All self-respecting Christmas stories start in one of two places: Bethlehem or the North Pole.
The former is firm favourite if the Almighty is featured in the narrative; the Arctic Pole is the preferred option when Santa Claus is the name in the frame. He is alleged to live there.
For this impromptu Autocar Christmas tour, we were going to have to fit the whole thing into a single November day. A trip to the Middle East was out of the question and Bethlehem a definite no-no. The North Pole might not sound so easy, either, but luckily there are several North Poles, mainly drinking establishments, conveniently located in London. Google can be so helpful.
Our destination decision was made even more obvious by the fact that our chosen transport was to be the recently launched Hyundai Santa Fe, a plug-in hybrid version of the Korean maker’s biggest and most imposing soft-roader. It was the only car we could find, sold in the UK, with a truly Christmas-oriented name.
My job was to ride shotgun with my Autocar colleague Sam Phillips, who came up with the idea of connecting a disparate collection of around-London locations with Christmassy names in a day-long journey. He found the places, laid out the route, chose the car and elected to do most of the driving.
Funnily enough, this idea isn’t quite as frivolous as it may sound. Sam and I are both keen devotees of amateur motorsport (he and his dad do classic trials in a quick and capable Subaru-powered car), and he soon explained that this day’s exploit was akin to a “scatter rally”, popular with car clubs, in which entrants find obscure locations and are required to note even more obscure details about them. Those with the most right answers win. Thinking of this as a Christmas-themed two-bloke scatter rally suddenly gave it legs.
Having originally decided to start at the North Pole (a well-used black-painted cocktail bar in one of the less imposing parts of Greenwich), we changed the route at the last minute to begin at the deliciously named Chestnut Avenue, close to Autocar’s Twickenham nerve centre. We arrived at about 8am: Chestnut Avenue is the official name of the long road that bisects Bushy Park, King Henry VIII’s 1000-acre deer park just over the road from Hampton Court Palace.
We found on this visit that Chestnut Avenue has recently been blocked to through traffic (yet another meaningless move by the Anti-Destination Leaguers who run London), so we contented ourselves with driving umpteen times around the picturesque central pond, admiring the platoons of resident Canada geese and inspecting a couple of huge and noisy deer beneath nearby trees that one little kid in a pushchair insisted loudly to his mum were reindeer. We looked closely, but there wasn’t a red nose to be seen.
The Hyundai’s nav system predicted a 90-minute journey across lower London to Greenwich to our next stop, the North Pole. It was the part of the journey we were least relishing, but the tall, comfortable and soft-riding SUV (a bit too soft-riding out of town, as it would emerge) was pretty much ideal transport for the job.
We made better than expected progress, and suddenly a tag on the nav screen bizarrely read: ‘North Pole 7 minutes.’ Not something you see every day. The North Pole turned out to be a big, somewhat forbidding building on a corner site abutting a main road, and of course it was closed and barred when we arrived because it was one of those places that comes alive at midnight. Seeing our interest, a local resident helpfully told us there had been a knifing nearby the other year.
When I peered in the window a black-clad young bloke, polishing glasses inside, reacted to what must have been a peculiar sight – a fat old bloke in a Christmas hat – and came to the door. I explained what we were doing and asked if it had snowed much lately, to which he replied “no” and banged the door shut.
I’m probably not going back. On the way to our next sensitively chosen destination – Turkey Street, Enfield, on London’s northerly outskirts – the all-battery range of our Hyundai PHEV ran out (it will do an impressive 30-35 miles in suburban running) and it started to rain. But we were already out of the worst of London’s traffic and buoyed by decent progress.
Turkey Street turned out to be an unexceptional suburban street, until we drove the length of it and found a bonus overground railway station – called Turkey Street, of course – with lots of surrounding cars, passengers bustling back and forth and all the shops and the signage you could want for the pictures we wanted to take.
We’d been wearing our infernal, pre-seasonal Santa hats for several hours by now, feeling damned stupid doing it. But they did give us a chance to study the varied reactions of our fellow humans when confronted with apparently inexplicable scenes.
My job in Turkey Street was to stand on the pavement, hat on, while Sam drove by in the Hyundai. Many people walked by while we did it. Some saw the camera and smiled with us, knowing there was a joke in there somewhere and not minding that they didn’t quite get it. Others just saw something very peculiar going on and were unsmilingly desperate not to be involved. They walked fast. I wondered, in a reverse situation, which tack I’d have taken….
Leaving Turkey Street meant we had stops left. First, a destination you could never omit from a story like this: Santa Pod, the famous and venerable headquarters for drag racing competition in this country just half a dozen miles from Milton Keynes.
Even though I don’t go there often, Santa Pod is a favourite of mine, so focused and dynamic. This time it looked particularly healthy, with well-kept office buildings, a large contingent of highly appropriate Ford Mustang V8s outside them, and a vast and neatly mown car park for punters when they come. The staff inside were friendly and obliging, instantly ‘getting’ our mission and letting us do what we wanted for the camera.
The truly impressive part of Santa Pod is the start line and burnout pad where the fastest, loudest nitro-fuelled behemoths pause to do burnouts before tossing off a 300mph, five-second standing quarter mile. That black, sticky expanse, running arrow-straight away from you towards a vanishing point (and flanked by bleachers that look almost too close to the action), makes an awe-inspiring view even when the whole place is dead quiet.
We reverently parked the Hyundai on the starting pad for a while to absorb the atmosphere, then it was back to the office to collect forthcoming event details to fuel our very firm intention to see the action here next year.
By now it was early afternoon in declining light, so time for the final stop. Then we’d end this crazy (pre) Yuletide sojourn at the perfectly named Christmas Common, near Watlington on the western edge of the Chiltern Hills.
Christmas Common is one of those leafy, achingly beautiful and discreetly prosperous rural Oxfordshire destinations, a spread-out village surrounded by stunning countryside and randomly punctuated with trees. As soon as you get near the place, however, you’re made aware that the residents are dedicated to keeping their home as it is. There are plenty of somewhat peremptory road signs that discourage you from spoiling the serenity. Pause in a lay-by and half a dozen sets of local eyes will have noted it.
We stopped amid all that beauty anyway, with the lowering sunlight enhancing the colours of our end-of-journey pictures. Soon it became clear we had stopped beside, quite by chance, a field with a little stable at one end, and its permanent residents were a pair of well-fed, well-kept donkeys.
As we clicked away, a woman arrived on foot to feed them, clearly part of her afternoon routine. In our business you get used to ‘just what are you up to?’ enquiries in lovely locations, but not this time. This lovely lady would have been perfectly willing to bring one of her donkeys – a Christmas animal, she asserted, if ever there was one – into our pictures had it not been for the fact that one of the pair was ill with colic, and it would have wanted to leave its recovery stall if she had moved the other one.
We had to make do with no donkeys in the end, but enjoyed a consoling assurance from this nice lady that she’d have helped us if she could. Which was fine: as people always say at this time of the year, it was the thought that counted.
