Cheesemaking isn't the only demonstration in town. Just around the corner a sweet shop has their own. The next session wasn't for half an hour and so I decided to get some lunch beforehand. I nipped into the local chippy for a chicken and mushroom pie.
“Just a pie? No chips?” the shop owner asked sadly.
“No, it's alright.”
I was still wary of undercooked chips after the Newport Poo Disaster.
He took my money, got a pie from his freezer, pinged it in the microwave, put it in a Styrofoam container and handed it to me. Then he adopted a tone you'd normally reserve for talking to three-year-olds.
“I've given you a few chippies anyway,” he said in his soppy voice.
It didn't matter. Today's chips were properly cooked and so Cheddar was spared a potato-based horror.
With the pie eaten I was back at the sweet factory although, in reality, it was a room about the size of a single car garage, a rope slicing the place lengthways, one half for the audience and the other for the staff. A long bench on their side of the rope hugged the wall. On a stove, a sugary solution was boiling away like a little witch's cauldron.
The boss man was a chubby old dude whose presentation skills felt a little, well, autistic. He worked at his bench, hunched over, mumbling inaudibly into the far wall. He then went to the sink in the corner, washed his hands and did some more talking.
“...and we'd be delighted...mumble, mumble...next time...mumble, mumble...questions.”
Beside him, the majority of the work was carried out by a young woman who kneaded the cooked toffee. She then cut off an eighth and repeatedly threw it over a knackered-looking hook on the wall, pushing air into the confection and causing it to lighten in colour. Strips of this paler toffee were placed on top of the darker slab before she folded it a few times and then loaded the entire thing into a large automated metal press. Boss man flicked a switch and helped to feed the machine's output – a thin sausage of sweetness – into a little hammering device that squished the sweets into their traditional peppermint humbug shape. The lightened toffee provided the stripe running through the darker whole. He finally turned around. That bit was quite dramatic. It was the first time we'd got a look of him. Was he actually going to talk to us face-to-face?
“That's it,” he said drably. “As you're leaving, can I remind you to follow the arrows. It's down to health and safety.”
No, it wasn't. The arrows led into the sweet shop. We could just as easily have gone out the way we came. But that was fair enough, since the demo was free after all. I bought a stick of cider rock. I mean, it was Somerset after all.
Full of cheese, pie and sweets I rode up Cheddar Gorge. It must be one of England's most stunning roads, the sheer, tall rock faces hemming me in on both sides of a narrow track. Indeed, it's not just my opinion. The book 100 Greatest Cycling Climbs puts it at number one.
It got steeper and steeper and so I thought I'd take a breather. I noticed a climber at the base of a cliff roping up a section and so I found a rock to sit on and stopped to watch him. But instead of climbing he walked to the corner of the rock face and had a piss. I didn't know if I was supposed to applaud or something.
Twenty minutes later I'd reached the top of the gorge. It had been a lovely climb. A bloke stood by his car at the side of the road.
“How far is it to the nearest village?” he asked in an Eastern European accent.
“Dunno. About two miles,” I said. “And it's great. You can watch cheese-making and sweets being made,” I added like some tourist information twonk.
“Thank you,” he replied a little weakly.
It was only after I continued that my mind filled in the details of the scene unfolding behind him. His family was standing outside the car while another bloke had his head under the bonnet. He wasn't looking for local places of interest. He needed a mechanic.
Once out of the gorge, you progress along a reasonably flat hill top and then happen upon a stunning vista, the plateau on which sits Wells with, in the distance, Glastonbury Tor, a little, round hill containing a tower that stands proudly and commands the eye. The newly confident sun helped to colour the world a rich green. It's the sort of scene that would make me set up an easel and paint a landscape if I didn't have the artistic skills of a spaniel.
I rolled down the hill into the lovely little city of Wells. Outside the cathedral, on an information board, it proudly says “England's smallest city” although if you read the text beneath, it sneakily confesses that the City of London is marginally smaller.
The cathedral is beautiful, with its wide front and large central tower. I stood there in its grounds captivated by it for a while. A young family sat on a bench nearby. For the sake of your visualisation you may as well populate this mental scene with the actors from Outnumbered, so perfectly cast would they be. Dad and daughter Karen were playing Rock-Scissors-Paper repeatedly. Dad seemed to be winning every game, which, in a random game like this, suggests Karen was picking the same object each time. Then young Ben came jumping in to spoil it.
“Rock-Scissors-Paper!” said Karen.
They all declared their weapon of choice simultaneously.
“Rock!” said the daughter.
“Paper!” said Dad.
“Nuclear bomb!” shouted Ben.
This sparked an idea in Karen's mind.
“We should play a different version,” she said. “Cheese-Cat-Mouse!”
“How would that work?” asked Dad, while Mum laughed to herself.
“Mouse would eat cheese.”
“Yes?”
“And cat would eat mouse.”
“Good.”
“And cat would eat cheese.”
“But that's not going to work, love,” he said.
“Yes,” she said earnestly. “Yes, it is.”
“OK then.”
