Any small step towards normality is a welcome thing. We greeted the text from the moho storage place that it was now 'operating normally' with an outbreak of jubilation usually reserved for rare moments of joy such as an unexpected tax rebate, tempting deals on Waitrose wine or a really cheap Eurotunnel crossing.
Sadly, experience has taught us that there is a malign dialectic between anticipation and disappointment whereby the more eagerly you await something the greater the risk of becoming crestfallen. A few years ago I wrote a series of haiku about a local woodland - the fifth one went like this:
Birds (soar) fields (open)
skies. (clear) unlike pleasure,
there are no small freedoms.
One thing lockdown has shown - I was wrong about there being 'no small freedoms'. Over recent weeks our basic freedoms have been removed then drip-fed back to us in small 'baby-steps'. I understand the necessity of it, but that does not really make it any less of an alienating experience, all the more when lectured about having to adjust to a 'new normal' . Taking the opportunity to avail yourself of some minor relaxation to quarantine arrangements only highlights all the others that are still in place. So frequent walks in the park rather than only one a day results in swerving past on-comers more regularly; this reinforces the uncanny aspects of the new normal rather than ameliorating them.
On a practical level we were pleased to be able to take the van out for a drive, after almost three months it was time to re-charge the main battery. We know from leaving the car on the drive for months on end while we are off on our travels that 12 weeks or so is about the limit before its digital clock manages to to flatten the battery. This was not something I wanted to happen to the moho squeezed awkwardly between two caravans in a field in the middle of the Pennines.
Our new right to roam raised the question of where to go. Not all public car parks in the Peak District have re-opened and not all of them easily accommodate a larger vehicle. After some discussion we decided to take a day trip to Barton Turns, a large marina on the Trent and Mersey Canal near Burton. Not perhaps the most obvious choice but the place ticked a few boxes. It is open, has acres of parking, is a pleasant place to stroll around and on the way we would pass Derby and Burton services which has an LPG pump. Another useful step towards getting the van 'unlock ready' would be to top up the re-fillable gas bottles. In the event it was good to be able to take a trip not least because it got us out of the Pennines to the flatter landscape and expansive sky of the Trent valley. England's green hills are lovely, but if you have been trapped in them for months they becomes a tad claustrophobic. So it was a 'yay' moment as we headed south down the A515. However it was not really a moment of unbridled jubilation - assertion of 'small freedoms' can never get beyond the 'yayish'.
What put the 'ish' into the 'yay' was a clutch of minor irritations and glitches stemming from the peculiar times we are living through.. Firstly, diminished road sense. It did not take very long before the need for pedestrians to give each other a wide berth resulted in them spilling off pavements and re-occupying the road. This was not much of an issue when there was hardly any traffic. Car drivers too seem to be to taking lockdown as an opportunity to ditch the petty demands of the highway code. Using indicators has become optional and people simply pull out of side-roads and driveways now on the assumption that there will be no oncoming traffic.
So back on board our much loved 3.8 tonne heap of bird dropping splattered metal I was wholly prepared that the couple with a toddler by the hand and a baby in a buggy would wander out into our path utterly oblivious of our presence. Equally, it was to be expected that the chap in a snazzy checked cap, delighted to be able to take his gleaming Triumph TR6 out for a spin on a sunny day, would rocket out of the forecourt of a Shell garage unaware of our somewhat larger 'pride and joy' bearing down on him.
However trucks are a scarier proposition altogether. During the six weeks or so that everyone apart from the emergency services and and key workers have been banned from driving beyond their locality HGVs have had the roads more or less to themselves. Unsurprisingly truck drivers ditched the rule-book too. In their mission to ensure no household went without the essentials of life (toilet roll and pasta), hazards such as blind summits, sharp bends and concealed driveways were impediments to ignore and petty by-laws such speed restrictions and double white lines.paltry matters when compared to the need to keep shelves stocked. They had a point, people took to the streets every Thursday at 8 o'clock to celebrate the work of care workers and NHS staff, but the efforts logistics and distribution sector that kept us fed during the worst of the epidemic was not acknowledged. It is understandable with shelves to stock and schedules to meet rules got bent. It's just as the general public once more takes to the road encountering empowered, mission-driven truckers handling forty tons of metal as if on Brands Hatch is a truly terrifying prospect..
