Through the tunnel

Growing up in leafy Blackheath, burrowing through the Greenwich foot tunnel to explore the Isle of Dogs was the subject of a stern prohibition.  So now that I live on the Isle of Dogs, or the Island as we locals coyly call it, traversing the tunnel to reach Greenwich and Blackheath produces a pleasantly mutinous frisson.  Despite the parental injunction, or perhaps because of it, I did occasionally venture through the dingy tunnel in the 1960s, quickly returning at the sight of the noisy and intimidating docks which briefly flourished during the post-war building boom until containerisation necessitated larger facilities at Tilbury.

Built in 1902, the tunnel was funded by employers on the Isle of Dogs to enable their employees to get to work when the ferry was halted during inclement weather.  Since the transformation of Docklands into a major financial centre with a working population of over 90,000, most of whom live elsewhere, the tunnel has become an important commuter route again, this time favouring the Lycra clad on fashionable single speed bikes.

The tunnel is open 24 hours a day and I have used it long after midnight, whistling tunelessly to dispel the loneliness.  On this occasion, I descending in newly installed lifts missing the surly operators who manned the old machines.  I used to feel sorry for them enduring a tedious and undoubtedly low paid job until one of them asked me if I fancied a holiday in Hungary as he owned an apartment building there.  Although the lifts have been refurbished, their glass doors and fancy lighting out of kilter with the grimy lavatorial white-tiled tunnel, the stairways are still shrouded in temporary plywood, so that ascending the steps feels like being on the unpainted side of a theatre set.

The day was clear and bright and Cutty Sark was magisterial against the sky as I emerged from the crepuscular tunnel.  Recent renovation has raised her three metres above the floor of the dry dock to accommodate a cafe and museum space underneath.  The hull has been reclad in Muntz metal, an alloy of copper, zinc and iron recreating an original and innovative feature of the ship designed to reduce fouling.  It gleams bronze in the sunlight while the glass roof over the dry dock creates the illusion of water, as though the great clipper is once again breasting the ocean.

Greenwich Park is still being restored after the depredations wrought by the equestrian events at the Olympics which took place while I was on weed suppression duty on the Pennine Way.  At the top of the hill, there is a fine avenue of chestnuts.  On this weekday afternoon it is populated exclusively by buggies pushed by elegantly coiffed and immaculately dressed young women.  And that's just the au pairs.  The park is bounded by high walls and although they're mostly distant or invisible behind foliage, there is always a sense of enclosure.  Leaving the park at the Blackheath gate, a vista opens across the heath which is always a shock as dramatic and unexpected as any theatrical scene shift.   Sightlines collapse to a horizon bounded by distant Georgian dolls' houses capped by a limitless azure sky engraved with the vapour trails of planes heading for Heathrow.

I set off in the direction of our old family home, passing the spot my father proudly discovered from which six church spires could be seen, a curious achievement for a life-long atheist to celebrate.  Nowadays, new developments mask most of the spires.
In my day, the heath was criss-crossed with small roads and paths, but enlightened Lewisham Council has turfed over many of these, no doubt stimulating the sales of 4 x 4s to frustrated road users  but restoring the heath to something of its pre motor car state.  A single decker bus moves along one of the remaining roads, close to where we lived and I recall my parents fulminating at the proposal that there should be a bus route there.  They somehow managed to reconcile rock solid elitist views on almost all aspects of everyday life with loyalty to the Labour party and would, I suppose, be characterised as champagne socialists  despite lacking the joie de vivre that phrase implies.  Most local opposition to bus routes across the heath was probably predicated on the impact on house values, although judging from current advertisements in estate agents' windows, the advent of public transport on the hallowed ground does not appear to have had much adverse impact, as any house proximate to the heath is commanding seven figures.

Our own family home was in a private road of eleven detached houses and was acquired by my parents in the early fifties for £4,000.  I heard it was sold a few years ago for £1.8 million.  Startling though those figures might sound, the real issue is the comparison with earnings.  In the fifties, average earnings were under £1,000 a year, so while average incomes have risen some thirty fold over the last sixty years, during the same period that property value escalated by a factor of about 450, making home ownership so much less affordable.

Of the original eleven houses, only ten remain.  Number one which boasted a massive garden, was inhabited by an elderly woman called Miss Fleck, but demolished in the early seventies and replaced by seven modernist town houses dubbed North Several to our undisguised derision.  I can still recall the names of all the families who occupied the other nine houses during our tenure.  The last of that set died earlier this year in a retirement home, having lived in the same house with her partner for half a century.  As I walked past their deserted house, it is moated by builder's hoardings bearing an architect's sign.  Last year, the adjacent house, also sold on the death of its long standing owner, had a basement excavated and I heard that our own property, the smallest in the street but still twice the size of most family homes with four floors, had had a passenger lift installed.  These enhancements reflect the changing demographic of the area.  In the sixties, the road was occupied by academics, journalists and local businessmen and the prevailing ethic was characterised by the Swedish word, lagom, signifying virtue in moderation and opposition to an excessive display of wealth.  So when a brash wholesale butcher moved into the largest house and parked a blood-red Rolls-Royce outside, he was quickly frozen out by polite disdain.  His successor made do with a Volvo, like everyone else.  Possibly for the same reason, or more likely due to a particularly middle class form of inverted snobbery,  the road was always unmade during my childhood, there being a vague notion that tarmac would, by bringing the private road into line with ordinary thoroughfares, somehow lower the tone.  No such qualms exist now: the road surface is smooth and black, a necessary concession to the expensive sports cars of the type which are only taken for a spin when rain isn't forecast parked in many of the driveways.

