My friends and family are in mourning: the Conservatives have sailed home with a workable majority and the Scottish National Party has all but obliterated Labour in Scotland.
And I have come home to the Tory heartland, to the town of my birth, a distinction that I share with Margaret Thatcher. It pleases me to be able to report that the statue to the Wicked Witch has not been erected in Grantham, as the good townsfolk opposed it. So hearteningly, even Tory voters have lines over which they will not cross. There is however, a stunning sculpture in the park to its other famous child, Isaac Newton. The stump of a felled sweet chestnut tree was sculpted into a hand and an apple carved in elm was placed within its fingers. (Photo courtesy of Jamie Hedworth on Flickrhivemind)
To mitigate our gloom we went on a little jaunt around the countryside. Out across the Lincolnshire Fens where, during the Second World War, the fighters and bombers were based. Airfields are still scattered amongst the fields with a liberal hand. In my youth I remember my first attempt at driving, up on an old airfield outside the town. The lad had an old van, and we started at one end of the runway and I must have got into second by the time we reached the other end. What he failed to explain before I tried to negotiate the turn was that I needed to double declutch (for those unversed in the traditions of archaic driving terms, here is a link that explains the mechanics of it nicely.) We turn towards the hangar and are still turning back onto the grass beside the runway as I two-step on the pedals in a slow dance of saturated incomprehension.
‘Right,’ he says, maintaining confidence in my abilities. A stance that he probably hopes will endear him to me. ‘We’ll have to reverse out of it.’
‘Well are you sure, why don’t you do it, I –’
‘No you’ll be fine, you can do it.’
Gear-stick into reverse, rev the engine, ‘No, turn the wheel the other way,’ off we go. We are trundling, ‘Brake now’, I jam on the anchors, we are still trundling, ‘Put your foot on the brake’, we are still trundling, ‘Brake!’ If we were going faster, at this point there would have been a spectacular handbrake turn. As it was the impact with the hangar doors was a grinding bump.
He looks at me accusingly, all confidence in my abilities obliterated. ‘Why didn’t you brake?’
‘I did.’
‘No you didn’t.’
‘Yes I did.’
There is a moment of tense silence before he opens the door and looks under the car then under the bonnet. ‘Hmmm, the brakes have gone. Shift over, I’ll drive.’
We trundle off again, down the runway and out onto the road. We pootle along. ‘You see we’ve got this problem,’ he says airily. ‘We have to go down the hill into Grantham and there’s a T junction at the bottom, so just open the door and if I say jump, then jump.’
Doors open we weave like a shuttle in a loom from one side of the road to the other and up the grassy verges. The T junction looms. We take a deep breath. It is Sunday afternoon in a small town. What happens on Sunday afternoons all across the Christian world. Absolutely nothing…
Salatheel 