Are We Nearly There Yet?: A Family's 8000 Miles Around Britain in a Vauxhall Astra
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ARE WE NEARLY THERE YET?
Copyright © Ben Hatch, 2011
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, nor transmitted, nor translated into a machine language, without the written permission of the publishers.
The right of Ben Hatch to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Summersdale Publishers Ltd
46 West Street
Chichester
West Sussex
PO19 1RP
UK
www.summersdale.com
Printed and bound in Great Britain
eISBN: 9780857653512
ARE WE NEARLY THERE YET
8,000 MISGUIDED MILES ROUND BRITAIN IN A VAUXHALL ASTRA
BEN HATCH
To the two ‘D’s: my dad and wife Dinah
Ben Hatch lives in Hove, East Sussex. His first comic novel, The Lawnmower Celebrity, based loosely on his time as a chicken sandwich station monitor at Darlington McDonald's, was one of Radio 4's eight books of the year in 2000. His second, The International Gooseberry, about a hapless backpacker with a huge ungovernable toenail, was published in 2001 and described as 'hysterical and surprisingly sad' by the Daily Express. Ben was on the long-list of Granta's 2003 list of the most promising 20 young authors in the UK. With his wife Dinah, he has also written three guidebooks – Frommer's: Scotland with Your Family, Frommer's: England with Your Family, and Frommer's: Britain for Free.
Contents
Cover
Copyright Page
Title Page
Dedication
About the Author
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
CHAPTER 1
The splurge of bags on the pavement is so huge and unruly it reminds me of news footage of a French baggage handlers’ strike. It’s bad enough going on a week’s holiday with two under-fours. But packing for a five-month road trip – you’d struggle to get all this in a Pickfords van.
‘Two more for you, love,’ Dinah says brightly, shuttling from the hall to the kerb with two more suitcases I’m expected to find room for.
‘Do these contain any more pairs of your boots?’
‘Getting stressed, love?’ says Dinah.
‘No, but it’s like being on the bloody Krypton Factor. Inside these two rectangular spaces – the boot and the roof box – there’s only one way to fit all these incredibly complicated three-dimensional shapes.’
‘Well, this is clothes.’
‘Honestly?’
‘What are you saying, Ben?’
‘Dinah, are there any more shoes of any description in these two bags?’
She laughs.
‘Darling, I’ve packed all my shoes.’
‘Because I’m going to open them and check.’
‘I thought we agreed no shouting this morning.’ I start undoing the zip of the first one.
‘OK, OK,’ says Dinah, rushing forward, delving into the case and pulling out a pair of black heels. ‘I can’t believe you.’ ‘It’s just one pair, Ben.’
‘That you actually wrapped in a towel to disguise!’ ‘You’re not a girl. You don’t understand.’
It takes an hour to cram it all in and when I’m done, without blowing my own trumpet, it’s a piece of genius. I walk into the kitchen, arms aloft.
‘And tonight’s winner with a Krypton factor of forty-six is Ben Hatch, the computer programmer from Yeoooooovvvvvvil. You’ve got to look at this.’
Dinah follows me outside.
‘You got the travel cot in, then?’
‘In the roof box.’
‘Very good. And the kids’ clothes bag?’ She peers into the car. ‘Between their seats. Nice one.’
‘Told you.’
‘Oh dear, are you going to tell me again how only a man can pack a boot?’
‘I am. We have a natural feel for space. That’s why we load dishwashers. And how many professional female snooker players are there?’
‘What?’
‘How many pro snooker players are women? I’ll tell you: none.’
‘You know that, do you?’
‘Yep. Angles, you see. We know about angles. We know how many bumper packets of Pampers size five nappies will fit behind a wheel arch. You see?’
‘Three,’ she says.
‘Exactly. And come round here. We know just how far you can squidge down a cool box containing breakable bottles of Dolmio Original Bolognese Sauce. We know to hold back padded items such as jumpers to stuff down the sides of a Halfords 250-litre roof box to reduce suitcase shunt.’
I open the roof box again.
‘Very good,’ she says.
‘Shall I tell you how we do it? What we do is carefully hold a mental picture in our heads of everything that must be packed, the size and dimensions of the whole as well as how each packed item reduces this overall.’
‘That’s what you do, is it?’
‘That’s how we do it.’
‘And everything’s in?’
‘Everything’s in.’
‘You sure?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Including the double buggy that was down the side return about two minutes ago that I told you you’d forget?’
‘Oh!’
‘And the big green suitcase that was upstairs on our bed that I reminded you this morning was too heavy for me to bring downstairs?’
‘I thought you brought that down.’
‘And, by the way,’ Dinah says turning to go. ‘That Dolmio sauce is leaking.’
She holds up an orange-stained fingertip.
‘WE ARE NEVER GOING TO LEAVE HERE!’
We’ve rented out the house through a holiday letting agency that has such strange kitchen inventory stipulations (butter dishes, tea cosies, a gravy boat) I can only assume they’re lining us up as a Saga short break destination. There are landlord rules on the number of matching side plates and the precise ratio of egg cups to guest (0.75 to 1, for some reason). We should have tackled these requirements much, much earlier.