My parents sold their house in the mid-seventies and some twenty years later I happened to be passing when it was for sale again.  Learning of my connections with the place, the vendors kindly invited me in to look around.  My father's DIY secondary glazing was still in place, I noticed, but much else had changed.  There was central heating, of course, some walls had been removed and all the rooms had been modernised and redecorated.  I spent an hour or so looking around, they offered me a glass of sherry (some things don't change in Blackheath) and I offered to send them copies of my photos from the fifties and sixties which they could pass on to the new owners.  I walked slowly to the station, reflecting on what I had seen.  But by the time a reached home, I couldn't recall a single image of the changed house, all I could call to mind was the place as it had been when I had lived there two decades previously, those childhood memories apparently being more cherished and deeply rooted than any change in reality.

Blackheath Village has endured a similar revolution.  Local grocers, greengrocers, chemists and a single estate agent were the retail currency of the post-war years.  There was a single restaurant, the misleadingly named Welcome Inn.  My parents took me there to celebrate my indifferent O-level results and I recall ordering the exotic zabaglione for pudding.  Only a single establishment remains in the village from those days, the Blackheath Bookshop.  Many of the other premises are now estate agents, while the single largest category comprises restaurants and coffee shops, most thankfully independent.

Leaving the village, I spot a new sign on the edge of the heath.  Erected by Lewisham Council, it shows in admirable detail the different parts of the heath, with the current and historical names of each field and the locations of places of interest and notable houses, some now demolished.

At dusk, I re-enter Greenwich Park, heading towards the statue of General Woolfe now haughtily surveying Canary Wharf, and make for the forbidden tunnel.

© David Thompson 2012

A birdseye view

Where do you discover the soul of a city, or find that ineffable insight which reveals what Thomas Wolfe calls 'the secret heart of darkness'?  Not in the effusions of contemporary architects more eager for glittering prizes than the echoes of posterity, nor the relics of earlier cultural incarnations, selectively preserved to complement and burnish politicians' chosen contemporary narratives. Perhaps in the gritty functional spaces - railway stations, bus termini -  cathedrals to the belief 'I move, therefore I am'.  Maybe in the ragged outer edges where city gives way to suburb and the tendrils of ribbon development reach for the next town.
Of course there is no single answer. To know a city requires synthesising all of these different facets. The tourist haunts, the exploration of the fringes as Will Self has famously done for London, uncovering buried layers quiescent under the familiar or persisting in ghostly parallel, as Robert McFarlane recounts in The Old Ways.
My time in Florence was limited and further curtailed by unexpected illness so as usual I adopted a pick 'n' mix approach whose only virtue was a complete lack of expectation, a guaranteed foil to disappointment.
From the eminence of Piazza Michelangelo, infested with the trinket sellers that gravitate towards all tourist honeypots, Florence lies at your feet, as my host Leyla had foretold. High enough to provide a view yet close enough to identify landmarks, the piazza offers Google Earth zoomed to perfection. Cupped by the surrounding hills, the city's patchwork of burnt orange, yellow ochre and hot pink is an artisan quilt settled in the folds of the landscape and pinned to the valley by the Arno and its tributaries.  As the sun sets, the colours grow richer and the shadows tilt the picture into 3D. Purchased with the lives of the exploited and oppressed, like most World Heritage Sites, the creation of this gorgeous vista is less of a marvel than its preservation. In any country the appetites of rapacious developers for an extra storey here, some infill there, is rarely resistable especially when sugared by so-called planning gain. And yet here in Italy, a byword for corruption in Europe, no building in view from the piazza exceeds the height of the Renaissance palaces, and, from street level, no architectural dissonance is evident.
For a truly unglossed account of any city, pay attention during the tiresome transfer from airport to city centre. Arriving for the first time at Budapest, which formed with Vienna and Prague the nineteenth century cultural nexus of central Europe, on the way from the airport I was startled to be confronted by a disjunctive Tesco, sqatting amongst the dusty villas and a beachhead for the multinationals.
The bus journey to Pisa airport slices through Florence's layers. As we progress from the preserved centre through dreary suburbs to the outer penumbra, the familiar attributes of modern life assert themselves: a shopping mall, factories, even a Hilton hotel forlornly banished to the city's margin. And then, cresting a hill, in a self-parody of the Tuscan stereotype appear endless olive groves and vineyards. In another field, a crop more curious than triffids has established a colony. A thousand or more photovoltaic cells tip their faces to the sun, silently harvesting photons, more valuable than the olives or grapes they replaced and signalling the crushing ascendancy of technology over agriculture. When forty percent of arable land in the US is sacrificed to the insatiable demand for ethanol, forcing price increases in foodstuffs, even the use of land for renewable energy production seems liminal.
We reach Pisa. Standing tall, if not proud, in the skyline the famous leaning tower cannot be overlooked, in any sense. A treasonous thought teases me: maybe Florentines regard the result of Pisa's experiment with the skyscraper as an awful warning, and their moratorium on high rise and architectural innovation owes more to caution than conservation.

