Inside was a large bloke, also around sixty. He struggled to move around behind his counter. Keeping to the theme of British health food I ordered a bacon and sausage sandwich.
“You're doing what?” he asked.
I repeated what I'd said.
“Then this is on me.”
“No, c'mon,” I replied. “That's kind but you're a business.”
“Nah, four lads came through the other day doing Land's End to John o'Groats an' I gave 'em theirs free too.”
“Well, thank you.”
“My son's into all that. He's forty. A while back he did a marathon and then rode five hundred miles home. It's his birthday today. He's gone skiing.”
“Somewhere nice?”
Austria? Switzerland? The Pyrenees?
“Tamworth.”
“Oh.”
“It's indoor.”
“Britain's Obesity Capital,” I said.
“Eh?”
“Never mind.”
We started talking about charity rides, and then he mentioned how charities are corrupt, paying their staff rather than funding their cause, and we crawled down a political cul-de-sac.
“It'll all be fine once I'm Prime Minister,” he said. He knew how to solve Britain's problems. “I'd have all the unemployed sweeping the streets.”
“They do something like that in Spain.”
“Yeah? And the disabled.” He raised his eyes and tutted. “They wouldn't get any money off me. Fuckin' shirkers.”
That was a bit harsh. I think I'd stumbled into Alf Garnett's van.
“C'mon, lots of them can't work.”
“Bollocks. Fuck 'em.”
“You can't speak like that when you're Prime Minister.”
He looked directly at me.
“I can and I will.” Bloody hell, he was serious. “Enoch Powell did. He had it right.”
“What, rivers of blood and all that?”
“Yeah, all these coons comin' over!” he sneered.
Oh dear.
“Y'know,” he continued, “there was a young lad an' girl round here who killed someone recently. You know what I'd do to 'em?”
I could hazard a guess.
“I'd put 'em in a secure prison until they were eighteen...”
Well, that was a surprise.
“...and then I'd hang 'em.”
“Well, thanks for the sandwich,” I said, turning to leave.
He stopped ranting and smiled.
“Sorry to have lectured you.”
“No, it's fine,” I said. “It's just nice to meet the next Prime Minister.”
I'd now crossed the border into Shropshire and it was, if it's possible, even more rural than Herefordshire. The first town of any size was Ludlow, one of the loveliest places I'd visited so far. Its 11th century, medieval walled town and five hundred listed buildings would suggest it's all about history but, nowadays, it's more about food. It has an annual food festival and at one time was the only town in England with three Michelin-starred restaurants.
I was a little peeved I'd opted for that damn tasty but racist bacon and sausage sandwich so recently. There was no room for the delicious-sounding hot roast beef and horseradish sandwich being peddled by a van in the main square.
Just before Craven Arms, which is a town as well as a pub, I saw a sign for Stokesay Castle. My budget didn't allow for many entry fees but I figured the money I would've spent on the bacon butty could be channelled in a more cultured direction.
Stokesay Castle isn't really a castle at all but the best-preserved medieval fortified manor house in England and I enjoyed looking around it so much that when the young woman at the ticket desk told me I'd get my money back if I joined English Heritage I signed up immediately. Rather than shun places with entry fees I'd have to seek them out to squeeze as much value as I could from my £52. With 400 historical buildings to see, that worked out at 13p each. Even I could afford that.
I now turned left and headed towards the little village of Clun, not far from the Welsh border. I had someone to meet. The road seemed to be disappearing into rural oblivion. Nothing but empty fields and hills lay ahead. Shropshire should drop the 'Shrop' and just call itself The Shire. Maybe they could give out fake hobbit feet to everyone.
I'd been told the local youth hostel allowed camping in its grounds. When I got there, the place was locked up but there was another tent already set up. Apart from mine, this was the first tent I'd seen on this trip. April didn't seem to be such a popular month for camping in Britain.
