Unfortunately, although par for the course in the south-east, the nearest supermarket was a Tesco's another three miles away. To make matters worse, this one was down a huge hill on a nightmarish dual carriageway.
“What do you need?” she said.
“Just something for dinner.”
“Hang on, I'll see if Eric is going to the chippy.”
And he was! I climbed into the passenger seat of his tiny Smart car and off we shot. It started to rain, big angry drops. The windscreen wiper made a scrapey sound as it ineffectively attempted to remove the water.
“The wiper stops working when it starts to rain,” Eric said.
That was handy. We screamed down the dual carriageway in the outside lane despite there being no other traffic around us. It felt faster than the speed of light, but cars always seem bowel-looseningly rapid after I've spent several months moving at ten miles an hour.
“It's alright,” I said. “The wiper's working on my side. I'll let you know if you're going to hit anything.”
I mentioned the lack of shops during today's ride.
“Yeah, but you're in the middle of nowhere,” he replied.
But that isn't true. With 1.5 million people, Kent is the fifth most populous county in Britain. You can't really be in the middle of nowhere in the south of England, unless maybe you're sitting in the centre of Dartmoor. And apologies to any American or Australian who reads that statement. If you find a map to check the remoteness of Dartmoor you'll think I've been sniffing glue.
Back in my rainy tent I listened to the football. The European Championships had started. England was certain to do well this year, especially since more teams were competing in the competition this time, and more teams meant worse teams, from countries with populations smaller than that of a British town. It was as good as ours. And it started off well until England gifted Russia a point right at the first game's death and then their ungrateful fans jumped the stadium walls and beat us up.
Of all the nationalities in Europe, it's the Russians who are most similar to the British. We both can't stop drinking, we both take off our shirts as soon as the temperature reaches double figures and we both believe we still have, or should have, or will have again, an empire. I suppose it was only natural the Russians would look into the back catalogue of British attributes and pull out football hooliganism.
Anyway, England had a point against the most difficult team in our group. We were on our way to European Championship glory. What could possibly go wrong?
*
I packed up and left in a fine drizzle and then, for an hour, got lost in dark lanes heavy with foliage around Boxley. I was never more than a mile or two from a motorway – the M2 or the M20 – but I felt like I was in the middle of the Black Forest. I followed my compass northwards and hoped I'd find a road sign or maybe a trail of breadcrumbs leading me out of the woods.
I eventually arrived in Bredhurst and then, via the villages of Borstal and Thong, rode into Rochester. The town's castle looked majestic but it would've taken a long time to get around. I pressed on knowing I had to penetrate London today, and in less than ideal weather conditions. The sky was as grey as John Major's underpants, and as wet as Edwina Currie's the first time she saw them.
The ride to Gravesend took me alongside the A2, now four lanes in both directions, each car with a single, glum-looking occupant. The roar was deafening after the morning's empty lanes. This stretch of the ride had become an ordeal.
Cycling through Dartford I saw two girls at the side of the road, probably about fourteen years old, shouting at passing cars. Both wore fluffy onesies despite the drizzle. As I cycled past, the one in the camouflage print shouted, “Oi, mate, I like your legs!” #everydaysexism.
I fought my way into London with a failing smaller chain ring slipping annoyingly on the uphills. For all we're told of the wealth that nestles inside the M25, this part of London – Belvedere and Abbey Wood - felt very much like Blackburn, terraced and poor. Sure, the houses are probably worth a squintillion pounds but the quality of life looked grim, people packed liked pilchards into filthy streets.
I got lost and saw a big hill. Despite being on the outskirts of central London I couldn't get a signal for my phone, and so I couldn't go online to check the map. The correct way is always into the wind or up the big hill. I started to climb it. A black woman in a red, green and yellow shawl, carrying her baby like she was still pregnant with it, told me I was going the wrong way. I was supposed to go down the hill. That had never happened before. It was the highlight of my day.
