Yesterday, leaving for another day the fourth dark episode of the ever popular but frankly grim Tales from the Precariat series – aka Roddis v Sheffield Hallam – I drove Jackie to a teaching day on one of wealthy University of Nottingham’s many inspiring sites. This one is on the cusp of Notts and Leicestershire in pretty Sutton Bonington, its grand houses and tory lanes almost affordable for being directly under the descent path for East Midlands Airport, two miles away. We’d set off at seven and were parking up by the church – to dodge campus fees – well before nine, despite pitifully slow progress on the last twenty miles of M1.
We hiked up through the village, me taking shot after shot. After so deeply suboptimal an April, such dazzling light, high contrast and hard, resist not could I.
Coffee on campus with Jackie’s colleague, Tina: warm, witty and instant convert to the Jasper Appreciation Soc. Leaving them to their doubtless busy day, woofer and I dropped back into the village to swing right at the phone box – now a defib point – and head down a dirt track to the Soar, a major waterway in its own right but here at Sutton B moving sedately northward to tryst with the Trent at Long Eaton.
Lovely, so like Lincolnshire rivers and banks
Very like Lincolnshire, Marion. But the wider vistas, which I didn’t do enough to capture, have a touch both of fens and shires: the latter more rolling; more fences and hedges for fox hunting, telegraph reading squires to drive their pointers over.
I’ll be back soon, maybe for one of my wild camping jaunts.
My favourite is the gently decaying caravan – emblematic of an earlier leisure era when lucky families could get respite from the town or city in their wendy house in the sticks. Great pics Phil.
I remember well your wendy house in the sticks, Bryan: specifically, huddled in a Castleton field ‘neath the grimly watchful walls and keep of Peveril Castle, not that it bothered your two bin-lids and mine: tots then but now confident men and women of the world, with the big four-oh their next milestone.