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Mar. 10th, 2007 08:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_elyanToday has been impressively full, in the end, which was good.
I went first to Cambridge, and a record fair - though after getting out of the house early-ish, I was slighyl peeved to discover it didn't start till 11am. Still, that gave me time to wander round Galloway & Porter, and neither time nor money in G&P is ever wasted, plus to walk through the Backs and muse once more on how they got the composition of St John's against the meadows so damned perfect.
The fair itself was pretty thin, as I expected it would be, and the main thing I bought was a bootleg DVD which turns out to be for NTSC players only. Still, since ity was only a fiver, and I still have a fool's hope of the material once day being released officially (The Beatles "Let It Be", official release of which is a saga worthy of the most venerable bards), I'm not too bothered.
From there I went on to Saffron Walden, and from there immediately on again to Thaxted. Thaxted, for the 99% of the population who haven't had the pleasure, is one of the quintessentially beautiful small English towns. A centre of the cutlery trade in the Middle Ages, it is now a complete anachronism, but an exceptionally comely one, with a huge, beautifully-proportioned church (which was on Songs of Praise last weekend, I gather), a Medieval Guildhall, and a windmill. There is pretty much nothing to do in Thaxted, but that doesn't make it any less pretty, with the thatched houses clustered round the church at the top of the town, the multi-coloured townhouses of Town Street, and the green fields beyond. Much recommended if you're passing through north Essex.
Saffron Walden, on the other hand, does have things to do, and plenty of nice buildings, but it still suffers slightly from being an Essex town, and consequently never short of a pug-faced teenager with an attitude like a dead rat. I was particularly taken with the woman who I saw wearing Versace shades at one end, and her arse hanging out of a pair of knackered combat pants at the other end. Essex - County of 1,001 Contrasts... Saffron Walden is nonetheless very pretty, not least because of another spectacular church, and is a great place for picking up pretty things, especially for the home...
On the way home I got talking to a theoretical biologist (?) from North Carolina, and when he requested a pub, walked wityh him most of the way to the Cambridge Blue. A nice guy, working for the EPA, which is probably the least reprehensible part of the Federal Government, even if it was founded by Richard Nixon.
What was really nice was to get out there, going to random places again. Even sitting on a bus, there is a sense of freedom about whizzing down country lanes, past unexpected side-roads (I especially liked Seven Devils Lane), obeying antiquated direction-boards, and not knowing quite where you are. Spiring is in the air, and the world opens out in front of our front wheels once more from its hibernation. This is good...
I went first to Cambridge, and a record fair - though after getting out of the house early-ish, I was slighyl peeved to discover it didn't start till 11am. Still, that gave me time to wander round Galloway & Porter, and neither time nor money in G&P is ever wasted, plus to walk through the Backs and muse once more on how they got the composition of St John's against the meadows so damned perfect.
The fair itself was pretty thin, as I expected it would be, and the main thing I bought was a bootleg DVD which turns out to be for NTSC players only. Still, since ity was only a fiver, and I still have a fool's hope of the material once day being released officially (The Beatles "Let It Be", official release of which is a saga worthy of the most venerable bards), I'm not too bothered.
From there I went on to Saffron Walden, and from there immediately on again to Thaxted. Thaxted, for the 99% of the population who haven't had the pleasure, is one of the quintessentially beautiful small English towns. A centre of the cutlery trade in the Middle Ages, it is now a complete anachronism, but an exceptionally comely one, with a huge, beautifully-proportioned church (which was on Songs of Praise last weekend, I gather), a Medieval Guildhall, and a windmill. There is pretty much nothing to do in Thaxted, but that doesn't make it any less pretty, with the thatched houses clustered round the church at the top of the town, the multi-coloured townhouses of Town Street, and the green fields beyond. Much recommended if you're passing through north Essex.
Saffron Walden, on the other hand, does have things to do, and plenty of nice buildings, but it still suffers slightly from being an Essex town, and consequently never short of a pug-faced teenager with an attitude like a dead rat. I was particularly taken with the woman who I saw wearing Versace shades at one end, and her arse hanging out of a pair of knackered combat pants at the other end. Essex - County of 1,001 Contrasts... Saffron Walden is nonetheless very pretty, not least because of another spectacular church, and is a great place for picking up pretty things, especially for the home...
On the way home I got talking to a theoretical biologist (?) from North Carolina, and when he requested a pub, walked wityh him most of the way to the Cambridge Blue. A nice guy, working for the EPA, which is probably the least reprehensible part of the Federal Government, even if it was founded by Richard Nixon.
What was really nice was to get out there, going to random places again. Even sitting on a bus, there is a sense of freedom about whizzing down country lanes, past unexpected side-roads (I especially liked Seven Devils Lane), obeying antiquated direction-boards, and not knowing quite where you are. Spiring is in the air, and the world opens out in front of our front wheels once more from its hibernation. This is good...
