Away From It All The 50 m.p.h. speed limit sounded
like a great idea last week, but it couldn't have made much difference to the motoring public in the South whose cars spent Whit weekend standing dead still in the merry rush to the coast, and it cer- tainly looked irrelevant away up north on Sunday, because I drove from Blackpool to Scotland then
and sometimes didn't see another car for miles on end. I would not, of course, have driven to Black- pool on a holiday weekend for pleasure, in case my refined friends sneered at me. I had to go there to attend a tribal wedding, which turned out to be a pleasure (but I can hardly be blamed for that). To be honest, Blackpool is not my kind of place at all. I work among 1,000,050 people for most of the year, and on holiday I prefer the human race in small loose groups; but I was won over again by the sheer conscientious exuberance of the town. The noise in the enormous pubs is hellish. but people seem happy and kind, and when I asked for directions or went into shops, I found that jolly eagerness to help which I have always associated exclusively with the Swiss tourist industry—even when I wasn't buying anything. Blackpool is all right. or reet, or something. And I , was charmed once- more with the fact that in this tiny crowded island there are always plenty of quiet still places just round the corner. The wedding reception was held a few miles away in a little hotel on the Wyre estuary, where there was nothing but grass, and water, and stray yachtsmen varnishing for the summer, and the dreaming rustic England we advertise for Americans. I don't propose to identify the place any more precisely, because the two charming women who run the hotel serve the best food I have ever eaten in England, and I don't want to have to fight my way through any mobs when I go back again.
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