After asking a couple more times for directions I stumbled across the campsite. Down a little lane on a backstreet of terraced houses, a field covered in caravans suddenly opened up, incongruous in a city like London. The land alone must have the value of a decent Premier League club, and worth far more than it could possibly earn hosting camper vans and tents at £18 a night, probably the cheapest place to sleep this close to Big Ben, aside from Primark's doorway.
A poster on the wall of the campsite's reception warned against leaving out your food or shoes. Apparently, squirrels will steal your leftovers and foxes your footwear. This was news to me.
A woman in reception had a problem. Her shoes were missing and she feared she had thrown them away. No one mentioned the foxes. She asked if someone could look in the rubbish for her missing footwear. Apparently this wasn't possible because of health and safety, the standard answer in Britain these days it seems when no one can't be arsed to do something.
That evening there was thunder and lightning. While I ate dinner inside my tent, from the corner of my eye I noticed something move. I went to put down my mug and noticed the trainer I was using as a cupholder had vanished. The foxes! I quickly opened the tent flap and saw my shoe stranded in the middle of the grass, ten metres away,. Luckily for me, my shoes smelled so badly even the vermin had given up on them. What does the fox say? “How about some Odour Eaters, mate?”
*
I woke up to more drizzle. As I was leaving the campsite I saw a couple of foxes chasing each other around the field. Despite the weather they seemed happy to be outside, or maybe they couldn't go home because their den was full of boots.
With the steel grey sky this wasn't going to be the day when London looked at its finest. The route took me through Woolwich and, under the conditions, its badly attended outdoor market, and then I spent longer than I should have fruitlessly looking for the meridian at Greenwich Observatory. Disappointed, I headed to Peckham and its wonderful Rye Lane, a multicultural, multinational melting pot, its noise and colour a more vibrant version of Athens' similarly ethnic and hectic Archanon Street. If Richard Littlejohn wobbled down this street, his liver would rupture in an overproduction of anti-immigrant bile.
I'd been told I had to try an East End staple, the infamous pie, mash and liquor. As a Lancashire lad, my youth hadn't been short of pies and given the sales pitch I'd heard for this London treat I was expecting greatness.
I headed to Manzies, the spiritual home of the Cockney dish, in the centre of Peckham. The menu on its wall only contains four items, the three already mentioned plus eels.
My meal was served in the manner of a school dinner. The woman behind the counter plonked a pie on a plate, and used a large palette knife to scoop up some mash and then literally scraped it on to the side of my dish. Two more smears of potato were added and the lot was drowned in a ladleful of thick, grey, green-speckled paste. It had to taste better than it looked. And yet.
I took my plate to one of their wooden benches, sat down and tucked in. The pie was unexceptional, more crust than meat and with a pastry so tough that the whole lot collapsed when you tried to dig in. The mashed potato was just that. Nothing but mashed potato. No milk or cream or even salt and was reminiscent of the bland spuds of school lunchtimes. Surely the whole would be saved by the sauce. I took a small spoonful. Mmm. It had the consistency of Gloy and absolutely no taste whatsoever. The green speckles a
re supposedly parsley, which is hardly the tastiest of herbs at the best of times, but I wasn't getting a hint of even that. I suspected the two main ingredients of my liquor were cornflour and hedge trimmings.
Now, maybe Manzies was having an off-day, or maybe so long in The Smoke has dulled yer average cheeky Cockerney's taste buds to such an extent that they need to reboot them with a meal that actually tastes of something, like a northern pie, chips and gravy, because today's lunch was rank. When I mentioned this opinion on Facebook later in the day I had a London crowd question my sanity, my sense of taste and my sexuality. But, like Liverpool's scouse, there's a good reason this local speciality hasn't travelled.
Having cycled right across London on my capital city tour, I didn't particularly want to do it again. Under other circumstances I would have visited a distant corner of the county of Greater London and been happy with that. Unfortunately, since I was visiting every county, and because Britain's smallest is the City of London, I had no choice but to burrow right into the middle, like an armadillo looking for insects or other parasitic worms.
The iconic sights of the nation's capital grew as I approached – the Shard and the Gherkin – and the ride across Tower Bridge was utterly glorious as I made for The City.
