This England, which England - Suffolk (questions of culture)

England is full, or at least it's major roads and holiday accommodation seems to be. Mid-week in the second week of September,  the schools returned, yet still we struggled to a campsite on the Suffolk coast with pitches to spare, most were booked solid until October. I suppose every single fifty plus caravanner and motorhome owner aiming to avoid being next to rowdy kids  simultaneously decided to take a break. Sadly they have been stymied, because every thirty something couple blessed with a brood of toddlers also decided to avoid the peak school holiday period too. Anyway, after a lot of faffing about we managed to find a place to stay. 

Shottisham, Suffolk  

It's a picture perfect sort of place, the kind of  English village that would appeal to American tourists hunting for somewhere quintessential. The pastel pink thatched pub looks more like a Bake-Off  showstopper challenge than an actual building. 

The village's eponymous camp site is based in a working smallholding. When we stayed here before in the summer of 2016 I commented that the site had a somewhat alternative vibe. Maybe this is now less the case, not because the place has changed but because green issues have become more mainstream. Just think how the choice of plant based 'milk' has increased in supermarkets, how many more people have adopted meat free diets or veganism, or the way the challenges of climate change are now on the agenda of all political parties not just the greens. All this must have been good news for the owners of the Shottigsham campsite. It was full.

It is not difficult to understand why, it has large informal pitches, is not overmanaged, offers simple outdoorsy pleasures and is popular with people who want to give their kids a taste of country life.

 

In fact you only need to sit outside for a couple of minutes before country life comes knocking, it is endearing to have the hens wandering free-range, the downside is the way the pitches get covered in chicken shit.

There has got to be a connection between the growing awareness of environmental issues and the increased popularity of camping. Inevitably because we live in a marketing driven era attempts to cashing-in on the trend towards 'eco-mindfullness' among urban twentysomethings can seem profoundly strange. The notion of 'glamping' is quite silly in itself, living under canvas has its charms but glamour is not one of them. The two young families in the next door pitch had taken glamping to a whole new level. results can be inadvertently funny.

Gill has a keen eye for the absurd. The people next to us consisted of two couples and their five pre-school offspring, Earth-mother and Man-bun she dubbed one couple. It was true - as for the two women there was much motherly floating about in Indian print hareem pants; bare-chested preening in Fatface kahki shorts was more the menfolk's thing. All the while their toddlers grubbed around them as nature intended. One of them was called Charlie, I made-up names for the other four - Poppy, Hamish, Autumn, and the baby I decided was called Pea-shoot.

No doubt the small tribe was having fun playing out some sort of bucolic fantasy. Their accommodation consisted of two big cotton bell-tents, the kind you would find on a scout camp in the 1950s. What pushed their encampment from the quirky to bizarre was a stove pipe sticking through a flap in the tent's roof.

It transpires vintage tents with a wood burning stove is a bit of a thing, elevating camping to glamping.  They are marketed as 'Hot Tipis' apparently, and will set you back about £350, you can add in a small stove with a collapsible chimney for a similar amount. That's a quite an expensive way of putting all your nearest and dearest at risk of carbon monoxide poisoning or wiping out the entire campsite in an accidental midnight conflagration. Amazing.

In fact a predilection for vintage was a apparent amongst some of our other neighbours. Their schtick was not so much late eighties new age (Swampy-wanabee style), their two venerable mk II VW campers leaned more towards the SoCal circa '67.

I am interested in history but not nostalgia. I understand why you might want to preserve an example of a VW Camper in a motor museum, but I can't imagine wanting to drive or sleep in one. In every respect our bog standard boring seven year old Burstner is more practical, efficient and I think it looks just as good too.

I wondered how much a fully restored 'L' reg. early seventies VW camper would cost. Around £35,000 it would seem, roughly the same as we might get for ours. I suppose the advantage with the VW is its iconic status means it is now appreciating in value, whereas our more mundane modern tank loses a few thousand pounds in value every year. However I don't think people own vintage motorhomes for pecuniary reasons, either they are mechanically minded and enjoy tinkering with things, or they enjoy 'owner's club type stuff' with all the rallys and social chit-chat that entails, or perhaps simply owning and using something antiquated is some kind of gesture against modernity's obsession with shiny new stuff. I understand these viewpoints, it's just none of them would work for me. I am so useless at practical stuff that I regard changing a light bulb as a significant achievement. Being part of a community of interest I would find difficult given my socially avoidant nature. On the whole I prefer new technologies to older ones simply because generally they work better and are more efficient.

Since we were here last there have been a few developments. A new on-site cafe sells locally sourced food and produce from the smallholding. I think it must operate at the week-ends, we did not get a chance to try it.

There is also a new sanitary block, a welcome addition, I seem to recall the older one was a bit basic and ramshackle. The new one is excellently appointed and you get fine view of the goats as you take your morning shower, a unique experience.

Unisex facilities are fairly commonplace on campsites these days, especially in France. The Shottisham site has seized post-modernity more profoundly however, its signage overtly asserting gender fluidity rather than mere equality. By an odd co-incidence there was an interview with Judith Butler in yesterday's Guardian. She seemed a tad regretful about the way her ground breaking work from the early nineties on gender and performity had become weaponised in the culture wars' more recent skirmishes. "Alliance, coalition and solidarity are the key terms for an expanding left. And we need to know what we are fighting against and for, and keep that focus," Butler asserted in the article.  Indeed, whatever happened to intersectionality, we all ask. All the same, on balance I think it was a sign of progress to be confronted by a sociologically challenging graphic before breakfast.