© David Thompson 2012

Travelling to Florence

Mathematicians are irritated by the phrase 'the law of averages'. There is no such phenomenon, they chide loftily. I daresay the same criticism could be levelled at the law of unintended consequences but I'm a sturdy adherent. When my daughter announced that she would be abandoning the UK for Italy, at least temporarily, I wondered why. Other than smouldering latin males, food that's the envy of the world and a perfect climate I couldn't fathom the attraction. She replied simply that she had enjoyed her childhood Italian holidays. My main recollection of those idylls is constant squabbling between her and her younger brother, but maybe rose-coloured spectacles have eluded the mathematicians' hit list.
A three month internship in a European country is a gentle transition from the purposeful world of university to the inanity of working life and she adopted an admirable sang froid, taking a relaxing holiday with friends the week before she was due to leave as the hunt for accommodation appeared to be sorted. But it acquired a fresh urgency when it dawned on us that there might be something not altogether kosher about a request to send money to Nigeria as a deposit for an apartment in Florence. Thwarted of proper digs, she spent the first week in a hostel. Fortunately Google has not yet found a way to embed sounds into email as the shriek accompanying the message in which she announced that there were bedbugs at the hostel would have shattered glass.  Curiously she didn't regard cohabiting with local fauna as a worthwhile notch on the traveller's bedpost and hotfooted it to a friend's place which she eventually took over when he departed.
Working only four days a week enables me to stack my non-working days into mini-breaks with satisfying regularity so Florence became an obvious target for a long weekend. As an indifferent flier, rewarding the stress of flying with the promise of further torture through the allocation of airmiles has, to me, always epitomised the addition of insult to injury.  But when flying is unavoidable, replete with airmiles, I prefer what are laughably termed full service airlines to the larger indignities of the low cost carriers. So it was that I left work earlier than usual to catch a train earlier than necessary to take me to Gatwick. After a promising start, the train ground to a halt in a cutting, unwontedly, with the dreary towers of East Croydon still fresh in the memory. When an announcement was heard requesting the guard to contact the driver, collective grimaces were elicited from the passengers. Not going to be good news, opined someone, superfluously. There had been an accident at Gatwick station, we learned, and no trains could enter or leave the area. Eventually we crawled to Salfords where we were given the option of leaving the train.  My speculation on the possibility of a taxi was greeted with a hollow laugh from a regular commuter, comfortably ensconced in his usual corner and clearly in no hurry to return to domestic bliss. Horley did offer transport alternatives so when the driver grimly assured us that the train was proceeding no further 'any time soon' a couple of dozen hopefuls tugging wheelie bags exited the station to thin drizzle. ln the taxi office we were informed that no cars would be available for an hour. The only option appeared to be the local bus, due in 10 minutes. Impromptu acquaintances were made as people offered cash to those with only euros. By this time, my obsessionally early departure seemed niggardly and as the clock ticked towards the gate closing time, hope all but evaporated. I considered abandoning the journey and rebooking my flight for the next day. Before this plan could crystallise into action, the train guard appeared at the station entrance and announced that the train had clearance for Gatwick. We trooped back, avoiding the eyes of passengers who had wisely stayed on board throughout. More for form's sake than with any hope of catching the flight, I raced though the airport, arriving sweatily at the gate ten minutes after the departure time but with ten minutes in hand as the flight had been delayed.
The lucky conjunction of a late train and delayed flight was, I soon realised, a Pyrric victory as the consequent late arrival at Pisa would jeopardise my chances of making the last train to Florence, which even on the original timetable were slim. I'd taken the precaution of opting for hand luggage but even speeding through immigration in the gratifyingly empty airport I was five minutes adrift. Other dismayed passengers directed me towards the bus service, which, even with an hour's wait seemed a prudent alternative to an unplanned stopover in Pisa or a taxi to Florence. As I nestled in the corner of bus, it slowly gorged itself on more displaced train passengers. At five past eleven, the driver started the engine, evidently a signal to laggards that he would leave promptly. Precisely at quarter past, the due departure time, he commenced the process of examining tickets. Most passengers had bought tickets in advance, thereby securing a small discount, and these were printed on tissue-thin paper with barcodes which the driver dutifully scanned with a handheld device which then printed a ticket, indistinguishable, to my eye, from the one tendered. This was passed to the passenger while the original joined the bundle in his hand.  There were many family groups on board and they produced streamers, half a yard long, of tickets each with its own barcode, each requiring scanning. Juggling the scanner and a growing bouquet of paper, progress down the aisle was glacial as the scanner required frequent coaxing before it would clock the code and fizz out a replica ticket. Far from annoying tired passengers, this unedifying spectacle engendered a curious bonhomie; the driver smiling and shrugging at the vagaries of his machine and the passengers joshing conspiratorially as if the whole performance were an unexpected treat or comforting reassurance that they were safely home in Italy after the impositions of efficiency endured at their northern European holiday destinations. Not being party to the insights of this strange ritual, I became increasingly irritated as the minutes passed, conscious that, even assuming she had received my text explaining my switch from train to bus, my daughter would be waiting to meet me. Eventually the ticket god was propitiated and we rumbled out of the airport and through the velvet darkness towards Florence.

© David Thompson 2012

Dinner

The highlight of our sojourn in Tallinn was an excellent dinner at the prosaically named Fish and Wine restaurant. Tripadvisor made it clear that such was the popularity of the place, booking was a necessity and friends in high places wouldn't go amiss. We duly emailed a reservation request and after an anxious wait received a courteous acceptance. To our delight, on arrival we were shown to the best table with a view over the adjacent park. We'd requested an early booking so were not surprised to be the first diners and prepared smug expressions, appropriate to our prime position, with which to greet later guests. After an hour no one else turned up and we had the entire restaurant to ourselves all evening. The food was as good, or better, than promised by Tripadvisor so I can only attribute the poor turnout to the end of the season and the recession.
Exhausted by our wrangle with Tallinn's embryonic consumer culture, on the last night we decided to take dinner in the hotel.  The ambience of the hotel restaurant, where we'd breakfasted daily, would suffer in comparison with a 1950s Wimpy Bar so room service seemed preferable; while the food might be indifferent, at least the surroundings would be more condusive to relaxation. Most hotels promote their room service mercilessly, charging extortionately for wheeling a trolley along the corridor to your room. In this hotel, their first reaction when I called reception was to deny they offered room service at all. I pointed out that I had dialled the number given in the directory for room service and they grudgingly transferred me to the kitchen. Eventually with a show of great reluctance, a battered card was brought to our room. There is something primitively comforting about room service. Perhaps it conjures memories of being tended during illness as a child or maybe it's simply an enlargement of the treat that is breakfast in bed. Dining in the old railway Pullmans while trundling across England induces a similar sense of cosiness and semi-detachment as the countryside slides past the window. But so low were our expectations of a hotel rusty at the nicieties of customer service that when the food arrived with crisp white napery we were hugely delighted.
The rattling of ancient trams and the glowing PricewaterhouseCoopers sign on the mirror glazed building opposite provided a disjunctive backdrop to our dinner a deux, but encapsulated my impressions of Tallinn. A disoriented city whose confused and oppressed past leaves its citizens uncertain of their present status or future aspirations.

