By now it was close to eleven thirty. I returned to my appointment and got in line with about twelve others. I was suddenly six years old again.
A young blond woman, not much older than twenty, appeared ahead of the queue, wearing a bright red cloak. She would be our guide. We were about to go on a quest through the universe.
To be honest, the interactive bit of the Doctor Who Exhibition was a bit rubbish. The TARDIS was under attack from giant space squid, a challenge frequently faced by NASA, and, as a team, we had to cross the cosmos and collect three crystals for reasons that now escape me. Peter Capaldi's Doctor would appear on a monitor from time to time and take the piss out of us. Finding the crystals wasn't very difficult. On whichever world we appeared, Skaro or wherever the hell those Weeping Angels live, they were just lying about the place.
Bless her, the guide worked her socks off and had the crack-addled enthusiasm of a children's television presenter, geeing us up and clapping her hands like a SeaWorld seal. Whatever she was paid, she was worth double.
The best part of the whole experience was when we entered the TARDIS itself. Six of us then got to control the time machine as we hurtled towards the surface of a planet. Lights flashed and the floor shook as the Doctor screamed instructions from a screen and the planet drew closer and closer. In the end we crashed. But that's always likely to happen if six different people try to drive the same vehicle. Given the events and the speed of our approach, it was a remarkably soft landing. In real life there'd have been a few casualties. I didn't care. I'd flown the TARDIS!
It was the next part of the day I was more interested in, the exhibition of props and costumes. It was great to see the evolution of the TARDIS interiors, the oldest one with home-made Dymo labels on its control panel saying ridiculous things like “YEAR-OMETER”.
And boy, were some of the early costumes rubbish. A black and white bee character from what is generally considered to be the worst Doctor Who story ever, The Web Planet, looked like the sort of thing a five-year-old would knock together for a school fancy dress party. Its eyes were clearly made from an old pair of tights.
Each Doctor had his own look and their outfits were all displayed next to each other. The old Doctors started off dour but classy and then descended from there. By the time we got to the mid-1980s – Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy's era – the pretence of the time traveller's style had evaporated completely along with the BBC's enthusiasm for the show. You could almost hear the production department screaming, “Let's sink this ship as quickly as possible.” Sylvester McCoy in particular looked like he'd been dressed by a committee of asylum inmates.
But the creatures old and new, like the Daleks, the Ood and the Sontarans, were great. And if you wanted to, via an instructional video on a loop, you could learn to walk like a Cyberman, or like one of those freaky scarecrows from the Family of Blood episode. Today though, nobody seemed particularly interested in adding this talent to their CV.
And then to the gift shop. Christ, there's a lot of Doctor Who crap. Fifteen quid for a sonic screwdriver was out of my budget, and it probably didn't work anyway, but I'd have taken a Cyberman's head mug if it hadn't been so heavy.
On the way out I noticed our bouncy guide was now on the ticket desk. The whole massive enterprise seemed to be run by a staff of about three.
“How many times a day do you have to do that?” I asked her.
“Depends,” she said with an enormous grin and perfect teeth. “Usually eight or nine.”
Bloody hell.
“And how do you keep up that level of enthusiasm?”
Drugs. Say lots and lots of drugs.
“The people,” she answered. “They're great. And every group is different. It's best when they come here dressed up as The Doctor or something.”
None of our group had dressed up. I felt we'd probably been a bit of a disappointment to her, merely a smelly cyclist and a handful of chubby, middle-aged Americans.
It was lunchtime. Cardiff's Caroline Street is locally known as Chippy Lane for the simple reason that it hosts a lot of chippies. It also contains Colin's Books, an adult magazine store with, ironically, the least sexy shop name on the planet.
I was told that a meal was invented on this street by Dorothy's, the oldest chippy here, and it's now replicated by all the others. Don't get excited. It's called “chicken off the bone” curry. It's a mass of shredded chicken and chips swimming in a rich curry sauce. It was very nice but, c'mon, it's chicken curry and chips.
