Orford's awesome tartlets

We managed to get on the road by 10.15am, which these days is good going having now lost any sense of the morning urgency we used to get from chivvying kids to school and rushing to get to work on time. Ah, the joys of worklessness! We needed to contact our youngest to find out when she was planning to come home, other than that we had no need to rush back north, or rush anywhere at all. 

Mobile phone coverage in this part of Suffolk is somewhat intermittent so we headed for Woodbridge hoping for a better signal in  town. The couple camping next to us in their rather fine 1978 VW camper had assured us that parking for motorhomes in the Budgen's car park was easy. It probably was for a VW camper, but I made the fatal error of entering the car park without ascertaining how easy it was to exit it. It soon became clear there were no pull through double parking bays available and the space between end parking bay and the supermarket wall looked a little bit of a tight squeeze for a 7m van. Thankfully people were very understanding as I slowly backed up to make my exit through the entrance, and one car driver gave a thumbs-up sign as I reversed gingerly into the corner, watching Gill making windmill gestures in the wing mirror to ensure I did not collide with a trickily placed lamp-post. People do seem very relaxed around here, laid back and not given to impatience or petty annoyance. It's refreshing.

With no idea where we might stay tonight we trundled through Rendlesham Forest heading for Orford, which had been recommended as a good place to stop for lunch by a chatty local we met yesterday. Mysteriously we wafted into a stretch of good 3G and managed to speak to Laura. We discovered she had managed to get a job in a sushi restaurant in Soho for the summer so would not be coming home after all. However, she needed her passport and NI number urgently; these were at home, so we were going to have to head back today after all. We agreed, Orford for lunch, then up the A14 northwards was going to have to be the plan

Orford is lovely. A big village of rust coloured brick houses centred around a market square with a flint church on one side and the ruins of a castle on the other. The quayside, opposite the shingle island of Orford Ness, is a few minutes walk from the centre and has lots of fishermen's huts, still used by fishermen, some good looking fish restaurants and small wholesalers selling shellfish products. It's the kind of place you imagine Rick Stein getting very excited about.

Gill decided that if we could not stay in Orford we would take some of it home to eat this evening. She started to dream-up a recipe using local white fish - preferably cod if possible. Sadly, Pinney's, the fish merchants had no fresh fish left, only smoked - this was not what Gill was after, so we decided to hunt out something for lunch instead.

Foraging for lunch proved much more successful. The products in the local craft bakery were superb, pricey, but delicious. As Gill observed, Mary Berry would have approved, not a soggy bottom to be seen. We bought a ham and cheese tartlet, a creamy feta croissant, and two small 'Portugese flans' for pud, then, to take home a gorgeous seedy loaf. I cannot remember having tasted better pastry products in the UK. Somewhere in the blog we describe a semi-divine moment in a small pasticceria next to the Theatre Pinandello in Agrigento, but the products in the Pump Street Bakery were just as good. 

The disappearence of local bakeries and the their replacement on our high streets by the dreaded Greggs is just one example of the way we seem to have accepted that all we deserve is second best. 'Every little helps' has become a curmudgeonly national aspiration. Talking of Tesco, we stopped briefly at the store in Kettering on the way home. Stacked up in the aisles, by the fruit and veg, were cardboard boxes of various products with an understated, badly designed logo on the side - 'Nightingale Farm', as if the store had begun, like some French Hypermarkets, to stock locally sourced produce. Closer examination of the actual produce revealed that it  had been imported, mainly from Holland. 'Nightingale Farm' was just another Tesco brand, and the faux rustic packaging and labelling simply a tiresome marketing strategy. Sometimes you do begin to believe the French theorist Braudilliard who asserted that reality has been replaced by simulation. What I don't accept is his belief that we have no choice in this. Even if 'authenticity' is a socially constructed myth, then surely we have the choice to adhere to that rather than the simulcra that allegedly replaced it, especially when the 'authentic' tastes as yummy as Pump Street Bakery's Portuguese flan.

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Shingle street and sundry estuarial delights

The Shottisham camp site is about 5 miles from the coast and 3 miles from the Deben estuary. Both easy cycle trips through a gently undulating landscape of cornfields and woods. There is little traffic and the lanes are covered in wild flowers. Magic! In some ways the idyllic ride towards the coast does not quite prepare you for the empty salt marshes near Shingle Street. The lanes are pastoral and cosy, but the marshes are a wild place and the shingle banks almost other-worldly, exuding a slightly un-nerving emptiness like the ethereal backgounds you get in paintings by Dali or Ernst.

