Only a few days earlier I'd been down to the jetty near my parents' place on the Isle of Man. On the sea wall there was a fish chart depicting legal catch sizes. Someone had taken the not inconsiderable time to stick googly eyes to each of the many fish and crustaceans displayed upon it, even attaching some to the tiny birds in the Manx government logo. All the creatures of the sea appeared to be lobotomised or drug-addled. It looked wonderfully mental. I took a couple of snaps, put it on Facebook and the post was shared hundreds and hundreds of times. Googly eyes were the future. They brought a smile to people's faces. I'd bought a bag in case something needed sprucing up as I cycled around Britain. On the wall of my tiny room was a grey-brown painting of a horse's head in profile and this image was drabness itself. I added a googly eye to its glass surface and instantly improved the artwork, turning it into a demented nag. I wondered how long it would be before a maid noticed it, probably months if the room's occupants kept choosing alcohol over cleaning services.
I was looking forward to tomorrow. Over the next five months I wanted to celebrate everything Britain had to offer. I wanted to fall in love with the place in a way I'd never managed to do when I lived here. And there was something else. If I ever decided to come back to live in Britain, I wanted to know where I would come back to. I knew it wouldn't be Blackburn, but where was best for me? Where could I live the sort of life I wanted to live?
I drifted off to sleep, ready for the new day's big, Britain-wide push with a crazed stallion watching over me.
I still couldn't feel my tongue.
Chapter 2: Lizzie is a scratter
Merseyside, Greater Manchester, Cheshire and Staffordshire
Day One was here and in front of me sat a bowl of something that could have been baby food or, equally, cat vomit. But let's start as we mean to go on, positively.
The reason Scousers are so named is because of their traditional dish lobscouse, or scouse for short, a mixture of potatoes, carrots and onions and, in theory at least, lamb or beef, although I was struggling to find any animal in my dish this morning. The bowl had arrived with a range of cutlery although such a puréed breakfast required only a spoon. It's easy to see why this dish is so popular here in Liverpool. You could still get it down your neck even with all your teeth knocked out. Scouse had originally been brought to Merseyside by Baltic sailors, like VD, only less visually appealing.
I looked around the café. It was 10 a.m. and I was the only one in there. I didn't even know if scouse was the sort of thing you ate for breakfast, perhaps a social faux pas akin to ordering a Full English at a midnight supper club or a bowl of Frosties for Sunday lunch.
The café was Maggie May's and it's famous for selling this local dish. The walls of the place were full of illuminated skylines and old Liverpool maps. Uniquely for an establishment dealing in locality around here, I couldn't see a single mention of The Beatles. Since it's mandatory to display the band's logo at least once every square metre from the centre of Liverpool out to a radius of ten miles, I'm sure this oversight has now been rectified.
I gave my scouse a little taste. Mmm, interesting, I thought. Well, I say interesting. It wasn't that it tasted interesting. What was interesting was that it didn't taste of anything at all. I added some salt and pepper. Ah, that was better. Now it at least tasted of salt and pepper. I cleared the bowl in ten or so gloopy spoonfuls. Towards the end of my tiny breakfast I did stumble across something vaguely resembling meat, although it may have been something that had accidentally fallen into the pan, but I still took it to be a positive. This was how the ride was going to be, seeking the gold in everything. Onward and upward! Or until I was ground down by reality.
Day One, and only Day One, was devoted to Merseyside. How can you see an entire county in a single day? I hear you ask. Obviously, I couldn't. I'd found the total area of Britain and that of every county and divvied up how long I was allowed to spend in each, given that I'd planned about 150 days for the entire ride. By that measure, some tiny, heavily populated but interesting areas were given almost no time at all while the huge and largely empty Highland area of Scotland was allocated something like three weeks. I reduced the quieter places and shared the days out amongst the rest in an entirely inconsistent manner. Still, Merseyside, in the bottom one-third of counties by size, only earned itself a single day. However, before I could even pretend to say I'd seen the place there were two important checkpoints I'd been told to visit.
