel carrier. If the towing joint had broken, the
vehicle would have surged forward and the caravan would have rolled backwards
pulling the carrier and spare wheel in its wake, hardly a great aid to stopping
it in its tracks.
We drove the 200 miles
without incident, except for the normal terror of imagining a breakdown in the
Tyne Tunnel. Despite the van being on
the small side, the car managed just 20 miles per gallon so I had to fill up
with petrol en route. That brought about the usual fears that the caravan
would be too tall for the petrol station canopy and would become irrevocably
wedged there. We had no difficulties in
buying petrol. The caravan site is at a village called Slingsby. We had been there before. It is a nice secluded site in a picturesque and charming village where everyone says ‘Good Morning’ and sells jam and tomatoes from their doorsteps. The only change that was apparent in the five years since we were last there was that the Volvo dealership had moved from the main street, leaving the premises vacant and ripe for redevelopment into housing. In Slingsby, house prices start at half a million pounds and work their way upwards.
It rained all day on the Monday, but cleared up and the weather was fine for the rest of the week.
On the Tuesday, we put up the awning. The pamphlet said that any two moderately fit people could erect it in 15 minutes. It took us two hours. None of the poles were marked and it was years since we last used it, so it took a long while to figure out which pole went where. A wind blew up from nowhere, which kept lifting the canvas and disturbing the frame, which then invariably fell onto the top of my head. When we had finished, I saw that the awning had adopted a rhomboid shape, rather than a true cube. I didn’t care.
The caravan site is next to the old railway station, which is now a building selling posh and fancy cakes with prices to match. The station closed in 1964, when British Railways realised that no-one had boarded a train there since 1956.
The branch line is now a railway walk, which is where I took the little dog for exercise three times a day for a week. It was always the same walk – half a mile of track, then turn left into an apple orchard, along a public footpath, past a derelict caravan and a white horse in a rudimentary stable, turn a corner past a few hens in a wire-mesh enclosure and a rotting box that said there were free-range eggs for sale and leave your money in a tin, except there were no eggs and no tin, past Pamela’s garden, or so a sign declared, full of sweet peas, wisteria and buddleia bushes, and finally past the sports field with its agricultural cricket-square, and finally the twee little Saxon church that was rebuilt in 1856.
It was on the sports ground that I had an altercation with a plump, middle-aged woman who looked, and sounded, not unlike Captain Mainwaring, though, thankfully, without the moustache. She berated me loudly for allowing the little dog onto the rough grass around the sports field when there was a clear notice instructing me not to. I was ready to reply in kind when I considered that she might have had three sons who were passable cruiserweights, so I declined.
Apart from that, the holiday went swimmingly and the days passed in a haze of visiting other quaint little villages, eating unspeakable fish and chips on a bench outside Morrison’s whilst ingesting carbon monoxide from heavy traffic at Malton, drinking coffee at £4 a head next to a bunch of guinea-fowl pecking away near a ford in Hovingham, and travelling to Pickering station to see a trio of red fire-buckets and a British steam locomotive, perhaps the preserved J27 or Q6 classes, members of which used to roll across the Seven Arches Bridge with great loads of coal long into the night when I was but a young boy. Instead, we were treated to a beastly American 2-8-0 built by
We left promptly on the following Saturday and rattled our way home in six hours. It took another hour to get the van back into its rightful place at the caravan storage park. I couldn’t reverse it into such a tight space at a ridiculous angle, especially as some fool had parked a small Peugeot in the only place I could turn, so I had to disconnect the van and manhandle it backwards up a slight gradient. I had the disadvantage of wearing rope-soled espadrilles on my feet, so I slipped violently on the loose scree and twice I almost fell down. The laws of gravity would have then ensured that the van rolled over me. I eventually managed the manouevre at the expense of a slightly dislocated right shoulder and a recurrence of my tennis elbow. Thankfully, the holidays were over for another year.
“I thought you were supposed to be making it interesting.”
“Well, I thought it was interesting.”
“It doesn’t seem very interesting to me. All that stuff about Baldwins, J27s and Westinghouse pumps. Bill Bryson would have made it interesting.”
“Bill Bryson doesn’t have to travel in a 22-year old caravan and stay in highly regimented caravan sites where the managers put you on a fizzer if you drop a Club wrapper on the grass.”
“Well, I don’t think that you’ve made it very interesting.”
“Well, that just proves my point. Nothing happens around here that is of the slightest interest to anyone.”
“Bill Bryson would have made it interesting. So would Michael Palin. So would that politician chap with the rubbery face who keeps getting on and off trains.”
“Well, we’ll invite one of them on our next trip and let them write up the results.”
“There’s no need to be sarcastic.”
“Ironic. I was being ironic. There is a difference.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter – no-one will read it, anyway.”
As Eric Morecambe would have said: “There’s no answer to that.”
