Number Seventy News

Innocents abroad in York ! As part of the late music festival the National Centre for Early Music put on Gilad Atzmon and the Orient House Ensemble – a jazz gig.  And jazz it was – sax, keyboard, bass, drums – melodic, driving, moving to contemporary blasts of noise.  What I didn’t know, and should have picked up from Gilad’s insistence that he wasn’t going to make any political remarks, was that he is a prominent anti-Zionist – jazz musician first, he says – but novelist and polemicist too. Good to have him here – pity I hadn’t done my homework so I could appreciate him in the round.  Music impressive – but concert stuff – not sure how it would go down in the living room.

Briefly, we were enchanted by North Norfolk.  Not only the North Norfolk railway, which completes the landscape just like a railway should, but also the wide marshscapes of Blakeney, the rich woodlands, the fine country houses, and the excellent pubs and pub food. And most of it isn’t flat. !  PS – saw avocets for the first time, and a barn owl hunting towards the end of the afternoon.

The National Railway Museum means well, bless its heart.  Hoping to make a little money, no doubt, from folks who had not a lot to do at half-term, they set up a 1968 nostalgia fest. (40 years on from the end of scheduled steam on BR).  Alas, I fear that for the organisers this had been research into ancient history, for the flavour of those heady days in summer 68 was not recaptured at all. (And I don’t mean les evenements at the Sorbonne in the same year either).  It’s all very well having Oliver Cromwell and Evening Star and Clun Castle and a Jubilee and a well-tank and a couple of delightful freight locos lined up in light steam but the only things moving were piddly.  Those of us who travelled through the night to see grimy 8Fs and Black 5s lit up by the first rays of the June sun, who stood in fields of willow herb to watch the last railtours of the last weeks of steam blast double headed over the hills and viaducts in Lancashire, who cherish the steam locomotive as a live, powerful,  working machine don’t get a lot from a static display like this.  I’d rather have had dozens of screens showing film of those last days.  The railway museum does a great job – but a few acres in York can only be a museum – they are never going to re-create the steam railway. Nice try, and I’m glad the NRM’s there, but it’s reminded me that I should visit and support more preserved lines.

By what serendipitous telepathy I know not, but something told me to head to Elvington and Sutton on Derwent via Heslington, rather than cut across to Murton after leaving yet another tedious evening meeting at the office.  A light summer drizzle was falling so I had donned the much abused and down-at-brim Tilly hat as protection.  Now, at 8.45 or so, one would expect the Portland Street Pedallers to have moved on swiftly from their first port of call and be cosily ensconced in the second, so my glance into the beer garden of the Charles XII was intended to be no more than that. However, sheltering from the barely noticeable drizzle, there were the pedallers, getting in another pint. Anything, even the negligible charms of the Charles, to keep them from the damp and the prospect of a further few miles in the balmy and by this time extremely pleasant evening air.  So we huddled there amongst the student masses, who clearly have either no taste or no ability to get off their backsides to find a decent pub, until we agreed to pootle across the Stray to the Wellington, where it was a relief to find a well-kept pint and a bar full of real people.

Cognoscenti amongst my readers will note that this hardly qualifies as an evenings cycling (even taking into account advancing age and infirmity).  Perhaps our highest aim should be to breach the ring road.  Onward !

What a delight a May evening can be ! Especially after staying late at the office for a meeting of the Audit Committee, surely one of life’s non-pleasures, but heigh-ho, we still need the bacon.

So off into the north-westering sun and a serendipitous rendezvous with the rest of the peloton outside Moorlands, where the rhododendrons were not yet out. A short ride between burgeoning hedgerows to the Jacobean, a quite undistinguished building pretending it was once a royal hunting lodge and with only one acceptable ale – Last Drop. The inside of the pub is quite plush, even over-stuffed, but outside in the smokers shelter on the verandah (not because we had any smokers with us but it seemed a shame to miss the birdsong and the 15% waxing moon) there were some relatively comfortable cast iron chairs and benches.  (Inside there had also been some local boors who probably do a lot to curtail trade).

Off to the west on the ride back towards the city the horizon red and smoky – and the air rapidly cooling.  So after navigating the shopping-trolley-booby-trapped underpass at the A19/ring road junction some of us were ready to settle into the fake rustic charms of the Dormouse – only to be encouraged outside by someone who wanted a ciggy.  Real rustic coolth out there, gazing at the ersatz 19th century terrace (c.2002).