Two well-groomed twenty-something blondes, who might have been in Hollyoaks but weren't, sat at a table sipping prosecco and probably taking about Botox. The cultivated air disappeared rapidly when a young bloke with Tourette's came in with his family. They kept shushing him, which only made him worse.
Everyone sat at their tables. The bar was just a place to buy drinks. This wasn't a pub for casual conversation with strangers, especially ones that once had the opportunity for intimacy with partially famous scratters.
Cycling home later I got lost again. After ten minutes of hopeless pedalling I was getting worried. I didn't have any pockets and so, pannier-free, I'd left my phone back at the tent. I asked a bloke waiting at a junction if he knew where the campsite was. He'd never heard of Royal Vale and, worryingly, his own phone wouldn't find it. Wonderful. Eventually, with the light failing, I mentioned another business I'd seen near the campsite and he assured me it was down the road I was on. What I also learnt was that the map the site had given me was printed upside down, with south at the top. That's quite a useful-to-know little detail. I'd set off in entirely the wrong direction.
*
It rained all night and was still drizzling in the morning. Fortunately I didn't have far to go today. I waited for the rain to stop around ten and then packed up and set off to Jodrell Bank, British engineering at its finest.
Google Maps told me it was easy: Just a straight three mile trip – no deviations – up the same lane as I'd accidentally stumbled upon the day before. But after four miles I was getting concerned. Two women on horseback sent me back the way I'd come, then right, then left at the church and then another mile and a half. Even Google was getting lost around here.
Eventually I stumbled into the Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre and what educational fun it was. There were loads of interactive toys demonstrating stuff like the effects of black holes as well as heat-sensitive imaging devices in which my head seemed to glow a brighter white than anyone else's. I hoped this was down to having cycled in rather than a sign I need to increase my blood pressure medication.
There were also videos to show how its massive dish had been involved in the Space Race, sometimes helping the Russians as well as the Americans, demonstrating how wonderfully cross-border science can be. They'd probably even work with ISIS if they were asked. Maybe they could build a big ship and send them all into space, maybe in the direction of the Sun.
There was an half-hour lecture about star formation. I'd studied some of this stuff before with the Open University but I suspected it was a bit technical for some of the people there when the first man to raise his hand in the Q & A session asked, “Yes, but how are stars actually made?”, something the lecturer had been banging on about for the previous thirty minutes.
I walked outside to go and stand in the shadow of the huge, 76-metre dish. At the time it was constructed it was the largest radio telescope in the world, although now it's only the third largest moveable one, which still isn't bad. Most interesting from a British engineering point of view was that, in the 50s, it had been budgeted at £120,000, equivalent to £3.25M nowadays, but eventually cost £700,000. That's quite a miscalculation. Did someone mention HS2?
From the dish I headed out east to Gawsworth to find another suggestion I'd been given for Cheshire, the odd story that is the grave of Maggoty Johnson. In life, during the 18th century, Maggoty had been known as Samuel and was a musician, actor, playwright and one of Britain's last jesters. He designed a tomb in the woods on Maggoty Lane for his faithful servant, but, being around in superstitious times, her brother refused her burial on unconsecrated ground and so Sammy took the spot himself. So there he lies, in Maggoty Woods, buried without religious fuss, like someone's pet gerbil, but in a slightly grander enclosure.
I cycled back to a sign I'd seen earlier in the village: “Local Shop”. Obviously no one around here watches The League of Gentlemen or, if they do, they clearly weren't worried about inviting comparisons to Royston Vasey's piglet-suckling shop owner, Tubbs, and her demonic husband, Edward.
On the door of the shop was a sign that said: “As seen on the BBC”. I had to ask.
“It's a community shop, not run for profit,” said the lady behind the counter. “We have around forty volunteers, and the Beeb were interested in the story.”
That's one hell of an effort just to keep a shop in the village alive, but an important one. A village without a pub, shop or post office is a dead one. I'd already seen lots of these on my ride and I would see many, hopelessly many, more in the coming weeks. This is what happens when we all use supermarkets.