What makes the shingle bank a site of special scientific interest is the way clumps of  maritime flowers and low shrubs dot the stoney surface. It is this feature which gives the area its slightly surreal ambience.

There are few houses dotted about, probably belonging to fishermen originally. None are very old, some late Victorian, but most post-war. I supect that the area is so inhospitable that it remained uninhabited until modern times. The only older buildings are a series of Martello towers built in the first yearrs of the nineteenth century in response to the threat of invasion during the Napoleonic Wars.

We returned to the van for a late lunch. By this time the temperature was hovering around the thirties, so out came the awning and a bit of a post lunch laze until the heat subsided somewhat.

view from the awning..

However, we are not too adept at doing nothing, so by late afternoon a cooling breeze had blown-up and we decided to see of we could find the riverside pub called the Ramsholt Arms, reputed to have a stunning view across the Deben estuary. It should only have been about a three mile ride, but we missed the turning and probably added a couple of miles to the jaunt by accident. No matter, the area is very beautiful, and since we had now worked up a bit of a sweat we did not mind at all that a local farmer had parked his giant automatic sprinkler in the corner of the field ensuring passersby, as well as his broad beans, received a proper soaking. Eventually we found the pub, and it is beautifully positioned next to a small quay used by fishermen and the yachting fraternity.

We had planned to stop for a coffee but fate intervened. Just before we arrived at the pub, while blithely pedalling through the lovely riverside woods, I was surprised by a metalic snap, my bike seat parted company from the stem and I parted company from my bike. Luckily I was going at no speed at all. It soon became apparent that the adjustment bolt that fastens seat to stem had sheared. We were about 3 miles from the van and there seemed to be no other option than to wheel the bike back. 

After a few minutues of huffing and puffing up a small hill we realised that at 26kg, wheeling the bikes back was not going to be easy. I experimented with two techniques that would enable me to ride it home. The first was to stand up on the pedals and rocket along like Chris Froome doing a sprint finish; the second involved perching my backside on top of the battery behind the seat stem and riding along leaning back, somewhat in the style of Peter Fonda in Easyrider. Both techniques looked equally ridiculous, but ignoring the somewhat quizzical glances of passing motorists, using a mixture of sprint finish and Chopper nostalgia I was able to ride back to the van. Cycling opportunities were the main reason for choosing to stay in this area. We decided to move tomorrow a bit further up the coast to find somewhere nearer the Suffolk coast path, though we were a bit hazy where that might be as we had left our UK camp site book at home.

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A is for alternatives

After two days of extreme relaxation in Edwardstone we decided to move on towards the Suffolk coast. The 'Spanish plume' ensured clear blue skies, hot afternoons in the low 30s and sticky nights. It struck us that for all our thousands of miles of continental wandering, these days in Suffolk were by far the warmest weather we had experienced in the last two years as our recent southern European travels have been outside of the summer months in pleasant warmth rather than searing heat. In fact the van, unlike some, has small windows and by keeping the blinds drawn during the day and the roof -lights fully open, we did manage to get a good night's sleep despite the humidity.

Given that we were just a few miles away from Dedham I convinced myself that it might be a good idea to visit the area immortalised in the work of John Constable. I should know better than to visit anywhere that has been commodified by the local tourist board by being branded as 'Constable Country'. The town of Dedham has a car park on the outskirts which looked big enough to accommodate a motorhome and a quick peek on streetview confirmed it had no height barriers. Even better, Google maps pinpointed a butchers shop on the High Street. Blue skies means BBQ weather and, to paraphrase Ms Austen, we were 'a couple much in want of a pork sausage'.The car park was great, but the butchers shop seemed to have closed and now housed a financial advisor and wealth management company. This seemed fitting. 

Deadman High Street

The architectural historian, Sir Nicholas Pevsner, described Dedham High Street in the 1950s as a 'near perfect example of a Georgian high street'. It still is. Unfortunately in the intervening decades, whatever worthwhile economic function Dedham originally had has been entirely overtaken by its fame as a tourist hotspot, and it now exudes all the ghastly  mortified charm of a giant National Trust tea room. We wandered up towards the river, past Dedham Mill (now converted to luxury flats), peered across the flood plain of the River Stour towards the path to Flatford Mill, and decided to give Constable's birthplace a miss. 

