Training Diary
I was lucky enough to have my sprightly Rhandolph with me on yesterday's walk. It's often only when we get outdoors together than I really just how fit he really is. There's me, having religiously walked my way through an increasingly tough training schedule, slogging up hills and stopping for breath, and he - with no exercise taken for the sake of exercise in his life at all - bounces up the same hills practically running. He's like a great hairy dog which was to be taken out regularly for a good run.
This week's walk was from Hastings to Rye. We got a direct train there in just over an hour, which felt like nothing compared to last week's 3 hours each way. Hastings is a strange combination of Whitby, Eastbourne and somewhere a big scarey filled with chavs - a sense of faded grandeur, decaying decadence and some very costly looking tudor houses, as background to fish and chips, amusement arcades and rather scarey looking blokes. To reach the Hastings Country Park we climbed up some stairs - occasionally serviced by a funicular railway, which like everything else in Hastings, isn't working at the moment - to the clifftop.
Hastings Country Park is beautiful, filled with deep glens cut like clefts into the cliff. It started snowing quite heavily while we were walking through these, contributing to a fairytale like atmosphere. We stopped on the Fire Hills for a muffin and a sit down. We had to get a pretty sharpish move on to get to the pub in time. We had a choice of stopping at an unknown, rather rough looking pub called the Cove, in Fairlight, or going on to the Smugglers at Pett Levels where we'd had a very nice lunch a couple of years before. We decided to press on through the sleet in the hopes of getting there before they stopped serving lunch. I got us a bit lost but we eventually made it - to discover that either our memories of the Smugglers were wrong, or it has very much gone downhill!
The stuffy, overcrowded pub was staffed by haggard old bleached blonde, cat's-arse-mouthed barmaids, accompanied by a tubby 'hearty' landlord. They had a laminated menu which despite having a large selection, plus a big specials board, only had 2 vege options, one of which was off, and both were pasta bakes. I had a nut roast which bizarrely, wasn't even on the menu (probably left over from sunday the day before), accompanied by overcooked wrinkled carrots and green beans, and the most astonishingly overcooked two dozen brussel sprouts I'd ever seen. They were like mush contained in a sponge bag. The menu had the astounding nerve to suggest 'gratuities were at the customer's discretion' but that 'sachets of condiments were 15p each'!
Rhandolph fared a lot better with his ribs and chips - I think that if you stuck with some variation on meat and potatoes you'd probably be alright here, but anything else and you were asking too much. Even my lime and soda had a weedy amount of lime in it!
Anyway, the next section of the walk was along the royal military canal, with a slight deviation through a field to pick up the 1066 Country Walk. It was at this point we saw a miscarried lamb, which was a bit disturbing. I never know what to do under such circumstances - are you supposed to tell the farmer? But how would you know which farm was responsible for that field, and surely a farmer would come round and check regularly anyway?
We reached Winchelsea and were pretty tired by this point, but made it through the next section of road and undercliff path without collapsticating. We saw an amusing conjunction of cat, sheep and lamb that we failed to capture on camera, and a barn owl. Then we somehow found a last burst of speed, to get to the station on time, where we saw the train sitting at the station. Amazingly, we just got on it after a 100-yard dash. Or more of a shambling limp run in my case. So, 13 miles, 7.5hrs, 3 deep glens, a lot of mud and a 1 and a half hr train journey later, I demanded a taxi home instead of walking the half a mile down and then uphill to home. Rhandolph was disgusted with me!