Saturday 15th JuneI guessed from the amount of light in the sky that it was about 4 am when I awoke needing to take a walk across the field. I woke Mrs. Wow, who prefers her visits not to be an emergency. In the end she left me behind in the nocturnal rush for the chemical bogs and just as I returned to the tent the rain started. It was driven by quite a strong southerly and, despite our efforts to pitch near the hedge, the tent was being shaken a bit and, once the rain got going, was splattered quite noisily. We got to sleep after a while and woke again around 7, I think.
The plan today was to go cycling. We had a quick cuppa for breakfast and then left, as Northey Island is only a short distance from the Round Bush pub, which has a café attached to it. We arrived there and Canardly and I ordered the mega-breakfast, which was big enough on its own but I was quite downhearted when we were faced with a separate dish of chips each. At one point I thought I felt something crawling on my leg and in the darkness under the table, against the background of my sock, I perceived what may have been a honeybee. I pinged it off and didn't give it any more thought for a while, until I picked my hat off the floor and found that about half a dozen black beetles had taken up residence underneath it. I thought they may have been cockroaches but wasn't sure. I drew one of the waitresses' attention to their existence.
<insert photo of big breakfast>
We headed north-east towards our destination for the day, St. Peter's Saxon church, on the sea wall at Bradwell. We had made such inroads into our cash supply that we visited the post office in Latchingdon and Canardly and I each withdrew £50. Bob was not aware that post offices offered this facility. It was much better than paying £1.75 to some faceless cash machine operator in charge of the machine in the garage across the road for the privilege of getting at my own money. Some light or other dimly came on within my brain: is the parish not known as Latchingdon and Snoreham? I had forgotten about Snoreham and I wondered where it was. There seems to be no evidence left within the village about its whereabouts. Wikipedia give this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latchingdon and Streetmap shows Snoreham Hall
http://www.streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?X=588500&Y=199500&A=Y&Z=120. Mrs. Wow didn't believe a word of my ramblings about Snoreham.
The road out to Bradwell is pretty unpleasant. There are numerous left turns, mostly going down towards large caravan parks on the Blackwater estuary, and these seem to attract a lot of summer traffic. The result is that the further east you cycle, the lighter the traffic becomes. At one point we were overtaken by a quartet of cyclists who were probably a little older than we were. They stopped shortly afterwards and one shouted "Would you like a jelly baby?" I affirmed that I would, so we did a quick U-turn and joined them for a brief natter and some sugar. It turned out that they were from Kent and were doing a car-assisted ride around the Dengie and they too were quite disappointed by the level of the traffic. I don't usually bother to ride on the Dengie peninsula these days as the B-roads serving it are so busy that there's little pleasure to be had. However, if you are staying in Maldon anyway it's worth making the effort. Tillingham is a nice little village and has a couple of pubs, and St. Peter's Church is a treasure. There is some good marshland riding to be had, enhanced these days by the existence of some wind turbines, for which our local FoE group were heavily involved in campaigning, countering some of the disinformation put about by a couple of anti-groups. Suffice it to say that these turbines have no detrimental effect whatever on the nearest villages.
After we had visited the church, the weather took a decided turn for the worse as the wind became stronger and the rain started. We would normally have been looking for some lunch, but we were still weighed down by the gargantuan breakfast. Jan and Bob produced a few snacks from the luggage: cereal bars and apples, and more jelly babies, which we ate outside the church, and then we struggled into the wind and wound our way round to Tillingham. There are two pubs in the village, the Fox and Hounds and the Cap and Feathers. We have had excellent meals in the Fox and Hounds before now, but the last time I was in the Cap and Feathers a tea room had been opened at the back of the pub, and tea and cake were really what we needed. There was no sign of the tea room but there was a sign on the wall advertising cream teas, so we went into the bar, where a small group of people were sitting round a table. We were greeted by a young woman whom I presumed to be the barmaid. I asked her about tea and cakes, particularly the cream teas offered outside. Before she could answer, one of the men sitting round the table, who seemed to be the landlord, said they "hadn't got any of that sort of thing". She did serve us a cup of tea, and when we had finished it we noticed that the rain was heavier, so we ordered another. Jan noticed a redundant sign leaning against the wall which had once advertised the now-defunct tea room. I suppose you aren't going to make much of a success of a tea room if you don't keep any cake in stock.
After Tillingham we made for Asheldam and then west along Green Lane, which eventually brought us into Latchingdon again, although by the time we got there we were drenched. The Red Lion (in Snoreham) seemed to offer some shelter, lavatories and possibly more refreshment, so we parked the bikes and walked through the deserted conservatory to the bar, where quite a few people were drinking. I asked the barman about tea.
"No, can't do that, the kitchen's being cleaned."
"Do you have any ale apart form the IPA," I enquired, pointing at the handpump.
"No, no draught beers apart form these," he replied, pointing to the keg rubbish.
Jan went to the loo and changed into some dry trousers as the rain had stopped, although I noticed as we left the reason for the conservatory's desolation: the roof was leaking in several places. So, two pubs in quick succession that will probably go to the wall in the near future quite simply because the people running them cannot be bothered to do a proper job.
The sun shone on the righteous for the rest of the afternoon and we headed past the junction to Northey Island because the tide was in. Instead we found ourselves in the Queen Victoria, in Maldon, which offered some good and reasonably priced food, an excellent range of beers (Adnam's Ghost Ship was our preferred tipple) and a view of the receding tide. After leaving the pub we bought some milk for our morning tea and then headed back to Northey and more beer. After a couple of ales and a bap containing some protein, we decided we had had enough of the not-very-good band. We subsequently found that it was their first gig, so when Pugwash take the world by storm in their ancient, scarcely-converted post office van, you heard of them here first.
After the band had finished, Canardly and I decided to sing a couple of songs, and unquestionably the
piéce de résistance was our rendition of the parody of "What a friend we have in Jesus" from "Oh What a Lovely War!", and even that was slightly bowdlerised by alcohol and decaying grey matter. For the record, what we were trying to sing was this:-
When this lousy war is over
No more soldiering for me!
When I get my civvy clothes on
Oh how happy I shall be!
No more church parades on Sundays,
No more putting in for leave!
I shall kiss the sergeant-major!
How I'll miss him, how he'll grieve!
It has to be said that, tuneful as we were, neither of us could quite manage the robust tenor sung by the actor in the film. Even so, we could tell that quite a few people sitting near us were mightily impressed. I feel with hindsight that what we really lacked was Oscar's Dad in a reindeer costume.
We finished the evening with a large dollop from a bottle of 12-year-old Glenfiddich, which Bob had thoughtfully placed in his car.