I decided to ride out of Liverpool via the docks. This was Merseyside after all, and the first leg of my journey would be to ride along the side of the Mersey. Did you know that, like the Ganges, the River Mersey is considered sacred by British Hindus? Maybe that explains all the bodies floating in it.
But what else do we know about this area? There's a lazy journalistic device that, because I'm equally lazy, we'll return to time and time again in this book. A reporter will see a recently released set of figures and, based on the numbers, declare a town to be Britain's capital of something or other. It's a con really. They don't give you the data. They just see that one town is more of this or that, even if it's only 0.01% more, and they have a story.
As a result, according to the tabloids, Liverpool is Britain's food bank capital. It is also its benefits capital, its whiplash claim capital and its dog attack capital. Merseyside as a whole is Britain's stalking capital. Do you fancy moving here yet? Maybe this one will swing it: Since Britain is the boob job capital of the entire world and Liverpool is Britain's breast augmentation capital, this means Liverpool has more silicone boobies than anywhere else on the planet. They've got more fraudulent tits than the House of Commons.
Looking at a map, Merseyside is an interesting shape, rather like a painful-looking sex toy or a weird blob giving the finger to America. While it's the fifth smallest county in England it's the sixth most densely populated. It's a bit of a squeeze, and that's without even considering all those fake breasts.
I would have liked to provide you with more tasty nuggets of information about Liverpool but they're impossible to find. If you type the word 'Liverpool' into Google you just get millions of pages about The Beatles. If you try to limit the search by looking for “Liverpool –Beatles” you break the internet.
Like most ailing industrial cities around the world, things weren't looking too good in Liverpool, especially here by the Mersey. Giant warehouses and old, ten storey mills stood empty, holding nothing these days but dust and dreams and broken glass from the windows skilfully shattered by local dipshits. How the hell did they manage to break the panes on the top floor? Maybe the vandals around here have sniper rifles.
As I escaped the clutches of Liverpool my stomach started to gurgle. Since all I'd had to eat was the scouse, it had to be the culprit. Why was my stomach bothering to process it? When it arrived on my table it already looked like it had been digested a couple of times.
My first checkpoint was on Crosby Beach and the site of Antony Gormley's impressive art installation, Another Place, one hundred cast-iron men stretching for two miles along the sand and staring steadfastly out to sea. I arrived at its southern edge and watched. The tide was coming in. The men were slowly sinking beneath the waves.
Still high on the dramatic improvement I'd made to that horse painting last night, I figured that perhaps one of Gormley's fellas would benefit from a little googly action. No one was about. I strolled purposefully across the sand to the nearest rusting man, supposedly modelled on Gormley himself, and attached two plastic eyes, a definite improvement. And then I retreated and sat to watch the tide claim the rest of the men.
Time passed. A red container ship slipped by lazily in the distance. As an Iron Man event it was a little disappointing but as art it was genuinely moving, watching the approaching tide drown the statues one by one. It's a little less moving when you know one of them is wearing googly eyes.
It was at this point I realised I was a prat. The sea would wash off the eyes, probably in seconds, and then, a
day or two from now, some poor herring gull would end up choking to death on one of them. I felt bad. I vowed not to stick googly eyes in stupid places again and I apologise profusely to any seagull chicks I may have inadvertently orphaned.
With my loaded bike leaning against the beach's metal railing an old couple walked by.
“Was it worth it?” the man asked.
Seeing my luggage he probably thought I'd cycled for days or weeks to reach this place and not just six miles on my first day.
“Yes, it is,” I replied.
To be honest, if this had been the last thing I saw at the end of my estimated five thousand miles it would still have been worth it. It is inexplicably magnificent. The feeling of being baffled was wonderful. Why did it make me feel sad to see an iron man up to his waist in freezing cold sea water? I've no idea but it did.
The coastal path, the Sefton Way, continued on smooth tarmac by the sea. A sign told me a mere fifteen miles away was Southport. Was I really going to be able to cycle the whole distance on a lovely seaside path? Well, no, obviously I wasn't. Britain's cycle paths may be improving but there's still a hell of a long way to go. The path quickly fired me into an housing estate and, with no further signs to give me a clue, I had to find my own way out and ended up on a dual carriageway.