Very soon, the tent's owner, Robin, turned up. We stood around our two-tent town and chatted. He's a keen cyclist who I only knew virtually from cycling forums and Facebook. He lives somewhere near Milton Keynes but was here doing out-and-back rides around Shropshire for a few days. He's a vet and seemed a happy chap and so it was a surprise when he said what he said.
“Did you know that vets have the most depression and highest suicide rates of any jobs?”
“Really? Why's that?”
“The public,” he replied, shaking his head. “The worst ones are usually those with Staffies.”
Recently one such owner had phoned his surgery, yelled angrily at his assistant and called her just about the worst thing he probably could. When the bloke turned up with his dog, Robin refused to examine it until he'd apologised to his assistant. Robin wasn't a physically imposing man but the bloke backed down and said he was sorry. Don't mess with Supervet!
We swapped stories and then, being British, went for a pint. First up was the 15th century pub, The Sun Inn, selling beer from the Three Tuns brewery, the UK's oldest, making beer since 1642, and then we staggered to the White Horse Inn, a place that brews its own ales. Over too many pints and a great English meal of wild boar paté and toast followed by pork and apple sauce stew with mustard mash we continued talking.
“Do you do cosmetic surgery on animals?” I asked jokingly.
I was imaging face lifts for ageing beagles or poodles with fake breasts.
“Well, it can happen,” he replied.
“Eh?”
“Some people want fake testicles for their dogs after they've been neutered.”
How odd, but maybe not. I knew that in Spain a lot of men refuse to have their dogs neutered because they see their pets inability to procreate as some reflection upon their own masculinity. If your own identity is that closely tied to that of your pet maybe you're less in need of a plastic surgeon than a psychiatrist.
To begin with Robin seemed a little reserved and so it was another surprise when he said he performed in pubs, singing and playing guitar.
“I've been in bands too. Doing covers, indie stuff. But I prefer doing it by myself,” he said. Then he smiled. “You get to keep all the money.”
“What were the bands called?”
“One was The Bandits, and then another one called Face to Face, which is a crap name.”
I love bands with rubbish names because I've been in a few. I started off in the mid-80s in a synth band called The Slaves of Circumstance but then the only member with any talent decided to leave. That left just me, playing one-fingered on keyboards, and Pat, a singer who aimed to emulate the limited vocal talents of Gary Numan and didn't quite manage it. We worked at the same place and another lad there kept doing impressions of Tuco, a character from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. For reasons long since forgotten, we changed the name of the band to Tuco Talks. This flummoxed everyone. At a working men's club in Blackburn we were in their “changing room” (i.e., the toilet) about to go on stage before a roomful of eighty-year-olds – octogenarians love Depeche Mode! – and the M.C. announced us.
“Now, please welcome two young lads from Blackburn. It's the first time they've played here: Two Coat Hooks!”
Now that's a great band name!
*
The next morning I said goodbye to Robin and cycled back to Craven Arms passing Aston-on-Clun, where I saw “the world famous” Arbor Tree. No, me neithe
r.
The weather suggested rain was imminent, a dull grey sky. The greens of the last few days ago were now washed out. The naked trees were covered in ivy climbing towards a sun that today was hidden from view.
I decided on a plan. Rather than lug all my gear around unnecessarily, I'd find a campsite in Much Wenlock, dump my bags and then run off to see the local sights. The A49 was reasonably flat but when the route to Much Wenlock turned right I had mini-mountains for the final ten miles. I was up and down like a manic depressive in a lift.
I found a campsite in town and just £7 would get me a pitch, along with a promise to use my stove on a wooden pallet because arseholes like me kept setting fire to their grass. I said I didn't really need the pallet because my stove was raised from the ground, but then again I'd forgotten mine had exploded only a couple of days earlier.
I jumped back on to the bike and popped into the Cistercian Buildwas Abbey, a ruin but a good one, founded in 1135. I had the place to myself. At first this made me think perhaps people didn't care much for these amazing places until I realised what time it was and concluded it was empty because it was a weekday afternoon in April and everyone was at work.
