Travels With My Camper Van - Debbie Young's Writing Life

Running in Wonderland (You Can Call Me Alice)

Posted on April 26, 2012July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

Changing your form of transport now and again is a good idea because if gives you a different perspective on the world around you. I’m always pleasantly surprised when transferring from my Ford Ka to our camper van: it’s like becoming a giant for a day. I can then look down upon walls that towered above my car and discover the secrets usually concealed behind high fences, their owners fondly believing they have private gardens. Pony-trekking has the same effect: I felt like queen of the hedgerows.

Trading four wheels for two is equally refreshing because until you acclimatise to the slower speed of a bicycle, it’s like travelling in slow motion. There’s more time to digest the view on your journey and the fresh air and sensaround smells on a bike ride are much more pleasant than the microclimate of a sealed glass and metal box.

But my favourite way to absorb the local landscape is when I’m running. Invariably I run alone and the solitude means I’m not distracted by passengers’ banter or irritated by their choice of music. Jogging down the familiar country lanes that surround my house, I often notice features that I’d never spot if travelling by other means. Last week, I saw a tiny wren on a branch and a smattering of bluebells breaking through a grassy bank, the earthy smell of new damp grass rising up from beneath my feet.

Once, plodding silently along Sandpits Lane, I caught a flash of taupe out of the corner of my eye. I turned to see what it was and discovered a mountjack deer gazing at me from a field a few metres away. The encounter stopped us both in our tracks and for a moment we breathlessly appraised each other. I felt like Alice in Through the Looking Glass when she meets the Fawn in the wood where things have no names. The Fawn therefore doesn’t know Alice is a girl and so is not afraid of her.

So they walked on together through the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they came out into another open field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice’s arm. “I’m a Fawn!” it cried out in a voice of delight. “And, dear me! you’re a human child!” A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed.

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There

The mountjack deer was first to crack in our staring competition and ran off rather faster than I did. Though this chance meeting lasted only seconds, the magic of the moment has stayed with me ever since.

So I was not surprised to experience another David Attenborough moment on Sunday as I notched up a few miles’ running training before lunch. I’d crossed the Bath road to extend my usual route. As I entered new, unfamiliar running territory, a splash of silver and white caught my eye and I looked towards it. There, in the corner of a field, lay a gentle, peaceful unicorn. I gasped. And there was me thinking my deer encounter couldn’t be bettered!

I stood stock still, not wishing to break the spell. I was breathing hard. (Well, I had just run three miles.) Then the oxygen started to return from my leg muscles to my brain and my eyes came into focus. And I realised that of course this wasn’t a unicorn at all, only a pale grey horse having a rest on the ground. It had settled down, legs tucked beneath it, in front of a white picket fence. A stake in the fence had come loose and was hanging free at an angle behind the horse’s head, looking for all the world like a unicorn’s horn. Turning round, I smiled at my own foolishness and resumed my weary trot in the direction of home. Whatever would I come across next? I wondered. I just hoped it wouldn’t be a lion.

(All the illustrations above by John Tenniel, from my favourite book of all time, Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass And What Alice Found There.)

If you liked this post and enjoy running (and this post), you might like some of my other posts about running:

What Would It Take to Make You Run 10K?

The Best Reason to Run

And if you really, really liked my post, please consider sponsoring my Bristol 10K Run 2012 in aid of diabetes research!

Travel

Dorothy Was Right: There’s No Place Like Home

Posted on April 24, 2012July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

Living as I do in an area that’s a tourist destination, I’m always curious when I go away on holiday to see whether I can find any other tourist spots that are equally homely. It’s rare to find another place that’s a match for our little corner of the Cotswolds.

I’m therefore taken aback to come across a small Scottish town that seems on first glance to meet my demanding criteria.

Late one afternoon, en route in our camper van from Perth to the coast of Fife, we encounter a small market town with a familiar air. Spotting brown tourist information signs to a nearby castle, we decide to stay the night and visit it in the morning. We find a place to park near the centre of town, and while my husband reads the paper and my daughter plays with her toys, I combine a recce with a run (I’m in training for the Bristol 10K).

I gently jog down the narrow high street, making a mental note of the facilities. There’s a craft bakers, an award-winning butchers, two charity shops with a high class of junk, and a useful old-fashioned hardware shop.There are signs to a library and a leisure centre and an edge-of-town supermarket. (Sound familiar, anyone?)

The calorific perils of a chippy, a Chinese and an Indian take-away are offset by a slimming club in the old market hall,which also hosts a cafe offering hearty soups, sandwiches and cakes. (Well, this is Scotland). I jog on to the end of town and I’m immediately amidst farmland, where fingerposts beckon me on to pleasant footpaths through sheep-strewn green fields.