When the shop lost its licence to be a sub-post office in 2009 and the revenue that brought in, the locals decided to change the system. And running it for love certainly affected the enthusiasm of the staff. Rather than a typically sullen nineteen-year-old depressed that she couldn't find a better job elsewhere, the two volunteers today were bouncily happy to be there.
“It's my first day today,” said a second lady behind the counter. “This is the first pie I've had to heat,” she added proudly, handing me my steaming local meat and potato pastry. It was wonderful.
It was time to locate my first mud-free bed of the tour. Maggoty Johnson might have been a jester but so was Dave, my host for the evening. Visiting the grave had been his suggestion.
Back in 2005 I produced a comedy sketch show in Nerja, a small tourist town on the south coast of Spain where I lived. It was a reckless venture. I'd never done anything like that before and was just making it up as I was going along, a lot like this bike ride. Between us we wrote the entire thing but once per show Dave had his own segment. He would appear as José Maria, the Jazz Poet, a Spanish, painfully drug-addled verse-meister with a huge, two foot-long doobie. He would recite his own incoherent, narcotic-related poems over an awkwardly spiky, electro-jazz backing track. It was surreal stuff. Half the audience would laugh at him without really knowing why, while the rest would stare at him in open-mouthed silence. Yes, that was the sort of show we were putting on. If 50% of the audience laughed we considered it a victory.
“I still can't believe to this day that you said, yes, let's put José Maria in it,” he said. I smiled at the memory. “And I still remember looking through those sunglasses, at the crowd, while performing it and thinking to myself, 'What the fuck is going on?'”
“Yeah,” I replied. “I had a few moments like that too.”
They'd been fun times, although not always for the audience.
Dave's home was now in Congleton, also known as Beartown. Back in the 1600s, in the days before Amazon's powerful discounting, the town had been saving up to buy a big ol' expensive Bible. Unfortunately, the town's main draw, bear-baiting, was suffering for want of a decent fighter and so, when it came time to make the purchase, the bloke in charge of the purse strings decided to spend the money on a large, aggressive bear instead. This might have done little for the religious education of the local community but surely made church services a lot less dull.
For a town with painful traffic problems, the centre of Congleton is a quaint, little place. Dave took me to the Olde Kings Arms, a pub with a unique history. Tunnels beneath the pub supposedly once led to the town jail so that prisoners could get one last drink before taking another tunnel to the churchyard where they would be hanged. I asked the barmaid if we could have a look at them. She went away to find out but came back with bad news.
“Sorry, guys, it's just not safe.”
The landlord appeared.
“Do the tunnels really exist?” I asked him.
“Oh yes. We use one as a cellar. But they're bricked up.”
“And no one's ever unblocked them?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“You could open them up and make a tourist attraction of them.”
“Hmm.”
He didn't seem convinced.
*
After a great meal made by Jacquie, Dave's missus, and a comfortable night's sle
ep I was back in the centre of Congleton, this time alone.
I'd been told to try a regional delicacy, the oatcakes from a shop on the high street. To my mind, oatcakes are Scottish biscuits that require more saliva than I can usually muster, but not here. These ones are plate-sized oatmeal pancakes. There was a choice of fillings and I opted for sausage and cheese, a lovely if gooey and difficult to eat breakfast.
“Are these a Cheshire speciality?” I asked.
“No, actually they're from Staffordshire,” replied the owner. “That's where we're from.”
“So why are you here?”
“The Cheshire water is better.”
“Traitor,” I said.
“Yes, we are,” he smiled.
My plan had been to visit the town's museum to find out more about the tunnels but it wasn't open until midday – two hours away – and I didn't know how long today's hilly escapades were going to take. Instead I asked the women in the tourist office about them.
“Do they really exist?”
“There are catacombs beneath the town hall.”
