Down in deepest Dorset...

There come times during the year where you just feel so knackered that you feel like everything is getting on top of you, all the hills you have to climb seem insurmountable and the crappy bits seems to be happening more often than the good bits. Colds, headaches, general feelings of malaise, all contribute and wear you down. This happened to us this year and we decided that we needed a week away from home (two weeks would have been better but neither of us has the holidays left), somewhere quiet, out of the way and in the country. Somewhere we could do very little except sleep, eat and chillax. So after some searching, and shouts of ‘how much!’, we settled on a week in a thatched cottage in Burton Bradstock.

It was just what the doctor ordered. Plenty of walks, good food, lots of sleep in the darkest place I have been in a long time, time on the beach and hardly any of it using the car. We used the local buses to get along the coast before walking back along the cliffs, or just wandered out. We went to West Bay for ginger and honey ice cream (and later some fantastic fish and chips), Bridport for the market and smoked mackerel, Lyme Regis for amazing bread, Dorchester for a disappointing detour, the Cerne Abbas giant to marvel at his manhood, Chesil Beach to get windswept, and Beaminster to say ‘good morning’ to just about everyone there.

It was a tonic. No wonder people who live down there live longer than anywhere else in the country. Not only is it a beautiful landscape, rolling hills and warm golden buildings, the people are actual quite nice. At least they will talk to you, not like Farnworth where the first thing most people say is unprintable.

On both outward and return journeys, we stopped at Charlton Orchards in Somerset to stock up on strange varieties of apples: Red Pippen, Orleans Reinette, Kidd’s Orange. We decided not to go for the medlars after I asked what they were like and the bloke compared them to ‘uncooked cake mixture’.

It was lovely to spend time in a village in the country, but made us realise how much you need a car and how important a village shop is. In some ways we have it easy in the town but, as MC Escher said, ‘Simplicity and order are, if not the principal, then certainly the most important guidelines for human beings in general’. It’s that simplicity and order that appeals.

Holiday in the sun...

After last October and our rain-drenched two weeks, we were determined to get some sun on our holiday this time - and we did! It has been such a comedown, though, being back in the rain-drenched shires that I haven't felt like posting anything. Even now I am struggling to think of how to report the whole two weeks in one post.

The easiest way is through photos, and these are the highlights:

Berlin: The Fernsehturm and World Clock, Alexanderplatz

Sleepy East Germany: Angermünde

Cooling off in Szczecin

Storks in various places, mostly on the top of precarious-looking nests

Breakfast in Osuch by the mill pond

Wheat and barley fields with no sign of pesticides, just a rainbow of wild flowers

A pedalo on the lake; silence except for the creaking of my knees

A barbecue on the beach, in 35 degree heat

Back to Blighty...

So we arrived back in Hull on a bright Tuesday morning and took advantage of the day by driving up to Bridlington. By 8.30am we were stuffing our faces with a full English (Agnieszka) and a full veggie (me), washed down with milky coffee, in a sea-front greasy spoon. From there we waddled off to the beach for a walk in the early morning sun before heading up to Flamborough for a stroll along the cliffs.

By the time we got back to Farnworth, around five o'clock that evening, we'd covered almost 2100 miles in the previous two weeks. It felt like longer and it felt like we'd never stopped moving. We saw a lot of places we hadn't seen before, some we probably wouldn't want to see again, we'd met plenty of people and we'd been exposed to various set-ups with regard to holiday homes, farming enterprises and agro-turystyka holdings. It has given us a lot of food for thought and, while we think we narrowed the search for a house down, the problem still exists: what do we do for money? More precisely, what do we do for regular income? We would need jobs, at least part-time and while I would go back to teaching, what would Agnieszka do? That's why a bigger city is a better bet, but there the property is more expensive, so living away from town is cheaper but raises the problem of getting in and out for work / cinema / shopping. So we have plenty of things to consider before we can even think about getting animals. Who would look after them? Would they be trustworthy? Would they do it properly? Questions, questions.

We go back to Poland at Christmas for a week to visit Agnieszka's mum and see some friends. Talking it over with them might reveal some answers but, for now, we have to sit tight until house prices here rise a little. Only then will we have a bit of capital to invest in another house but this time I want to do it right, with a big garden, somewhere we can grow old and enjoy living.

When I am in work and feeling a bit off, I think of this picture and remember being deep in the forest, looking for mushrooms with the woman who has made my life so wonderful. Thank you, Agnieszka, for the holiday and, indeed, for everything!

So pack up your sea stores, consider no longer...

After deliberating for a year, we finally sorted ourselves out and made plans for a trip to Poland. We left Farnworth on a drizzly Monday afternoon and scooted over to Hull, where the sun shone and the wind blew, to get the ferry to Rotterdam. From there it was just a little over 800 miles to Smołdzino and our agro-turystyka lodgings.

We were disappointed, however, to find that Pan Tadeusz (http://www.agroturystyka.pl/index.php?inc=kwatera&id=714) didn't have any animals. He keeps a few ducks in the summer, he said, but there was no sign of them in the yard and we didn't check his freezer. The farm across the road (where a 4x4 from Chapelhouse Suzuki in St Helens sat in the yard) had cows but, out for a stroll one evening in the chilly dusk, we heard one in distress. A young bullock, it was yarking fit to bust, and seemed to have a bloated stomach. The woman from the farm came out to see to it but apart from stroking its flank, didn't seem to do much else. Then, as we walked by, there was a thump and down it went. We think it must have died and was chopped up there and then as there was a lot of activity in the yard that night. In the end we didn't buy any twaróg from them, just in case whatever the cow had was transmittable...