On my way back to the campsite I had a look around Cardiff's indoor market. It's like a smaller, less chaotic version of the old monster in Budapest but with more foreign influences. I bought a couple of Welsh cakes for 30p each, a crumbly, half-thickness scone. They were alright but I suspect they should have had butter on them. It took me a good half hour to regenerate any saliva.
A little farther through town a muscular black bloke with dyed blond dreadlocks played bongos on a street bin in a repetitive and awkward 5/4 time while the people staffing the street stalls nearby looked on uncomfortably. I think they were just hoping he'd go away. It would have to be of his own volition. No one was going to challenge him.
Back at the tent I cooked up some food and listened to Radio Four. There was a series of travel programmes called Crossing Continents. Written down, that name looks fine, but spoken on the radio I was expecting a show about people who were angry at their lack of bladder control. Does no one think these things through?
*
Yesterday's predicted rubbish weather actually arrived this morning. Today I was supposed to be heading towards Merthyr Tydfil but I didn't fancy another Welsh drenching and I was just glad I was at least stranded in a city that still had places to explore.
In this weather I couldn't even boil water with my porchless tent and so I moved into the site's laundry room and made coffee. Vance came in.
“What's with those animals around the castle?” I asked him. Cardiff Castle has a series of stone beasts peeking out from over its wall. “I mean, the lions and bears make sense for a castle but what's the story with the seal?”
“Ah,” he said. “It's Billy the Seal. I named my son Billy.”
“You named your son after a seal?”
“No, just a coincidence.”
Billy though wasn't just a stone seal. She, for Billy was a female, was tangled in fishing nets and brought to live in Victoria Park from 1912 until her death in 1939. She was always popular but never more so than when the River Ely overflowed and Billy escaped and went swimming down Cowbridge Road East.
With breakfast eaten and coffee slurped I shuffled to the town's large museum through a blanket of rain. It's one of those places where you start by carefully examining each item. You then start to speed up, walking faster and faster, once you realise that if you spent as long on everything as you had on the first item you'd actually die of old age in there.
There was some chilling art relating to Mametz Wood, a First World War battle that saw the end of several thousand Welshmen, as well as a modern art installation containing five huge video panels, each showing a person – doctor, barmaid, orchestra conductor and other walks of life – each rotating in darkness. The work was dedicated to the memory of the Aberfan disaster in which 116 children and 28 adults died in a landslide in the 60s. The museum wasn't as grim as I'm making it sound. They also had the world's largest known leatherback turtle, weighing nearly 1000 kg and washed ashore in north Wales. It had died tangled in discarded fishing nets. No, that's still grim, isn't it? Let's move on.
After walking about ten miles through the museum I went back into town, still under a leaking sky, and headed to Rummer Tavern that claims to be the oldest in Cardiff. I ordered a pint of ale, Sleeping Brew Tea, from the barmaid.
“Will that be a straight glass or with a handle?”
I didn't care. Why would I?
“Whatever. A straight glass,” I said. “Does it make a difference to the flavour?”
“No,” she replied, “but the hipsters like handles. You'll have to grow yourself a beard and get one with a handle.”
From there I went back to Dorothy's for an early dinner, this time for another local speciality I'd never tried, chips, cheese and gravy. I'd no idea how big it was going to be and so I asked the lady behind the counter – Dorothy? – if I needed a pie with it as well.
“I don't think so, babe,” she replied, as though I'd asked a stupid question.
She brought the huge brown and yellow splat to my table. It wasn't awful, but it's less a meal and more a sloppy, incoherent mess.
*
This morning the weather was even worse. The continents had shifted. Wales was suffering a monsoon. Would I ever be able to leave Cardiff? I liked the place but there were other counties I needed to see. This would be my last day here no matter what tomorrow threw at me. I was leaving Cardiff then even if I were required to swim. As it turned out, staying was the right choice. Today I'd have drowned.
Back in town, dripping wet, I was approached by a young fella in a suit. Ah bugger, I thought. He's going to try to sell me something.
