Nashoba, Base Green, near Wetherden, Suffolk

Again the days seem to have slipped by, few spent with interest to fellow tourists. We have dined and afternoon tea’d with relatives, some closer than others. We passed a delightful evening with my husband’s siblings, his brother’s partner, and a niece and nephew from each family, travelling into Bury St Edmunds through narrow lanes and misty rain on a dark night, to dine at a now familiar pub, not familiar for boozy nights but for past dining experience. 

One day we travelled up to Barningham on a pilgrimage with my sister-in-law to dine in the pub the three Clarke children spent about three years of their childhood, all of them admitting to climbing out second storey windows but each with differing expeditions in mind. 

Unsurprisingly the past sixty years have seen alterations within the outer shell of the Royal George, then a Greene King establishment, now a Freehouse. The pub has been fully opened as a licenced public house since the end of the 19^th century but the building dates from the 15^th century. It was once two dwellings and is named after a fighting ship of the line built in 1746 and sunk off Spithead in 1782.

The current publicans have been there for about twelve years and these days buy in the freshest of fish and offer a wonderful lunchtime menu. No doubt the evening menu is just as good, however we were only interested in the midday repast.

Apart from enjoying the feast, both Chris and Margie reminisced over their childhood and the layout of the interior, all very much changed over the intervening years.

While up near the Norfolk border and in the midst of the childhood villages frequented through those same years and since, we called down at the home family farm, Fen Farm, on the edge of Hopton and the border fens. 

During the last twenty plus years, Chris has often spoken of his time “down on the farm”, holidays and weekends more accurately spent bothering his elders, but “helping” from his childhood perspective. Grandfather Goddard bought the property about a hundred years ago, then a much more extensive land holding that Cousin Bunny owns today. These days Chris’s cousin, close to eighty,  holds little more than his house and good sized garden, and his son, a patch of yard big enough to operate his busy firewood business from.

We admired Lilly’s dahlia’s, acquainted ourselves with the excited little terrier, Scamp, and sampled Lilly’s home baking over cups of tea in fine china. These folk are down-to-earth Suffolk folk, who speak of “meda’s” rather than “meadows’, whose broad Suffolk accent requires great attention of visitors from DownUnder, and whose hospitality is boundless. I had met them at a family funeral a couple of years ago, so I was not entirely a curiosity, however to spend a couple of hours in their own surroundings was so much more rewarding.

But that morning we had received ghastly news from New Zealand. The elections were held several weeks ago, and while the incumbent National Party, won more seats than any other party, the MMP system has meant that the opposition has been able to gain power with the support of very minor parties. More accurately, one Kingmaker, he who has been in this position at least twice before, has chosen to support the left leaning Labour Party, and we will return to New Zealand at the end of this month to political change. In all fairness, we have no grounds to complain, because we did not vote, not having any address where voting papers could be posted. However I am not at all happy, nor rejoicing in the fact that New Zealand’s now has its third female Prime Minister. It is not the fact that Jacinda is female, or only in her mid-thirties, but the fact that she has so little experience in parliament.  

Since then we have had poor weather, and reluctant to step out onto footpaths bordered with wet nettles and brambles, with muddy surface, we have not spent our time as well as we might. This morning with the showers more infrequent, even in the midst of Storm Brian and wild winds, Chris washed and polished the Kia while I remained in the shelter of the caravan, defrosting the fridge and sorting jars of dry goods, deciding whether to store or discard.

After lunch, we headed about eight miles north for distraction, up through the lovely village of Bacton toward Norwich, but turning easterly to Gislingham. I have been nursing a walks’ pamphlet for some months now, waiting for an opportunity to suggest an expedition. 

We parked up near the village hall and set off out across the arable farmland for the four and a quarter mile circular walk. We walked through woods and fields, often traversing planted areas which would be fenced off with electric wire if I were the farmer, but of course cannot be here. The public footpaths on which the public have a legally protected right to travel on foot are hundreds of years old, and land owners have no right to consider those travellers as trespassers. If I were a farmer I would not be happy to have random walkers wandering across my cultivated fields, but the pathways in a couple of cases today did indeed instruct us to do exactly that. 

We passed through spinnies and copses, two delightful English English words one does not readily come upon DownUnder. We crossed the busy rail firstly on a fine old brick bridge and later across the tracks, here encountering a local who was waiting for the Flying Scotsman to come rattling on through. He had checked the internet and seen it was due to leave Norwich at 2 pm and figured it would pass by this spot about half an hour later. I suggested they might have stopped by in Diss, given that this was a tourist train and not necessarily on a strict schedule, so long as its journey worked in with the other trains using the tracks. We stood and chatted for some time with him, but then left him to his vigil; we pressed on across the muddy field now on the home run to the village visible in the distance. Today there were less pigeons, pheasants and crows across the fields making the most of the scattered seed;  gas fuelled bird scaring guns firing off at intervals frighten both avian and human interlopers.

Once back in Gillingham, we set off home on a roundabout route through the lovely villages of Walsham le Willows and Badwell Ash, travelling back through Elmswell where we stopped to buy ice-creams. It seems that the coming of winter prompts ice-cream stocks to be run down; we made do with a couple of marked down items from a box tucked away in the large freezers.