While in a rainforest of tower blocks the skies opened and fat droplets poured. I decided to hide for a while. Under cover of some scaffolding I watched banker types scurry backwards and forwards from building to building like mice worried that they were made of soap. The men were anonymous in identical dark suits. At least the women had a choice of a small range of colours. What did they do all day except run from office block to coffee shop to office block? Many of the blokes had their hair slicked back, although maybe as a result of the rain rather than some stylistic choice to emulate Gordon Gekko. I tried to imagine what thoughts ran through these bankers' heads but all I could hear was a permanent loop of Vincent Price's laugh at the end of Thriller.
I stood there for a good twenty minutes. It's odd how invisible you are in London. Only one person, a young black lad, acknowledged my existence during the entire time. I thought about what I was watching, about these actions as actual lives being lived, and a chill ran down my spine. If the same people even noticed me they probably saw a tramp on a bike and felt the same shiver.
I carried on under spits and spots, saw St Paul's and crossed back over the Thames at Blackfriars Bridge. My plan of escape was to hog the river until Twickenham but the riverside path stopped after a kilometre or so. I tried to follow cycle path signs to Richmond but even in newly bike-friendly London that was hopeless with vague directions and dead ends.
The rain came down properly once again in some nondescript part of town and this time I cowered under the porch of another office block. Traffic streamed past me, spraying the grey-brown puddles on to the pavement for them to refill again immediately. The odd, lone walker, dressed in the muted colours of a Lowry painting, shuffled by, a glum expression of isolation and alienation fixed on her face. I was imaging all this of course. She might have been thinking about the film première she was attending tonight followed by dinner at The Ivy. But in my Radiohead version of events it wasn't going to get any better than Netflix and a frozen lasagne.
I reached Putney. London was changing, improving. I stopped for another pastry refuelling session a couple of miles short of Richmond. Signs for Twickenham, my target, suddenly dried up. Lin, Nina's sister, had said she was only a ten-minute ride from Richmond Park and so I headed in that direction and was rewarded with a hill and a great view over London. Apparently Rupert Murdoch has a place up here. He likes the high ground, though not morally speaking, obviously. I worked out where I was, crossed Richmond Bridge and pootled through St Margaret's to Lin's.
Lin has a lovely house, unassuming from the front, but clean and brightly white inside, with a huge kitchen and a garden that finishes with a small river, a tributary of the Thames. Her little boat wallowed in the water, waiting for the right conditions.
“You can only use it when the tide's coming in,” Lin said. “To go for a drink, you have to set off at the right time and then you've two hours before you need to come back.”
“Tides are every twelve hours,” I replied. “You could stay in the beer garden for fourteen hours, surely.”
We had a Guardianista snack of chorizo, hummus and some delicious, chewy-centred, crunchy-crusted home-made bread and then jumped into her little sports car and went to look at the oddity that is Eel Pie Island.
This tiny isle in the Thames was once the location of the Eel Pie Island Hotel that saw shows by The Rolling Stones, The Who, Genesis, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, amongst many others. It was closed by the authorities and then burnt down in a mysterious fire in the early 70s.
Sitting in the Thames, joined to the real world by a single, narrow, traffic-less iron bridge, all food has to be delivered via the water. In a land of such densely packed people and heavily planned communities, Eel Pie Island is a genuine one-off. It's how the world would look if the phrase “Planning Department” had never been invented.
Its houses are joined by a narrow lane and of every conceivable architectural style, from shacks to 1960s pebble-dashed council houses to mini-Alpine chalets. They have cute names like Wyndfall and Ripple, Wild Thyme and Piecrust. One has an interesting collection in its garden: gnomes, a canoe, a crocodile's head and a zombie escaping the soil. And then, once back over the bridge, normality returns.
We headed to the White Swan to meet a couple of Lin's friends. Its beer garden gets cut off at high tide and so you have to make sure you have enough to drink or risk getting your feet wet.