© David Thompson 2012

Jetlag

As you navigate your way through life's pitfalls and indiscretions - blandishments to lovers, excuses to employers, diktats to children - it's worth familiarising yourself with the results of some of the more arcane psychological experiments to buttress your stance.  These are better deployed without citation as it's frequently easy for the opposition to unearth evidence proving the converse.  
My favourite concerns circadian rhythms.  In the freewheeling time before the advent of ethics committees, volunteers were isolated in a dark cave with no external stimulus to monitor their sleep habits and determine their natural day length.  Despite having inhabited the planet for thousands of years, it seems that humans are still not fully adapted to a 24 hour day as most people were found to be attuned to a 26 hour cycle.  This explains why, left to my own devices, I prefer to go to bed later and later each night, with a corresponding slippage in getting up time. While this explanation might mollify the parents of indolent teenagers, I've never found it cuts the mustard with apoplectic bosses.  However it may contribute to explaining why travelling west across time zones, which increases apparent day length, is generally less stressful than going east.    
My own formula for dealing with jet lag is simple.  When travelling regularly to New York, I'd aim for a late morning departure, typically BA175, which would deposit me in Manhattan by mid-afternoon.  Having checked in to my hotel and showered, I'd take a walk of at least an hour in daylight. Sunlight and exercise, apart from being tonics in their own right, are apparently the secret to resetting the metabolic clock.   A stroll through Central Park, a steak at Smith and Wollensky's and holding out for bed until at least 9pm would guarantee a good night's sleep and an early start the next morning with no excuse to circumvent the gym before work.  
Provided one could feign working on the outbound flight, sleeping was encouraged on the way home, but less from sympathy than the expectation that the itch of guilt would propel returning travellers straight to the London office after a quick shower in the arrivals lounge  But however much BA tricked out the cabin to resemble a hotel bedroom, I only ever slept fitfully.  In the certain knowledge that once we'd left the eastern seaboard the captain was busy flirting with the most pliant flight attendant, I never wavered from the belief that unless someone was monitoring the creaks and quivers of the aircraft it would surely plunge into the Atlantic.

© David Thompson 2012

Shopping

Despite my obsessional study of the weather forecast before venturing to post a letter, let alone visit another country, I can somehow never really believe that the weather elsewhere is much different from what I'm currently experiencing. So leaving London in balmy autumn weather I arrived ill-equipped for the brisk northern chill of Tallinn. The first evening, we dutifully explored the Old Town, admiring the architecture with chattering teeth. The waiters in the rip-off restaurant  recommended by the hotel (always a mistake) looked bemused when we asked to sit indoors and thoughtfully left the doors open in case we found it stuffy.
Next morning it drizzled and ironically, having left the largest mall in western Europe behind in London, we resorted to shopping.  Unlike the gleaming ziggurats which masquerade as malls in the US, the crumbling edifice close to our hotel had all the decrepit charm of a 1980s shopping centre in Basingstoke. Nevertheless, within an hour we had bought a wrist watch and a pair of trousers. The latter were bright red and wearing them made me feel like one of those people who buy hereditary titles on eBay. Our final quarry was some makeup for Sally who normally eschews the stuff but somehow felt she couldn't manage without it for a long weekend in Tallinn. The shop was empty and a single assistant regarded us balefully from behind the counter. Her mask-like face evidenced her commitment to her profession. Not content with the concept of foundation, like a celebrity architect striving to engineer an iconic building, she had started at the sub-basement and worked her way through the storeys, finally reaching the penthouse of blusher. In attempting to showcase the entire stock on her own face she had produced the garish effect beloved of face painters at country fairs which delight seven year old children but horrify their parents. I looked at her again and despite her camouflage I was sure I could detect signs of life, or maybe her skin was simply twitching in allergic response to the cocktail of potions assaulting it. Sally was inveigled by this robot into buying a brush to apply the foundation she selected. Costing over 20 euros, to my ignorant eye it looked indistinguishable from the sorts of brush you pick up in packets of three for a fiver at the local DIY shed.
By the following morning, the the handle and the bristles of the make up brush had parted company.  I forebore to suggest that this wouldn't have happened with a B&Q product. As it was our last day, we thought it simplest to return the brush before our final round of sightseeing. The shop was deserted and we explained the problem to the same assistant, who must have got up several hours before us to refurnish her face. She regarded the remnants of the brush gravely and then opined that it had got wet.  Sally replied sweetly that its washability had been promoted as a key selling point the day before. Woodenly the mannequin stated that she couldn't offer a refund. That was fine, a replacement was what we wanted, Sally explained, eyeing the shelf-full of brushes. That too was impossible as she couldn't offer exchanges without consent from her manager who was not available. We protested that since the item was clearly faulty surely there could be no argument about its replacement. She was undaunted by this reasoning. Impressed by her unflappable intransigence in the teeth of incontrovertible logic, it didn't seem worth invoking consumer protection laws. Something in her manner suggested that reference to a higher authority, such as the mayor or an EU commissioner, might prove necessary if we were to push the matter. I wondered silently what the word for jobsworth was in Estonian while she added that even if her manager agreed to the exchange there would be a lot of paper work involved which generally took two or three days to complete. Eventually when we explained that we were leaving Tallinn imminently she agreed to try to fast track the procedure and suggested that we should return in the afternoon.
At six o'clock we reentered the shop. It was empty as usual, and the thought crossed my mind that the whole enterprise was a front for money laundering, or that some of the vials contained substances more valuable than scent. On the counter, the impassive assistant had laid out three identical brushes. For a moment, it looked as though, in a crass and unnecessarily generous gesture, she was going to offer us all three as compensation for our disgruntlement. Instead it transpired that she had in mind a re-enactment of the scene from The Merchant of Venice where Bassanio has to choose a casket.  Sally solemnly examined the first brush and pronounced it acceptable but the assistant insisted that she should try the others, as though Sally had progressed seamlessly from tiresome customer to head of quality control. She obliged, making great play of testing each thoroughly and finally making a difficult choice. After some further deliberation concerning which receipts we were entitled to retain, we were allowed to leave.
Increasingly I derive pleasure from returning to London. Few other cities offer such rich variety and the costs, to wallet and health (London consistently fails the EU air quality targets) seem to me entirely proportionate. An area of notable improvement is in public transport and I was reflecting on this as I walked to Sally's from the 21 bus stop the week after our sojourn in Tallinn. Noticing some jars on her dressing table, I enquired after the make up brush. "Oh, I haven't used it, I don't normally bother with brushes," she murmured.