Even better it was good to get out and about, entertaining as it may be to hang about the campsite being snarky about your neighbours.  'Snarkiness' probably isn't good for the soul whereas as tranquil estuaries definitely are.  Todays mission - explore the eastern shore of the river Deben estuary around Bawdsey.  The last time we visited Suffolk we stood on the quay at Felixstowe Ferry and discussed whether to catch the small. open topped passenger ferry across to Bawdsey; we concluded that we had left it a bit late in the afternoon to make the trip. Next time, we promised ourselves, and here we are, this time on the opposite shore. It's only 200 metres across the river, but by car 25 miles, involving a long detour back to  Woodbridge, consequently though Bawdsey is only three miles from the bustling port of Felixstowe it feels quite remote.

Aside from the little flurry of activity when the ferry arrives or departs nothing really happens, Yachts drift by, gulls wheel and cry, a pearly light dances on the languid water. Lovely.

However, we had not pedalled here to simply sit and stare, we required a simple but delicious lunch, Today is our wedding anniversary - number 43. People on Google and Tripadvisor  had posted  very positive reviews about the simple, traditional  fare served-up by the nearby The Boathouse cafe -

Oh my lordy the lemon polenta cake is to die for... Mind you, I have not had anything that wasn't amazing when I have eaten here...

 

The staff are so lovely and give really great service too.

Could this unpretentious place tucked away in a remote spot really be that good? 

It was, and the staff were lovely. I suppose when we think of fusion cookery we assume transcontinental - Spanish tapas using Waygu beef fillet (La Andaluza, Salamanca, March 2015), a unique amalgam of pork pie pastry with quiche Lorrain filling (l'Occitane, Tokyo, July 2011),  Sword fish ceviche, Peruvian style, (La Portel, Tossa de Mar, September 2019). The sausage roll served up at the Boathouse Cafe managed closer to home fusion cooking. A local butcher must be producing Italian style pork sausages with fennel, simply swapping Cumberland for Tuscany revolutionised a simple sausage roll, it looked very ordinary but was delicious. We wondered if they sourced these from the specialist sausage shop in  Trimley St Martin that we came across the last time we were in Suffolk. 

However we were here for the much praised cakes, in particular - was the lemon polenta really a slice 'to die for?'  We were in luck, because there were only two slices left.

The reviewer did not not exaggerating, I am not a particularly 'cakey' person, but I could tell this was a very special lemon polenta cake, light and fluffy, a strong, but not overpowering citrus kick cutting through the sweetness. As we left Gill fell into the conversation with one of the owners, Gill mentioned she had used Nigella's recipe for lemon polenta cake in the past. The one we had just eaten was developed from  the one in the River Cafe cookbook, we were told. This is not some obscure local cafe, the people running The Boathouse have real commitment and skill, producing memorable dishes that are simply delicious. What a find.  

Beyond the cafe an overgrown path runs through a disused boatyard towards the river mouth. Then you reach a shingle beach, few people seem to come here, we had the place to ourselves. At low tide the path runs northwards beyond a bluff. Today there seemed no way around it without getting our feet wet so we simply admired the fine view of  Bawdsey Manor, a rambling pile of Victorian neo-gothic; its spikey roofscape poking out above the trees that tumbled down the hill to the shoreline. These days the place operates as an outdoor education centre, but in the 1930s and 40s  it was used as a government research facility. It was here in 1936 that previous primitive attempts to use radio waves as a way of tracking aircraft were developed into a fully operational radar system. 

The bomb-proof bunkers in Bawdsey Manor's grounds have been preserved and developed into a museum by local volunteers. The small museum was excellent, explaining clearly exactly how radar works and the crucial part it played in the Battle of Britain.

There was a lot to admire about the way the museum had been curated. One section was dedicated to 'women in radar'. The role the WAAF operators played during the Battle of Britain tends to get overlooked, the 'few' usually perceived as 'our boys' flying Hurricanes and Spitfires. The display attempts to re-balance that bias featuring first hand accounts of the role sites like Bawdsey played, staffed mainly by women, in providing a constant stream of intelligence flowing between fighter command and the pilots in the air. 

Perhaps the most powerful story in this section was that of Dr. Mary Taylor. Female theoretical physicists were very rare indeed during the 1930s,  her calculations and understanding of the way radio waves behave in the atmosphere made a crucial contribution the operational success of  the 'chain home' network of radar towers that protected the east coast of England during  WWII. Gill mentioned to one of the volunteers that she felt that Mary Taylor's story had been underplayed, that she should have been featured on the main display along with the other key pioneers in radar's development such as Robert Watson-Watt and Arnold Wilson. It turned out that that the person she was talking too was one of the main protagonists in the museum's development. A physicist himself, I got the impression that he agreed with Gill's observation. 

The Suffolk coast is a profoundly cultured place, not because Constable's depiction of it has made it a paragon of an 'English Landscape' or that the opera house at Glyndebourne is world famous, but more to do with the way you stumble upon ordinary, out of the way places that turn out to be extraordinary and full of small delights and intriguing contradictions. From tipis with stove-pipes, a toilet block that espoused  queer theory, to a lemon polenta cake to die for, and the story of a forgotten pioneer of women in science, see - small delights and intriguing contradictions - that's why we travel. Rip-up your bucket list, look at what is in front of your nose instead.