Cycling away from my second religious building of the day, Wenlock Priory, I passed the rugged-sounding Bastard Hall, a 15th century, oak-panelled country house. It belonged to Richard le Bastard – a French Bastard I'm assuming – in 1267. At the time of writing, the place is up for sale for half a million quid if you'd like an address with some real oomph.
Tomorrow was St George's Day and Much Wenlock had a George and Dragon pub. It felt only right to go there and have a pint. I'd finished my riding for the day and so I left the bike at the site and walked back into town, past a little wood full of rabbits. For five o'clock the place was rammed, mostly with men who I assumed from their clothes were painters and decorators. One of them looked like the arse of his jeans had just had a run-in with an angry shark, his blue and white-striped underpants on view to the world.
Much Wenlock's poetry festival kicked off today but only for official invitees or if you wanted to pay top dollar to hear a serious-looking bloke with an African name who I'd never heard off. Tomorrow, though, it would open to the public. There was someone there I wanted to meet, someone with a job like no other.
*
I got up lazily, made coffee and breakfasted on a packet of double toffee cupcakes. There was no point in rushing. Nurse Verse wouldn't get going until eleven.
Yesterday's grey skies had been replaced by a much more cheery shade of blue. It was bloody cold though and the wind was getting up. I cycled back to the priory, where an old ambulance was parked up, awaiting patients. Outside, a woman, the coordinator of this enterprise, was talking to a Sikh fella, a magnificent-looking chap with a turban and a huge waxed moustache. He looked like he should have been something big in Bollywood. I made an appointment with Nurse Verse, the Emergency Poet, and was then interrogated for a little while.
“Will you be going to Cumbria?” asked the man.
I was a bit mesmerized by him. His skin appeared to glow, like he was made of gold.
“Hopefully.”
“I was there once, walking up Sca Fell,” he continued. “The weather was terrible. It was so windy it blew off my turban.”
I probably shouldn't have laughed because I quickly realised from his expression that this was a source of real pain for him, but, well, I did.
Another woman climbed out of the ambulance.
“The Emergency Poet will see you now.”
I entered the mobile clinic and what followed was a surreal experience. Nurse Verse instructed me to climb on to the couch and get myself comfortable.
“Now I want to ask you a few questions and then I'll prescribe a poem,” she said.
“Alright.”
This wasn't weird at all.
“First, can you remember the last time you stood by the sea?”
That was easy, watching iron men drown and seagulls choke to death at Crosby Beach twelve days ago.
“In your everyday life, what do you do to relax?”
“Maybe I'm weird but I'm always relaxed. Is that unusual?”
“I think it probably is. Do you read poetry?”
“Not much. In fact, hardly ever. But if I do I either love it or it annoys me intensely.”
“Yes,” she said, laughing. “A lot of it is terrible.”
She asked me about my favourite books, music and places.
“Can you describe your ideal room when you're old and grey and can't be bothered to move.”
“Just a comfortable chair and a room full of books.”
“A dog or a cat?”
“Yeah, a little dog.”
“And what would you have immediately to hand?”
“A pen, and a pad. And even though I've never smoked I always thought I'd fancy a pipe when I'm old.”
“Now then, do you have any condition that I could give you a poem for?”
I thought for a second.
“Tired legs?” I offered. “Or motivation to get going in a morning when it's bad weather and I don't want to leave.”
She searched through her folder of poems. It was my turn to ask the questions.
“Do you do this at the festival every year?”
“I do it all over the place,” she replied.
“What? Is this your job?” I asked incredulously.
She laughed.
“It's one of my jobs. I teach poetry at Worcester University and do other writerly things too.”
“Because this has got to be one of the strangest jobs in the world,” I said. “And great too.”
“Yes. It is great. I just completely made it up. There's no one else doing this. Next week we're at Stratford Literary Festival. The week after that we're in New Zealand.”
Wow, an international verse nurse!
