Every year I set myself a birthday challenge – something that looks feasible from a distance but turns into a living hell close-up. Last year, I wandered across the North York Moors in an 8-hour October rainstorm (and ended up writing it up for the San Francisco Chronicle). On my birthday this year…well, I was busy. Too much writing, too much on – something had to hit the wall.
So, two months late….I’m hitting the wall.
(2008)
The voice coming over the loudspeaker is beginning to struggle.
“Uh – on platform 6, the Treno Notte to Roma will be leaving in approximately…”
“SHOW ME TH’WAYDA GO-OME…..CAZZ I’M TIREDANA WANNA GOHDA BED…”Read More
Here’s a story about how archaeology ruined me as an Englishman.Read More
It’s midnight, and I’m looking up at a signpost.
The best way to see England is on foot. (The second best way? Ask Sustrans). It’s a country designed to fit your feet, whether via the National Trail network or by those enticing mystery dashed lines you see winding their way into the trees at the fringes of your Ordnance Survey Landranger. You’re not meant to go from A to B – you’re supposed to dabble with the rest of the alphabet. This is why English people of a certain age will argue until they’re blue in the face about the ‘quickest route’ for a stranger to get somewhere. What they really mean is their favourite route – and everyone has a different one, because England can accomodate that.
At midnight on the 23rd of August I’m in Hornsea, my childhood home on East Yorkshire’s coastline. I’ve wandered along the sea-front, tweeting fitfully and plucking at memories, until I’ve reached the Marine Hotel and a sheer concrete wall to the upper promenade I clearly remember being too nervous to climb, which I can now scale by jumping, grabbing the rail and pulling myself up. (It’s such a contrast that I feel I have someone else’s memory). The clouds are low enough to turn to mist, fogging the streetlights and giving the ruinous amusement arcades the look of a heavily anti-aliased Pripyat.
Then I’m at the end of the old railway line, the one that connected Hornsea with Hull until Doctor Beeching swung his axe. The disused train station is long gone, and replaced with an enormous paved compass, pointing westwards – specifically, at Southport, on the other side of the country.
I walk the first mile of it.
From here, the Trail winds over the Wolds and down towards Sheffield, splitting in either direction to provide secondary routes for the weekend-tripper (one of which is up to York, via the whole Solar System)….
…and finally, on the main route, reaching Southport on the west coast, 20 miles north of Liverpool.
When Barbara of Hole In The Donut Travels came to York a few months back, I was startled to learn she hadn’t arrived via London. Because all too often, that’s the England visitors see. I’m not knocking London (it’s a fascinating place) but it’s not a synonym for England. The England I love best, that gets me scanning maps with what I can only describe as geographic lust, is that of hill and dale and moor and backwater trail – and the best ways to find these are by taking the great trans-England walking routes so beloved by folk like Wainwright (who even devised his own coast to coast walk)…
Striding along these great Ways isn’t just an effective method for seeing (and feeling) England – it’s also a great way to say goodbye to it. Since my plans revolve around seeing the rest of the world, a couple of final, epic walks sometime soon are an attractive prospect.
And the symbolism of starting the last of them from my childhood home?
Irresistible.
Further reading:
London breathes on my back. Around me, shirts billow, dresses flare and hats are clutched, as the stuffy, tasteless air roars past us in search of somewhere to dump its heat. Behind me, the mournful screee of an Underground Tube train – and around me, a subterranean London that is far from solid.
Imagine laying a cross-section across the city, dividing it like a cake. Looking at the results, you’d think: earthworms. The ground under London is Swiss-cheesed with cavities. There are the most famous – the London Underground and its many, many abandoned stations, and the extraordinarily extensive sewer system pioneered by Joseph Bazalgette, the “Sewer King“, an engineering marvel now threatened from above. But around them, burrowed into the sponge of subterranean London, are countless other mysterious voids. The church catacombs, most notably at Camden. The military bunkers and citadels and their extensive tunnel networks. The pedestrianways winding between Heathrow’s terminals (above), hauntingly endless when you’re dragging your suitcase down them. And then there’s the Fleet, London’s lost river, gushing back and forth through the sewer tunnels as the tide waxes and wanes, a trickle of its former self but still powerful enough to drown the unwary.
