Essex - underrated
Dad is still sick in the hospital, so I am spending a lot more time in Essex than I would normally choose to do. I don't like spending too much time in Essex, and everyone assumes this is because it is horrible. It really isn't. It's just that my parents live 45 minutes from a cinema, 30 minutes from the nearest deli, and about an hour and a half from anything I would view as a decent museum or art gallery. And there are no hills. And I spent two years back at home trying to persuade my Essex friends to go out dancing, or to the pub, and managed to get htem to the pictures about a quarter as often as I would have liked. That fact alone ought to put any rumours of Essex being a land of party mad blonde sex monsters to rest.
But it isn't horrible. These pictures were taken when I left the intensive care unit dad was in for an hour to get some air and phone my friends to update them ("no, I can't come out tonight. I know it's your birthday.") and they're within half an hour of Stansted airport. The photos show the little cottages with decorated plasterwork - pargetting - that are sort of Essex's hallmark architecture. They also show the layby I made the phone calls from - bound to be a tourist attraction when I publish my memoires (provisionally titled "memoirs of someone who was actually pretty happy as a child, thank you, and thoroughly average as an adult" - what do you think? ;) ). It also has a small plaster cottage.
Essex is actually quite pretty.