“And do you write poetry yourself?”
“Yes.”
“I'll look you up online.”
“They're a bit rude actually.”
“Good. I like rude. Stuff like 'There once was a man from Nantucket'?”
“A lot ruder than that,” she said, extracting two sheets from her folder. “Right, I've got two poems for you.” She handed me The Table by Turkish poet Edip Cansever. “It's about a man piling things on a table. It's a metaphor for a life richly lived, which I think yours is.”
That was nice.
“And there's this one for inspiration.”
She gave me Variations on a Theme by Rilke written by Denise Levertov. It concluded with the words “I can”, just like Herefordshire. I looked at the photocopied sheets. She'd written “Take poems with good local ale at lunchtime!”
This felt like something that could only happen in Britain, an intelligent person doing something bonkers for the hell of it. She's called Deborah Alma, by the way. Check her out. And she was right; her poetry is gloriously filthy.
I cycled out of town, down lovely car-free lanes, to see the remains of a Roman city, the Wrekin standing tall in the distance. Watling Street, the Anglo-Saxon road that was paved by the Romans and connected the south-east to the rest of Roman Britain, originally terminated here at Wroxeter. It was later extended to Hadrian's Wall, olive oil and wine moving northwards, shortbread and aggressive gingers coming south.
Wroxeter, originally called Viriconium, or the place of werewolves, was the fourth largest Roman town in Britain, almost the same size as Pompeii. It took some effort to imagine how the city would have looked but you could get into the part if you wanted to. A dressing up box was available. I pulled out a toga but it looked like it had been used to wipe the face of a plague victim and so I decided against it.
The Wrekin – pronounced Ree-kin – is a famous 407-metre hill, a landmark visible for miles on the Shropshire Plain. The phrase “all around the Wrekin” is used locally to mean “the long way around” and it can even be used to forecast the weather.
If you can see the
Wrekin it's going to rain. If you can't see the Wrekin it's already raining.
Apparently, from the top on a good day, which doesn't sound very likely given that forecast, you can see fifteen counties.
A legend says the hill was created by a giant who wanted to kill everyone in Shrewsbury. He gathered a giant-sized spadeful of soil and set off towards the place, planning to dump the earth in the Severn to flood the town. A shoemaker was travelling in the opposite direction and carried a large sackload of footwear that needed to be repaired. When the giant asked him for directions, the shoemaker, wanting to save his countrymen, showed the giant his sack and told him he'd worn out all these shoes walking back from Shrewsbury. The giant couldn't be arsed to trudge that far and so dumped the soil, which became the Wrekin.
Even by the standard of legends this is complete bollocks. Using a back-of-a-fag-packet calculation, the Wrekin has a conservatively estimated volume of around 700 million cubic metres. The giant would have had to be around 6,000 metres tall, over two-thirds the size of Everest, to carry the Wrekin on a spade. Wherever he was in Shropshire he could've seen Shrewsbury and walked right across the county in thirty paces. Maybe I'm taking this too seriously.
The wind had become stronger, an icy knife in the face. As to be expected it was coming exactly from the direction I was cycling. A few miles farther and the quiet roads disappeared. I was in Shrewsbury, Shropshire's county town. I'd always thought the correct pronunciation was Shrose-bury, but the newspaper said 81% of people in and around the town prefer Shroos-bury, which makes it one of the few British towns to be pronounced as it's spelled.
It's a pretty town for a mid-afternoon food stop, full of spires and a stone bridge crossing a Severn that's already impressively wide even this far north. The town was heaving. In the main square people were fencing. I didn't know if this was a display for St George's Day or just the sort of thing people got up to in Shrewsbury.
Shrewsbury has a few unique features. It's got the world's oldest skyscraper, the world's longest running flower show and the world's oldest building to host a McDonald's, although I'm not sure that last one is much to be proud of.
Route Britannia, the Journey South: A Spontaneous Bicycle Ride through Every County in Britain Page 7