The air temperature wasn't particularly cold for this time of year, but the wind was – remember, we're trying to be positive – invigoratingly powerful and refreshingly in my face. I put my head down and pedalled into it. Southport and its funfair eventually appeared.
The tabloids may not have dubbed Southport the capital of anything, but thanks to local Barbara Pratt it was the first British resort to launch its own perfume. Apparently, it captures “the essence of Southport”. I'm not sure there's such a large market for smelling like fish 'n' chips with a hint of sewage outfall. But then Mrs Pratt went one better and created a fragrance for the town's non-league Southport FC, described as “woody with aquatic notes”. Let's hope “woody” here refers to something floral rather than the Urban Dictionary's definition. On launch day, the players covered themselves in it and won five nil, either a reflection of the perfume's luck or how effectively it repelled the opposing team.
As I entered the town along the coast road I saw an ice cream van parked up on the seafront. What could be more British, I thought, than attempting to eat a frozen dessert while an icy wind tried to remove it from its supporting cone? Bloody nothing, that's what. I scored me a 99 and sat on the sea wall thinking that perhaps a Cup-a-Soup would have been a better option.
The reason I'd headed to Southport was to visit a museum the likes of which exists nowhere else in the world. The British love their gardens and what is a garden without a lawn mower? Quirky eccentricities are also very British. Enter Southport's own British Lawnmower Museum, a venue that brings both of these things together and a mere three pounds allows you to see the magic.
The place is only small – three or four rooms – but it's rammed with gardening machinery, so rammed in fact that it's hard to concentrate on any one thing. While examining one piece of machinery your eyes are distracted by the next piece seemingly entangled within it. Unless of course, like me, you're not that interested in lawnmowers and then it just looks like some mad bloke's garden shed.
As well as a history of grass cutters they have a room entitled Lawnmowers of the Rich and Famous full of celebrity pieces. Coronation Street's Hilda Ogden donated a mower as did Paul O'Grady. Was his mower adorned with a pink, fluffy handle and a leopard-skin grass collector when he used it in his own garden or was this just an addition for the museum's benefit? We'll never know.
One interesting sort of celebrity piece comes from Britain's last hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, who had personally stretched the necks of four hundred ne'er-do-wells and, presumably, a handful of unfortunate innocents, such is the nature of capital punishment. He was paid £15 per execution, which incidentally, according to a sign in the museum, was the cost of the mower he had donated, as if perhaps his grass cutter had the same value as a human life. Regardless, in the museum's only attempt at drama, albeit slightly tasteless, his mower hangs from the ceiling by a noose.
A glass cabinet includes a collection of smaller items from celebrities lower down the food chain. Trowels and gardening forks have been donated by the likes of Vanessa Feltz, Timmy Mallett and Alan Titchmarsh, although surely he stills needs his gardening gear.
In the same cabinet was a dibber from comedian Lee Mack. He had a couple of reasons to be annoyed, aside from any association with the aforementioned Z-listers. The museum managed to spell his name incorrectly, an impressive feat for a moniker consisting of just seven letters. Not only that but his tool lay dangerously close to that of Fred Talbot, a man who, given his sexually deviant past, you probably want to keep your tool well clear off.
I have less than zero interest in lawnmowers but there was something utterly charming about the museum and it seemed like the ideal place to visit on the first day of this very British adventure. I said goodbye and turned the bike inland. Three miles later I arrived at a campsite, or the muddy field of a farm as it would be more accurately described if I wasn't being positive. I was the only customer. After all, early April is a bloody stupid time of year to go camping in Britain.
