Dover-Sheffield Friday Afternoon

A long schlepp to Sheffield. The M25 was snarled up and impatient I went up the M11 knowing I'd get held up on the A14 link road to the A1. It was  awful. But I grew up south of Cambridge in Linton and seeing familiar country in the blowy brightness of a July day was great. Then edging the fens - see the green barn composition taken from stationary traffic on the A14 and Lincolnshire before the flat hills towards Grantham - the middle earth/England of Margaret Thatcher.

Somewhere I pulled off the A1 into a tiny road - luckily there was no traffic behind me - and in two hundred yards stepped out into waving fields of field beans and distant vistas of cornfields, hedges trees, a church and huge skies. It reminded me of the big sky country between Paris and the Loire.

My legs were aching and a bit of debris had blown up under the car outside Canterbury and broken the plastic sump guard - a bit of which was dragging on the road.

The silence and the fresh, playful wind were a tonic as I stretch my leg and scrambled under the car. I took these photos and worried about getting back into the A1 traffic from my tiny side road but all was well.

The trip took six and a half hours with more tailbacks just as the A1 claimed it was becoming a motorway.  The M18/M1 stretch was fine and I rolled into Sheffield and familiar streets - I lived in 'Steel Town' for ten years.

Cold beer was waiting for me as I pulled into the terraced lane-end where my daughter and her partner are living. I was  drive-befuddled but I had arrived.

I think the photos are taken from Bull Lane and the church is at North Whitham.