I've been, in blogging terms at least, drifting a bit of late. The Campaign for a Real President has taken up quite a lot of my time of late, planning trips, acting as a sounding board for Ros and, to be honest, party bureaucracy has begun to pall in terms of its attractiveness...
This weekend saw the campaign trail reach Peasedown St John, in North East Somerset, the new constituency which takes in Wansdyke, the last Labour seat in the county. Our host, Cllr Nathan Hartley, threw a very pleasant event, with good food, great beer and fun company. Ros gave a speech which attracted laughter and interesting questions in good measure, before we retired to the home of Gail Coleshill, the local PPC for the night.
In the morning, we set off for Suffolk, having discovered that, due to the vagaries of rail fares, it was the same fare to travel first class as it would be to travel standard class. I'll return to that at some point...
On Sunday, we had been invited, with a broad cross-section of Suffolk high society, to attend an event to celebrate the first stage of the restoration of the Miller's House at the Pakenham Water Mill. So, we dressed for a Sunday afternoon in the country (floral print for Ros, linen jacket and chinos for me) and drove over to Pakenham. The Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Sue Tamlyn, another of those Suffolk women who, had they been born a century earlier, would have been running a British Residency somewhere in the Empire, made an unexpectedly humourous speech indicating the work that has been put in by the volunteer corps of fundraisers, millers and mechanics who have underpinned the restoration.
We then had an opportunity to see the restored buildings, see wheat being milled into flour (the mill is a working one, and produces high-quality flour for sale in local farmers markets), and admire the millpond and the new flat that has been created as part of the site. In an era when food miles are a middle-class obsession, Pakenham has food yards - you can see the fields of wheat from the mill.
The Board of Trustees then invited us to take afternoon tea, with finger sandwiches and their 'really rather excellent' lemon drizzle cake. The tea was high-quality (and I say that as someone who takes his tea very seriously) and the lemon drizzle cake was, dare I say it, really rather excellent.
This morning, however, it was time to head back to London for the urban bureaucrat. I like to end my Suffolk weekends with a proper breakfast on the train, a luxury I know, but it helps me make the transition from country to city. Today was almost painfully perfect though, with an excellent full English breakfast served by those really rather nice people at National Express East Anglia - "was everything alright, my love?" - and the sun shining as we glided effortlessly through mid-Suffolk and the Stour Valley at Manningtree.
As London drew closer, I began to daydream that the guard had come up to me and said, "I'm terribly sorry, Sir, but we really do feel that you shouldn't go to London today. Don't worry though, we'll put you down at Brentwood and someone will make sure that you get back to Needham Market safe and sound." Sadly, it never happened...
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