Part of the fun of a holiday is planning it. Or at least, part of the fun of our sort of holiday. One of the Systems Administrator's friends disappeared to Thailand (or perhaps it was Vietnam) at practically no notice having got a deal so cheap he said it would be rude to refuse it. He had always been big on spontaneity and economy, so that made him very happy. Our holidays tend to be lined up well in advance, what with the need to fond somebody reliable who can look after the cats and the hens and won't kill more than one or two of my pots of plants through over or under watering, who doesn't worry about being left with the bees, or have an insane suburban urge to prune my shrubs into neat buns while I'm away.
By this stage of the year I'm starting to narrow down on one or two areas and make lists of possible things to do and places to visit, to check whether there's enough besides that one desirable garden or steam railway to keep us happy for a week. Anything we might like goes on, from museums and churches to landmark stretches of coastline or notable sections of canal, and the list is roughly organised according to geographical proximity and opening time. We both flag the things we really, really want to see. Once we're there we plan around the weather, and we always end up discovering extra places we hadn't heard of until we got there.
We have not yet ended up staying in a place where after the fourth day we were scraping the barrel for things to do, or managed to miss visiting something we badly wanted to see after suddenly realising on Thursday that it was only open on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. We have become pretty good at spotting those rural main roads that have four digits after the A, with a market town every fifteen miles and no bypasses, so that gardens and museums that look quite close on a large scale map turn out to be a tedious hour or more's drive apart.
In fact that would be my key piece of advice to everybody responsible for a VisitCounty website, not that they will be reading my blog. Put a map in. Put lots of maps, especially when your county is the size of Yorkshire. Do not assume that your potential visitors from the other end of the country, let alone from abroad, will have the faintest idea whether Market Dumpling is ten or fifty miles from Mill Town.
It was partly the thought of mills that led us to start thinking about Lancashire and west Yorkshire. There's a great scoop of countryside inland and north of Blackpool, that neither of us know at all. There's the Keighley light railway, no major gardens but some interesting smaller ones, beautiful rural scenery, and quite a lot of industrial heritage and Victorian civic architecture. Queen Street Mill and Helmshore Mills Textile Museum still have their machines in working order. Then I heard a couple of days ago on the radio that Lancashire council was considering closing them, to save money. An article on the Museums Association website confirmed the story, and today Jonathan Jones is warning in the Guardian of an emerging north south divide in heritage.
I was so cross that I signed the online petition to save them, though I am afraid it is gathering signatures only very slowly. I know that money is desperately tight for councils, but it seems absolutely bonkers that the mills should be closed. People love heritage. The National Trust has over four million members. London has found seventy million quid down the back of the sofa to build Joanna Lumley's silly bridge, and meanwhile Lancashire county council wants to shut five museums that are immensely relevant to the people in Lancashire whose grandparents worked in the cotton industry, never mind southern would-be tourists like me, to save a little over a million in the financial year 2017-18.
The other region I was plotting on my spreadsheet for this year's holiday was West Sussex. Perhaps we had better go there instead. Or Bath. Jonathan Jones made Bath sound very inviting. North-south divide indeed.
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