The Oracle was an extraordinary experience, visitors were asked to bring along items from thier homes or work, or (we suspect that some of the objects presented to the Oracle came from) the hedgerow or bin. However: whatever the providence of the item, the Oracle has the uncanny ability to tell the visitor exactly where it has come from, what it is for and... erm... other interesting stuff about it. The day involved the peculiar discovery of a squirrel frozen to a fence post in the 'great snowy incident' of early 2009 (he is on long loan, so we are told by the Oracle) and a trip to very nice pub. The Muntymuntys were the chief point scorers on this leg of the trip. Watch this, or a similar space for more news of the Oracle's location in the near future.........But now, we are proud to present the Ribston Pippins' blog. They scored the winning amount of points in this first airing of the GBRT for which we salute them. We hope to devise a 2nd leg of the GBRT for those that have expressed an interest so, again, watch this space...

The Ribston Pippins Blog

 The Skinners Tea Party

Saturday 28 February

 

We had a splendid time over at the Skinners today. They’re East Enders like us so it was a hop and a skip on the bus, bakewells in hand, to Eva’s party. And what a party it was! A proper spread they put on, my goodness. Finger sandwiches, endless sponge cake and sherry fit for a prince. They’ve got a super new car too, like something out of the pictures it is, all gleaming and glam. We had a good singalong and lots of fun with the kids too- some very unusual Scrabble words, I must say. Don’t children grow up fast these days? Plus we met some lovely new people, you can see the pictures of them, muntymunty and someone from the fishermen. There were some other very dapper gents there too but we didn’t manage to catch their name, they swept off with a glamorous swoosh! Oh and we met some of the Basil Balfe crew as well, lovely people they are. And we had to nip off to see Bernie in the hospital at the end, bless im… time for some Lucozade and grapes, poor chap… though we’re not supposed to mention grapes, due to his condition… you know how it is…

 

 

Day 1, London to Derbyshire

Friday 13^th  March (oo er)

 

The first day of the adventure starts well as the East End half of the team actually make it to starting point at Walthamstow on time at 2.30pm. This is unheard of. The cabbie actually remembers us  - he picked us up for our last harebrained scheme involving weird props and racing all over town a year ago. Ahem…

 

We decided last week that we were going to dispense with the Ford Fiesta and B&B route, and take our home with us. Plus you can hire a monster van for 300 quid for a long weekend – between 4, that’s what we call credit crunch holiday style.

 

And so, we meet it. Parked on a side street in E17.

 

Wow, she’s a beauty.

 

We are enchanted with our home and carriage for the weekend. She is a mighty 7 berth beast that is basically a luxury home on wheels. She’s so well appointed and gleaming white we feel a need to roll up our jacket sleeves, wear deck shoes and call each other Crockett and Tubbs.

 

After a slightly awkward democratic process involving everyone having a vote – bring on tyranny, I say -she was christened Priscilla Matilda The Kraken.

 

En route…

 

We played a brief game of “Which Can?” This is a sad reflection of the state of litter in our glorious nation. Basically you bet on which discarded can of fizzy pop you are going to see next on the side of the motorway. Kit won with a canny (see what we did there? Sailing close to genius, I tell you) choice of Coca Cola.

 

We invented a new game too, which involves ranking our favourite on-the-road place names – bonus points for making them a new part of language

 

Eg

How’s your South Mimms doing?

I’m all on my Toddington

 

We also scored high with a bump bump! as we spotted a Rolls Royce, which was an unexpected thrill.

 

We made cracking time and soon arrived in Chesterfield (Steph’s birthplace), on the hunt for a local supplier of cider.

It took some time and asking the local yout’ (very nice boys) to find it, but we had a marvellous experience. Morrisons rocks. Really it does. We bought a ton of filthy food and guilt cheese of all kinds. This was, as you will see, quite a theme for the weekend. An opportunity to indulge in all our food shames, basically, from Dairylea slices to tinned ravioli. (Incidentally if you mix those two under a grill – it’s gourmet heaven, I tell you…)

 

We invented a new name for this kind of depraved indulgence – Filthshimi. See Jim’s video demo with a Scotch egg and Dairylea for details.

 

We drove down winding lanes and over hills, seeing glimpses of menacing cliffs, and getting excited about what we’d be waking up to the next day.

 

We arrived at the site and then ran into  - well, lots of mud. We mean, lots, and lots, and lots of mud. PMTK was not built for this kind of ground. The minute we drove off the lane and onto the parking, Priscilla Matilda The Kraken got stuck.

Really stuck.

 

Proper, wheel-spinning, messy, sludgy, utterly stuck.

 

We pushed and puffed and got sprayed with mud, but she wasn’t moving. We were parked for the night. And at a distinctly drunk angle.

 

Mick the campsite owner was an hour away.

 

OK. Fine. We can live with that. But could we live with caveman facilities? Or rather, would the electrical hook up be long enough?

 

It was.

 

Just.

 

Exactly.

 

One more inch of driving through the mud and we’d have been cold, waterless, hot foodless and lots of other lesses.

 

Hurrah!

 

Only the water didn’t really work.

 

It turned out that the lady at the hire place hadn’t given us all the right instructions, so every time we tried to make the water work, we were actually releasing water under the van, and thus sinking ourselves further into a DIY swamp. We didn’t discover this until the next day…

 

And the DVD was also not working.

