🌾 More Than Words – Stage 40: There Will Be Mud 🌾
From a Norfolk car park with a colourful reputation to a Cambridgeshire field that once housed nuclear missiles pointed at Moscow — via a man who survived a three-mile freefall and got away with a sprained leg. The Fens contain multitudes.
Featuring:
🔍 Two Mile Bottom: brutally literal name, surprisingly lively car park
🌲 Thetford Forest: what happens when Britain runs out of wood and panics
🥶 Santon Downham: holds both the UK’s lowest June temperature and a July record of 39°C, because commitment
🪨 Brandon: supplied one million musket flints a month to defeat Napoleon, then quietly ran out of customers
✈️ RAF Lakenheath: a self-contained slice of America in Suffolk where F-35s rehearse the apocalypse
🕷️ The Fen Tigers: the original NIMBYs, but with arson
💧 Prickwillow: a village kept above water by a 25-tonne pump, sitting on a ridge the height of a packet of biscuits
🪂 Flight Sergeant Alkemade: jumped from a burning Lancaster at 18,000 feet without a parachute. Sprained his leg. Went home.
☢️ Mepal: beet fields by day, nuclear warheads by night
🐾 Clement Freud: grandson of Sigmund, Liberal MP, dog food spokesman, pub landlord — the unconscious really does lead you somewhere unexpected
Eels as currency, sandstorms in Suffolk, a rear gunner defying gravity, and nuclear missiles under the cabbage fields. Just another week on the road.