And through all this, the dead air of London’s ancient breath…
In.
Out.
Further reading:
If at first you don’t succeed..you might be onto something here.
For a long while, my ability to attract misadventure and fall flat on my face whenever enough ground presented itself…well, it haunted me. Other people seemed to glide as if well-oiled through the machinations of society. I rattled, clunked and occasionally jammed.
In 1995 I went on my first archaeological excavation to West Sussex (only a few miles from where I was last month, in fact). I took the train – the first time I’d used the backwater trains south of London. In most cases, the carriage doors don’t have handles on the insides; you push the window down and reach through to turn the outer handle. I didn’t know this.
The train stopped. I pawed at the door like a trapped animal. Since nobody watching me could work out what I was doing, nobody stepped in to help. After a while, the train started rolling, and at precisely the point it began to move too fast to jump off it, I realised I needed to open the window to get out. I pulled it down and shouted “HELP” at the English countryside. When I turned round, a backpacker was laid on the floor, laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe.
A few hours later, at the excavation site, I discovered I should have brought a welded hard steel (WHS) 4″ trowel, like this:
Instead, I pulled out one of these:
The archaeology students I’d just befriended all fell to the floor and wept openly.
This was my one and only chance to make a good impression. And I’d fluffed it.
But.
What happened next was what always happens next, in a pattern I hadn’t yet recognised but I’ve since come to associate with most of the events in my life. I became “the guy [that did something fantastically stupid]” – in this case, “the guy with the big-ass trowel”. My mistake hadn’t just dissipated into thin air, in the way I’d wanted to myself when I realised what a fool I’d been.
It had defined me.
Be remarkable, say personal branding gurus like Gary Vaynerchuk. Well, I am remarkable. I’m remarkably disaster-prone. My recent trip to Austria started with enough stress to put grey hairs in my beard. (I say that I grew a beard last week to compare with the one I grew 6 months ago, and it appears I’m turning into a badger). I’ve been like this for my entire adult life – and nowadays, that’s a long time. And it’s almost always self-inflicted. My friend Jodi Ettenberg has a problem with birds shitting on her. I have a problem with me shitting on me.
(Not literally – or this story would have been posted here).
However, you may have noticed how unconcerned I am at all this self-sabotage. I honestly don’t care. Take a look at this blog’s subtitle. Does that sound the work of someone ashamed of what a walking disaster he is? Ain’t so.
In future posts I’m going to dig deep into the power of mistakes, the little-evangelized joy of protracted misfortune, and the way that everyone takes pity on the klutz in the room. (You want to break the ice with people on the road, right? Then channel your inner numpty. Prove you’re a human in the most mortifying way possible, and once they’ve picked themselves up off the floor where they’ve been laying laughing at you, you’ll have a friend for life).
This is the tip of a huge iceberg, waiting to bang a hole in the side of your dignity. My advice? Sail straight at it – full speed ahead.
Mistakes are medals.
Aim to become highly decorated.
Images: Kurt Thomas Hunt, Electricians Direct and Jeffrey Beall.
What stuff do you need to go travelling?
Let’s pretend we’re back at school, and that’s an essay question. What are we trained to do? Break down. (The question, I mean). We disassemble into its component concepts, in search of the tricksiest.
And what’s the troublesome word here?
I have a real problem with that word – because I’m needy. Not in the “talk to me or I’m going to bawl into a tub of ice-cream” way. In the sense that I find everything fascinating.
No, really. Have you ever really, truly looked at [insert some mundane object here]? It’s AMAZING. We live in a world of invisible, endlessly entertaining miracles. Have something you want to sell me? I’m sold! In fact I’d be the perfect consumer, were it not for the tragic fact that I have no money. Everything commands my attention, which is why I often neurologically short out in public and stand there, drooling and gently soiling myself.
It’s because the world is so fascinating.