We stayed in an apartemencik here, with views across to Smołdzino Las (the forest) and not too far from a little shop. The view from the window is obscured slightly by the fly netting, but gives an idea of how far from Farnworth this place was, and I don't just mean the mileage.
Obviously, with the forest so close, we had to go for a mushroom hunt. All along the A6 from the German border we'd seen gangs of spindly old men in threadbare coats and cloth caps, smoking like Russian factories, standing over buckets of freshly-picked mushrooms, waiting for customers. We had to have a go and, during a lull in the torrential rain, we wandered off for a couple of hours to see what there was. It felt so nice to be wandering in a 'proper' forest, as opposed to the bits of woods we have in England. I know that might sound a bit snobby, but you haven't been in a forest until you've walked for an hour, completely surrounded by trees, silent except for the wind sighing in the treetops, the occasional birdsong and the hacking cough of a bloke pushing a bike through the undergrowth, also looking for grzyby.
So this was our haul. We had them checked by Pan Tadeusz, who threw out a couple and advised us to peel one or two more. Then they were washed and chopped, with half going on some newspaper by the radiatoor to dry and the rest going in the frying pan with an onion and some garlic. Mniam mniam, picked and fried in under two hours. Can you get fresher than that?

Close to Smołdzino is the seaside town of Łeba, a place I have wanted to visit for some time as I heard it is very pretty, with a winter population of around 4000 people and a summer one of ten times that. It was windy and damp the day we visited, all the shops closed or closing after the hordes of summer. It is a pretty town, one main drag lined with shops selling shells, amber, smoked fish, shells, postcards, amber and shells. At the harbour, a flotilla of boats-cum-restaurants / bars were moored, creaking gently in the gale and empty of punters. The whole town was empty in fact. I don't think we saw more than half a dozen people while we were there.
On one of the postcards, this part of the beach is crammed full of people in bikinis, but in October we had the place pretty much to ourselves apart from a couple of brave souls wind-surfing. Back in town, we asked in the post office how to get to the national park and the woman was very helpful, breaking off from reading her magazine for just long enough to direct us to the nearest car park. The lives of celebrities obviously more interesting than two damp out of season tourists.

The reason for coming here was to see the shifting sand dunes that 'walk' between two and ten metres a year. It's an eerie place. For three or four miles you walk through leafy forest, passing halfway the former V2 rocket launching site, now a museum, before coming out into a wider picnic area. From there the dunes rise up above, white against a (for once) bright blue sky. The dunes are slowly encoaching on the forest and quite a few trees were dead or dying after being enveloped in sand. We plodded to the summit of the largest dune, no mean feat in the soft sand, and it was incredible. On one side: trees and the start of a lake; on the other, dunes as far as you could see and then, twinkling in the distance, the Baltic.

A truly amazing place. I think we would have explored more if the wind hadn't been so strong. Every time you tuned into it you got your face sand blasted, like an eco-scrub. The pair of us looked like we'd just come out of a sauna and we were only up there half an hour. After hiking the few miles back to the car park we headed back to Smołdzino and the warmth of our little apartment, where the smells of wet walking boots and drying mushrooms accompanied our evening.

From Farnworth to France in one day...

A week in France was just the ticket. A break from the routine of work and daily life and far away from the hell hole that is Farnworth. We drove down to Portsmouth, taking the ferry to Le Havre overnight. It was Le Mans weekend so we were accompanied on the boat by every red-blooded, car-mad, testosterone-filled bloke from the south coast, eager to show off their driving skills to the French public, none of whom give a toss about driving. Or skills.

For the first night we stayed within sight of Mont St Michel but were so knackered after the ferry that we crashed out at 8pm and didn’t surface for twelve hours. A week in a gite followed; a week of morning coffee, fried fish, salad, bread, chilled cider, cold wine and the greatest discovery of recent times – mayonnaise and mustard. Mixed. In one jar.

Having breakfast outside the gite, determined to enjoy it, even when it wasn't that warm and sunny.

The beach at Pleneven where we went a couple of times...

And the moules frites we had which were covered in garlic and made Agnieszka a bit ill.

The green man at the crossing in Erquy, hidden by signs to other things...

Us having a walk along the front at Erquy, which was tranquil and calm, if a bit cloudy.

A street in Dinard where we went for the day out and where we climbed to the top of the horological tower which made me very frightened, especially when the bell rang the quarter hour...

Leeks and other veg ready to go out into plots and gardens, spotted at a market in Lamballe.

Me trying to have a quiet slash behind the cathedral in Bayeux. It reminded me of the book, Clochemerle, where the town council builds a pissoir next to the convent and how it divides the town. Very funny in a French farce way.

And finally, Leo Sayer's older, uglier, madder brother, spotted in St Malo trying to chat up a couple of birds and, despite the leather waistcoat, hat and face like a folded napkin, doing quite well.