(April, 2000)
Well, maybe it’s down aisle 3.
I try aisle 3. Bread. Strange jars of cabbagey, pickly things. More bread. Larger pickly things. Even more bread. Dear god, Latvians like their bread. Sadly, I’m not after bread, I’m after what is apparently the rarest of things in Latvia – a jar of curry sauce. And if it’s in this supermarket, it’s not down aisle 3.
Okay, maybe it’s down aisle 4…Read More
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.
