We went to Orford Ness today, our second visit. We visited this time last year, thought it was extraordinary, and suggested to friends that they might like it. Thursday 5 September ended up being pencilled into the diary, subject to weather and random events, as fitting in with everybody's holidays and other commitments. And I thought it wouldn't be so hot by September. There is no shade on the Ness, except in those disused military buildings you are allowed to enter.
You reach the Ness by National Trust ferry. It runs every twenty minutes at this time of year, with a break for lunch, and holds a maximum of a dozen people including the ferryman, which acts as a natural cap on the number of visitors. In October it drops back to Saturdays only, another reason to go in September given that I work every other Saturday. What happens in high season if more than thirty three would-be visitors have arrived in the hour I don't know. Does the ferryman make an extra trip, or are some unlucky tourists told they'll have to content themselves with the delights of Orford?
The experience of buying the ferry tickets (half price to NT members) was just plain odd. I thought it was peculiar when the woman behind the counter asked the two men ahead of us in the queue whether they were friends. As opposed to what? Complete strangers who had simply fallen to chatting in the (slow moving) queue? Civil partners? (I think she meant to ask whether they were travelling together and wished to be on the same ferry sailing). They thought it was odd too, as they replied in puzzled voices that they were brothers. You have to give the surname of someone in your party when you buy your ferry ticket, as your docket forms part of the National Trust system for ensuring that nobody is left behind on the Ness overnight, and the ticket lady then commented on their surname, and how there was somebody with that name in the village.
It got to our turn. The Systems Administrator and I both put our membership cards down on the counter and asked for four tickets, two members and two not. The ticket lady looked at our cards, and demanded to know how it was that Mr unusual-name and Mrs unusual-name had different renewal dates for their membership. We were nonplussed, while one of our friends missed it because by that stage he had fled from the room. What are you supposed to say? The tickets are forgeries, but we are very careless. We are brother and sister. It's terribly romantic, we only got married last week and haven't got round to synchronising our memberships yet. We have been married for nearly thirty years but can't be arsed to synchronise our memberships. You should be grateful, the National Trust gets more money that way.
The Ness was looking as marvellous as I remembered it. The day was hazy, the outline of the lighthouse slightly blurred seen from the river. As our boat load of visitors began to fan out from the landing stage, a hare broke cover and ran briskly up the road away from us, before ducking back into the long grass. Heading for the lighthouse, metalled road and waving grass with scrapes for water birds gave way to shingle scooped into long ridges topped with sea campion and lichen, and studded with lumps of concrete and shattered metal. Much of the unexploded ordnance on the Ness has been cleared since the military stopped using it in 1987, but not all. You are told to keep to the marked paths, and in truth I can't think many people feel the urge to stray. The threat of unexploded bombs is of course a great way of protecting the rare shingle flora from the damage that tramping feet would do.
We took the red path, which led us past the lighthouse, now decommissioned and fated to fall into the North Sea in a few decades, and along the beach, then back via some of the bomb testing buildings. Photography of derelict industrial buildings has become fashionable in the past few years, so much so that the term ruin porn has been coined for it (I hesitated a moment before googling to check that term, in case something very unsavoury came up, but it was all bona fide to do with photographing decayed buildings, at least on the first page). It is faintly irritating when something you have always liked becomes trendy, but I've long had a soft spot for atmospheric industrial decay, and haunting reminders of the cold war. The ruins on Orford Ness are extremely atmospheric.
Unfortunately signs began to appear on the walk back to the landing stage that all was not well with the SA, who had gone very quiet, and begun to pour quite alarmingly with sweat. The retreat out of the sun into the shade of a pub did not do the trick, nor did the pint of chilled lager (not the SA's usual tipple), and after two mouthfuls of lunch the SA had to go and sit in the car with the air conditioning full on, to cool down. I knew the SA was not good in hot weather, but have never seen things that bad.
The pub was rather chaotic. A mystery electrical fault made the lights go out every few minutes, so half the staff were wandering about playing hunt the fault, and the stress had got to them. The sweet girl behind the bar when we arrived had forgotten one of the specials, her young colleague charged me for a pint when serving me a half, and was then incapable of either calculating the right change, or correcting the till error, the hot food arrived before the cold and all of it arrived before the cutlery. They were very nice about putting the SA's uneaten lunch in a little box (the ploughman's lunches were gratuitously enormous. I ate as much of my cheese as I could, and wrapped the rest in my paper napkin as it seemed a waste to leave it. I have just weighed it and it tips the scales at four and three quarter ounces).
The cool of the air con revived the SA to the point of being able to drive, which was just as well since none of the rest of us know how to drive the jaguar or are insured to do so. Once safely home the SA sat in the shade and drank a great deal of water, and began to look much better. The car thermometer peaked at thirty two degrees C on the way back. So it was a mixed day out, good in parts, shame about the weather. You don't reckon on being hit by incipient heatstroke on the Suffolk coast in September.
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