For my first night on the road I pitched my tent in the windbreak shadow of a huge barn and, despite the early time of day, fell asleep for an hour. What was wrong with me? I'd only cycled about thirty miles. After shaking myself back to consciousness I decided to stretch my legs. A one-mile walk brought me to The Richmond. The sign outside advertised a special offer: “Carvery and ice cream for £6.25”. I don't know about you, but I prefer my carvery with gravy. Inside it looked uninspiringly like a Brewers Fayre, and it is one of Joseph Holt's 120 pubs, but if I was going to avoid pub chains, especially given there was absolutely nowhere else around here, I was going to be very thirsty.
After a couple of pints I returned to my tent as the first spits and spots of deliciously cool rain tumbled from the sky. Once safely inside, this turned into a pitter-patter, then a light drumming and it wasn't long before it sounded like a team of builders were pouring buckets of water over my tent.
I'd enjoyed my day in Merseyside but already I realised that, despite this being a multi-month tour of one tiny island, there was still so much I'd never see. I could have, for example, visited St Helens, Britain's teenage pregnancy capital. Or maybe Widnes, once Britain's chemical capital but now perhaps on a downer. Back in 1888 it was described as the “dirtiest, ugliest and most depressing town in England”. When I typed the phrase “something positive about Widnes” into Google it returned a blank page. If I wanted to keep this ride upbeat it was probably best to avoid such places. But one day for Merseyside wasn't enough, but that's all it was allowed to have. And it would be the same story for Greater Manchester tomorrow.
*
I woke up to a delightfully grey morning of light drizzle. It's never nice to pack your tent away wet, especially my tent. Its outer and inner are permanently fastened together and so there's a good chance that when you unpack it again both are soaked through. That's not such an issue if you're erecting your tent in tropical heat – it dries out immediately – but today there didn't seem to be any heat on offer, tropical or otherwise. It was unseasonably Arctic.
An hour or so after setting off I found myself on the outskirts of Wigan. As the pie capital of Britain you get the impression that meat-stuffed pastries are a big deal around here. And if a pie won't provide you with enough carbs, you can pop along to Galloways in the town centre and they'll do you “a pie on a barm cake”. I think that's the most northern phrase I've ever written.
The town also hosts the World Pie Eating Championships. Originally the aim was to eat as many pies as possible in a set time. Anthony “The Anaconda” Danson scoffed a record-beating seven in three minutes. But to meet government healthy eating guidelines – as if pie-eaters ever cared about those – th
e competition was changed a few years back to the fastest time to eat a single pie. The record is 22.53 seconds.
Over the years the competition has been beset with more controversy than FIFA. First off, a vegetarian option was added a few years back but the meat-free pie was only 60% the volume of the standard. In 2007 a competitor's dog went all Scooby Doo and ran riot at the pie stand, eating twenty and damaging ten others. The contest nearly had to be cancelled. In 2007, the organisers ran out of pies before the competitors were finished and in 2005 there was a four-man protest when it turned out the pies had come from nearby Farnworth instead of Wigan. But the most serious gaffe occurred in 2014 when the results had to be voided after the competition ended up with the wrong size of pie. Apparently the batch of pastries intended for the event was mistakenly routed to a local divorce party. It's my hope that, whenever the name of Wigan is mentioned on the news in future, you'll forever conjure up the unbearably sad image of a group of middle-aged women sitting in a working men's club celebrating the end of a love-less marriage with a massive pile of over-sized pies.
I was approaching Parbold, unfortunately famous around here for its inclusion in the expression “Parbold Hill”. I struggled up the steep slope with untested legs, the sweat on my forehead mixing with the rain. The bike was heavy. I'd packed too much stuff. You'd think I'd know by now.
Under the workload I was taking heavy slurps of water and had emptied my two bottles. I'd need to find some more and soon. And then it appeared: A church with a version of the now-hackneyed Stay Calm government poster. This one said Stay Calm and Trust God. I leant the bike against its railings and hunted around the building for a tap and – lo and behold! – God provided or, in reality, a long-dead plumber had provided. God can't take the credit for the water unless he's equally willing to own up to AIDS, ISIS and Donald Trump.
Route Britannia, the Journey South: A Spontaneous Bicycle Ride through Every County in Britain Page 2
