Surrey: an apology

When I was growing up in north-east England we were taught to recite the following ditty. The idea, I suppose, was to cure us of short northern vowels.  For the full effect you have to pronounce the a's as though they are spelt "ar" ("rarther farst" and "parst")....

My father's car is a Jaguar
And pa drives rather fast
Castles, farms and draughty barns, 
We go charging past

In retrospect it seems very odd. Nobody can have expected us to pass ourselves off as being posh, but perhaps the plan was that we could  mix with the officer classes without causing embarrassment. It was never going to work, and thankfully society moved on anyway. We learned from the Beatles how to do a much better imitation of a Liverpool accent, and if there's anyone still around who talks like Celia Johnson or Trevor Howard then they are keeping their distance.

However, that little ditty, together with the schoolboy reading of the time left me with some very confused ideas about the south of England. I imagined that in the south boys my age all boarded at minor public schools, and understood the mysteries of cricket. Their little sisters rode ponies, their father (who they called pater) had a slightly shady job in the city, drank g&t at the golf club (before driving home in a Jaguar, rather fast), while their mother was having cucumber sandwiches with the vicar. They all lived in large mock-tudor mansions in villages full of little old ladies on bicycles who solved murders while spitfires flew overhead.

Inevitably, as time went on my knowledge of the world expanded, I met people from the south of England who didn't wear cravats, and who could drive in the snow. I discovered parts of southern England that weren't as I imagined, and eventually I sold my northern soul to the devil, and followed the job down here.

As a result I can now say that some of my best friends are southerners. Not many of them, of course. Most of my friends are lapsed northerners like myself, or expatriates from exotic and faraway places such as Scotland. The only southerner I know really well is from Essex, and that counts as East Anglia anyway. But lets not get bogged down in detail.

The important point is that I now know that Kent isn't like the southern England that I imagined, and neither is Sussex. Middlesex doesn't even exist any more - it turned into an airport. So all of my prejudices ended up concentrated on Surrey. I knew virtually nothing about it, so in my mind it was the last bastion of southern-ness.

And then along came my Jenkins quest, which forced me to visit the county, and threw my pre-conceptions into disarray. I've made a couple of trips on the bike to Surrey now, and discovered that the bastions are not as I imagined.

Perhaps there is really a heritage centre somewhere where all the minor public schools, jaguars, golfers, and ponies are still preserved, and people dress up in cravats and talk as though they are performing in a black-and-white film. But if such a place does exist I haven't discovered it yet. The parts of Surrey that I've visited are quite ordinary.

So unless anyone can point me in the right direction, this is by way of an apology to Surrey for years of imagining that it was weird. I'm sorry, and in future I'll try to be more sensible.

"Gosh"

http://www.robinhoodtax.org/

Medieval stained glass

All Saints at North Moreton was one of the two churches that I visited on Saturday. Saint Andrew, at East Hagbourne was the other. Both are close to Didcot.

All Saints has been described as the most perfect medieval church in Berkshire. Which is a little odd, given that it is in Oxfordshire. It isn't the church that has moved. It's the county boundary, which was shifted in 1974 (on April 1st), when Didcot and Wallingford became part of South Oxfordshire.

All Saints is a nice enough parish church, with one outstanding feature. The stained glass in the Stapleton Chapel dates from the late thirteenth century, and even to my uninformed eye, it looks superb.For something that it is over 700 years old, the colours are stunning.

Unfortunately Saint Andrew's church at East Hagbourne was closed when I got there, so I didn't get to see the carvings, which apparently are the highlight.

My route outwards was via Henley and Wallingford. I started along the back roads to Henley, but for the sake of speed I then followed main roads. It's quite a long climb out of Henley, so at that stage I was getting quite warm, but then the temperature dropped noticeably as I descended through Nettlebed to Wallingford in a bit of light fog.

Coming back I followed National Cycle Route 5 across the hills through Stoke Row to Reading, then I crossed Reading along the towpath beside the river. The subtle colours of blue and grey along the river in the dusk were striking, but by the time I came out of Reading it was getting dark and from there I just bashed along the main road to get home.