The River Stour valley - now branded 'Constable Country'

In the end, what is the point of making some kind of pilgrimage to the place when you know that its re-invention as some kind of heritage theme park, complete with giftyshoppe and chintzy tearoom, is going to be simply irksome, You have to ask yourself, why is Constable significant?  Because he challenged the conventions of eighteenth century landscape painting by observing directly natural phenomena in a quasi-scientific way, such as clouds and trees. He developed a loose sketchy style that was highly influential, particularly in France. There is a direct link from Constable to Courbet and the Barbizon School, then later to the work of Monet and Pissaro in the early 1870s. You can get all of that in half an hour on-line, and appreciate the influence of the locale simply by walking through a field or staring at the sky for a while. Which is what we did.

If you want to understand Constable, save yourself the cost of a National Trussed cream tea, and try staring at a field...

We now headed north for about 20 miles or so, trundling along the A12 among the trucks headed for Felixstowe container port. We skirted Colchester and Ipswich, both of which seemed to be expanding with large new build estates on the outskirts. The 'new vernacular' style seemed to be much in vogue with rows of three-storey terraced town houses painted in pastel colour-washes and featuring dark clapperboard overhanging gables. It seems a not unpleasant way of masking house-builders' ploy of maximising housing density by reducing building's footprint. The re-development reminded me of Portishead near Bristol.

Our final destination was a few miles from Woodbridge.The Shottisham Campsite is situated on a smallholding on the outskirts of the village. As smallholdings go, this one was quite big, run by a friendly, enthusiastic couple who wandered through the camping field in their wellies, or drove around the place on their mini-tractor doing mysterious eco stuff. Back in the late 1970s when we went through a 'green phase' such a place as this would have been our dream. Our fellow campers had a definite eco-style about them, Vintage VW campervans were more prevalent than our tank, and people drifted about, waif-thin, giving the impession of a lifelong commitment to vegetarianism and a penchant for scented candles and Ayengar yoga. Given different circumstances maybe the pair of us would have been indistinguishable from them. In our late twenties we were really was very eco-minded, fund-raising for Greenpeace, turning our back garden into a big vegetable plot. I went through a folky moment, learned to play the anglo-concertina very badly and grew the kind of beard now fashionable among hipsters. Billy Connolly called them 'Save the Whale beards'. So, as we wandered around the smallholdings's squared-off enclosures, the pigloos and the poly-tunnels, the alpaca enclosures and the free range chickens - I began to speculate what happened to our eco-dreams, what became of the alternative us?

Free range...

The way the smallholding was divided into smaller enclosures reminded me of the illustrations in 'Self Sufficiency', by John Seymour - the essential coffee table guide for armchair environmentalists in the 1970s.

I don't think we ever conciously decided to give up aspiring to some rural idyll, life simply did not work out that way. There was one specific moment, however, I recall questioning my involvement in the green movement. It must have been around 1986, a Friday evening, Matthew, our firstborn was still a baby, we had just finally nursed him to sleep and were looking to get an hour or so to ourselves, both totally knackered trying to juggle work and family. The phone rang. It was a local Greenpeace activist inviting me to dress-up as a Kangaroo the next day and spend Saturday demonstrating outside of the Wigan branch of Dolcis. Nike and Adidas (evil multinationals)  apparently were using leather derived from marsupials in their trainers, therefore placing the entire planet in danger of environmental meltdown. I politely refused,

So, its not that you lose your ideals as you age, I think they get squeezed out by more immediate concerns, like working all hours to afford the mortgage that has sky-rocketed due to spiralling interest rates. Priorities become more immediate, family, job, practical considerations prevail over philosophy. The reason why we abandoned growing vegetables was the result of moving to Buxton. It soon became clear that the only thing that flourished in our garden were astilbes and lichen, which is hardly the good basis for a healthy diet. Then there is the weather, which 1000 feet up in the Pennines is usually chillier than anywhere else other than Lerwick. It rains frequently and drizzles in between. We are people who like living outdoors, so soon after moving to High Peak we started to scoot south at every opportunity. I do wonder if we had not moved to Buxton for work, whether we would ever have developed such an addiction to travel.

So, sitting here in a smallholding in Sussex, it does encourage thoughts of the 'road not taken', a greener, more alternative existence that we once aspired too. It is lovely here, an ideal spot with a gentle climate, a great place to follow your eco- dream.The next door garden has a fig tree, in fruit too, now that's a benign climate!

Shottisham - an archetypal English village

with a local which looks as if Gandalf should be sitting in the corner

Church lane...

The village church - a typical chunky flint built affair.

