In October five of us, friends from university, went cycling on the Isle of Wight. We passed through the New Forest (and a flooded stream) on the way.
The Isle of Wight has been a single parliamentary constituency ever since the Great Reform Act of 1832. For many years Islanders have resisted calls to form constituencies that would include parts of the mainland. As a result of their success in this, the Isle of Wight was the British constituency with the most voters at the 2019 general election. Then the Conservatives won 56% of the vote, Labour 24% and the Greens 15%. The Liberal Democrats did not stand. At the next election the constituency will at last be divided into two, Isle of Wight east and west, both wholly on-island. (According to the report of the Boundary Commissioners, some people still oppose this and want to stick to a single constituency.) It will be interesting to see which way the two seats go at the next election.
The island’s terrain, especially in the south, is like that on the other side of the Channel where I cycled in May (https://paulhhodson.wordpress.com/2023/05/21/a-cycling-tour-to-normandy-from-the-southern-netherlands/): chalk cliffs and hills,
small towns and fields. I found the often-irregular English fields more attractive than the often-bare French ones.
west of Dieppe, May 2023
west of Ventnor, October 2023
In the nineteenth century dignitaries like Lord Tennyson, Ellen Terry and Charles Darwin came here. We visited a house called Dimbola in Freshwater to look at the photographs that Julia Margaret Cameron took between 1860 and 1875 of both dignitaries and local people. She held out her stained hands to Garibaldi and said This is not dirt, it is art. In her house there is also a room dedicated to the Isle of Wight festival of 1970. (If you want to capture the ambience do not on any account listen to the song Wight is Wight by Michel Delpech, brought to my attention by the Parisienne.) In the garden there is a sculpture of Jimi Hendrix.
In Ventnor, after we ate, I went to the Crab and Lobster pub to see the disappointing (though merited) end of the England-South Africa rugby semifinal. Pass it! shouted patrons at the England team without effect.
In Cowes we met Sir Henry, who I shared a room with in the second year at university, and his wife the Prosecutor. They are retiring and moving to a smaller house. I asked how many books they have. Fifteen hundred. Knowing Sir Henry, and knowing how hard I found it to cut down to two thousand books when Travelling Companion and I moved to London, I did not believe this to be true.
We made a ride like this, without hills, in the Netherlands in 2019 (https://paulhhodson.wordpress.com/2019/06/23/a-possible-origin-story-for-a-phenomenon-for-which-an-explanation-is-difficult-to-conceive-cycling-tour-of-friesland/). Since then the Expert Witness, the Professor and the Student of Bear Behaviour have got fitter; Mr Radio has bought an electric bike and probably got fitter too; and I have got less fit. They kindly waited for me at the top of many hills.
On the way back we caught a ferry from Hythe to Southampton. It was called the Great Expectations and sailed from the end of a rackety long pier.
I liked this sign.
I liked the words “however” in the second paragraph and “but” in the third.
Paul Hodson 