In the past I've never managed to follow cycle route 5 coming into Reading, because I drifted off route by missing a turning. As a result I've ended up negotiating some busy roads. This time, thanks to the OSM cycle map on the GPS (and, I suspect, some better signage out on the road) I managed to follow the Sustrans route properly.

It's a fun ride, diving down little lanes, and around a park to join the river at Caversham bridge. I found it a big improvement over my previous attempts to cross Reading, and a much more interesting way to get from one side of the city to the other.

All of the roads that I followed were already on the OSM map, but neither of the churches were, so I've now added them. It's getting harder to find places locally that need mapping, but since I got home I've noticed that there are some missing minor roads quite close to the route that I followed. Next time I need to plan some short diversions to plug a few gaps.

"Cycling may be dangerous to people coming out of church"

There are two things that need to be said up front.

One is that I don't normally cycle in churchyards. I'm not sure that I can explain why, but even sticking to the paths, it does feel disrespectful to cycle through a graveyard. So normally when I am visiting a church on the bike I get off at the gate, and I push.

The second thing to point out is that at the church where I took this picture there is a footpath that crosses the churchyard. It runs close to the church door and it seems to be quite heavily used.

So placed in context, the sign makes a lot of sense, and I'm all in favour of the spirit that lies behind it.

However,.....

In the different context of the more bizarre attacks on cycling and cyclists, I find the idea that "cycling may be dangerous to people coming out of church" quite funny. And I offer this up in that spirit.

Jethro Tull's cottage, Crowmarsh Gifford

I hope there is a debate going on somewhere in the OSM community about how best to tag buildings associated with people whose name was subsequently adopted by a progressive blues-rock group featuring a flute. Unfortunately I didn't record the precise location of this building, so I'm in no position to contribute.

To my generation Jethro Tull are a British group, best known for "Living in the Past", "Aqualung", and Ian Anderson standing on one foot while playing the flute with his hair in disarray. This is not the cottage in Crowmarsh Gifford, where members of the group have lived since 1967.

Jethro Tull (1674 – 1741) was an English agricultural pioneer. He improved the seed drill ( a device for sowing seeds), while living in this cottage between 1700 and 1710.

Geology

This evening I've discovered from Mapperz that the British Geological survey publishes KML files of UK geology.

I thought it would be interesting to see if these could be overlaid onto an OSM base map. If you are patient enough, they can.

The file is in KMZ format, which I couldn't get to work, so I've de-compressed it to extract the KML content. But be warned, there is more than 17mb of data being shunted around here, so everything moves very, very, very slowly.

Even in this condition, I think it is worth the effort. It's beautiful and fascinating, as I hope the image shows. At least for now, you can view the whole shebang here (eventually). I hope you find that it is worth the wait, and maybe somebody more skilled than I am can figure out how to make it all happen a bit faster. Meanwhile, start it up, then go and put the kettle on.

Glass half full

One month of the year is over, and so far I've covered 211 miles on the bike. That's more than at this time last year. Come to that, it's more than at this time the previous year, though two years ago I'd only had the bike for a few days, so it doesn't really count.

I've only done five trips in January, but three of them have been over 60 miles. That's far enough to be over my comfort level, but it hasn't had a big effect on my Eddington number yet. It does mean that I'm banking some trips that should be useful later in the year though. I've also ticked off visits to four of the churches that are on this year's list of fifteen to visit on the bike.

All that's on the positive side of the scales. On the other hand, if I'm going to reach my annual target I've got to average nearly 300 miles a month, so there's a bit of a gap building up. Also, I've not added anything significant to Open Street Map yet this year (all the routes that I've ridden in the last few weeks had already been added).

Last year it was at this point in early February that things began to drift off-plan, and it took me a couple of months to get back on track. So while I'm not unhappy with how things are going at the moment, the next few weeks are going to be telling.