‘OK, let’s not panic, love. Now, where do we get a tea cosy from? Do they even still exist?’
‘Dunelm Mill,’ says Dinah.
‘Where’s that?’
‘Worthing.’
‘You want to go all the way to Worthing for a tea cosy! Where do you plan to go for the baking tray – Stoke-on-Trent? We need a department store type place.’
‘Bert’s Homestores on George Street?’
‘OK, good, what else from there?’
‘Maybe jelly moulds and the gravy boat.’
‘We need jell
y moulds?’
‘That’s what it says.’
‘Who the hell comes to Brighton to make jelly? OK, it doesn’t matter. Let’s go. I’ll drive. You nip in.’
We visit home-ware stores in an ever increasing frenzy, me mounting the kerb outside, say, Robert Dyas, putting the blinkers on while Dinah dashes inside volleying off enquiries like: ‘Please help me, we need a Lancashire potato peeler’ or ‘Bath mats, nonslip – which aisle?’
Just to increase the pressure we carry out the ‘professional clean’ ourselves as well. We vacuum and make beds as the kids do their best to undo our good work. Every personal item – pictures, clothes, toys – must be locked away in the downstairs study. We drop off multiple sets of keys to the agency, photocopy gas safety certificates and accomplish a hundred and one jobs ten times harder to achieve when you’ve got two bored under-fours fed up with the colouring-in books you bought them specifically for this day, and who are at your knees demanding you ‘spin me round really, really fast and then I climb on your back and be a nasty lion. I WANT TO BE A NASTY LION, DADDY.’
Finally, we’re all in the car outside the house.
‘And you definitely got the buggy in this time?’
‘I definitely got the buggy in.’
‘And the green suitcase?’
‘And the green suitcase. And you’ve smuggled in all the footwear you need?’
‘I have.’
‘Good. We’re ready then. OK, radio on.’
Dinah presses the button.
‘A little higher.’
She turns it up.
The first song that comes on is ‘Leaving On A Jet Plane’ by John Denver.
‘Very appropriate.’
I put my hand out. Dinah slaps me a high five. I put my hand round the back seats accepting low fives from Charlie and Phoebe. And although technically speaking we aren’t leaving on a jet plane but inside a very cramped Vauxhall Astra diesel 1.1 hatchback so heavily laden I can’t do over 35 miles per hour on the Kingsway without beginning to fishtail, it still feels perfect.
We pass Hove lawns and the blackened, burned-out skeleton of the West Pier. At the roundabout next to the Palace Pier, I shout over the music, ‘Say goodbye to Brighton guys.’
‘Goodbye, Brighton,’ Phoebe and Charlie shout.
And as they continue shouting out up the Old Steine – ‘Goodbye, lady at the bus stop, goodbye bus, goodbye tree, goodbye building’ – what’s seemed abstract for the months it’s been in the planning suddenly becomes real. We are actually going.
‘Can you believe it?’ I ask Dinah.
‘I can’t really.’
‘Are you scared?’
‘A bit.’
‘Me too.’
We’re researching a guidebook on family-friendly attractions in Britain, have never done it before and it’s something everyone’s tried to talk us out of.
‘Eight thousand miles in a small car with two under-fours. You’re mad,’ friends have told me.
‘You’ll get divorced,’ Dinah’s sister Lindsey warned.
My brother Buster’s even predicted we’ll end up murdering each other. ‘A different hotel each night – packing up, moving on every morning, seeing four or five different attractions a day! For FIVE MONTHS! One of you is coming home in that roof box! Chopped up in a bin bag! You’ve gone loopy.’
But on this balmy spring afternoon, looking back at the Brighton sea, arranged in three perfect strips of colour – blue, green and turquoise – the sun warming my forearm through the open window, the music vibrating through me, watching the kids laughing in the back seat as they shout goodbye at more and more inanimate objects (‘Goodbye building next to the other building’ … ‘Goodbye windows in the building of the building next door to the other building’… ‘Goodbye person’s face in the window of the building next to the other building), I know in my heart it’s going to be magnificent.
CHAPTER 2
Draft Copy for Guidebook: If its famous residents (Robbie Williams, Heston Blumenthal and Steve Redgrave, to name but a few) have earned Marlow the nickname England’s Beverly Hills, then the North Bucks town’s Beverly Hills Hotel is surely The Compleat Angler. The Georgian inn, nestling in the shadow of All Saint’s Church, has beautiful views from its garden terrace to the cast-iron Tierney Clark suspension bridge and is where the Queen ate her first public meal outside London in 1999 and where many celebrities have dined including Princess Diana (pork), Sir Paul McCartney (fish), Clint Eastwood (ribs) and Naomi Campbell (OK, we admit – we have no idea what they ate). Set against the swan-clustered banks of the River Thames, a rowing seven glided silkily past as we climbed out of the car, creating such a quintessentially old English ambience we half expected to bump into Miss Marple enjoying an Eccles cake with her spinster pal Dolly Bantry in the hotel’s Aubergine restaurant, which we walked through to get to reception.