Hmmm, this is home from home, I begin to think. I could get to like this place.

There’s even a local royal connection, albeit not one to ever make the pages of Hello magazine: Mary, Queen of Scots, was once a guest at the local castle and later a prisoner.

Turning left onto a footpath, I jog happily round the perimeter of the town and am rewarded with a glimpse of the castle, in the middle of a small loch. I pause to catch my breath by the ticket office and mentally book a family boat trip to it for tomorrow. Culture, a boat and a spooky-looking setting that would do Scooby-Doo proud – there’s something here to keep all the family happy.

When I head back into town, the charity shops are opposite me, and I notice for the first time that they are in aid of a Scottish children’s hospice. A little further down the road, in the direction of the other end of town, is a sign to that very hospice. A few yards further I pass the high school. It is closed down and boarded up, peppered with danger signs. I’m sure there’s no connection between the closure of the (dangerous) school and the presence of a children’s hospice, but it still makes me shudder with horror. I’m so sad for the children affected by either building.

I run on, hoping to find something cheery to negate the effect of these discoveries. A little ahead of me is a large building, by far the most grand and imposing on the high street. I run a little faster, spirits rising. Level with the gated entrance, I read the sign. It is a funeral directors. Now feeling thoroughly chilled, I turn on the heel of my trainers and plod back to the van, to find my family waiting. I couldn’t live here, not amidst all this sadness. After all, there is no place like home.

(This post was originally written for the Tetbury Advertiser, May 2012 issue.)

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like this one about the lure of home: East, West, Our Village Show’s Best or this one about another country dear to Mary, Queen of Scots’ heart: Lost In France.

Travel

New Respect for Old Fishwives

Posted on April 23, 2012July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

photograph of fishwife Dolly Peel — What's not to love about the fishwife? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Don’t talk like that, you sound like an old fishwife.”

Until my Easter holiday in Scotland, I’d only had negative associations with the concept of a fishwife. I’m not sure how fishwives earned their reputation of being “coarse and shrewish”, to quote one dictionary definition, but the word had always conjured up in my mind a garrulous, nosy old lady in an apron, smelling of fish.

But then last month my visit to the wonderful Scottish Fisheries Museum at Anstruther in Fife (the bit of Scotland that sticks out above Edinburgh and the Firth of Forth) gave me a much more complimentary perspective.

Scottish Fisheries Museum, Anstruther, Scotland — The Scottish Fisheries Museum, Anstruther (photo: museum's website)

In small fishing ports such as Anstruther, fishing was not just the work of the menfolk. The men were the ones who braved the North Sea waves to bring home the catch, but behind every good fisherman was an equally sound fishwife.

The fishwife’s duties were not just to keep house, cook, shop, wash, iron and raise the children while her husband was at sea. Nor was she only an industrious craftswoman, knitting ingenious seamless socks and sweaters, made as one piece to prevent ingress of water. (The sleeves were especially short to avoid chafing the wrists with wet wool.) Weaving the creels (baskets) to carry the fish was another art at which the good fishwife was adept.

The fishwife also played an important role before and after the fisherman’s seafaring adventures. She helped make and repair the nets, gathered the bait (shellfish were picked on a cold beach at daybreak) and stuck the bait on numerous hooks on fishing lines. After all this, she was required to give her man a piggyback to his boat. She paddled barefoot through the shallows, skirts and aprons hitched up, so that the fisherman could set off with dry feet. When the catch was brought ashore, it was the fishwife who gutted and cleaned the fish, packing them into barrels for export.

Girls processing fish — How ever will they get that one in the box? (Photo: Fisheries Museum website)

You didn’t have to be married to earn the dubious privilege of helping with the catch. Hordes of single girls followed the fishing fleet around the coast, packing the haul whenever and wherever it was landed.

Fishwives’ reputation for gossip was perhaps borne of the closeness of these fishing communities. They supported each other when anxious for their menfolk out at sea in storms, or widowed in the inevitable tragedies of “those in peril on the sea”, as the memorable old hymn goes. They were hugely comforting to friends, family and neighbours who lived with the knowledge that their men were risking their lives daily.

Fishwives baiting lines for their menfolk — Baiting lines (photo: Fisheries Museum)

But most impressive to me of all the fishwives’ attributes was their ability to bait the hooks on lines to be dropped into the sea. These lines could be as long as – wait for it – a MILE in length. There are pictures and room-sets in the museum with these extraordinarily long lines piled neatly into the aforementioned home-made creels, waiting to be cast swiftly into the waters. Speaking as one who can’t put her iPod earphones cable in her handbag without it emerging in an inexplicable, inextricable tangle, I cannot imagine how they achieved this.

