Middle England, Part Two

most of my travels around Britain have been to fairly industrial areas- Sollihull, Slough and Newport come to mind. my father complains that i have developped a skewed view of england as consisting of foreigners (in London) and masses of working class estates (outside). so i was quite intrigued to be invited to have a glimpse at a posher side of the country, being invited randomly to a wedding in Beccles, East Anglia. As i went as the date of my great friend H, and we are both determinded travellers, we decided to make a weekend spectacle of the whole thing, and use it as an excuse to travel around East Anglia. so we jumped on a train in London Liverpool street and headed off into the great English unknown. it didnt take long out of London for the scenery to start to change. by the time we got to Chelmsford, i already felt i was in a foriegn country. We were exceptionally lucky, the weather was gorgeous. it was a bit on the cool side, but unusually for England, there was bright sunshine. the wedding itself was a very English affair. H and i didnt know what that entailed, but my flatmate was able to walk us through the routine beforehand, and these things obviously follow a script, because everything he said, no matter how improbable it seemed at the time, proved to be spot on. Once I was actually there, even i was able to recognise a few things that are clearly part of early 21st century wedding traditions. For example, someone from my office got married a few months ago and asked some of her friends to do readings at the wedding. One of the readings was a Lovely Love Story by Edward Monkton, which her friend adapted for her, and which got read out to us in the office after the wedding.....and sure enough, when H and i got to the wedding in East Anglia, the ceremony featured selected readings by friends, including the very same Lovely Love Story, adapted slightly differently to fit this couple. clearly it is the hot poem for wedding planners to recommend! In the hotel in Beccles, our room was filled with wedding brochures, as that is apparently an industry there, and one of them featured a cake made of discs of posh cheese on the cover. the article inside informed me that old fashioned wedding cake is now passe, and that you should serve a dessert first, then cut a cheese wedding cake which later gets turned into a cheese spread for the guests.....i had never heard of this, but obviously i dont go to enough weddings, cause the exact same looking wedding-cake-of-cheese-discs appeared at this wedding, indeed after the dessert. i was quite happy with this arrangment i must say, as the dessert had been average, but the cheese selection proved to be most delicious.

in addition to the wedding, H and I also made a tour of the region, as we had plenty of spare time the day before and after the wedding. Before the festivities started, we had a lunch in Beccles in an all pink tea room. we hadnt exactly intended to end up there, but the 2 pubs we found were full and the one restaurant we passed was booked for another wedding. we were the youngest in the tea room by probably half a century and i felt vaguely like i had suddenly been given a provincial English grandmother and plunked into her dining room. the food was like something from a French person's imagination of English food...the only vegetarian option was baked beans on a jacket potato, whilst H's involved mushy peas and chips. Sverall of the guests were elderly women sitting on their own, mainly consuming tea and biscuits. they all ate very slowly whilst seemingly staring out the windows. H and I were often the only ones speaking which made me feel vaguely self conscious. in moments it reminded me of visiting my own grandmother, if you ignored the very English food, much of the rest of the scene was elderly home universal. Beccles itself was a lovely little town with views of green fields and all the postcard style images, but the average age must surely have been at least 55. the few young people we saw seemed to be wedding tourists, walking around as i was with a camera. we spent the night in Oulton Broad, which proved to be overlooking an inlet waterway which we explored in the morning, after a breakfast which consisted of even more baked beans than the previous days lunch. that afternoon, we made our way to Lowestoft, where signs informed us we were in Britain's most westerly town. Lowestoft was more of a town than Beccles, and in some ways it is sort of a mini- Brighton, minus the notoriously raunchy gay party scene. like Beccles, the average age was high, and we ended up chatting on a bench with a lonely widower, his wife had died in December of last year and he was still trying to sell the house. He had noticed H and I, clearly not from the area with our wierd accents and tendency to walk around speaking Serbian, and had approached us, looking for company. from the lookout pier, the widower had a beautiful view of the sea, looking out towards Scandanavia. We joined him on a bench and followed his gaze. The wind blew gently over our faces. it was a beautifully peaceful place.

But after 2 days i was desperate to get back to East London!