On the road: status update.

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Because of course you must have a status update, otherwise I don't know what might happen. Lions lying down with lambs before you can say winking.

 

The Pigeon and I left as the sun was rising. We slid over the Grampians, to the south. The mountains of Perthshire were looking particularly stately and blue. Into Cumbria, the green hills had a covering of snow. The winter sun dazzled off them and everything looked clean and beautiful.

The Pigeon, bored after five hours in the car, bounded into the Tebay hotel, and marched straight behind the reception desk, where she bonded fully with the receptionist.

'Does she want to help?’ said the receptionist, laughing quite a lot. ‘Shall I get her a name-badge?’

This is one of the lovely things about the hotel at Tebay. It is strictly called the Westmoreland Hotel, but it is part of Tebay, and that is the name any traveller to the north knows. For my readers abroad: Tebay is the only motorway service station in the country which is family-run, has a farm shop, and gives one delicious food cooked by smiling humans. (As opposed to disgusting faux-victuals, heated in a microwave.)  It is so special and rare that is has become famous with anyone who ever has to make the long drive from Scotland to England. Its very name can make people smile, involuntarily.

Anyway, not only is this a motorway hotel that does not want to make you claw out your eyeballs; not only do they charge the same as a Premier Inn or Travel Lodge but decorate with lovely muted colours instead of searing orange and purple; not only do they have a soul, unlike the heartless chains; but they are nice to your dog.

There is a really bizarre thing about dear old Blighty. We are supposed to be this great nation of dog-lovers, but you try actually taking your canine anywhere. The awful expression Pet-Friendly returns a paltry amount of results on The Google. Almost every door has a no dogs allowed except guide dogs sign. I love guide dogs and revere those who train them, but I sometimes feel a bit sad that the poor Pigeon is treated as a second-class citizen by comparison.

Not at the Tebay hotel. They are nice to the dog; they make jokes about the dog; they seem genuinely pleased to see the dog. My dog, sensing adoration, wanders about, wafting her tail in slow circles, sniffing the air and making friends, which is her great talent, after chasing sticks.

‘What a confident, happy dog,’ says the receptionist. I have to restrain myself from hugging her, it is such a perfect compliment.

Then we go to my room and watch the racing. I do my usual shouting, which makes The Pigeon do her usual barking, until I suddenly remember I am in a motorway hotel, and the walls are thin, and fellow guests might not appreciate roars of ‘come on, my son’, accompanied by frenzied woofs.

I back three losers and two winners, the last of which gets me out of a very great deal of trouble. I was suddenly convinced that the spirit of my late father had possessed me, even though I do not believe in spirits and I do not believe in possession. But he was always having to ‘get out on the last’ and here I was, getting out on the last. (Thank you to the very talented trainer Alan King, and his sparkling run of form.)

Now I am eating the chicken sandwiches I made for the journey and eating watercress soup from a flask. I can’t work out if it is nerdishly sad, or chicly retro, but I now set out on the road with several sandwiches, crusts cut off, wrapped in neat foil packages, and one thermos of soup and one of coffee. It’s a very new austerity picnic, anyway, and as the Prime Minister likes to say, we are all in it together. Very, very lucky that lovely Giles Cross won the big race with my tenner on him, or it would be no sandwiches at all. I should have to eat grass. As it is, I live to fight another day.

Off at dawn for the second leg of the journey. There are gales outside my window and The Pigeon is slumbering on her special blanket. Only another two hundred and fifty miles to go.

 

Pictures of the day are of the views from my motorway hotel. I am half a mile from the M6. Can you believe it?:

The light kept changing in the gloaming, moment by moment. This sky is extraordinary:

I put this one in black and white so it made me think of something from before the Great War:

That little red lorry is charging up the M6 to Carlisle and all points beyond:

The Pidge, on a mossy hummock, checking about:

Just finished reading The Racing Post:

Looking very regal indeed on her special Johnstons of Elgin travelling blanket:

And also, pensive:

Actually, that look is because I am holding out my hand with a biscuit in it, and she is hatching a cunning plan to get me to give it to her. The plan, you will be amazed to hear, worked. It involved sitting and looking so enchanting that I gave her all the biscuits. And now she is fast asleep.

An apology

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Well, all I can say is the most enormous sorry. I ruthlessly drive off to the south of England and stop all the blogs.

