Travel blog: Not a week to remember - Lyme Regis to Cheddar via Looe
Thursday, 23, Jul 2009 10:19
For three months this summer Ben Aitken will be touring the British Isles in Roger, a Nissan campervan with a clutch like bronchitis.
He'll be exploring Britain armed with unusual ambitions: to sell gourmet organic omelettes; to volunteer on organic farms and at soup kitchens; to avoid arrest; and to share a frank and bustling account of it all with the readers of travelbite.co.uk. Here is his third blog entry:
I have a knack of asking the most easily dumbfounded people for advice or opinion. Sat on the beach at Lyme Regis I wondered what it might be like to live in a place which resembles scoops of glorious Neapolitan ice-cream; a place where tourism dictates a split personality.
I saw a youngish lad sat on the balcony of a beach-front flat. I asked him what he made of Lyme. His face took on, by degrees, the look if a man just asked why the Spanish Government of 1963 introduced regulations on pigeon racing.
I lingered in the hope that he was conjuring something enlightening; perhaps about Lyme's abundance of Jurassic fossils; or why the curator at the wonderful Dinosaur museum is such a reticent fellow; or its fish; or its depiction in the novel The French Lieutenant's Woman. He pulled an enduring blank. I wondered whether I would achieve such idiocy if asked for my opinion on Portsmouth.
Bill Bryson wrote that Exeter is not an easy place to love. I would alter this slightly, abandoning the euphemism: Exeter is an easy place to hate. For a traveller passing through, unsure whether to pitch a tent or hitch a lift, first impressions are important.
I had got lost up some backstreet whilst searching for a hostel. I wound the window down and asked for directions. The guy I asked could barely stand or talk. He offered me convoluted, slurred, frankly indecipherable directions. And then, to cap his benevolence, he offered me the invitation to f**k off. As I pulled away, thanking him as I did so, he kicked out at the van. Welcome to Exeter.
Exeter's cathedral, even for those as familiar with Norman architecture as they are Polish vernacular, is uplifting. Exeter Peace Shop, on the unsightly Fore Street, is an office of the CND (campaign for nuclear disarmament), and if you wander in to peruse be expected to discuss the Cuban missile crisis, Kim Jung Il and Cornish pasties
I then spent three days on a yoga retreat. The Beacon Centre, just outside of Exeter, is a member of WWOOF, a charity that organise working weekends on organic farms. A lady named Becky and her dog Juno run the centre but also tend to the land around it. In return for accommodation in a beautiful converted farmhouse, I dug and prepared a vegetable patch.
Dartmoor is a vast and sombre playground for disinterested livestock. The sheep and ponies consider the lively B-road that winds through Dartmoor National Park a chaise-longue. With such a surfeit of moorland in which to meander and unwind, what draws the animals to the tarmac? Is it an act of organised disruption? I hope so.
It is the immensity of Dartmoor that renders it a compelling spectacle. The horizon is so distant that it loses its colour. At any of its points one feels as if they are stood within only the first pages of a book, with much to come and much unknown.
In Totnes, a small town at the peak of the River Dart, I sat in the King William and watched the cricket. The King William ought to audition for Eastenders. The women drink stout, the TV screens show horse racing and if you ask for a cream tea you're likely to be introduced to an ash tray. I enjoyed the brusque manner of the pub, which was so at odds with the rest of Totnes, which is cobbled and laid-back, jammed with independent and artisan outlets.
I would rather make love to a bacon sandwich than spend more than twenty minutes in Plymouth. Plymouth is a limp, fed-up city. No wonder Drake was said to have been in no rush to confront the Spanish fleet. Let them have it.
The fishing village of Looe, thirty miles west of Plymouth, is a remedy for any sore mood. Its two halves rest confidently astride the River Tamar. The houses huddle around the port as if on layers of a wedding cake.
I sat on the beach and drank a can of Guinness. The stack of cheese I had bought in Totnes was chilling in Texaco. I pondered how I might get my fridge fixed. Oh, the electricity of youth.
I picked up my cheese from the garage at 7am. I moved Roger up onto a long street which overlooks Looe Island and the channel. I washed my cherries and grated my cheese and sat watching the fishing boats head out for the day.
Three hours and about sixty people passed by. The closest I came to selling an egg was when a hotly sceptical litter-picker asked, "What's this, unofficial café?" I wasn't concerned that he worked for the council; if he told me to move on he'd be doing me a favour. I assured him that I was certified which didn't impress him much. "I'm certified `n all. We're all certified - but there ain't room for me in the nut-house." I don't know what this meant but it stung.
Beneath the beauty of Polperro must lie a social and economic cancer. When the consumptive summer hordes have lurched homeward, and the cream teas have settled down to clot for another year, what remains? The skeletal, off-season reality for such idyllic villages must bite, hard.
I left Looe on Thursday evening with the loose aim of arriving at a field in Devon sometime the following evening. (For a music festival - a bookkeeper in Exeter tipped me off.)
I have Tiverton marked down as a place that ought to go on a date with Plymouth. But on what grounds do we form such judgments? Are they simply aesthetic assessments of a place's bits and pieces? Its colours and shapes and features? No, it's more than this. It is the people, their faces and moods, the way they talk amongst each other; and it is also the intangible personality of a place. One's reaction to a place is the sum of an equation which is subjective, contingent and unreliable. Thus, from how I have seen it, Tiverton is bleak.
That wellington boots - an item of function, of occasional necessity - should be vulnerable to fashion's fickle fingers is disconcerting. The welly-wearers at the Wattsfest musical festival dressed like Indian street merchants but had Berkshire accents. Judging by the array and ingenuity of some of the outfits, being a hippy these days must be bloody expensive.
There was an open-mic tent. I am not a musician and I cannot sing. Yet I felt an urge to command the stage; to share my utter inadequacy with a watching, gawping audience. I introduced myself with an earnest and protracted apology. I sang one of my own. 'Met a girl, but not in a bar / At a museum in Trinidad and Tobago.' My voice sounded sinful. 'I said I'm leaving now, won't you come? / Back to my place for an instant cappuccino.'
The audience, being accustomed to talent, were unimpressed. What was I thinking? The painting equivalent would be an artist with the skills of a toddler jostling to have his work - produced hastily and in the knowledge that it was laughable - exhibited at an open-easel afternoon at a renowned gallery. Post-performance, I slunk back to the van to listen to the rain in the dark. Wet and embarrassed, I made an escape for Cheddar, leaving my shoes behind as a symbolic apology.
Ben Aitken