 

We had a crazy luxury 19 inch telly, but it wouldn’t eat a DVD.

 

We coaxed and swore and fiddled and tried different batteries and pleaded and poked but it refused. We’d never watch Withnail at this rate.

 

Much fiddling, battery replacement and swearing later, we made it work. Phew! Otherwise we’d have had to talk to each other or something.

 

We converted one table and chairs into a sofa – PMTK was a wonder of storage indeed, quite an extraordinary beastie. There are possibly some lost Aztec civilizations somewhere in the rear cupboard.

 

 

Steph got stuck into her beloved Wild Swim book, still hopeful of a bracing dip in Hardraw Force, and we couldn’t be happier.

 

It turns out that Jon is in fact the bastard love child of Mick Hucknall and Chas and Dave. See photographic evidence… (we would show you the musical evidence but it’s too terrifying…)

 

Dinner of prawn and salmon bake and the best sticky toffee pudding ever. We mean, ever. With crème fraiche. This was food worth dying for. Well, worth doing a lot of bad things for anyway. Available at M&S for a very reasonable three quid or so which is pretty good value for orgasmic, knee tremblingly good dessert action.

We settled down to Withnail with some vino and cider, full and happy.

 

We just needed to find a man with a tractor in the morning.

 

“Are you the farmer?”

 

 

Saturday 14 March

 

We wake and have a mild panic at the distinctly drunken listing of The Kraken, before remembering the parking disaster. Mick’s back and assures us that two mins with a Land Rover and a rope will see us right. “When you get stuck you’re like a sausage sliding around in a frying pan” he memorably intones in his delicious Derbyshire roll.

 

We like the ad for Eyam church in the shower block. Good media placement. Cleanliness is next to godliness and all that.

 

We decide against a proper breakfast and just pressing on, so make do with more food filth – the ultimate, cheese and prawn spread rolls.

 

It’s a beautiful sunny day and we can see the peak district for the first timeö. It’s stunning. We trundle off towards Eyam.

 

Eyam was more exciting and inspiring than we ever expected. We pootled through the town and towards the church where we read about the plague events. Eyam have really got it right by focusing on the human stories behind the disaster, rather than facts and figures.

 

It’s strange really that a living village should be pretty much solely defined by death – and death of 350 years ago. But they do it well.

 

We were entranced and frankly quite emotional over all of it. Tales such as the tales of Emmott and Roland, young lovers separated by the plague. Emmott died and Roland lived, only never to marry, and died heartbroken. The Rector Mompesson and his wife Catherine who died after refusing to leave, stayed to help, died after remarking on the sweetness in the air…

 

The Cucklet Delph, what a name! And leaving money sealed in vinegar, the horrible sadness of ring a roses…  All the wonderful contrasts, drama, beauty, tragedy, whether it’s about a royalist and a non royalist rector or the current church holding a ceremony in the ouotdoors in a pagan way once a year to remember the dead, or the general bravery of the village in sealing themselves off. To us it had all the ingredients of a wonderful story and Steph and I resolved to come back and tell it. Every thread of it had so much narrative delight, and it would be great to tell the tale of the events from unexpected perspectives (history always written by men and winners and all that).

 

Even the school has ring a roses on the gate which we thought was quite macabre.

 

It was all a huge input for our puny brains and so we mooched on to a pub for a restorative pint.

 

We had another mission too.

 

Steph’s Dad used to live in Eyam, in fact he was engaged to the landlord’s daughter, Ann, back then (this was before he met Steph’s Mum) and one of his paintings hung in the pub. Several calls to parents proved fruitless (parents just don’t get mobile phones, do they?) so we took a chance on the first one we found and had a look. No sign of the painting.

 

Finally, mid-pint, we reached the rentals and it turned out we were in the right pub! New landlord though. But, weirdly, there was a plaque outside about the wedding of the rector and the landlord’s daughter – also called Ann. Spooky.

 

Lunch in the Kraken – more food filth. Then off up north to Yorkshire!

 

 

 

We had some lovely chats on the way. There’s something magic about being in transit that encourages good talks. You’re in an inbetween space. This is why I love train travel.

 

We saw brilliant sunshine across winter spring fields and trees. I love how daffs and crocuses - croci?  - spear through the earth, popping up everywhere like spring knives, slicing away at winter darkness.

 

We make it in record time, 2.5 hrs to Yorkshire and the Black Swan at Masham.

 

We’re laughing about the fact we’ve come with 4 laptops, an iPhone, an iTouch and 2 Blackberries. We are trying to get away from it all. Really!

 

(Jim claims immunity as he brought the laptop for music, and me for the blog)

 

However we are very excited by the fact we can plug the video camera drive into the telly! Alas it doesn’t quite work as our remote is buggered. technologyFAIL. Oh well. We are not destined for the big screen. Probably just as well.

 

We have a very windy night indeed – a storm builds over dinner to an absolute tornado.

The two of us in the crows nest are swung back and forth all night and wonder if we’re going to wake up upside down and half way down the site. Thankfully The Kraken stays upright but the next day we see lots of hefty trees ripped in half by the gales…

 

Sunday 15 March

 

You can tell the story of today by the pictures and videos. We spent the day trekking over hill and down dale, sacrificing kitties, discovering critters and drinking dodgy beer. We got fresh clean air into our filthy London lungs and had a brilliant time. Spring sprung all around us and we felt truly alive…

 

The next day we had to travel back to the city… but that’s another story…