The day's final weirdness was a memorial stone from 1896 near Lin's house that seemed to have been finished in a hurry. Its inscription says “To the Glory of Cod”. Maybe it was a nod to the almost fishy nature of its host street's name, Haliburton Road.
Lin cooked me a chilli and made a salad. I suddenly realised this was the first green matter I'd eaten in nine weeks, aside from that manky parsley sauce at lunchtime today. I made a resolution to improve my diet in the weeks to come that I instantly ignored.
Despite the dank weather, I'd enjoyed my ride through London. Like last time, it was a bit like a fight, but the traffic was well-behaved and no one tried to kill me. But I was glad to be escaping it for leafier places tomorrow. Samuel Johnson famously said that when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life. Or maybe he's a cyclist.
*
I said goodbye to Lin with a pack of ham and horseradish mustard sandwiches and a posh scotch egg that she'd parcelled up for me. It was already drizzling as I left London behind.
Today was certainly leafier but the countryside of Surrey continued the uninspiring theme. You'd think wealth would be attracted to Britain's scenic hotspots, but not around here. I headed out through the Elmbridge area, apparently Britain's dogging capital, and towards Box Hill to see the best of it, but the weather came down and the traffic was relentless. After sheltering from the rain first in a garage forecourt and then a bus stop I decided that once I got to Leatherhead I'd abandon sightseeing completely and turn towards Guildford. At one point I was caught between shelters and got absolutely soaked in something approaching a tropical storm. Still, it could have been worse. I could have been in an office.
Guildford wasn't looking at its best with its cobbled main street dug up just in time to greet any summer visitors and so I cycled towards a campsite that had been described as “miles from anywhere and down a mile-long rough lane”. I came to a track near a small collection of houses that could have been a contender.
“Is there a campsite down here?” I asked a woman walking by.
“Oh, I don't think so.”
Maybe she wasn't local.
“Are you from around here?” I asked.
“Yes, I live just there,” she replied, pointing at a nearby house. “And I've lived here for years. No, there's no campsite.”
Without a seriou
s alternative I went through the lengthy process of starting up my phone and finding the site's actual location. This was indeed the correct lane. Maybe it was a secret campsite.
I cycled down it. At the bottom was a farm house and a handsome young fella, Justin, was pottering about. His half-New Zealand, half-Thailand ancestry gave him a striking look.
The campsite was basic, with one shower and one toilet and, as far as local conveniences went, it held the record so far for being the farthest from any shop.
“The nearest place is seven miles away,” said Justin. “In Godalming.”
“Oh.”
“But I'm popping there in the car later if you want a lift.”
I set up my little home. Lin had been kind enough to wash my entire wardrobe yesterday and I suspect it was this, my new-found cleanliness, that revealed my tent had taken on the odour of an old and mildly incontinent dog. It didn't matter much. In a day or two, everything I owned would smell like that again and I wouldn't even know.
Justin was 31 but had a boyish charm. He'd been living with his girlfriend in Switzerland but she left him and seemed to get the better deal when it came to their shared belongings. She got the house and he'd returned to Britain homeless and hard up.
Justin's van, which he kept on-site, was now also his house. He worked for the campsite's owner, a farmer, doing odd jobs, like fixing up the shower. To access the passenger seat of his tiny mobile home meant a lot of rearranging, his possessions spilling out on to a campsite table protected from the elements. Unencumbered by his worldly goods the insides of the van were revealed. His vehicle had cost £800 and he'd spent another £200 on wood to fit it out. He'd done a great job.
Justin drove me into Goldalming. He described it as “proper middle-class Surrey”. It seems life has always been a little better around here. While the rest of Victorian Britain was burning its children to keep warm, this was the first place in the country to have a public electricity supply and electric street lights. In 2016 it was considered the most prosperous place in the UK. I ambled around the chain-lite streets, popped to the supermarket, bought a newspaper and waited in the pub until Justin was done. At the risk of damning the place with faint praise, Goldalming seemed very pleasant.
Route Britannia, the Journey South: A Spontaneous Bicycle Ride through Every County in Britain Page 22
