Next stop Cowes IOW

No more planes this week. From the sublime (Istanbul, Port Camargue, Estoi in Portugal) to the maybe slightly less so, firmly set in the 1950s and clinging resolutely onto those halcyon years of architecture, design and cuisine. The architecture is unremittingly Bungalow and buildings that exhibit an unfulfilled yearning to be Nissan huts but somehow sadly lost out when the planning genes were randomly distributed.

We are off to Cowes for Cowes week. Being based in East Cowes, you soon learn the vagaries of the timings of the chain ferry from East to West Cowes, of the effect of the tides and whether you may just as well give in and drive all the way round via Newport. Yup, no tunnel, no bridge. One ferry, very old, inclined to get cranky.

Fish and chips is haute cuisine here. You see lots of holiday makers in great locations like Ryde beach eating chips for lunch with eggs and sausages and chips for their evening meal with fish and mushy peas and the odd saveloy.

Ah yes, the saveloy: "A saveloy is a type of highly seasoned pork sausage, usually bright red in colour, which is served in English fish and chip shops,"^[1] sometimes fried in batter. The word comes from the French cervelas, a pork sausage, at one time sometimes made from pigs' brains" (Wikipedia).

By contrast, in West Cowes in the early morning the twenty somethings who are crew on the bigger racing boats all fall into the high street sandwich shops to buy expresso and hot bacon baguettes and nurofen for the hangover they worked on for most of the evening and night in the beer tent. Then in their colour-coordinated and logo bearing outfits they fall into the hot showers and onto the boat to head out to the Black group start, praying there is enough wind - no, not for the racing but to blow the cobwebs of the hangover away and get them thirsty again.