© David Thompson 2012

Globalisation

My father travelled regularly to Chicago in the 1960s and I was the only boy in my class, possibly the whole school, to have been to America, as we used to call the US. Freddie Laker, let alone his aviation spoor, had yet to bring us the mixed blessings of low cost flights.  In those days, it was de rigueur to take a small gift when visiting friends or colleagues overseas and nothing would enchant English expats as much as a pot of marmalade. Globalisation has made it almost impossible to find meaningful gifts or souvenirs now that high streets are identical and most merchandise is available through Amazon in any case.  
Staunchly middle class villages and urban enclaves fight stoutly against creeping domination by the chain store. Think Totness in Devon and Stoke Newington in London. Maybe it's ironic that some of their most embattled establishments, coffee shops, wouldn't even exist if it were not for the popularisation of the genre by the success of Starbucks and its ilk. And it's interestingly to contrast the acclaim heaped on these doughty middle class nimbies by the liberal press with the scorn they pour on countries which try to preserve their most cherished cultural bastions. The obvious example is France, which starts with the inherent disadvantage that it is, well, France. The Institut Francais has long railed against encroaching anglicisation of French which they view as cultural imperialism. The ridicule reserved for attempts to control the use of language is partly due to its futility.  In a global world, tilting at that windmill is as doomed to failure as any other laudable campaign from nuclear non-proliferation to getting teenagers to squeeze the toothpaste tube from the bottom. Perhaps France has got it wrong though and has been too timid about conservation. Instead of limiting it to the lingo, how about expanding the ambition to banish homogenisation of the high street. No more McDonald's elbowing aside neighbourhood bistros. United in their stand with Totness and Stokey, that would be globalisation we could all support.

© David Thompson 2012

Tourism

As an industry, tourism generates more ironies than most. The most trenchant paradox is that as international travel become more accessible it accelerates cultural convergence and becomes nugatory.
Business travel must shoulder even more of the blame. I know from experience how, arriving in an unknown city late at night in a different time zone with a client meeting a few hours away, one craves the simplicity of familiarity. Multinational hotel chains recognise this and pander to our weakness. At every Marriott, JW smiles down paternally from a huge Ruddigorian portrait while you check in, a talisman promising that the bed will be as soft here as it was in Frankfurt and the towels as fluffy as they were in Melbourne. But the balance between the anodyne and cod-local is carefully calibrated: business travellers relish unique touches, provided they don't interrupt the smooth flow of commerce. Local cuisine alternatives at the breakfast buffet are acceptable, provided the international standards, embodied by Kellogg's, are there too. Recounting the peculiar breakfast tastes of the natives makes good travellers' tales back in the office.  
Leisure travel is a different matter. An acquaintance from my PwC days who travelled regularly on business and whose life was consequently spent in a haze of identikit hotels, booked a holiday with some colleagues in a log cabin, eager to experience the traditional way of life.  There was a mixup and the tour company explained that their primitive accommodation was double booked. Don't worry, they said, we're giving you a free upgrade to a 4 star hotel. Most of their customers would undoubtedly have been delighted but my colleague explained to the baffled company rep why this was not satisfactory. Given no alternative, they accepted the offer, but being a lawyer, he also negotiated a full refund.

