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Hi-de-hi
The sign behind the bar in the Riverside Pub in Lechlade has a sign which reads: “Prices may vary according to customer attitude.” If it were the other way around, that meals and drink prices were set according to bar staff attitude, we could have dined and drunk free for a week. After setting up camp near this lovely Cotswold town, we arrived at the Riverside at precisely 7.47pm intent on dinner but as Marty went to pick up a menu it was whisked from his grasp and he was told, abruptly so, that last orders were taken at 7.45. Apparently the kitchen had been open from 12.00 noon and if we had wanted food we should have come then. Undaunted (or perhaps suffering a lack of choice), we returned the next day where Rob asked if they had Kronenberg beer on tap. The monosyllabic response of “no” was uttered without suggestion, recommendation or inclination that something else could be on offer or available. On a trip later that day up the Thames River on the Cotswold Canals Trust’s sightseeing boat, we were told that the pub had improved greatly under recent new management. It can only have been awful previously.
Lechlade, population 3,000, was our destination with Marty’s cousin Jani and her husband Rob, having evacuated their home in Oxfordshire while their son Finn and about sixty friends celebrated his eighteenth birthday. Jani and Kaelene travelled by car laden with camping equipment and dogs, Marty and Rob on a motorbike for what could best be described as a white knuckle ride. Camping, it must be noted, is not a natural activity for us; there seems little point in spending a day preparing and packing, and then hours setting up a campsite in order to be completely exposed to the elements and subject to every form of deprivation (not to mention wasps and stinging nettle) known to humankind when you could be elsewhere with all the comforts of home. There is nothing remotely attractive about 1950s-style concrete and polite (the building material, not the behavior) ablution blocks, not to mention early morning hikes through dew-damp, mown grass getting to them. Living under canvas (or whatever the latest material of tent manufacture) could possibly be more attractive if there was a specific purpose in mind, such as for a rock music festival or if the location was a nice beach or somewhere picturesque, but the benefits are lost on us when the destination is a featureless rectangular field, particularly so when you are decamping and going through the reverse packing process the very next day.
But we did well. We pitched the tent, walked through paddocks of cowdung, and wandered the river banks, past small launches and narrow boats (interestingly one named Hine Te Awa), all moored, and whose owners, undeterred by inclement weather, sat at picnic tables sipping tea from thermoses or wine from plastic glasses. Down we went past the nearby St John’s lock where the keeper was working the lock for a single canoe and back over the Halfpenny Bridge, so named because that was the toll charge when the bridge replaced the ford in 1792. A pint was had at The Trout Inn, one of those fine old traditional English pubs with stone floors and low, hand-sawn timber ceilings, and next day, for Kaelene and Jani, a trip to the town’s specialist Christmas shop. At Lechlade Fishing Tackle live maggots can be purchased by anglers wanting to fish for pike, perch and other aquatic livestock, but unfortunately not the swans which are there in abundance fouling the waters and hissing at passersby.
We learned too about tent envy, the practice of gazing wistfully at the camping paraphernalia of others and longingly comparing it with your own. This form of desire apparently leads to the endless upgrading of equipment, the result being better and more sophisticated gear for some and fantastic bargains for those who buy second-hand.
This town is quite literally at the headwaters of the Thames River which, at 125 miles, is the longest waterway in England. It is also the start of the now disused Thames Severn Canal, which as the name suggests linked the Thames and Severn rivers. Twenty million pounds of lottery funding has just been given for restoration work meaning that, when finished, we could keep traveling and moor right outside the front door of Alan Moorhouse, one of Kaelene’s genealogy friends, in Stroud.
We did one very good deed, hoisting an elderly woman from a rabbit hole she had fallen into and sending her, with suspected broken ankle, to a nearby hospital for examination and repair. It was as well that she didn’t have swine flu, those with symptoms of that particular condition are denied entry to the local pharmacy in order to protect other customers and staff from possible infection. They should, an important notice to visitors reads, go home. All of which raises the question of how sufferers pick up their medicine.