So from now on, if anyone calls me a fishwife, I’m going to take it as a compliment. Or at least I won’t rise to the bait.

If you liked this post, you might enjoy these other thoughts about educational outings to museums:

Reliving history in Northern France

The Ring of Truth

Family, Travel

Girls In Their Summer Clothes

Posted on March 28, 2012July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

Debbie and Laura about to buy Sancerre at source — "Have red shoes, will travel" (Buying Sancerre at source in France last summer)

If the weather turns wintry tomorrow, blame me. Because this afternoon, I dragged out from under my bed the big plastic storage box in which my summer clothes have been hibernating since October (cue for a snowstorm).

As I spread flimsy dresses and crisp cotton shifts across the bed, images of last summer flitted across my brain like the apocryphal flashbacks of a drowning man. All of these images featured me in these clothes.

There I was on the Avignon tourist trail in a floaty, floral Cath Kidston number. This cool cotton lawn frock was the only thing keeping me on the right side of sanity in the sticky, seething streets. And it was the perfect outfit to “danser sur le Pont” (as you do).

And then there was the cappuccino sleeveless linen shift, short skirt sticking to my legs as we cycled across the cobbles of Senlis to reach the open-air municipal pool. Splashy French shrieks of excitement and distant foreign children’s laughter lured us in the right direction, even though we couldn’t see the pool till the very last minute. It was raised on a balcony above street level – an upstairs open-air swimming pool! Who’d have thought it?

Debbie and Laura on top of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, Summer 2011 — No prizes for guessing which city we're in! The terrace on top of the Arc de Triomphe provides a whole new perspective on the Eiffel Tower

The tiered navy sleeveless Gap drill dress didn’t show the dirt on a hot, dusty day spent giving my daughter her first taste of Paris. Laura didn’t like Paris. “It’s too city-ish.”

It obligingly withstood another day’s wear at Disneyland Paris – a twelve-hour shift to get our money’s worth. Now that Laura did approve of.

And then there was the blue and white stripey jersey shift, too short and shabby to be worn beyond our back garden really, but perfect for the long haul south in our camper van, my feet on the dashboard as we ambled down the valleys of the Loire and the Rhone to Provence. (Don’t worry, my husband was driving.)

For a second, I allow myself to believe that the act of trying on my favourite summer clothes will magically transport me back to the south of France, far from the woolly jumpers of home. I gaze at my favourite cotton lawn sundress with the wistful longing that as a child I’d project on an old wooden chair, hoping it would sprout the wings of Enid Blyton‘s famous Wishing Chair and whisk me away. (How those magical children’s stories stay with you forever!)

But this year we won’t be heading south, whatever we wear. We’re spending this summer is Scotland – and as my daughter likes to say, “You don’t go to Scotland for the weather”. I’ll still be taking my beloved summer clothes. But I expect I’ll have to wear them all at once.

Writing

The Power of the Postage Stamp

Posted on January 31, 2012March 9, 2013 by Debbie Young

The mid-January cold snap finds us in search of an indoor venue for a family day out and we alight on the Bath Postal Museum. This tiny gem, tucked beneath the city’s central Post Office, is packed with hands-on exhibits to nurture my daughter’s brand-new hobby: stamp-collecting.

Living as we do in an old Post Office, we’re naturally interested in the history of the postal service, now at risk of redundancy in our modern internet age. Surely it’s only hope is the rise of online shopping. Though an ardent emailer, I still get excited when a “proper” letter arrives in the post, handwritten and bearing a decorative stamp – a miniature work of art in its tiny perforated frame. To me, every stamp album is an art gallery for The Borrowers. An international stamp collection smacks of adventure, each small square of paper having travelled from far and wide before finding a home in your album.

The Postal Museum reveals that Laura is in good company. Celebrity stamp collectors have included King George V (his own profile must have featured on most of his collection, in those heady days of the British Empire), Franklin D Roosevelt, and, to our complete astonishment, Freddie Mercury, lead singer of Queen.

The man behind the museum shop’s counter proudly regales us with the highlights of his own collecting career, including buying a stamp for £20 that he later sold for £600. He offers Laura lots of advice before realising that the conversation has been rather one way. Then he gives her an opportunity to speak.

“How long have you been collecting?” he asks.

She answers truthfully: “Since yesterday.”

It’s a conversation killer, but I realise there is one redeeming feature: we ordered her stamp collecting kit online from Stanley Gibbons and it arrived, very fittingly, by post.

Long live the stamp (and our village post office!)

This post was originally written for the February issue of Hawkesbury Parish News.