I do have excuses. But I hate excuses. They always sound like the dog ate my homework. (I cannot blame the Pigeon for this, nor any canine.) It has been a combination of technical glitches, lack of actual internet, social life (about which I forget, when I am immured in my hills; one cannot just say, Oh how lovely to meet you, now I am going to do my blog, or at least, I can’t), the making of several soups, serious discussion of dangling modifiers with the Man of Letters, packing, unpacking, the catching up with the nearest and dearest.

Still, it is a shocking state of affairs, and I should quite forgive you for muttering furiously under your breath like Mutley and asking for your money back.

I am writing this now at the Beloved Cousin’s kitchen table, in the first moment of silence. All the small people have been fed and bathed and put to bed. The dogs – two elegant black ladies of this house, and my own dear Pidge – are slumbering gently in front of the fire. The cousin has just come in and recklessly opened a bottle of the good claret. We shall eat some beetroot soup for health, and get an early night, and tomorrow I shall be more settled and return to proper posting.

I would love to promise you stellar blogging from here on, to make good this shameful lack, but I do not want to raise hopes only to dash them again. (I laugh ironically at the idea that my blogging is ever stellar, but I have, of course, a desire now to overcompensate.) I can, however, vow a return to regularity. And perhaps a little catch-up of my last four days of travels. There shall also be pictures. The camera has not been out once, although the weather has been uniformly murkish, so you have not missed much on that score.

I only hope you can find it in your hearts to forgive.

Pictures are not of the day, but a tiny selection of the things I left behind in my garden. At least there is some colour to divert you:

The beauty and gravitas of The Pigeon, which remains constant:

Places I shall never see

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

There is a time, in middle age, where you have to admit that there are some things in life you are simply not going to do. This might sound a little defeatist or morbid, but I actually find it rather liberating. I can concentrate on what I am going to do, rather than fret about possibilities missed.

Travel, to certain destinations, for me, is one of these. I know now that there are places in the world I shall never see with my own eyes. I really hate to fly. I hate everything about it: the expense, the queues, the security panics, the discomfort, the lurking fear that I shall in fact die in a ball of fire. So I am now embracing the fact that I am not going to go anywhere I cannot get to by train or boat. I feel rather joyful as I write that sentence. I realise that I have known this for a while, but refused to confirm it; there is a lurking guilt in me, because I was brought up in a generation that religiously believed in travel broadening the mind.

The gap year was fetishised in my youth. Everyone hurled their possessions in a backpack, and set off for South America and India and the Far East. How we all scoffed at those mad statistics everyone bandied about in the eighties, about only 7% of Americans having passports. I remember feeling properly shocked by the fact that George W Bush could become president when he had only ever visited Scotland and Mexico. How could a son of such preppy East Coast privilege, from a family of great wealth and sophistication (however much he tried to pretend he was just a down-home Texan) never have been to Paris or Rome or Bombay or St Petersburg?

So travel was never just a whimsical luxury to me, but enshrined as a moral imperative. This is, of course, absurd. There are plenty of perfectly good, clever, imaginative people who do not dash off about the world. There are travellers of the mind. I suddenly realise that I do not have to castigate myself because I shall never see the statues on Easter Island. I am going to think of the great luck I had in seeing the places I did. I shall live off my hump, like a camel. I shall remember Venice and Rome and the Italian Lakes and Capri and the great, crazy New Year's Eve I spent in Naples. I will recall taking the train from Bombay to Cochin, three magical days in a crowded carriage with an American artist, two Swedish hippies and a very polite Keralan called Albert. I have in my mind Manhattan in a snow storm, and Seattle in the blinding sun, and Paris in the rain, and the marvellous city of Malacca in the sultry, tropical heat.

All the same, I feel the need to bid a formal farewell to the places I shall not witness. It is an occasional series, if you like. Today, for no reason I can identify, it is Colombia.

I shall never see Bogota:

Or the wonderful Las Lajas Cathedral:

Or the majestic plaza at Villa de Leyva:

Or the backstreets of old Cartagena:

But thanks to the miracle of The Google, I can see the pictures. And I think that is sort of all right.

Fact check: I am certain that 7% figure can never have been true, although people did repeat it as if it were gospel. I do discover the current number of Americans owning passports is 22%, according to State Department figures, and I do think that is quite strangely low. But then if I lived in a country with such an amazing variety of landscape and flora and fauna, maybe I would come over all Uncle Matthew and refuse to go abroad too.

