Private site
June 1st - 3rd
What
a lovely site, run by the most relaxed old bloke in the world. He had
sounded great when I spoke to him on the phone, asking my name but
not asking for a deposit. When I arrived he shook hands and we had a
great old chinwag. He
seems to run the little golf course here as well. It's expensive at
£20, being a private site, but beautifully laid-out, spotless and
the showers are amazingly space-age. The bus to Carlisle stops
outside the site entrance and goes into the city every hour. The only
drawback is the lack of internet coverage.
The
drive down was motorway pretty much all the way until I took the A689
to Workington at Carlisle. Is this the road which goes to Bishop
Auckland? What a treat to drive from Workington to Bishop Auckland!
Steady now, Rog, you've never actually been to Workington. A real
treat is having radio reception again. I've really missed it. At
Moffat I got lousy reception but at least I got some, and listened to
the England/Sri Lanka 50-over match with great difficulty. I
did manage to get reception on Channel 5 to watch the highlights at
19:00, but fell asleep before it came on and missed Jos Buttler's
amazing innings!
Cycled
into the substantial village of Dalston a mile or so down the road.
Just outside it is a huge grey metallic factory which I took to be a
feed mill but which, it transpired, was a Nestlé
beverage plant. A lady on the bus the next day told me they made
Nescafé and Blue Riband
biscuits there. I passed the Blue Bell pub as I entered the square.
So many pubs in the North are called “The Blue Bell”. They are
all named for a blue bell (the kind with a clapper) which is usually
on the pub sign, and not the flower. I wonder what it's all about.
Outside the Co-Op was a placard from a local paper saying “Robbery
bid man demanded 'zombie' haircut”. Bizarre! Unfortunately the shop
had sold out so I couldn't read the story.
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| Anti-Bulgarian prejudice in Carlisle |
On Monday I took the bus into Carlisle, just a couple of miles. What a joy it is to use my bus-pass again and get something for nothing. We passed a big Pirelli tyre factory on the way in. At first sight the city is pretty gruesome, with street after street of horridly run-down terraces and disused warehouses and vacant sites. Once into the centre things get better, but, after Edinburgh and Glasgow, it seems a pretty low-rise sort of a place with little pretension to even the slightest grandeur. After a couple of hours of strolling around, though, I came to like it a lot. The layout is quite eccentric and there are lots of little fiddly bits. Not one of the streets seems able to travel from its start to its end without spawning alleys or ginnels or snecks all over the place, and there are arcades, too. There is even a nice faux-Georgian crescent. The railway station, splendidly named the “Citadel”, is monumental and there is the daintiest town hall, now the tourist information centre.
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| The Town Hall |
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Well,
it was last of the current series of “Have I Got News For You”
this week and I hope to God it's the last. It's a pale imitation of
the programme it was even two years ago and has turned into a
second-rate joke show. It was sad to see, like watching a beloved pet
dog drag itself from its bed to bark weakly at a visitor. I mean,
there was some idiot called Joe Wilkinson on the last show. He said
nothing apposite and just made a string of pathetic quips. Who the
hell is Joe Wilkinson anyway? Is satire dead? And, while we are at
it, what IS the point of Harriet Harman?
Went
into Carlisle again on my last day and had a look at the major
architectural features. The cathedral is initially rather
unimpressive because, being built from red sandstone, it looks
somehow recent. Inside, though, it's a different story. It's quite
small compared with, say, Durham or York, but this adds to its
attraction.
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| The Choir roof |
There is a large chapel dedicated to the Border Regiment,
or, to give it its full name, the King's Own Royal Border Regiment.
One of its battle honours is Neuve Chapelle, where my grandfather
was killed and was buried. There are many interesting memorial
tablets, including one which shows that, in the South African War of
1899-1902 (the Boer War), three times as many men died of disease as
were killed in action. How careless of the people in charge who
should surely by then have known better. There is also a tablet to a
man who was the vicar of Hutton Roof, a small village in south
Cumbria, and who was awarded the DSO and the VC. He was also chaplain
to the King. How did a padre get involved in action to the extent of
winning the DSO and VC? He must have been involved to some extent
because he died of wounds in October, 1918. Very strange. The choir
is perfect and some bright spark has thought to place a mirror on its
back on a table, pointing upwards so that you can look properly at
the magnificent vaulted ceiling, heavenly blue with gold stars,
without getting a fatal crick in your neck. The cathedral was built
in 1133, so the new-looking red sandstone has lasted very well.
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| The East Window |
The
station was next and was a cathedral in its own way. It is
impressively called Citadel Station. If you can imagine a shoe-box
with no lid and no ends; the two sides are of stone, twenty-feet and
two storeys high and contain all the station offices, the ticket
office, the waiting room, the left luggage office, the
station-master's office, the buffet and so on. The shoe-box covers eight railway
tracks. Spanning the two sides is a glass roof supported by a
cast-iron canopy, surprisingly delicate given the length of the span.
Inside, the station is light and airy and has such a pleasant
atmosphere I wandered around for probably twenty minutes. As a bonus,
the station is the northern terminus of the famous Settle and
Carlisle Line, which the powers of evil tried so hard for so many
years to close.
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| Citadel Station |
Carlisle,
you know, used to be the home of the state brewery. Yes, you and I,
tax-payers, used to own a brewery, complete with its own chain of
pubs. It was sold off to Theakston, the Yorkshire brewery and closed
by Scottish and Newcastle Breweries after they had taken over
Theakston. I had imagined its sale was the first fuhrer directive
issued by Maggie as soon as she strapped herself into the Harness of
Power in 1979, but, in fact, Grocer Heath was the culprit in 1971.
I thought Carlisle was terrific and congratulate the people who live here.
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