© David Thompson 2012

On the way

Oldsters might recall Brian Redhead, doyen of the Today programme in the 1980s until his untimely death. A regular commuter between Manchester and London, he would occasionally murmur a reference to the mysterious Friends of the M6. An unlovely motorway, it needed all the friends it could muster. Among motorway afficionados, a select group admittedly, the M11 probably garners more votes. Its destinations are more alluring and the scenery, once past the suburban penumbra encircling London, more rural. So having elected to drive rather than train it to Stansted, speeding away from the dogdays of the Olympics along an empty motorway induced pleasant pre-holiday spirits. Airports have even fewer admirers than motorways but it's generally agreed that Stansted is the least objectionable of the southeastern gateways and enjoying a latte in the sunshine it seems scarcely worth bothering going anyway else.
To pass the time during my obsessionally early arrival, we played the country game. You get one point for each country you've visited which the other person hasn't. If there are high stakes, it can be refined: five points for a continent and so on. Competent geopolitical bluffing is the key to winning. I managed to argue that Jersey counted as a separate country, but failed with the Isle of Dogs, despite a learned account of the 1970s attempt at UDI. I was outclassed anyway; streaking ahead on the Nordics, it was clear I'd be thrashed once we got to Asia.
Indolence had prevented me from finding out much about Tallinn before departure but I was determined not to believe the stereotype that it was simply the new stag party capital, cheap flights having penetrated ever deeper into Europe passing the mantle from Dublin to Prague and no doubt others. So I was mildly offended when the opening remark of the friendly Estonian seated next to me on the plane was to enquire whether I was going to Tallinn to drink. Denying this, and enquiring what he'd been doing in London elicited a one word answer. "Drinking."

© David Thompson 2012

Preparing for Tallinn

Canny entrepreneurs are continually devising ingenious new ways of encouraging us to travel more. Yet their methods sometimes produce anomalies.  
Read any account of long distance walks and the protagonists will allude to the peculiar physics whereby one gram of luggage in the backpack mysteriously weighs one kilogram after walking a few miles.  So when packing for a walking holiday, one naturally pares luggage down to the minimum.  But on my recent Pennine Way trek, I engaged the services of a baggage carrier, a kind of rural white van man, who turned up every day and hefted a suitcase the size of a steamer trunk into the truck and deposited it at my next stop while I sauntered out with a day pack.  How reassuring it was, when arriving at the next stop and greeted by a quizzical landlady wondering who this dishevelled bloke could be, to see the suitcase standing sentinel in the hall behind her, my guarantee of entry however unappealing a guest I might appear.  And how refreshing it was to change into clean clothes, chosen from a vast array of outdoor gear covering all eventualities from sand storms to blizzards.  No counting the grams for me!
One of the pleasures of a weekend city break is doing what you please: a bit of gentle sightseeing, a morning in bed, dinner at a fancy restaurant.  So naturally, a few different outfits, even for the most curmudgeonly fashion-resistant amongst us, is desirable.  So how come I'm trying to fit all my gear into a suitcase half the size of my Pennine Way day pack?  Yes, it's the curse of the low cost airline which will blithely charge more to transport a weekend's worth of clothes in the hold than they require for a ticket to fly you a thousand miles.


© David Thompson 2012

Epilogue

I sit on the East Coast mainline train from Berwick-on-Tweed to London, a journey which will take less than four hours to exceed the distance I walked in three weeks, and think about the PW.  
To recycle a platitude, a project like walking the PW is a microcosm of life: it is contained, unique and unrepeatable. But projects can be reviewed and analysed after they are completed; life can't, at least not by its central protagonist.  
Back in February, I planned to walk the PW because I wanted to leave London during the expected turmoil of the Olympics which apparently passed off with minimal disruption to normal life.
But there was another, more romantic, reason for my fascination with the PW. The first house I bought had been occupied by an elderly couple and needed extensive renovation. Partly for financial reasons, I decided to rewire it myself. I read a couple of books, faked some tradesman's stationery to obtain access to a builders' suppliers and started lifting floorboards. It was hard work but the only significant challenge was the bathroom light. When I peered into the tiny loft space, I could see there would be no room to turn around, let alone stand up. Claustrophobia gripped me and I decided we'd have to manage with candles in the bathroom. Then it occurred to me that one day the child with whom my wife was pregnant would be sure to ask why ours was the only house in the street where you had to pee in the dark. The prospect of that future shame was too much; I took a deep breath and swarmed over the rafters to fix the light. The result of my week's labour, crawling under floors and over ceilings, was a strong sense of connectedness with the building, unmatched by any subsequent home when I engaged professionals to undertake repairs. I had a notion that walking halfway along England might generate a comparable bond with the country I call home, similar to the way in which the Aboriginal songlines described by Bruce Chatwin link them to their land and families and need to be periodically rewalked.
Inching northwards towards the border, the red line on my GPS lengthened daily and I visualised the PW as a thread which I was drawing across the country, pinning it to the ground at each overnight stop. Although it would rank as mediocre needlework, with lots of dropped stitches where I missed the way, this looping trace formed the record of my journey. Fellow walkers comprised another set of links, a human chain of individuals motivated by a single purpose, with whom I felt a strong kinship. Lee with his enormous pack, Davinder who shared with me his special technique for washing and drying socks, the youths carrying the Olympic torch and many others. All were a constant presence as I trudged the trail. Even those I'd heard about but didn't meet, like the Norwegian women who stayed at Grange Fell the night before me and the Dutch couple who'd fallen in a bog, formed part of the tribe I sensed moving synchronously across the countryside as part of a larger caravan of PW walkers.    
My PW expedition was planned as a solo event. Many factors contributed to that decision. Self-sufficiency as an ideal has assailed me from various directions and I believed that tackling the PW by myself would yield the most rewarding experience. The fellowship I derived from walking with others was an unexpected and pleasurable counterpoint and mirrors the enjoyment of walking holidays with friends, such as a recent one along part of the South West Coast Path. So while I shall still relish lone walking, my future long distance walks will be planned differently and include company. The finding that I need to balance time alone and time with others, while not perhaps a great revelation, will help in planning many aspects of my life, and worth enduring three weeks on the PW to discover.