For this reason, I’m bewildered when people use the word “bored”. Are we occupying the same reality? Hey, Bored Person, here’s a list of things you should do before you are allowed to use the b-word – and yes, I’m sorry it’s rather long, it’s because there’s Absolutely Everything on it. Off you pop now.
Not everyone is as easily impressed as me – but it’s a fact that we’re all overwhelmed with desirable objects. We just can’t cram things into our lives fast enough. And that’s the way other people like it. Out there are fabulously clever folk who know how to design, make and promote things that instantly become necessities the moment we start playing. (My most recent example? Evernote. What did I do before Evernote? It probably involved banging rocks together). Such marvels feel like they complete us, by erasing our older memories of feeling complete. It’s mystical and magical.
It’s also how to end up travelling the world with useless crap.
The problem arises when the emotional component of “need” swamps the practical one. Case in point: last month, my beloved Kindle was either mislaid or stolen at Heathrow Airport. I discovered it was gone when I boarded my flight to Frankfurt and reached into my bag, ready to let George RR Martin take away my flight nerves. I rummaged. I dug. I turfed everything out. Gone. Gone. I slid into a miserable funk. When the inflight drinks arrived and I was handed orange juice, I asked the air hostess for something stronger. She gave me stronger orange juice. (And they say Germans don’t have a sense of humour). Sober and utterly without reading material, I resorted to playing a game that involved applying just enough knee-pressure to the seat in front for the occupant to shift uncomfortably, but not enough for them to realise I was to blame. This passed the time nicely. (The lesson: misanthropic psychological warfare is a great way to get over a fear of flying).
In Austria, I downloaded Kindle for Android, and all the books I was reading (ta, Amazon).
And in doing so…I realised I didn’t really need a Kindle anymore.
Oh, I wanted one. I wanted one so bad that its absence was like emotional toothache. Inwardly I pined and wailed – but I still read my books on my phone. And you know what? It was fine. No, it was great. It was everything I needed from an ebook reader. And I shudder to say this, but…it still is everything I need.
Sure, I want a new Kindle – but I can survive without one, thankyouverymuch.
It’s a difficult process, stripping away the layers of want to find that kernal of need. Context is important. That’s why travelling is a great way to find out if something is useless, cumbersome crap. It’s also a great way to lug useless, cumbersome crap around, having seasoned travellers and hotel staff laugh at you pityingly until the day you lose your patience and stuff the offending article in a stranger’s half-open bin. Nothing breeds self-contempt like an unnecessarily heavy backpack or suitcase. (In Greece, I ended throwing away my suitcase, choosing the lesser evil of a single rucksack so overladen it was nearly spherical).
That approach is best avoided. You’re better off deciding what you need in advance.
But how?
My best answer is one that the beauty-loving part of me hates. It’s a grimly mechanical view of the world. It’s utilitarian – and I hate utilitarian. It’s the following simple question:
If I’m going travelling, my rule of thumb is to choose function over form. Does it do the same job as something larger and heavier, equally if not more reliably? Then I don’t care how it looks. I don’t care if it’s a piece of Hello Kitty merchandise, or plastered with Justin Bieber’s intensely irritating face – it goes in. And nuts to my social credibility (if I have any left, that is).
And there’s another benefit to uglifying your possessions, as Shannon O’Donnell notes – they’re less likely to get stolen. Have an expensive camera? Wind duct-tape around it until it’s an eyesore. Smartphone? Make it look it’s freshly repaired by an idiot who clearly knows nothing about technology, ie. you. Visually brand yourself as the kind of person who wouldn’t carry anything worth stealing.
I’ll admit – I find all this tough. I love gadgets and oddities, and I’m easily prone to daydreams of how I’d use them when I travel (“YES, this Inflatable Turkey would be just *perfect* for…hell, I don’t care, I just want it!”). I’m a hoarder. But most of my squirrelling tendencies, born of immediately being smitten with the idea of something rather than the reality of something, can’t survive the What Does It Do line of enquiry. That’s how I best spot unneceessary crap before it has a chance to clamber onto my shoulders…