“I'm doing a business project,” he said with a smile. He pulled an item of stationery from his pocket. “And I have to trade this paper clip for anything you have on you. But it can't be money. And then I'll trade whatever you give me and see how far I can go.”
The only thing I had on me – apart from my jacket and he wasn't getting that – was my bag of googly eyes.
“There you go,” I said.
I gave him a small handful. God knows what he was going to get for them, but I estimated he had at least quadrupled his initial investment. I still have his paper clip. It's the favourite one I own.
I've sometimes thought back and wondered what was the final value of the item he ended up with. He looked like a capable sort of bloke, but I could have been very wrong. Maybe he was rubbish. Perhaps he'd begun a couple of hours earlier with a flat screen telly and twelve trades later all he had was that paper clip.
I wandered around, ducking from shelter to shelter. I had a look at the menu for The Clink, a restaurant run by prisoners from Cardiff Jail, but it was out of my budget, although as far as prison food goes it all sounded pretty good. I wondered if they served it to you on compartmentalised moulded plastic trays, one sloppy ladleful here and there, while the cigarette ash of the kitchen staff dropped into your mash potato. Probably not.
By eight in the evening the rain had stopped for the first time in fifty-odd hours. My journey wouldn't end in Cardiff.
*
It was Thursday morning. I popped into reception to say goodbye. I felt like Vance had become a friend in the time that I was there. He'd enjoyed his speed-dating the previous evening. There was one woman he'd particularly liked but if it didn't pan out – he would find out what she thought of him that evening – then at least he wouldn't be quite so nervous next time. I hope he finds someone. He seemed like a nice bloke.
Unfortunately, my bike developed a new malady. On the edge of Cardiff I stopped for a break. When I set off again the chain jammed. One link of it was now twisted. This was causing the chain to jump off the cogs as I pedalled.
I cycled out of town on the Taff Trail. Like most cycle paths it was far from direct but it was taking me in the direction I wanted to go and beside a pretty stretch of river. I decided to stick with it for a while, at least until it took me somewhere daft. This occurred a few minutes later when I went on a circuitous tour of a housing estate in Caerphilly. Abandoning the official route I arrived at its famous castle – the largest in Wales and second largest in Britain – an impressive building with a collapsed, leaning tower. A tour guide was telling a large bunch of Americans he'd seen a Welsh leaflet claiming it leant at an angle “steeper than the Leaning Tower of Pizza”.
Caerphilly was the first Anytown I'd come across in Wales. The cities aside, the country seemed to have done its best to snub the chains. At least there was a local baker, Glanmer, next door to Greggs. I bought two pasties, a chicken and ham, and a beef and Stilton. They were twice the price of their large chain rival but, then again, if you put pieces of meat in your products – not something that concerns Greggs - it's going to get expensive. They were worth every penny.
And then I hit county twenty-five, Merthyr Tydfil, just over a quarter of the way through this Britain-wide quest. This is not to be confused with the sick note capital of Britain, the town of Merthy Tydfil.
Climbing towards the valleys, in the village of Senghenydd, there's a painful memorial to those lost in the treacherous industry for which this area is famous. An explosion here in 1913 killed 440 miners. The negligent mining company was fined a mere 55p per death. The website whatsthecost.com tells me that, in today's money, this is something like £50, about the cost of one quarter of a cheap coffin, which, sadly, is all they would have needed if the crooked company had bothered to gather up their remains. The garden has a sort of circle of death, detailing the fatalities elsewhere throughout Welsh mining's history. It's grim reading. What's even sadder is that this bleak period, when sons and fathers went off to their doom for the privilege of extracting a fuel that would ultimately devastate the Earth's environment, is seen around these parts as “the good old days”.
From Trelewis I headed east over a large hill and moors with a strong headwind but pretty views looking down on to distant towns. At least the sun was finally out again. Arriving in Markham it was easy to see why this place is called The Valleys. Two deep, tree-lined channels, one main road in each, disappeared northwards. More valleys run parallel off to the east. It was like the whole world led to this bit of Wales.