“But tunnels linking the prison to the pub and to the church?”
“I don't know. You can only go down so far and then they're bricked off.”
I couldn't help thinking it would pull in the punters if you could get down there and walk the walk of the recently condemned. But no one seemed too bothered to see if the story was true. Maybe they were worried it wasn't and, with the death of their legend, all they'd have to fall back on was that killer bear.
I headed eastwards into the soggy hills of Staffordshire. The temperatures were low under a grey sky but the air was perfectly still.
Staffordshire has a number of claims to fame. Apparently, according to the Stafford Post, its Cannock Chase is the place in Britain you're most likely to see a werewolf. And from that we can deduce the Stafford Post is the newspaper in which you're most likely to see a load of bollocks. And then there's Tamworth, Staffordshire's second most populous town, which is both Britain's obesity capital and its teenage pregnancy capital. Maybe the chubby girls can't run away from the horny lads fast enough.
Staffordshire also has two records. One is that the munitions storage depot at RAF Fauld near Hanbury was the location of Britain's largest ever explosion. Its 1944 blast left a crater 250 yards wide and 100 feet deep and killed seventy. The other record is the place I was visiting next, Flash, Britain's highest village.
Once off the hilly A54 there was a steady gradient on the most peaceful road you're likely to find in the southern half of Britain. Over a period of fifty minutes only two cars passed me. A rabbit hopped along the road without a care in the world. A pheasant marched across the tarmac free of any fear of being squashed flat. The only sound was the occasional metallic squeak from my bike and my own heavy breathing. The colours were muted greens and browns, and dampness was everywhere, with dry stone walls so moss-covered they looked like they'd been upholstered.
I suddenly had a feeling of utter contentment. I was cycling around Britain and actually enjoying it. The scenery was great and the traffic was elsewhere. These weren't the temperatures I preferred, just a few degrees above zero, but I was overcome by an inner peacefulness. I was Buddha on a bike.
Eventually I reached Flash, sitting at 1518 feet in the Peak District National Park. It's a small collection of stone houses, a church, a pub that was unfortunately closed today and a primary school.
I loved its name. In fact, I like any adjectival town name. When it's placed before a typical shop or service it takes on a new meaning. Flash Primary sounds like a feeder school for Eton, except that, due to the village's tiny population, it's now closed down. Of course, adding a descriptive town name to a service works the other way too. There's a village in Scotland called Dull.
Coming down the other side of the hill towards Leek, the wind chill of the steady descent dropped the temperatures farther still. It was nipple-stiffeningly cold. Fortunately, after a mile or so, and still out in the wastes of the moorland, The Winking Man appeared to offer some restoring warmth and a pint of really quite nice Burton's Ale. I found a snug corner and defrosted my extremities.
Resuming the ride, the temperatures hadn't become any warmer but it had now started to spit too. I passed a welcoming caravan site but saw its unwelcoming sign: “Sorry, no tents!” It was the sort of place that demanded a better class of customer. No canvas-dwellers here, just a resort exclusively for those who preferred holidaying inside tin cans.
The rain came down harder. It was another eight miles at least to the site I'd found on my phone and I suspected it might be back up another, even colder hill. And then, like a mirage, another sign appeared, one of those brown tourist ones that depicts a little tent next to a caravan. It was still early but with the clouds so low it didn't look like this rain was going anywhere soon. I ducked into their office and confirmed the lack of pattern to the amount I was paying each night. This one was just over a fiver, the cheapest yet and today, in the gradually thickening rain, my saviour.
As soon as I could, I threw the tent up and shoved myself and all the bags inside and waited for it to stop. But it didn't. I feel asleep for a couple of hours but the cold rain just came down harder and harder. The drumming on the tent's outside made it sound like I'd pitched my tent at a Stomp gig.