© David Thompson 2012

Byrness to Kirk Yetholm

The Pennines themselves peter out at Greenhead and the last two days of the walk, where the PW nibbles at Scotland, belong to the Cheviots. If the moors which form the backdrop to most of the PW are reminiscent of a rumpled tablecloth (and hardly more interesting) the Cheviots resemble toothsome meringues. In a disorderly range they create gorgeous vistas and lush valleys which beg to be explored. I was looking forward to paying tribute to their seduction but, after the atrocious conditions of the previous day, also apprehensive. However after a steep ascent and a few comparatively tame bogs, large parts of the path were slabbed, for which I was grateful. So much so, in fact, that I amused myself by composing the following limerick:  
There once was a Way called Pennine
Whose surface was far from benign
They thought they might slab it
Then made that a habit
Now those sections are perfectly fine.    
Wayfinding was not a challenge either. The Scottish border is delineated by a wire fence, rather a pathetic boundary compared to Hadrian's Wall, but useful for defining the route of the PW. Following it, I was reminded of the film Rabbit-Proof Fence which describes the remarkable journey undertaken by a group of Aboriginal girls who were moved thousands of miles into settlements by the Australian government and used the fence to navigate their way home.
A few hardy types yomp the final 27 miles in one go as there's no overnight accommodation midway. Like the majority, I had decided to forgo the bragging rights associated with such a marathon and instead arranged to be collected halfway and transported to my overnight billet. The drawback with splitting the final section is that there is no convenient collection point since the PW abjures proximity to roads. I had been instructed to phone the people meeting me as soon as I departed from the PW; that would enable them to reach the collection point at about the same time as me. In theory this is a splendid idea but it failed to take into account the lack of mobile phone reception in the middle of the Cheviots. The walk to the collection point was nearly three miles, and although I had cheerfully tramped over two hundred and fifty miles in the preceding three weeks, I found myself resenting this uncalled for bonus, especially as it entailed descending a steep hill which I would be obliged to climb the following morning to regain my position on the trail. Periodically I checked my phone. Occasionally it teased me with a weak signal but nothing which would sustain a call or even a text. I was starting to panic and make mental preparations for a night on the hills when salvation appeared in the guise of a group of bullocks. Unlike sheep which roam the hills freely, cattle can't stray far from the farm so civilisation had to be at hand. The track descended sharply and I suspected it wanted to dive below sea level and deep into the earth's crust to ensure I had the benefit of a really stiff climb in the morning but it had to content itself with depositing me on the floor of the valley. I spied a farmhouse, attended by the usual retinue of barking dogs which in due course attracted the attention of the farmer. She kindly allowed me to use her landline, but not before expressing astonishment at my naivete in assuming that a mobile phone might work in such remote parts.
On the morning of the last day, the sun shone as I was dropped off. I was in a good mood and looking forward to the walk, or at least the end of it. As I marched up the track which had annoyed me so much the day before, the ridge ahead was gradually obliterated by mist. By the time I reached the PW, visibility was poor and a blustery headwind hindered progress. After a few miles, a mountain refuge hut provided welcome shelter and when I emerged after signing the visitors' book the mist was clearing and the wind had changed direction and assisted me up the remaining hills. My final picnic lunch was enjoyed in brilliant sunshine, contemplating the Cheviots and the plains beyond and feeling a tinge of sadness as the walk was drawing to a close.  
As I loped down the path towards the Border Hotel, the traditional end of the PW, I reflected that my identity had changed. No longer could I define myself to strangers as someone "doing the Pennine Way". From now on, I was simply one of the many thousands who had completed it.



© David Thompson 2012

Bellingham to Byrness

I've mentioned before the dilapidated state of many properties in the countryside. At Gilsland, I noticed a particularly sad example: a fine house with a large part of the roof missing which I therefore assumed was empty. However my host informed me that the owner still lived there but refused to undertake any repairs despite the coaxing and cajoling of the local community which in desperation had even offered to buy it.  In other places, it's not unusual to see substantial farmhouses with relatively minor depredations completely abandoned as farms have been amalgamated and people have moved away from agriculture. Demolition is, I suppose, expensive and unnecessary while conversion to holiday accommodation requires available capital and some guarantee of a market, so many places are just left to decay. Passing them, I can't help wondering about the lives of those who lived and died there and how they would feel about their cherished homes being left to the elements.
The walk from Bellingham to Byrness was one of the least inspiring so far. Almost half the distance comprised boggy ground interspersed with tussocky grass and heather. Avoiding the mire is awkward and timeconsuming while treading on the spongy ground in between saps the energy, like walking on a sandy beach. The tussocks are hard and uneven so it's difficult to get a firm footing and I would have fallen or twisted an ankle on several occasions had it not been for my pole.  The remainder of the route followed forestry commission tracks which were better underfoot but afforded views only of uninspiring coniferous monoculture so I was pleased when I finally reached Byrness.  
On most days, I've encountered very few other walkers. Except for the sponsored group on Hadrian's Wall, the daily tally has rarely exceeded ten and normally it has been far fewer. I'd been wondering whether there would be a day when I saw no one else at all and I was beginning to think this was it. Then in the last mile I caught up with a woman who had started the PW a couple of days after me but had not taken any rest days. When we arrived in Byrness, she went to the youth hostel and I headed for my B&B, and that made me think about the different modes of travel on the trail.
PW walkers fall into three groups who can usually be identified by the size of their backpacks.  Some, like myself, choose the most luxurious mode of travel, short of a helicopter, which is staying in B&Bs and having baggage transported. This means that it is only necessary to carry a daypack while walking, but does limit one's flexibility as overnight stops are planned and booked in advance. So far as I can tell from the limited number of PW walkers I've met, the largest proportion stay in youth hostels. Of course they have to carry all the clothes and other accoutrements required for the entire expedition, but it's cheaper than B&Bs. Youth hostels are sparse, so that option affords limited flexibility and as several hostels along the PW have closed, perhaps reflecting the decline in popularity of the route, this group is sometimes forced into B&Bs. A surprisingly sizeable minority camp along the PW which minimises cost and maximises opportunities for impulsive variations. Lee, who I met way back in the Peak District, was one example and I've encountered several since. At Byrness, my accommodation also provided camping facilities which was being used by a man with two children.  He had completed the PW by himself some years ago and obviously thought it would be selfish to deprive his children of the experience. They were going north to south and had needed a rest day after an overambitious start. They joined me for dinner in the guest house and were clearly reluctant to leave the cosy log fire for chilly tents. As I was setting off in the morning they were packing up. The children were auditioning for the "most sullen teenagers" competition and I didn't envy their father the next two weeks.