Why Buxton suffers unduly from this problem is a question of geography. For years Alston and Buxton's tourist blurb both laid claim to being England's highest market town. In fairness it is debatable. Both places lie around 1000'. At one point Alston's town centre is a few metres higher than Buxton's, but since Buxton lies in a steep valley the altitude of its outskirts reach up to around 1150'. This means that most of the roads leading into the town are either narrow, bendy or steep. Those connecting us to Leek and Macclesfield manage all all three hazards simultaneously. The reason why they are busy with HGV traffic from dawn until dusk has to do with geography too, but geology rather than topography. The nearby limestone hills are pockmarked with quarries, working and disused. They are huge. There is a mineral railway running to them, nevertheless much of the quarried material is lugged out by road, the stone chippings in tipper trucks, the powders by tanker. At the best of times it can make driving across the Peak District a tad hair-raising. At the moment with truck drivers emboldened by the near empty roads a simple journey down the A515 from Buxton to Ashbourse can be very nerve wracking. With the lorries powering towards us cutting corners to maintain speed and the one right behind filling both wing mirrors and constantly nudging me to exceed the 50mph speed limit, I was relieved to reach the junction with the A50 dual carriageway near Sudbury.
From here it is a about a twenty minute drive to Barton Turns. This part of the Trent Valley has a clutch of Millennium regeneration projects - The National Forest, the Memorial Arboretum and Barton Turns Marina. Though barely two decades old they are almost historical monuments now, redolent with the optimism of Nineties 'Cool Britannia and New Labour's bushy-tailed bur cynical mix of neo-liberalism and social engineering. All three projects are slightly odd, each of them in some sense channeling 'heritage' as a trope to assert optimism about the future by evoking a romanticised past. The National Forest attempts to recreate 'Sherwood' by re-wilding the Derbyshire and Notts coalfield's disused collieries and spoil heaps. A noble thought, but it's fair to say even two decades on the landscape does not seem any more wooded than it before. The oddest of the three 'invented' monuments is the National Memorial Arbotetum. I wrote about it on another blog back in 2014. It seems to me that there is something fundamentally flawed about constructing a national monument to 'the fallen' in an abandoned gravel pit. It's a rare achievement to make bathos haunting but the National Memorial Arboretum manages to pull off this seeming contradiction.
Of the three Barton Turns Marina is the most innocuous. It' mixes a large storage facility for narrow boats with retail and leisure opportunities. The style of the shopping complex is 'nouveau vernacular' a latter day take on the British predilection for buildings that deliberately reject modernity - it has a long tradition, Neo Gothic, Arts and Crafts, Mock Tudor. I am not sure if our latest attempts at pastiche has a name, 'fake mews' perhaps. The shopping complex is built in local brick in a style that recalls mid-Victorian canal-side warehouses or Maltings. It contains a big gastro-pub and wedding venue, a row of heritage themed shops - arty-crafty studios, a farm shop, and a country clothing store (think - styled by Nigel Farage).
Even when functioning normally Barton Turns feels like a virtual reality simulation. Now emptied of people, the place's toy-town ambiance felt somewhat uncanny. The impression was heightened since our last visit by the gated community of waterside apartments recently built on edge of the car park.
The marina was full of brightly coloured narrow boats. The place can accommodate hundreds of them and it was full. Sitting on a sunny day in the garden of a canal-side pub in the Midlands, the sight of a brightly painted narrow boat gently chugging past is a heartening sight, an image of England of yore, a reassuring steampunk fantasy. Today, with hundreds of them drawn-up in serried ranks, corralled into some sort of heritage mass storage depot they looked plain weird, an unsettling sight rather than a comforting one.
We ate our ham sandwiches, queued to buy some sausages at the farm shop - the only place open - then concluded that Barton Turns felt very strange, reinforcing out sense of the abnormal rather than ameliorating it. We decided to head home, calling into Derby and Burton services on the way home to fill-up our LPG bottles. No chance, a hastily scribbled note on the pump advised that due to Covid-19 LPG was unavailable, clearly the virus is fatal to fuel pumps as well as humans as the note also advised us that when restrictions were lifted the pump would be removed. Gill summoned up myLPG, a handy app that lists the locations of gas pumps throughout Europe. The nearest was in Uttoxeter, only a few miles out of our way as we headed home. Thankfully it was operating, a bit of a faff to find but in the end we filled up.
The positive aspect of the day is that the van is now ready to use whenever that becomes possible. The Caravan and Motorhome club is taking bookings from 4th July onwards, Though no official announcement has been made that seems to be some kind of assumed date when staying overnight in camp sites may be possible.
On the way home we decided that in future it be may be better to simply take the van out for a daytime jaunt to one of the larger car parks by the Tissington Trail and go for a bike ride. That would feel more normal.. In fact, it transpired that we should not have visited Barton Turns anyway. The website states that motorhomes are prohibited. The British have a strange attitude towards then in comparison to Europe. What sense does it make for a place that can accommodate 300 narrow boats in the marina to ban motorhomes from the car park?
Motorhomes and narrow boats do exactly the same thing except one has wheels and the other a hull. I'ts simply cultural mores the lead us to perceive the former as nuisance, an annoyance that 'spoils the view' and the latter as an expression of shared heritage.