I've got two tents, a larger, heavier one that has a decent porch to allow cooking even in the roughest of conditions, and a smaller, lighter one without a porch at all. Have a guess which I'd brought with me? This was a dumb choice given the probability of moist weather in Britain. I'd remembered seeing a few groceries back in the office and so splashed back through the rain to see what stove-free meal I could cobble together.
“Oh sorry, is this a board meeting?” I asked as four people huddled over their desk.
“Yes, it is,” replied the lady who'd served me originally. “Do you want a job?” she said with a smile. “You can be managing director if you like.”
Seeing my dampened state she picked up the office kettle.
“Fancy a coffee?”
“That'd be great.”
I gathered from their shelves a motley collection of dinner ingredients: two Snickers bars, two packets of crisps and a packet of Jammy Dodgers. I put them on the counter.
“There you go,” I said. “That's my five a day.”
“I think it's supposed to be five fruits or vegs.”
I looked down at my E-number collection.
“S'alright,” I said. “Peanuts, potatoes and strawberries in the jam.”
I didn't possess a tin opener – all the food I was carrying was dried – but they also had a can of hot dog sausages. With the kind lend of an opener I scuttled back to my tent with my mug of hot coffee and hid from the rain for the rest of the evening, eating cold wieners from a tin, just like the Sultan of Brunei does when he's on holiday.
Even when the weather was as awful as it was today, it wasn't hard to be positive with such nice, kind people about. Well, it was a little bit hard, but freezing rain wasn't going to bring me down. Not yet at least.
The temperature dropped further and the rain got harder. To soak up more Britishness I put on my radio and tuned in to Radio Four. There was something about the station's gentle tones accompanied by the wind and rain outside that made it almost too homely to bear, like listening to a distant message from home while on a wave-tossed boat in the middle of the Atlantic. Eventually the tiring batteries of my little wireless couldn't compete with the heaving drumming of the leaking sky and so I had to give up.
The night was freezing. I realised that, as a result of my lack of preparations, I'd packed my older, more knackered ground mat – one I'd had since the Boer War – which, over time, had compressed to the approximate thickness of a sheet of paper. It really wasn't up to the job of a cold, damp floor. I put on a warmer t-shirt and a second fleece but it still wasn't enough. I barely slept, shivering through the night. Tomorrow I'd have to stock up on some Briti
sh spring-proof evening wear, or buy a three-bar electric heater and a generator.
*
After a night that lasted at least thirty-six hours the morning sun rose and gently heated the tent's insides. I lay there, recharging my body, like a lizard on a rock, until half past nine when I decided to venture out. The sun might have been warm through the skin of my tent but out in the open air it was still bitterly cold.
I popped back to reception to return the coffee mug and tin opener.
“Did you sleep well?” the lady asked.
I told her the truth.
“Is there no room in your budget for a bit of luxury?”
Sadly, there wasn't. This trip wasn't the £1-a-day of last year's adventure but British hotels are vastly overpriced. It wasn't unusual to pay £15 for a clean and comfortable room in Spain. Even this seemed expensive after the £6 I paid in Ukraine. Britain's hotels, even Premier Inns, are typically ten times this at least. And you sometimes have to share a room with Lenny Henry.
The lady's husband told me they used to run a campsite on Loch Lomond. He said the Scots took some getting used to.
“They were great people but you couldn't tell them what to do or else they'd just call you 'an English bastard'. You had to treat them carefully. Since we left the camp it's changed hands three times. The new owners couldn't hack it.”
She was more disparaging about some of the English tourists who visited.
“The Scottish don't mind the rain. They're used to it. But you'd get people from Kent coming there, looking up at the sky and saying, 'How long's it been like this?' They thought it was our fault.”
I returned to my tent and started to pack away. A smiling Mrs Campsite came out again with another cup of coffee for me.
“We were making it anyway and thought you'd like one. It'll warm your hands.”
Did I have to leave this place? Well, yes, because I had an appointment down the road that evening in Stone.
Route Britannia, the Journey South: A Spontaneous Bicycle Ride through Every County in Britain Page 4
