Our Grand Adventure

On Thursday we had a grand adventure. [...] had sold some shop-fittings on eBay and we drove down to deliver them to someone in Lincoln. This meant driving through the delightful Beverley, across the magnificent Humber Bridge and then going home up the coast via Bridlington, Filey and Scarborough. The Humber Bridge was quite a highlight, especially as [...] had somehow got through life without crossing a massive bridge or even going through a tollgate. How? I don’t know. This he found very exciting, even though the sky was grey, the water was beige and Hull’s cityscape was something between the two.

Other highlights included sitting on the seafront at Filey and a really decent bacon sandwich in a pub which had a big sign outside saying “Handicap Friendly”. I don’t know about elsewhere, but this is extremely unusual in the UK for two… three… no, four reasons. One is that if somewhere is accessible, they may have a small sign, a sticker on their window or something - not a massive sign you can read from 200yrds up the road. Two is that the H word is considered massively problematic amoung Brit crips. Three the word “friendly” in conjunction with the needs of disabled people is pretty damn patronising (if in doubt, imagine a job advert where a company described themselves as being Black Friendly). And four, the place was a very ordinary country pub complete with steps, narrow doorways and so on.

However, over the course of our brief visit, I noticed at least two other customers who almost certainly had some form of learning impairment and I guess this was what the sign referred to. We theorised that there was some sort of sheltered accommodation nearby and the pub was trying (and succeeding) in getting the custom of friends and relatives who wanted to take the residents out for lunch… Still pretty dodgy if you ask me.

The television was on in the corner of this pub. I couldn’t really hear it, but when I looked up I saw the Prime Minister on the screen, a caption underneath him reading London Blasts and I knew that the terrorist attack which we have been expecting for the last four years had finally gone off…