Saturday the 22nd of August -to Loughborough

Today, Samuel drove me into town, past this view of the Lacemarket:



I flyered the RC cathedral, St Barnabas, the Castle:



....the museum of the Law, and St Mary's in the Lacemarket, which looks like this inside:



..and is watched over by a huge, heraldic lion and Unicorn.

But yet again, I felt in a hurry to get back on the road. The perennial feeling on this walk has been that there is more to do than I have time to get done. Every morning I feel like I need to get into the next town soon, so I have where i'll stay sorted...but that means that as soon as I'm in town, and meeting my hosts, I have no control over the other aspects of the walk. The most I can snatch is flyering the most obvious buildings in the time, which is easy in Northallerton, but impossible in a place the size of Nottingham.

For that reason, I'd pencilled Loughborough in as a 'day to myself'. I'd received a text from Jenny telling me that people had offered a bed there just a day earlier, but I'd had a room sorted in the university since Tuesday. Obviously, the bed was free, but I needed a day away from the hospitality. This was so I could catch up on the blog, but also because I've found myself 'getting into the zone of walking' a lot in the past few days. I've started feeling light-headed when I walk; this is nothing to worry about, because although I've never felt it before, I know exactly what it is: it's the feeling of my body getting used to, and accommodationg that fact that walking has become the norm for it. It's a strange feeling – like I'm drunk on walking, without the incoherence, almost like I'm floating, and that things like that bag don't weight anything.

The point of this is that when I'm walking, I'm 'in the zone' and it takes a few hours afterwards to get out of it. Today I needed a break from the fact that on most days, the walk stops suddenly, in the arms of my extremely-friendly hosts, and as soon as the walk stops, the talk begins. This added, to the fact I've often feel I have to hurry the walk up because the hosts expect me in town at a certain time has let me to feel a little like everything is rolling infront of me a little faster than I can catch up with.

Anyway, I left Nottingham quickly...passing the home of the world's oldest football club, where Sven has just made his home:




….and here, which used to be the home of Brian Clough:



,Trent Bridge, the home of Nottinghamshire County Cricket ground:



...and this building, which..used to be the home of the man who invented HP Sauce.



This was a pretty straightforward walk, along paths, straight out of Nottingham. The only time when it got a little hairy was on the main roundabout outside town, but that was because I forgot to look right where the traffic was approaching..for a second. Quicker than I expected, I ended up here:
...this isn't such a funny name for me, because, I've been here before, on a night out in ...1995. I remember it was being three houses and a pub, but, it certainly isn't:


It's quite a large village, and I stopped for a coke in the pub which seemed closest to the one in my memory from one evening, 14 years ago. Here, I tried -with no luck - to do a search on 'where is Loughborough University?', so I packed back up, and headed up 'Bunny Hill' (which was full of sheep) and on until I came across this chap in the middle of my path:



Now. this shrew-thing allowed me very close - so close, in fact, that I thought he was in the process of expiring. I stuck the camera really close about ten times, and he just sat there. Then, when I raised it, and stood back up, he pelted off into the grass - an exhibitionist shrew, then. I carried on through a few very attractive towns:



and past various churches, like this one, that had no letter box, forcing me to improvise my flyer-drop:



Then, I came down a slow, steady hill for about twenty minutes. At the bottom, I knew I was on the right track:


Immediately, it was followed by a great view:


The entire land around was very flat, and reminded me of Lincolnshire, and I crossed under a railway bridge into Loughborough proper. I'd didn't have a clue what to expect, but it wsn't this immense terraced street



Luckily, there was a corner shop there, and when I asked the guy where the unviserity was, he sucked his teeth and said 'oh, it's a bit of a long walk, you know.' When I asked how long, he said 'well..about half an hour, you know.' I told him I could cope with that, and followed his directions over two roundabouts, and finally, to here:



Big trouble though - nobody had heard I was coming- security hadn't, the group of S.U guys and girls hanging outside their SU bar (called J.C.'s -all SU bars are acronyms - Keele's was the reverse: C.J.'s ). . The only thing happening at Loughborough that night was a wedding reception
, and I wasn't invited. One of the girls was from Sunderland, but she didn't really know what was going on - but the other one did, and she rang a few people, finally telling me to go back security. I did as I was told, and this time a phone call did the job - I was expected in 'The Hub', and after being driven there by a guy who looked like The Terminator, I was given the keys:

..to a room in the proper student accommodation at the back:

My room was typical new uni accommodation- it even smelled that way. There were a few foreign students milling around, and I walked through the campus, which looked a lot like most landscaped campuses made since the 60s; this is the library:

All Modernist, but not bad - I think buildings like this look original, and fit perfectly into landscaped environments like this -it's when someone decides to knock down a perfectly-suited Victorian street, to plonk something like this in the middle, that it doesn't work, and ends up being an 'eyesore' or 'blot on the landscape'. Anyway.. I found my bearings in the bar at the 'hospitality hotel' right at the back of the campus. The barman told me there were other places in the town to go, but I went back to the room to do the blog, and couldn't muster the energy to go and see. I went back to the hotel bar, and gave out a flyer or two, then wrote a little more on the blog, and went to bed