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Contrary to expectations

One of the best things about travelling by motorhome is its unpredictability. It has an uncanny knack of confounding expectations and challenging prejudice. Over the past three years we have stayed in almost two hundred places in more than a dozen countries, so we regard our view that the UK is the least motorhome friendly country we know, not as a prejudice, but the result of thorough research. We assert confidently that nowhere we have stayed in the UK would make it into our top twenty favourite spots, well, apart from the lovely ACSI site at Wallingford, perhaps that would squeeze in. 

The last few days in Suffolk has turned our assumptions upside down. Both places we have stayed have been utterly delightful, and as memorable as any of our more far flung destinations. How did we manage to miss Suffolk's delights for so long? On the face of it our first destination was a modest place. A small country pub called 'The White Horse' in the hamlet of Edwardstone, a few miles east of Sudbury. In a county famed for ancient hostelries dripping with thatch, 'The White Horse' is quite plain, a simple early Victorian brick building, but it is very welcoming and has a cosy interior. To the rear there is a outside space with picnic tables and straw bales, supplemented by a further in an airy, open ended marquee. A venerable clapper board barn contains the micro brewery, though I am uncertain if this still operates. The pub garden is next to a vegetable plot complete with poly-tunnel,

The White Horse, an unpretentious local pub

The micro brewery - complete with solar panels

The whole place aims towards being as sustainable as possible, seasonal vegetables and local produce are used on the menu, the barn roof is covered in solar panels and the camping field is overlooked by the pub' s mini wind turbine It seems like a lively place with regular events and an annual music festival. While we were there the camping field was mainly occupied by vintage car enthusiasts. The models ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous, the former represented by a gleaming late 40s Daimler Lanchester coupé, the latter by a Trabant and a Lada. Some enthusiasts had gone the whole hog and were towing vintage caravans. As you might anticipate it was quite a blokish occasion with evenings wiled away gathered around open bonnets, can in hand, in earnest discussion of the intricacies of a well adjusted carburetor or wonders of a Trabant's two-stroke.

An Austin Westminster and Daimler Lanchester

Vintage caravans and the wind turbine.

Not that the occasion was entirely a male preserve, it was a family occasion too, with BBQs organised as kids and over excited pooches darted about having a great time. It gave the place a lively buzz, until Sunday afternoon when the site emptied, and we were left in glorious isolation to watch the sun set. The stars came out one by one. A  fat moon rose above the adjacent field transforming the dry, straw coloured grass into a silver grey lake. This seemed to excite its sole inhabitant, a patchy cart horse who must have been called Dobbin. He whinnied and galloped about in the moonlight tossing his head. It was a moment of magic realism.

Our mysterious next door neighbour

The lanes around the pub are quiet and great for cycling and two footpaths lead off from the near the White Horse and connect with a network of tracks through local woods and farmland. The area is given over to arable farming mainly and consists of big square fields interspersed with coppice woods, mainly oak trees. It is a comfortable, lived-in sort of of landscape, 

follow the sign

through the woods

into the fields

towards the horizon

We spent an hour or so pedaling around the local lanes. The buildings are an interesting mix of vernacular styles, colourwashed thatched cottages and clapperboard barns, sturdy flint-stone churches and solid looking Victorian brick cottages. I like looking at village notice boards because that gives you a glimpse of the community life of the place. Summer seems a a time for fetes and garden parties. Most were running children's clubs for the summer holidays - a good sign that the communities have not become enclaves for the retired. The White Horse on Sunday morning had a couple of young families in the garden eating lunch. They seemed to have walked to the pub - so were probably locals. In fact the local area seemed to be thriving and most of the villages had more recent housing developments as well as the older buildings. You sensed continuity here, not just picture post card cottages but bungalows from the thirties or sixties, small estates of ex-council houses and more recent new-build. Not much evidence of 'affordable housing'; the locality may not have petrified into an enclave of the retired, but it may well be a preserve of the affluent.

As well as the buildings, the gardens were delightful too. July was moment hollyhock, in all kinds of pastel shades wafting in the breeze beside thatched cottage or executive new-build. The gardens seemed productive, honesty boxes by the gates - eggs, strawberries or local honey all kinds of local produce on sale. Some places offered pots of bedding plants with procedes going to 'the parish hall' or a local charity. As we pedalled about most people said good morning, when we were short of some change to buy a punnet of strawberries a local woman, unbidden, wound down her car window and came to our rescue. It seemed very relaxed and friendly, and this sentiment was repeated by the landlord of the White Horse who had recently moved from Sheffield. "It is very friendly here" he confirmed, "but nothing happens very quickly." He paused momentarilly then mused, "In fact, nothing happens here very much at all."

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