June, 2016 - Travels with Verne and Roy

Running England’s Country Lanes

In preparation, I mentally practised flattening myself against a box hedge to avoid becoming roadkill

Ah, those famously narrow and twisting English country lanes! At first, I wasn’t sure which would be more nerve-wracking – being driven pell-mell by Roy along them (and no, I don’t have the nerve to drive them myself), or running on them. Sometimes there’s room to jump out of the way of oncoming traffic, as in the picture above, but that’s not always the case. In preparation, I mentally practised flattening myself against a box hedge to avoid becoming roadkill.

So I plucked up the courage one chilly June morning and headed out from Chapel Croft B&B, set in the farmland surrounding the town of Biddulph near Stoke-on-Trent, praying that most of the morning commuters to Congleton or wherever would still be nibbling their egg soldiers and slurping their PG Tips.

This being England’s Peak District, the wind was fresh, to say the least, and the terrain challengingly hilly – a far cry from what has been my standard sweaty run in Singapore’s dead-flat East Coast Park. I passed a field full of blanketed horses – a riding school, it seemed – and several beautiful farmsteads, including one with a discreet sign boasting Charollier sheep.

In the end, I had the lanes mostly to myself. There was an uncomfortable moment when two large lorries come head to head on a bend, and I had to stop while they sorted themselves out – clearly all in a day’s work for them.

Back at the B&B, I felt I’d earned my plateful of locally smoked salmon with deep-gold “scrammled eggs” (according to the blackboard special) from landlady Lynn’s own fat and beautiful chickens.

Lane convert

Within the week, I’d braved two more sets of lanes. The first was just beyond Victoria Park, a small industrial suburb of Biddulph, where Piper Boats was putting the finishing touches to our barge, Karanja. (To “snag” the boat, we were spending a somewhat surreal weekend living on board – not afloat, but in the boatbuilder’s big car park – cooking, bathing, washing clothes and so on to test the electrical, water and other systems.)

Unexpectedly beautiful running trail, directly off semi-industrial Biddulph’s Brown Lees Road

Seems that unless you’re in London, you don’t have to go far in England to find countryside. No more than a kilometre from Piper Boats, down Brown Lees Road, I found a pedestrian and cycling track that took me a couple of miles through idyllic fields and meadows to where the houses started again; or I could turn right off the road for another leafy mile or so to another village green.

And then, a week later, we stayed for a few nights with Roy’s sister, who lives in a horsey part of the Warwickshire countryside. In the ice of winter, you can slide dangerously along the slippery lanes and it’s not much fun to be on foot. This time, though it was beautifully dry, the lushly shaggy trees and hedgerows seemed to shrink the narrow lanes still further.

Again, I had them almost to myself: even at 8am on a weekday morning, I was able to count on my fingers the number of passing cars in the course of 70 minutes. And when you walk – as I did the final stretch home to Lyndsay’s – you’re more likely to see the swooping of fat magpies, and the odd bunny-rabbit hopping across your path.

Driving English Country Lanes

I stay safe by keeping my eyes tightly shut

English lanes – like the one above, taken from the passenger seat – terrify me. For Roy, they seemingly hold no fears. As we zip around blind corners boxed off with shaggy green hedgerows, I stay safe by keeping my eyes tightly shut, while he revels in the action of driving, punctuated by the occasional expletive as we narrowly escape collision with yet another articulated lorry.

A couple of weeks ago, we drove from Biddulph to Leek and up to Buxton, through the spectacular moorland of England’s Peak District. (We were staying in the northern England town of Stoke-on-Trent, while Piper Boats was finishing our 49-foot Dutch-style barge, Karanja. There’s only so long you can hang around watching busy craftsmen, so it was a good opportunity to see something of the area.)

Long and winding road up to the spa town of Buxton

At 1,000 feet, Buxton itself is in the High Peak district, and billed as the highest market town in the country. Solid and substantial houses and elegant late-17th-century public buildings hewn from the local grey stone recall the various heydays of the town, when the carriages of the affluent must have traversed these same lanes and roads – minus the tarmac and roadside warning signs – to take the waters at this famous spa town, second only to the southern city of Bath. (Buxton, too, was a Roman spa, and again from the Elizabethan era onwards.)

Historic Buxton Crescent and the Old Hall Hotel

It’s soon going to be possible to take Buxton’s waters again – in two or three years’ time, volunteered the construction-helmeted chappie who saw us peering through the fence at the elegant, late 18th century Crescent Hotel, currently undergoing restoration. He even whipped out his smartphone to show the photo he’d taken of the spectacular interior – probably of the old Assembly Room – before work began.