The next tiny county, Blaenau Gwent, is the smallest in Wales although it's also one of the most densely populated. It has a couple of claims to fame. Its county town, Ebbw Vale has Britain's highest number of people on anti-depressants, according to the Daily Mail,. And it's also the town with Britain's cheapest rents. Just think how many pills they'd be popping if they had to pay London prices.
There might have been an air of gloom around these Welsh hills, especially when you consider its tough history and what the Daily Mail reports as its medical solution, but the surprising thing was that, for such a ruggedly attractive area, there appeared to be little tourist infrastructure. Campsites were certainly in short supply. I carried on northwards to Tredegar to the only campsite I'd seen around these parts. They had to put me on a special field because their normal one was under water from the last three days of rain.
I decided to look at my bike again. The chain was still making a rubbing noise. And it was then, under closer inspection, I realised it was fitted incorrectly. When I'd relinked it ten days ago I'd fed it through the wrong part of the dangly down bit whose name I still haven't learned. Now, I'm a technical buffoon, obviously, but why the hell hadn't the so-called professionals at Halfords spotted it when they checked the gears over? I unclipped the link, put the chain in the correct place and the rubbing stopped. The mangled chain still jumped off the gears though. You can't have everything.
*
Today something truly horrible was going to happen. It was horrible when it happened to me, and it will be horrible when you read it. Or funny. That depends on you. But if you are currently eating anything covered in a thick gravy or, say, chocolate sauce I'd skip this bit until you've finished your meal.
I woke up to a lovely sunny day. I left my tent and had a stroll to the lake at the campsite. Several pairs of Canada geese were swimming about, followed by their little, yellow-green, fluffy chicks. What a scene of bucolic loveliness, I thought. One of the chicks came ashore and walked with a limp before falling over. The foxes'll have him, I thought. It didn't seem so bucolically lovely any more.
After breakfast I headed into Tredegar to see what I'd heard was a “dominating clock tower” in the main street. So undominating was it that I couldn't even find it.
I popped into a hardware store to buy meths f
or my stove.
“I bought some myself the other day,” the man on the counter said. “I like to use it to clean light switches. Maybe I should stock some.”
Like every other hardware store in Britain, yes, Alan Sugar, maybe you should sell meths.
I knew there would be hills today to begin with but nothing terrible came my way. On the outskirts of Ebbw Vale I found the rock monument to Aneurin Bevan, the designer of the NHS, the place where he once made a great speech. The main rock represented Bevan himself, and there were three others, one for his home town Tredegar, his constituency Ebbw Vale and another, probably to represent the perceived weight of the NHS as it hangs around the Tories necks.
The route took me across beautiful, wild moorland. The sun was shining and the riding was great even with my gears failing as they did. All was well.
In Blaenavon I saw the old, now closed ironworks and decided to stop for lunch. I walked into a very full chip shop. Everyone was standing around; no one was being served.
“If you want chips you'll have to wait,” said the woman in charge of the fat.
I waited and waited and several more people came in behind me. Eventually the chips were ready and we all walked away with our own paper packages, mine containing a fish cake too. I sat on a bench on a little square and ate my meal in the sunshine. The fish cake was tasty but some of the chips were a little underdone. Perhaps they'd rushed them to feed the queue as quickly as possible.
For almost the entire ride to Newport I barely had to pedal. I freewheeled downhill with a lovely cool breeze evaporating the sweat from the earlier hills still on my forehead. Life couldn't have been better. My stomach gurgled in a way it sometimes does. It was nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.
I'd entered the county of Torfaen and passed close to the village of Varteg that had recently seen a battle between local residents and Welsh language campaigners. Varteg, y'see, isn't Welsh – its alphabet has no letter 'V' – and there was a proposal to Welshify it. Unfortunately, this would have meant changing the village's name to Y Farteg. A number of dismayed locals described their horror and humiliation if having to give their address as Fart Egg. The residents came up trumps. Of all the town names the campaigners wanted to localize, they let one go.
Route Britannia, the Journey South: A Spontaneous Bicycle Ride through Every County in Britain Page 13