In which I get excessively cross about the ugliness

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Rushing south for various reasons, I decide that life is earnest and life is real and I just can't justify stopping off at some chic little inn in the Lake District but must bite the bullet and do what millions of ordinary decent Britons do, and break my journey at a motorway motel. The credit crunch is biting hard, and my days of being a hotel queen are over. (I sometimes have actual dreams about the days when I used to check into the Carlyle for a week, or the time I snuck into the Bel Air for three days and did not tell anyone where I was; I never felt so much like an International Woman of Mystery in my life.) But it is time to welcome myself to the real world, and it is good for me to stop behaving like a complete flake for once.

Thank heaven there is the wonderful Tebay, the only civilised service area on the M6, which has ducks and a farm shop and a nice hotel, only a little more expensive than a Travelodge, but has managed to decorate its rooms with actual style, as you can see below. (I am sorry the pictures are so small, I cannot seem to magnify them in any way. Stare closely at the screen for the full effect.)


The Westmoreland at Tebay has done a very clever thing. The sheets and towels are a little thin, as you would expect from a motorway stop, but someone has given more than ten minutes' thought to aesthetics. The rooms are painted in a nice Farrow and Ball taupish sagish colour, the curtains are a wonderful thick felt material, in dark claret, and the carpet is a very nice biscuit. When you get off the road after three hundred miles, your retinas are not assaulted by horror. Also, the bathrooms are very elegant indeed.

But, hideous shock, Tebay is FULL. I must plunge into the terrors of the Holiday Inn Express and the Travelodge. I call my mother. 'Can I really stay at the Days Inn in Charnock Richard?' I say. 'Yes,' she says, firmly. 'You astonish me,' I say. 'The dogs will like it,' she says, obscurely. Then she becomes rather excited. I must, apparently, take all my lovely travel rugs and my own pillows and scented candles and some room spray ('have you got lavender for the bed?' she says) and I can make the room heaven and feel smug that I have only paid £29. By the end of the conversation, we decide that it is a tremendous idea.

Then I look at the website:

Oh, I know it's not the worst bedroom in the world. But bear in mind if this is the picture they put up on the web, this is the best they have to offer. We all know that the actual room might not live up even to this. And there is something so demoralising about it. So I cast around. I find a Holiday Inn:

Again, it's not the ugliest thing in the world. But there is nothing in there that you would want to take home with you. You would not decorate your own bedroom like that. What is wrong with some nice claret curtains and a bit of biscuit?

Then there is the Premier Inn, which actually looks quite smart:

But I stopped at a Premier Inn on the Birmingham toll road once and it was all orange, so much it hurt my eyes, and the room smelt slighlty of mushrooms.

So then there was the Ibis at Preston:

I know. It looks like someone is having a little joke and doing a pastiche of the seventies.

I kept looking at this picture, and feeling sadder and sadder:

And then I thought: damn it, I can't do it. I don't care how many scented candles I bring. It's not just the aesthetic nastiness of these places. If you go to Tripadvisor and type in any chain motel, the theme that that comes up over and over again in the reviews is a sense of neglect. The shower curtain is torn, the grouting in the bathroom is black, the bed was uncomfortable, the lady at the bar would not serve drinks even though it was only one minute past midnight, the wake up call never arrived, the room had not been cleaned, there was mould around the bath, there was a worrying smell, the bedlinen was stained.

And maybe none of this would be so bad if it was only £19, like their websites like to shout. But it is only that if you book three months in advance and arrive on a Tuesday in February. On a Saturday in October it is £55. I must pay £55 to be made sad.

So I used my initiative and many internet hours and finally found a lovely new place in the delightful market town of Kirkby Lonsdale, exactly half way between me and London, ten minutes from the M6. The man could not have been nicer. Of course the dogs were welcome. Nothing was too much trouble. And the price? A knock down £70. For FIFTEEN POUNDS more than the cost of the demoralising rooms above, I get this:

See how much time and care has gone into that room. They have even put a charming leather suitcase under the brass bed, to give you the impression that you might be staying in someone's actual house. There is nothing chi chi or chainish or corporate about it. There is no hint of the Coloroll school of decorating that marrs so many British inns. It is clean and calm. But here is what I really don't understand. How is it that the nice man at Plato's in Kirkby Lonsdale can achieve a room like that, in the middle of a credit crunch (they have only been open for two months), for fifteen pounds more than the soulless nastiness of the Travelodges and the Premier Inns and the Holiday Inns, with all their economies of scale? And why does the great British public not rise up and say we are mad as hell and we are not going to take it any more?

In the meantime, call me old-fashioned, but I am very, very happy that I get to stay here:

Instead of here: