Dartmoor

Dartmoor

In my corporate days, we were exhorted to 'walk the walk, not just talk the talk" which was toe-curling management speak for getting the stuff you'd promised to do done. A prime example of this being observed in the breach is rail companies' implementation of their cycle policies. Supposedly committed to welcoming bikes and striving for integrated transport, instead their cycle space booking process (itself unnecessary in the days of capacious guards' vans) is both labyrinthine and error prone. When I booked my journey to Newton Abbot online, it was not until I fetched the tickets from the machine - for some reason, obligatory once you request a cycle space - that I realised it had only reserved a space on the return leg, not the outward trip. Fortunately, the booking clerk was able to rectify the omission.

The facilities provided on board for cycles are lamentable. Two hooks are suspended in a space the size of a broom cupboard inadequate for accommodating two bikes, and one hook is so close to the ceiling that I was unable to fit the front wheel, admittedly with a 40mm carbon rim, on it. Instead I lurked in the corridor holding my bike in a more dignified horizontal position for the 20 minute journey.

Of the dozen or so waiting at Newton Abbot, most had travelled by car, a few had taken an earlier train while one had cycled from Exeter. The latter feat, a two hour trip, was on an electric bike which, although only a few years old, was already of a design which looked old-fashioned and clunky compared to the latest generation, which are almost indistinguishable from their mechanical counterparts. (And yes, I can’t wait to add one to my collection. The adage, oft repeated among the cycling fraternity, is that the optimum number of bikes is n+1, where n is the number you currently own.)

Newton Abbot is known to its detractors, which includes almost everyone not locally resident, as Newton Armpit. The soubriquet seems unjust once you leave the high street, which itself is no more depressingly unloved than most. Our canal side route took us past attractive waterside terraced houses, although their view of the warehouses and declining industrial units lining the opposite bank meant they fell short of offering a rural idyll. 

Traversing a narrow section of tow path under a bridge, a woman pushing a buggy remonstrated that we were supposed to dismount. I acknowledged the mistake, saying, truthfully, that I hadn’t seen the sign. She was not mollified and continued to abuse cyclists in general and us in particular. My guilt was increased by recalling how incensed I used to become when cyclists refused to walk through the Greenwich foot tunnel.

After the canal, the route wound through wooded slops on an insistent climb, but gentle enough for everyone to keep pace with the two electric bikes in our group, the second being an older bike with a front wheel conversion kit and a battery dangling inelegantly from the handlebars. Our group has only recently admitted e-bikes, bowing to the increasing frailty of members and the growing choice of e-bikes. Apparently, they now comprise 90% of the revenue from new bike sales, although as they are pricier than leg bikes, that does not translate into the same proportion of units sold.

Our coffee stop was at 365 cafe in Bovey Tracey, a converted garage reinstated in 2017 using original, vintage and industrial materials which now caters for cyclists in great style with comfortable sofas and low lighting complimenting the excellent coffee and cake.

One of the pleasures of cycling in a group is the opportunity to converse with fellow cyclists. That conversations are inevitably subject to frequent interruption by the exigencies of traffic or weather can be an annoyance or a relief, depending on the person and the topic. On this occasion, I enjoyed exchanging views on local music events with Tim and even resolved, as a result, to become a member of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (a resolution since acted upon) primarily in the hope of nabbing the best seats during the priority booking period.

By the time we reached Moretonhampstead, my GPS informed me we had ascended over 400m but it had seemed fairly effortless, partly, because I cycle at a more sensibly sedate speed when I’m with a group than alone. We sat in the churchyard to eat our sandwiches. Mine, as usual, seeded rye rolls, one filled with chicken and avocado, the other Cheddar cheese and chutney. Very light drizzle started as we were packing up and during the afternoon we periodically donned and discarded rain jackets in response to the changing weather and the incline of the roads.

The roads were quiet, the only encounters of note being a vintage Rolls-Royce, whose width seemed unsuited to Devon lanes, and a succession of 1960s Rovers, presumably from some local rally, whose exhaust fumes lingered long after they had departed.

I had been supplied with approximate times for various landmarks to check I would make my return train. The only one I noted was Jay’s grave. Jay was an eighteenth-century servant who had fallen pregnant by her employer who subsequently disavowed her. She committed suicide as a result, but being thereby excluded from sacred ground, was buried at the meeting point of three parishes.

This was my first time cycling across Dartmoor and it felt adventurous to be in such high and wild spaces. We passed Hound Tor and Haytor Rocks, but the weather was not conducive to lingering and our interaction with the environment was confined to near misses with lambs frisking on the road.

The leader’s planning was perfect and we were in good time for my train, thence home for tea and medals.

Crediton

There is a sweet spot which occurs somewhere between the commencement of retirement and the onset of old age during which robust health, adequate resources and surplus energy render anything feasible. It’s not possible to identify the apogee of that period but it becomes apparent when it has passed. In my case, it appeared in the rear-view mirror during a holiday in Wales last summer when a steep and rocky descent signalled that the balance of risk and reward from hill walking had tilted inexorably in the wrong direction. Similarly, the weekly parkrun, although still pleasurable, brings in its wake stiffness of muscle and soreness of knee, a joint, I am told, which is in any case poorly designed for upright movement.

Cyclists visiting Devon are envious of our profusion of cycle paths and minor roads compared to many other counties and Exeter quayside lies at the nexus of this cornucopia. Southwest to Dawlish; southeast to Exmouth, northwest to Crediton, northeast to Sidmouth. For more ambitious jaunts, the newly restored train to Okehampton makes the Granite Way, and beyond to Tavistock and Plymouth, a day trip, albeit at the mercy of Dartmoor’s unpredictable weather. The train to Barnstable brings the Tarka Way in range and there are many more I’ve yet to discover.

Over the three years I have been exploring the environs of Exeter by bike, I have accumulated a rudimentary knowledge of the features and landmarks. No longer do I lean on a farm gate wondering whether that lump on the horizon is the Sidmouth Gap, only to be told gently that we are looking towards Dartmoor. I can compare the merits of the coffee at our various morning stops and allude with due disparagement to some of the unrepaired potholes boasting geological longevity. Arcane titbits gleaned from the YouTube channel Global Cycle Network fall casually from my lips, disguising that I have only recently learned what a ‘bottom bracket’ is or how to change the pads on my disc brakes.

In the company of new joiners to the group, I am a venerable old hand, in the same way that, as a teacher, it is only necessary to be one step ahead of the class to be revered as an authority. A phenomenon of which I took shameless advantage during my days in front of the blackboard. 

The Sunday ‘B’ ride to Crediton started at the Countess Wear ‘swing bridge’ amid confusion over which side of the road we were supposed to meet. A dozen or so of us, including three e-bikes one of which was a do-it-yourself conversion, set off to Haldon via Exminster. Morning coffee was at a Costa in a service area adjacent to the A38, a site benefitting neither from picturesque scenery nor palatable coffee and conducted in the pall of effluvia from the sewage vent. 

It was the first really warm day and by lunchtime in a buttercup strewn field, I was down to a single layer, plus my sunhat. The Queen’s platinum jubilee is imminent, and I shared my disgust at the whole business of royalty and the fawning induced in a population victim to false consciousness with Gareth, one of few (another being Hermione) who appears to share my views. 

The afternoon route to Crediton was unexpectedly hilly. I can survive most hills on my carbon-fibre framed bike, even if it means stopping once or twice for a rest to catch my breath. The downhills were steep but being dry the anguished squeal my brakes emit in the wet, despite numerous attempts to quell the noise, was muted. Bizarrely, all the cafes in Crediton surrounding the pleasant market square are resolutely closed on Sundays so to avoid a second Costa, we opted for the motorbike café. These motorised brutes have become bigger and louder since the days my class-mate Alan Northcott would go ‘up Chelsea Bridge’ on his 250cc machine to meet co-religionists. But the coffee was surprisingly good: presumably even bikers’ expectations have risen.

It turned chilly on the way home and I relaxed under a hot shower immune to the rising cost of gas.

Cremyll

Of the Exeter-based Met Office, the conventional obloquy is ‘all they’ve got to do is look out of the window’ when the forecast turns out to be annoyingly inaccurate.

The 50mph winds they confidently predicted on the day before had mysteriously vanished when Wednesday came, so although the prospect of rain was uninviting, the question, previously abandoned as impractical in view of forecast storms, of whether to venture to Plymouth for a boat trip to Cawsands and a coastal walk back to Cremyll, now became pertinent.

My preference was to delay for a day, but that would have entailed Gerry travelling by himself so when he rather endearingly remarked it would be ‘more fun’ in my company I conceded that the weather seemed worthy of a try.

The boat trips on offer for excursions or fishing required prior day booking but the one we were aiming for was a ferry and therefore more of a commuter service with tickets available on board.

I devoured an extra slice of toast in anticipation of a late lunch and we quick marched to St David’s. I always like to have a train in hand in case the target is missed and that was the case on this occasion. So although we arrived in Plymouth in good time to walk to the Mayflower Steps, there was sufficient drizzle to justify a taxi. It took most of the 15 minute ride for Gerry to recall the last time he had indulged in such luxury.

The rain had subsided to a demoralised drizzle by the time we reached the ticket kiosk. With little ceremony and less apology, we were informed that the Cawsands ferry was cancelled due to ‘bad weather’. Having just put on my sunglasses to cope with the glare from the flat calm of the sea, I challenged this. ‘It was windy this morning was the explanation.’ In vain I protested that while it was indeed windy earlier, such was not the case now.  An inner voice told me to save my breath and I fulminated instead to Gerry in an uncharacteristic reversal of our usual roles. Possibly induced by an hour’s train journey on the sacred Dawlish line, he was in a state of unassailable cherubic calm.

An anodyne lunch at the Flower Café, proudly flaunting its encomia in the local press on the walls, passed the time until embarkation. At the quay, while waiting for the ferry, we engaged in conversation a deck hand from the vessel preparing for the harbour cruise. Recently graduated from Plymouth Uni, she was passing a pleasant year in this fashion while deciding whether to return to her native France. Disarmingly, she spoke faultless English with a Plymouth twang.

Mount Edgcumbe is the chief attraction of Cremyll. Only the Tudor walls of the symmetrical house with towers at each corner survived wartime bombing and the family subsequently rebuilt the inside. Flaneuring around the grounds replaced the more ambitious walk we had intended but Gerry was mightily pleased by the absence of any charge for ambling through the grounds and perusing the craft workshops. We took tea in the converted stables where I tried the homemade carrot cake flapjack, a not entirely successful blend of two coffee shop staples

As usual, the connecting train to Exeter Central was just pulling out as we crossed the bridge, a fact which Gerry bemoaned but I privately celebrated as our tickets were not valid for the extension and GWR staff are assiduous in their application of penalties. In consolation, we took a short-cut ginnel on the way home from the station entailing a steep climb to the Picturehouse which avoids the Exe Bridges roundabout (or more accurately, gyratory) and much noisome traffic.

Dinner was the remainder of the cauliflower cheese we had made the night before, to her discomfiture, for Jilly.

Rufus

It took me only two weeks in Exeter to make a decision which I had pondered in London for two years. The flat by the river, the kingfisher at dawn, the spontaneity and friendliness of the natives were factors. But the turning point was Belle Isle Park. The ‘Quiet Riverside Park’ was its apt subtitle on a noticeboard not entirely obliterated by graffiti. 

That summer was hot and still. At night, the covers would be discarded one by one until, as sunlight filtered through the thin curtain at 4.30, only a sheet remained. I’d discovered Parkrun and spent early mornings in the company of other runners, distracted from efforts to improve my PB only by the statuesque heron or an egret high stepping through the river’s fringe as delicately as a duchess skirting a puddle. Belle Isle Park was on a short cut from my rented flat to town. A profusion of wildflowers dominated by scarlet poppies turned the open grassland into a flickering Monet. This was the territory of a ginger cat at one end, a tabby at the other. A large boulder, holding a plaque recording the date the park was opened by the local MP, marked the division of the cats’ territories. Never did I see either animal stray past that boundary. 

It was the ginger one which caught my attention. Some days it would run up to me, eager for a stroke. At other times, I would be studiously ignored, its mind focussed on surveying its manor or preoccupied with feline philosophy. 

When my granddaughter visited, I tried to distract her from picking the flowers with the ginger cat, who by then I had christened Bella after the park. But she was more interested in the dogs, which, not allowed in this park, were abundant elsewhere on our walk. Later my son Jake, who had a cat of his own, visited. Proud of my new friendship, I introduced him to Bella. Unprovoked, the cat bit him. 

I continued to salute the cat when I traversed the park. Another walker, on their way to coffee at the Quay or to meet a friend, stopped, reached out a hand and stroked it. 

‘Everyone knows Rufus,’ he said, casually, looking up at me. 

‘Oh, is that his name?’ I didn’t admit I had privately bequeathed him a female handle. 

‘His owner comes here to fetch him every evening. Lives near St Leonard’s church.’ 

He gave Rufus, as I must now call him, a final tickle under the chin. 

The best thing about my new home was the garage. I’d never owned one before and without a car to accommodate, the space was a magnificent bonus. I would open my front door, stroll across the apron between the garage blocks and stand in the maw of the garage relishing the emptiness. 

One day, when I returned to the flat, Rufus was inside, staring at me challengingly from the top of the stairs. He became a frequent visitor after that, but not a regular one. Days when I longed for his company he was nowhere to be seen, not waiting by the door, not in the park. At other times, he would lurk outside the front door, demanding to come in just as I was going out, like Eliot’s Rumtumtugger. 

Rufus’s visits have a routine. As I open the front door, he slips between my legs, races up the stairs and peers down at me from the landing. When I go up, he follows me into the kitchen, waiting for a saucer of milk from which he will take few disdainful slurps. To begin with, he would stay for only a few minutes, signalling the need to return to his duty policing the park with a peremptory miaow. The day he leapt on to the sofa, fell asleep after washing and stayed all afternoon was special. In his company, I feel the need to do nothing – just being with him is enough. 

As dusk falls, gazing out of my window across the river path, I often see Rufus cradled sleepily in the arms of a short, bald man taking him home for dinner.

Flying

Flying

‘In the meantime, sit back, relax and enjoy the flight.’

For years, those words were the alarm clock signalling the beginning of my working weeks. Words, intended to calm, which invariably triggered latent fear.

In the teeth of all the information, with which I’m familiar, around the robustness of planes, I am frightened by turbulence. It is as though the lurching, vibrating sensation engenders a visceral reaction which bypasses or neutralises reason, perhaps in the same way as the fakery of religion penetrates otherwise rational minds.

Travel was essential. Some weeks, I spent longer travelling than in the office. No matter, travelling was work, increasingly so after the advent of mobile phones and as laptops were untethered from graunchy dial up and replaced by ubiquitous wi-fi. Work outbound, sleep inbound. That was the edict for transatlantic flights. On short haul, the assumption was you worked both ways, or at least until the abundant free alcohol took effect.

So paralysis by fear of flying was as impractical as demanding your own office on the grounds that open plan triggered agoraphobia. I took a flying desensitisation course being offered free by the local newspaper in return for the right to plaster the rag with images of cowering passengers vomiting on the tarmac or being reluctantly hauled into the maw of a plane. 

The morning session was devoted to lectures from a flying instructor standing next to a crisply attired airline captain. 

‘How do planes actually fly,’ we asked? 

‘Because the air passing over the curved upper surface of the wing has to travel faster than the air traversing the flat, lower surface, thus creating a vacuum and producing lift.’ 

A simple, neat and convincing answer. Unfortunately, it’s wrong, or at least a gross over-simplification. (In the award-winning radio comedy, Cabin Pressure, there is an embarrassed silence when this theory is challenged innocently by the observation that planes can fly upside down.) 

After lunch, we were herded into the plane, a beefy Boeing 757. At the top of the steps, one victim, a mousy woman who had sat with a glazed expression at the back of the class, refused and tuned tail, unabashed by the ignominy matched only, to my mind, by making one’s way back down the ladder from the platform of a bungee jump and the main reason it’s not on my bucket list. Another got as far as her seat before fleeing through the still open door. The rest of us clipped in dutifully, well-spaced around the mainly empty plane, and listened to the reassuring commentary (‘hear that click, it’s the undercarriage retracting’) from the crisp captain flying us from Birmingham to Glasgow. 

It was early spring, and the air was as calm as the atmospheric equivalent of a millpond. My son had been born the previous week and it was without the blessing of his mother (whose only challenge on her ten-mile drive to work was the occasional traffic jam) that I was indulging in this trip. There was no turbulence, so that while others endured the entire trip remoulding their arm rests with whitened knuckles or eyes squeezed shut in an ecstasy of terror, I sat demurely at peace as we made our way across northern England, circled Glasgow airport and returned with a feather light landing to the Midlands.

The only value I derived from the event, other than avoiding several nappy changes, was the instructor’s encouragement to request a visit to the cockpit on future flights if we felt that would calm our nerves. On many occasions since then – we are talking 1990’s, oh, halcyon, innocent days! – I would signal to a passing flight attendant, reach up to them conspiratorially and make my request, deploying the open sesame phrase, nervous flier. Always, it was granted. The theory was that seeing confident, self-assured people crisply in charge of the plane would dissipate the anxiety. In my case, it was the boyish fascination with the switches, knobs, screens and lights, such as lads of the early twentieth century might have experienced on the footplate of a locomotive, which provided such a distraction that fear lost its grip.     

Late in my flying career, I was approached by a confidential flight attendant during a trip to Stockholm. 

‘Mr Thompson?’ he inquired. 

I froze. Why was I the passenger he had picked to inform that we had run out of fuel/a wing had dropped off/the pilot had had a heart attack and I had been selected to land the plane?

‘Mr Thompson, I have just had a message from the Executive Club. At the end of this flight, you will have flown half a million miles with British Airways.’ 

He looked as chuffed as if he had personally booked and paid for all my tickets. 

‘We would like to offer you a glass of champagne to mark the occasion.’ 

I nodded my acceptance. In traditional BA style, it was lukewarm.

Since ending my working life, I have had no need to fly and have smugly occupied the moral high ground, deprecating aviation for its contribution to global heating. A stance which has been annoyingly devalued by the forced grounding of everyone else by coronavirus. I see pictures of aircraft, tessellated nose to tail, in the Mojave desert, nicknamed the boneyard, and rejoice.

But Google and Apple, who know me better than I do myself, mine deep into my history to excavate secrets and release demons. Periodically, interspersed between videos demonstrating how to repair bicycle punctures and showcasing the latest innovations in electric cars, I am offered footage of the pilot’s eye view of a 747 departing JFK, or a carefully coiffed senior first officer tackling a cross-wind landing in Dublin. I hesitate only for a moment. I pour a glass of wine and lower the lights. Now I’m sitting at the pilot’s shoulder watching the runway unfold. A robotic voice announces V1: the point of no return. Finally, I am able to sit back, relax and enjoy the flight.

Dads

 Dads

 

Today is my father’s birthday. Now just five years shy of the age at which he died, I ponder our relationship. Introspection is a disease of retirement.

 

Viewed through the wide angle of distance, how rosy was the post-war settlement! “You never had it so good“, was Macmillan’s celebratory exhortation with its undertone of admonishment. Zoom in. An economy in overdrive, jobs for everyone, the dawn of the jet age with its promises of exploration and freedom. Look, there are the new towns, the new houses, the new cars. Tighten the focus again. Now we are looking into those ticky-tacky homes. Mums in floral pinafores proud of their new top loader, dads polishing the Morris in the garage, 2.4 children scenting the approach of the 1960s. How successfully economic prosperity papered over the cracks! Who could be unhappy with a roof over their head, a full belly and the safety net of the welfare state? Post-traumatic stress disorder hadn’t been invented and therapy was an indulgence for middle-class Americans. Giving your children a better life than you had was not an aspiration, it was an inevitability. What could possibly go wrong?

 

My grandfather, my father‘s father, was a Communist. At some point in the 1930s, he left his adopted home in the UK and returned to the Soviet Union, taking his wife and youngest son with him. His teenage middle son, my father, was left in the care of his older brother, just five years his senior. It was a prolonged separation. Not until nearly a decade later did my grandfather return to London with my father’s younger brother but missing my grandmother who had died of starvation in a collective farm.

 

Abandonment by his parents in pursuit of an ideology must alone have been tough. But during my grandfather’s absence, the Second World War happened. My father lived through the London Blitz and, as a firewatcher, would have observed scenes as harrowing as any on the front line. Nevertheless, with determination of a calibre I could never match, he put himself through school, college and university emerging from the tunnel of the 1940s into the prosperous post-war daylight where my future mother was waiting to meet him. All his moorings must have been loosened by the events of his first thirty years. How else could he have fallen in love with and married a non-Jew? A fatal mistake, as his divorced wife acknowledged half a century later, and one which eventually resulted in the severing of all ties with my extended family on both sides.

 

How facile it is to lay the fault for our shortcomings at our parents’ door. Even when it is justified, that is only, as Philip Larkin tells us, because ‘man hands on misery to man’. And that is the dividing line between accountability and blame.

 

As I complete the last mile of the Countess Wear walk, the canal placid in early morning sunshine, I try to summon sympathy for a man who achieved the adoration of his students and colleagues while bearing the burden of his past, but at a heavy price to his family.

Lockdown

Lockdown

It happens every year at Christmas. Shops lower their shutters, the streets go quiet, everyone is closeted indoors with their family. And this hiatus is repeated a few days later over New Year. So the first day or two of the Covid-19 lockdown didn’t feel strange, or more accurately, the only strange thing was that it didn’t feel strange. By the third or fourth day, the strangeness, or lack of it, had worn off and was replaced by a weary acceptance, at least for those of us suffering no immediate adverse impacts on either health or finance. The sharper the shock, the longer the implications take to sink in; dissenting voices are already murmuring of sleep walking into a police state.

Most weeks, my calendar is studded with events which provide some traction to my sense of purpose. But enforced use of the delete button has created empty space as forbidding as the fresh white page of a Monday morning. My grip on the value of living, ever tenuous since I stopped productive (and reproductive) activities, is less secure. The carefully curated catalogue of pastimes – voluntary, leisure, social - assembled to fill the chasm left by work has been dismembered with nice precision, cancellation email by cancellation email. Death by a thousand cuts. Only assiduous attention to my regime of running and walking by the river provides some diversion.

The normal dance executed when opposing pedestrians wish to give way to each other is replaced by a scrupulous veering to the edge of the path, with communication limited to a shy smile or a grunt of thanks. Even strolling along a perfectly straight path, one is obliged to adopt a zigzag trajectory to give an adequately wide berth to overtaking runners or cyclists and oncoming pedestrians. The friendliness of strangers, which so attracted me to Exeter, has been replaced by the tense wariness practised by passengers in London tubes, where any acknowledgment of others is perceived at best as a social solecism and at worst as an incipient threat.

Marauding families colonise the byways previously the preserve of walkers and birdwatchers. Surly fathers and harried mothers trail two point four children. The disconsolate teenagers, fermenting their sense of injustice, are sulkily submissive. Parents are visited by memories of pushing buggies around draughty playgrounds, counting the minutes until the sun goes over the yardarm. 

Friends meeting by chance during their ration of daily outdoor exercise face each other across yards of no man’s land as inviolable as if it were mined. The distance necessitates raised voices so their amplified conversations are audible to all passers-by and, with the addition of hand gestures for emphasis or elucidation, give the appearance of a play. Watching this street theatre from a bench where I was resting for a drink, I was reminded of a performance of Under Milk Wood featuring Cy Grant in which the characters bawled their lines to one another from the front doors of their homes placed around the edge of the stage. I was taken by my mother who invited the daughter of her best friend with whom she was trying to match me, a bloodless creature who was no more interested in me than I was in her. The outing was not a success. To this day, I find the conceit of Under Milk Wood repellent.

Last night there was no wind. After the tumult of recent storms, the silence was especially intense. Unlike the muting of ambient sounds by snow which is calming, this silence had an eerie quality. Sounds were not being muffled, they simply weren’t there. As I stood on the bridge at the quay surrounded by darkened windows, I could hear clearly the paddling of a single swan thirty feet beneath me. One of the riverside restaurants had left lights on in its empty riverside terrace, to create an illusion of cheery normality. Passing through their reflections, the swan shattered them.

© David Thompson 2020