Named after Izaak Walton’s famous angling guidebook, The Compleat Angler’s bedrooms are all themed after fly-
fishying terms. We stayed in Dibbling, complete with under-floor heating, Molton Brown accessories and a widescreen TV on which our bemused kids, whose only previous exposure to men on horses was a cartoon western, watched Channel 4 Racing (‘Daddy, those cowboys are wearing funny clothes!’).
As we fill out guest registration at The Compleat Angler, and Charlie keeps doubling back to stroke/dirty the paintwork of the sprinkling of super cars in the car park, a liveried porter passes behind us, according our three already-starting-to-split plastic Tesco carrier bags an embarrassing degree of reverence.
‘Bless him. Look! He’s trying to pretend it’s normal luggage. That makes us look so chavvy, Ben. We must buy another bag.’
In our interconnecting rooms, clearly usually reserved for the disabled, Charlie has fun pulling all four red alarm cords in the bathroom and bedroom. Meanwhile Phoebe, obsessed with rabbits since I inadvertently let her watch Watership Down while we packed, methodically draws bunnies with ripped ears on hotel notepads, handing each one to me and demanding I put it in my pocket, as if to say, ‘Look, I have no control over this. You exposed me to The General and this is the result.’
We’d planned to wander to Albion House in the centre of Marlow and pose a family snap of us all pulling scary monster faces outside our first attraction, the building where Mary Shelley finished writing Frankenstein in 1818. But with the restaurant not serving food until 7 p.m., Dinah bathes the kids while I go out alone.
Mary Shelley, aged nineteen when she lived here with her famous poet husband, wrote of Marlow, ‘All your fears and sorrows shall fly when you behold the blue skies and bright sun of Marlow – and feel its gentle breezes on your face.’ And although not all my fears have flown – it took me almost as long to find what we needed from the boot as it did to pack the entire car earlier – I do feel pretty good. It’s a warm summer evening. The Thames slides past me. And, for the first time in years it seems, at 6.30 p.m. I’m not knelt on a sopping wet bath mat holding a teddy bear towel out, shouting over noisy splashing: ‘For the last time – no more evil dolphins. If you want stories tonight, you must get out NOW!’ Marlow Historical Society describes Mary Shelley’s house as ‘the home of the monster’. It conjures up an image of a creepy, gothic-looking property beset by lightning flashes and thunder claps not quite drowning out the blood curdling wails of, ‘IT LIVES!’ Renamed Shelley Cottages, the house is now split into three twee, whitewashed homes. There’s a blue plaque on the wall and the only mildly frightening thing is a man in a cable-knit cardy outside it recounting to a neighbour in terrific detail his delayed train journey from Maidenhead. I was going to persuade a passer-by to take a humorous snap of me outside the address looking cross-eyed, my arms outstretched, with two Molton Brown bottle tops I took from the hotel ablution basket pressed into each side of my neck. But unwilling to risk embroilment in the points failure discussion, I just take an establishing photo of the house and return.
The hotel’s secon
d restaurant, Bowaters, has views over the Thames, which is raised and fast flowing after a fortnight of rain. We feed the kids here, read them stories back in the room and rig up the Bébétel baby monitor, before returning to the restaurant ourselves. Our table is surrounded by well-fed city boys discussing the Bank of England’s latest rate move with mobiles hanging like sunglasses from the middle buttons of their shirts. Dinah spots someone who looks like Nick Hewer, Lord Sugar’s right-hand man from the BBC series The Apprentice. Although she’s based this solely on the greying back of his head and four overheard words, ‘The wine list, please’, it’s enough to fuel another discussion about Dinah’s brainwave for a buggy with a special sleep compartment in it for an adult (‘So the parent can hop in and catch up on sleep when their baby sleeps’).
‘Are you talking more loudly than normal, love, because you’re a bit drunk or because you’re hoping Hewer overhears and reports the idea to Lord Sugar as a business opportunity?’
She laughs. ‘Let’s imagine that.’
‘OK. What would you do if Lord Sugar suddenly landed behind the hotel in his private helicopter and offered you £250,000 a year to develop the prototype for Amstrad? I’ll be Sugar. You be you.’
‘OK.’
‘’Ello there. I’m Lord Sugar, Britain’s toughest boss. My eyes and ears Nick ’ere says you’ve ’ad a great idea. It sounds pretty ’air-brained to me, but I am willing to invest two ’undred and fifty grand in you because I like the way you weren’t fazed bringin’ them placcy bags into this ’ere posh ’otel owned by a good friend of mine.’
‘I’m afraid my husband and I are currently writing a guidebook about travelling around England reviewing baby-changing facilities and kids’ menus. Would it be possible to give you a ring in September?’
‘You wouldn’t say that.’
‘I know.’
‘Have another go?’
‘Go and check on the kids first. It’s your turn.’
Standing at the bedroom door I watch Charlie fast asleep in his travel cot. His face is pressed into the mattress and he has his bum in the air like he’s praying to Mecca. Phoebe has arranged her limbs into almost exactly the shape of the emblem for the Isle of Man.