Tag: beer

Monday 25 March – Beer, Devon.

It’s been almost a year since I’ve driven a car and God knows how many since I last drove a manual gear shift. I have to say I didn’t particularly enjoy the time on the road over last two days, though at least the rental car was easy to drive and comfortable and the journey to and back from Devon was without incident.

Gill, Eleanor’s only sibling and older sister moved to America with her now late and ex husband, Jack, in the mid-eighties. Jack passed away at the end of last year and the family wanted to bring his ashes back to the UK to be scattered in the sea off Devon. Gill, her three adult children and Jack’s new wife and some friends had come to the UK from all over the US to gather together for a Sunday evening meal with Jack’s English family in a pub in Beer; a small fishing village miles from nowhere in rural coastal Devon, not far from where Jack grew up. Dinner was followed by a brief ash scattering ceremony on the beach below the pub.

Holding the event in Beer meant I had to drive as Eleanor has never learned and public transport was going to be difficult if not impossible on a Sunday. We also took Eleanor’s son and their partner as they also don’t drive.

I collected the rental car on Saturday afternoon and we left for Devon at 10:00 on Sunday morning. Living in North East London and heading south west meant traversing the city. The M25 London orbital motorway was partly closed for road works, annoyingly in the direction we wanted to travel, so we had to resort to using the A406, the infamous London North Circular; my least favourite road in London. Naturally there was an accident somewhere and the sat nav sent us and loads of other cars down a string of now jammed residential side streets. This is why I hate driving. It took 90 minutes to clear London and finally get on the open road. At least it wasn’t raining.

To be fair it wasn’t a terrible drive, there was expected traffic as we passed Stonehenge, but I’m never going to complain about driving slowly past such a remarkable place. We arrived in Beer just before 3, in time to check into our room in the pub where the meal was being held and get a quick stroll on the beach before the 4 o’clock gathering.

Beer is small, but bigger than I recalled from the last time I passed through here in 2012; to be fair to me at the time I was over halfway through the 56km coastal run I did for my 50 birthday and wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the shape and size of each town I passed through.

We were staying in the Anchor Inn, right on the sea front and had a room overlooking the sea which was fabulous; the view, the room was average.

We ditched out bags and nipped out for a stroll on the beach before meeting Eleanor’s family. Like Hastings, Beer is a working fishing beach, though significantly smaller than Hastings, which has the largest beach launched fishing fleet in Europe;  I think, its definitely the largest in England!

After the walk and a sneaky Devon ice cream in the sun we joined the large family group in the bar of the hotel for an early meal and some beer,  t would be rude not to drink beer in Beer. I enjoyed meeting and spending some time with Eleanor’s wider family who we don’t see often at all. Maybe a trip to America in the near future is on the cards?

Fed and watered (beered in my case) we all went down to the beach as the evening descended to toast Jack’s life and for the family to scatter his ashes into the sea. I didn’t know Jack, so after raising a glass to his memory I stood back and let his family and friends say their farewell.

As predicted the wind increased in the middle of the night and with it came the rain. The bed was quite small and with the noisy weather battering the sea front window on the other side of the room I had a relatively sleepless night.

It was still raining when we left in the morning and the rain stayed with us for the first hour of driving. It wasn’t fun, but at least we didn’t hit any real traffic on the way back to London and made it back in reasonable time.

I’m not going to rush to drive again, but will have to rent a car to head back to the south west for a tiny music festival I’m attending in Glastonbury in July; but not ‘that’ music festival.