“Cheese-Cat-Mouse!” said Karen.
“Cat!” shouted Dad, while Mum sniggered, and he did this for the next ten games until Karen realised the flaw in her game's rules. It was really quite lovely.
I wheeled my bike around town, hunting out the old streets. I found an absolute gem in Vicars' Close, a narrow cul-de-sac terminating with a chapel, each house with a tall chimney. It's supposed to be the oldest purely residential street with original buildings still intact in the whole of Europe. It was built between 1348 and 1430. Sometimes Britain can be amazing.
As I pushed my bike up the middle of this lovely lane, a bloke at the chapel end got out his camera to take a picture. It wasn't me he was interested in but there was no way I could get out of the way. I felt it was the least I could do to move slightly to my right and occupy the Golden Mean to aid his composition.
I continued ever onwards. Six or seven miles down the road, near the Tor I'd seen earlier, I found a campsite. It was the most organised one I'd seen so far, with its own off licence that loaded its shelves with Glastonbury Real Ale beers and, for the Guardian readers, labelled each item with the food miles that had brought the beer to the shop. Since Glastonbury is just down the road, each bottle had only cost five food miles, which is pretty environmentally friendly until you factor in how far the hops, the other ingredients and the bottles had to travel to reach the factory in the first place. But the thought was there.
The campsite also had specific foodie nights, for Chinese, Indian, pizza and fish and chips. You placed your order and they organised the food from a local takeaway. Unfortunately, on Sundays they organised nothing and you can guess what day it was today. But at least the weather was nice enough for me to cook something for myself. I popped to the site shop, bought four different Glastonbury Real Ales and a packet of crisps.
“That looks like a fun evening,” said the woman behind the counter.
Yes, it did. And she was right. The beers were excellent, especially their Hedge Monkey that described itself as “bold and ballsy” as well as being “dangerously drinkable”. I don't think this brewery bothers with all that Drink Awa
re stuff.
The beer made me philosophical. Outside my tent I looked across the flatish English countryside and examined the sky. Clouds are everywhere in Britain but are one of the most overlooked features of the landscape. Maybe they don't count because they're constantly changing, but they can be more beautiful than the ground. In a blue sky I watched cotton wool clouds bubbling into odd shapes, a squashed, elongated cumulonimbus. One structure must have been twenty or thirty miles long, but stood alone in the baby blue sky, moving eastwards and carrying moisture to rain eventually on someone else's head. It was magnificent. Or maybe it was just the beer.
*
After a breakfast of two not very British pain au chocolate from the campsite shop I cycled into Glastonbury. If you're the mayor of a town worried that yours is being sucked into the chain-filled tedium of an Anytown, you should come to Glastonbury and take note. Towns with character don't have chains. No, they have a theme, a theme unique to themselves and Glastonbury's theme is “spiritual shite” and good on it.
I got off my bike to look at its shops. On one side of the street was a place called Natural Earthling and another called Enlightenment, while on the other side a Meditation Centre was having a sale on Buddha Maitreya Etheric Weavers. I had to do some research to find out what the hell they were. It's a “quartz crystal meditation vibrational healing tool that transmits the monadic, soul-filled light and healing blessings of Buddha Maitreya the Christ to awaken the soul and heal the personality”. Hmm. Later, a shop with the supernaturally corporate name of Witchcraft Limited was advertising tarot healings. What, they can heal as well as accurately predict the future? Amazing. It would take a large glass of water to wash a couple of them down though.
Glastonbury Abbey was getting in on the otherworldly nonsense too although, being an abbey, I suppose it always did. It claims to be the burial site of King Arthur.
The warden of last night's campsite had described Glastonbury as “like Marmite”.
“It's not for everyone,” he said. “But it's full of people who want to do you no harm”.
A warming smell of joss sticks hung in the high street air, or was it marijuana? Two blokes with long beards and guitars sang folk tunes. I didn't believe a single syllable of what the town was trying to sell to me but, Glastonbury, I like your style.
I was a little sad to leave Witchville but I had some miles to do. I stopped at Burrow Mump, an artificial-looking hill with a knackered church on its summit. From the top I could see for miles around, a flat patchwork of fields in muted greens now that the sun was hiding. Low hills rose in the distance, ones I'd be tackling shortly.
And then I reached Taunton, the county town of Somerset. I was expecting the stereotypes, Worzles-style locals sitting at picnic benches quaffing huge tankards of scrumpy and belching amiably outside rough-looking houses made out of old cider casks. Unfortunately it wasn't as much fun as all that. Taunton was an über-Anytown, with barely a non-chain to be seen.
I cycled around the pedestrianised centre. I could hear people talking. This accent is the closest Britain gets to the American Appalachians; it's Deliverance on a river of cider.
I stopped at a place called Henry's for a Somerset sausage baguette with cheese and a pint of cloudy cider. Across the street was the British Heart Foundation's furniture and electrical store. A bloke, who had this really been America would surely have been called Cletus, leaned his head out of the shop and warned a potential customer, “Do vat again, mate, an' I'll knock your block off!” It wasn't the only whiff of violence in the air.