For now, you can wander through the quaint boutiques of Cavendish Arcade, enjoying the Victorian/Edwardian tiles, mouldings and an impressive if slightly gaudy glass domed roof, but especially one of the original marble-lined baths in all its Victorian glory, complete with a winch and pulley system and a wooden armchair to lower you into it. I hope the new spa retains something authentic to the place, and not just another temple to Kerstin Florian or whoever.

How We Got Here

As luck would have it, I’m terribly prone to seasickness

Why a boat?

It’s a long story, but now that my husband is retired – and I’m doing a lot less writing and editing work – I have some time to tell it.

Three or four years ago, I gently hinted to Roy that perhaps he should find a hobby to occupy himself with after retirement. This was mostly with a view to his future happiness, but also with the idea of keeping him busy when he no longer had minions to boss around. Perhaps he could take up pottery, or macramé – or we could join a choir together once again (in preparation for the inevitable).

To my surprise and alarm, he started Googling boats. Surprise because he’d shown zero interest in boating of any sort since we met in 1992, discounting the odd cruise on a floating five-star hotel. Alarm because the boat-builder he had in mind was Nordhavn, purveyor of ocean-going, trawler-style motor yachts that start from around a million-and-a-half US dollars. (Everyone knows that there are two happy days in the life of a boat-owner – the day you buy it and the day you sell it.)

As luck would have it, I’m terribly prone to seasickness. His Nordhavn file was already a couple of inches thick with brochures, and Roy’s customised wheelhouse design almost complete, when the cruise we did on the lovely Silver Shadow from Singapore to Hong Kong proved conclusively that I was not a suitable mate with whom to cross the ocean on 40 to 120 feet of vessel. Phew!

Which boat?

I married a tenacious man, it must be said. When he came up with the idea of a canal barge – a Dutch barge, specifically – designed to ply rivers and canals, I thought: why not? It would at the very least keep him busy. Roy is a man who needs a project; and his most recent one, the gutting and redesign of our Singapore apartment, was finally complete.

If you ask Roy, he’ll tell you he’s been interested in barges ever since he was a boy growing up in in the English Midlands. He even recalls doing a detailed barge design in his early teens. (Who’d have guessed?)

And what an absorbing project it has been! To test the waters (so to speak), we hired a wide-beam barge called the Serenity for a ridiculously warm and sunny week in September 2014, and tootled up and down the Grand Union Canal between Milton Keynes and the charming old canal village of Stoke Bruerne. After some trepidation I mastered the windlass and conquered the locks, together with any doubts I may have had.

(Read more about our week on Serenity in this article, published in Expat Living Singapore in April 2014: Serenity Trip April 14)

Finding the right boat-builder (Simon Piper of Piper Boats in Stoke-on-Trent) was the next step. Debating the size (49 feet, rather than the physically daunting 75 feet that Roy was inclined to go for) and the number of bedrooms (just one, so as to maximise living space) took several visits to Piper’s offices and quite a lot of verbal stamina on my part.

I’ve always wanted a TV that disappears from view

Traditionalists might regard the Karanja with perturbation. For one thing, we dispensed with the traditional stove in the corner of the saloon. Instead, we have a concealed TV that glides up and down at the touch of a button on the remote.

Is life without a bath worth living?

For another, I have a full-size bath. What’s more, we’ve maximised the deck space by shifting the dog-box (ceiling hatch) as far aft as possible, surrounded the deck with stainless steel yacht stanchions and covered it with gorgeous flexi-teak. Perfect for my sun-lounger!

And here are a couple more great photos, courtesy of Piper Boats:

Why Karanja?

Karanja was the ship Roy remembers most fondly from his nine years with BI (The British India Steam Navigation Co.) – a passenger cargo vessel that plied the Indian Ocean with stops at Bombay, Karachi, the Seychelles, Mombasa, Dar Es Salaam, Beira, Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) and Durban. A picture of the original ship now hangs in her namesake’s saloon, and the engraved silver mug that was a 21st birthday gift from his fellow officers gleams from a nearby shelf. (How long it will continue to gleam in the absence of domestic help is a question.)

The original Karanja, which Roy sailed on during the early 70s

As for her black-and-white exterior, every BI ship had a black funnel painted with two white bands, and our baby Karanja’s paintwork is a sort of homage to that.

The flags tell their own story: the one at the back is the Singapore ensign, showing that we’re registered in Singapore. The small one at the front is the house flag: fairly quirkily, Roy chose the flag of the old British East India Company, which would have been flown by Stamford Raffles as he sailed into Singapore in January 1819.