On Lincolnshire...

St Mary's, Mablethorpe.
Scene of Andy & Deborahs wedding on Saturday.

If my history serves me right that leaning tower (yes it really does lean to the left) is a typical Norman tower, which means the church could be up to 900 years old.

And the thing about Lincolnshire is that St Mary's doesn't stand out from the crowd, its a fairly common sight to see houses and churches of an ancient vintage - just over the road from the church was a single storey thatched cottage which could easily have been from the same era.

Lincolnshire is in the main a flat county, its also a huge county stretching right down the east of England from the Humber to the Wash with only one major city and one short motorway to its name - lots of small market towns and even smaller ancient villages are Lincolnshires forte and a drive through the place is not to be undertaken if you are in a hurry.

We stayed the weekend at a small hotel in an even smaller village called Sutton-on-Sea, a hamlet that nestles against the huge dyke that protects it from incursion from the sea, a 30 foot high bank upon which sit mile after mile of beach huts fronting the mile after mile (dozens of miles) of continuous, deserted sands.

The sea defence dyke is there for a reason, stand on top of it and look seawards, then turn and look landwards and you can't help but notice that the land side is lower than the sea side, and the low lying land streches for several miles inland, if the sea decided to break through the dyke at any point within 20 miles then most of this area of the country would disappear.

The absence of major roads also makes for interesting satnav guided journey's, we found ourselves outside of Louth with little prompting from the lady who lives inside my dashboard at which point I entered the hotel address for guidance on the last a dozen or so miles to Sutton. almost immediately we turned of the only "A" road in that area and found ourselves driving down narrow "B" roads of the type that are described as "country lanes" in Leeds but here they were major thoroughfares.

It wasn't long before the lady who lives in my dashboard recommended a right turn onto what she described as "an unknown road" and we found ourselves driving down a narrow track hoping that nothing would come the other way and when it did we had to pull off the road into a field to let the other vehicle pass.

I had my doubts around about this time because the display on the satnav screen was showing nothing, just an arrow pointing into a blank space, it knew where we were but couldn't show any road on the screen because this was hardly adequate to be described as such.

But it was not faulty, this was the genuine route to where we needed to be and after a few miles of driving at 15mph in and out of fields to avoid other cars we found ourselves back on the one single "B" road within a half mile of our destination - satnav doesn't let you down but if you chose "direct route" in places like Lincolnshire then you are in for an interesting drive, the "A road only" option would probably not have even got us there.

So now Andy is married and we have no bachelors left in our group of friends, he put on a good show on Saturday as we left his singleton lifestyle behind, good food (when I could get served), good beer, and excellent company - makes you wish that life could just be weekends.