As I ate my sandwich, a conversation carried on behind me between a local lad and another who was the bar's doorman. Was security really necessary at 2pm on a Monday lunchtime?
“I only gone an' got moiself barred, in I?” said the lad.
“What for, mate?” asked security.
“Foighting at Fever. Took four bouncers to pull me orf.”
The security didn't seem too impressed with this. After all, had it been here rather than the other nightclub this doorman would've been the one pulling him orf and he was probably sick of silly little sods like him.
They discussed the failing state of the town's nightclubs. Soon there'd be no foighting because there'd be no clubs, the lad whined. Security mentioned a place he used to go.
“Nah, that place is going dahn, mate. It's the boss there. He ain't the brightest spark.”
In front of me, two Vicki Pollards threw a small baby backwards and forwards between themselves while each puffed away on a mouthful of fags. The mother looked at her baby boy and then her friend.
“He's doin' my head in,” she said.
“You shouldna 'ad 'im,” her friend replied.
The mother shook her head.
“Wish ah 'adn't.”
Taunton's town centre wasn't the sort of place to be if you wanted to focus on positive Britain. I cycled down the road a little and found myself a nice campsite. I sat in the sun and watched a middle-aged man who had the look of a Bond villain spend a couple of hours trying to rescue his drone from a tall tree with the aid of a picnic bench and a telescopic broom handle. Various people occasionally offered to help, but no one managed to rescue it. The man returned to his caravan looking broken. He would have to find some other way to take over the world.
Chapter 8: Gnomes, fairies and wizards
Devon, Cornwall and Dorset
I woke up to an utterly beautiful sunny day. The trees swayed in a gentle breeze, even the one with a drone still stuck in it.
As I packed away I saw the campsite owner.
“Sleep well?” he asked. I had. “It wasn't too noisy for you, was it?”
He was talking about the nearby motorway.
“Not considering how close it is,” I said. “It's just a distant hum.”
“I pretend it's the sea,” he said.
Now that's thinking positively.
I cycled out of Taunton and along lovely country roads, stopping at Wiveliscombe for a bacon, egg and sausage bap. A woman was complaining to her friend.
“You know in this silly bloody country they don't have competitive sports days any more,” she said.
“What happens then?” her friend asked.
“They're all winners. Everyone wins.”
“Mmm.”
“An' our Jack, he's a good little runner. He wants to win. But they say it's not fair.”
“Yeah.”
“But Jack's dyslexic and he's constantly tested at words. There always has to be a winner with words.”
She had a point. Surely it's better to lose at a running race at an early age than to reach sixteen riding on a wave of life's inability to disappoint and then commit suicide because the WiFi's gone down for twenty minutes.
Along a B-road of rural loveliness I crossed the line into Britain's fifth largest county, Devon, and according to Cambridge University, the friendliest one outside of Scotland.
After further refuelling at a garage in South Molton I asked the woman behind the counter how far it was to Torrington.
“It's about fifteen miles away,” she said.
“That's alright then.”
“But it's all up and down,” she said.
Bloody hell, she wasn't telling fibs. The land concertinaed. I'd experienced a similar sort of nonsense in this part of the world before, repeated ascents and descents with 20% or 25% gradients. Last time I just assumed we'd chosen a lousy route. I didn't realise the entire county was like this. Devon's motto is “With God's help” but even He wouldn't have been able to get me up these hills. I had a lot of pushing to do.
Torrington isn't really a place. There's Great Torrington, which is shortened to Torrington, and then, just down the road, there's Little Torrington. There's also a Black Torrington, presumably where all the local outlaws live.
Once there I popped into a Co-op to do some shopping and talked to the young woman on the till. I was lacking some travel information.
“Which direction
is Little Torrington?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Little Torrington?” she asked a young lad beside her like I'd requested directions to Uranus.
“I've no idea,” he said.
“Really?” I continued. “I thought it was only about two miles away.”
The woman shrugged her shoulders and walked off, leaving me with this local mine of information. He just looked blankly at me.
“Do you live here?” I asked. Maybe he was someone who commuted in from miles away and had good reason not to know any local geography.
“Yeah.”
“Oh. All your life?”
“Yeah. But I don't go out there,” he added mysteriously.
Maybe Little Torrington was the Voldemort of villages, the one that Must-Not-Be-Named, even less visited.
“You've never been two miles away from the town?”
He looked wounded.
“Yes. Just not in that direction.”
There are only three main roads out of Torrington. And I suppose the A-road to Little Torrington, that turned out to be slightly less than two miles away, does venture further into deepest, darkest Devon rather than in the direction of the bright lights of Bideford on the sexy northern coast.
Outside the Co-op was a large woman with a pram.
“Good way to get a nice tan,” she said, looking at my lower half. “To get the legs out.”
“Yeah, but beneath these shorts is the body of an anaemic albino.”
“Maybe you should ride around in a mankini.”
I smiled and shook my head.
Route Britannia, the Journey South: A Spontaneous Bicycle Ride through Every County in Britain Page 16
