retiredmartin

Closer to home, our St Ives is now a mere 22 minutes away. I reckon it would have been twice that before the A14 upgrade.

The Cornish version doesn’t want you at the moment, and I guess Huntingdonshire’s St Ives isn’t welcoming tourists, either.

But there’s worse places to get your unlimited exercise, and a moderately famous bridge with a chapel in the middle. Which makes it the Rotherham of the east, I guess.

This is the bridge that they use on Look East as a background for the weather reports (“25 degrees, light breeze, chance of a downpour in Ramsey later“).

Mrs RM has decided to join me on my local walks, on the proviso they don’t take more than a couple of hours. You can guess why.

Look how busy St Ives is.

There’s nothing open, of course. Last time here in 2017 for opening day at the average Spoons which had just joined the estimable Royal Oak and Oliver Cromwell in annoying the deceased Lord Protector by serving the demon Citra (the beer not the beer blogger).

Typically, even the Greene King and Elgoods pubs looked incredibly inviting when shut.

It’s the tiling porn at the butchers that impresses though.

Rather than join the queue at Waitrose (it stretched back to Needingworth), we took the riverside walk to lovely Houghton.

At this point I need to bring you news of a serious infringement of the Lockdown Rules (S.37 Para 445).

A young lady made a slight sideways movement to pass us on the cycle track and neither Mrs RM or I remembered to say “Thank you“.

“YOU’RE WELCOME” she shouted.

“Oh, sorry, thanks” I called back, mortified.

But it was too late. And there were witnesses, tapping away on MumsNet right now*.

Chastened, we continued along the Thicket to the chocolate box villages of Houghton and Wyton.

At the National Trust Houghton Mill, excited septuagenarian volunteers were showing holders of pre-booked tickets to their allotted parking spaces, where they ate their own sandwiches, moaned about the closure of the toilets and then drove back to Huntingdon.

Mrs RM and I crossed our legs and pressed on over the Ouse….

*I’ll be asking for 37 other offences of uncoordinated Thursday clapping to be taken into account.