© David Thompson 2012

Once Brewed to Bellingham

Resuming the PW after my rest day proved irksome. Instead of increasing my energy, the day of relative inactivity had sent the wrong message to my legs, which obviously thought the whole daft project was over and that they deserved their pension.   The first two miles continued along Hadrian's Wall, following a section which a couple of walkers I'd met the previous evening described as "savage". My legs agreed. To make matters worse, just before leaving the wall, I encountered a particularly intransigent looking herd of bullocks. One was planted next to the stile, shaking his head ominously and daring me to climb over. While I was looking for an alternative route that didn't risk falling off the crags, a party of walkers approached from the opposite direction. The leader shoved the bullock aside as nonchalantly as if it were a piece of furniture and the group passed through. I took advantage of the safe passage while trying to give the impression that I'd simply been waiting for them to cross first out of politeness. Behind this advance party were at least a hundred more, all wearing Hadrian's Wall Trek 2012 T-shirts and evidently raising money for the Help for Heroes charity.
One of the ordinary activities which attracts a different focus on a walking holiday is food. Partly this is because the need, real or imagined, for food is a good excuse to have a break from walking. In my case, walking doesn't seem to burn many calories and after the Coast to Coast I found myself several pounds heavier after overindulgence in hearty dinners so I try to exercise restraint.   My diet at home is drawn from a limited but reasonably healthy palette. Breakfast comprises cereal, orange juice and fruit, lunch is a chicken and avocado sandwich accompanied by an apple, dinner finds me eating fish with a baked potato and salad or vegetables. Brussels sprouts are a favourite; living alone I can fart as much as I like. Before bed, I have more fruit, sometimes with a sneaky square or two of chocolate. However staying in B&Bs the pattern changes a bit. I've stuck to the general principle of declining cooked breakfasts, although B&B proprietors are invariably surprised and sometimes offended, taking it as a personal slight on their culinary skills. If it's a long day, I'll eat half a banana mid-morning and the remainder in the afternoon. Many B&Bs offer a packed lunch but I prefer to buy a sandwich from a shop where possible. It's cheaper and also avoids the problem of disposing of the crisps which seem to be a mandatory ingredient of packed lunches. Very few B&Bs provide dinner, although I was invited to join the family for a delicious roast chicken with all the trimmings at Ponden House, so I rely on local hostelries. In the last few years, the phrase "pub food" has ceased to be an oxymoron and my overnight stops have all so far offered at least one decent food venue. I'm always hungriest in the evening and can rarely resist the homemade pates and other goodies offered as starters.
At Once Brewed, I did make an exception to the breakfast rule and had smoked salmon and scrambled eggs to celebrate my rest day. Breakfast is not served until 8.15 so wanting an early start for the walk to Bellingham, I requested an "early bird" takeaway breakfast on the second day. When I opened it, just after leaving the Wall, I saw it comprised two croissants with ham and cheese, a pot of Greek yogurt and an object in a paper bag which at first I took to be a large apricot and then realised was an egg, presumably hard-boiled. Since the packed lunch was a ham sandwich, I rather overdosed on pork that day.

© David Thompson 2012

Greenhead to Once Brewed

My planned accommodation in Greenhead had been flooded and instead I stayed in nearby Gilsland. Unusually I was not the only guest. Bob, an autoharp player en route to a gathering of coreligionists in Dumfries, had been stranded with car trouble. We had dinner together in the village and he explained that he had taught chemistry for many years, then taken up drawing before arthritis set in so that the autoharp was his third career. When we returned to Bush Nook, I was amused to see that he tuned this ancient instrument with the assistance of an iPad. He played some Irish tunes including "Gentle Maiden" before we were interrupted by a summons to see Usain Bolt, the fastest man in the world, win the 200m sprint. Considering the length of the event and the price of tickets, it must also be the fastest way to spend money, outranking even the hourly cost of PwC partners. More events followed but after watching the women's taekwondo and boxing I was getting impatient for the bear baiting and cock fighting.  
The walk from Greenhead to Once Brewed follows part of Hadrian's Wall, where the best remains and some restored sections are to be found. In many places, the wall surmounts lofty crags, enhancing the fortification value but increasing the effort required to construct it - and to walk it. The wall is an impressive edifice, but its ultimate failure and the fact that walls are still viewed as solutions in places as diverse as Berlin and Israel makes one wonder how much civilisation has progressed over the intervening 2000 years. Much of the wall has been scavenged over the centuries for buildings such as Thirlwall Castle, now in ruins and pictured below.
My second rest day was in Once Brewed. Although I didn't feel I needed it, the preceding two days having been relatively short, it provided an opportunity to visit Vindolanda, a Roman fort and village. Nine different settlements have been detected at the site, the earlier wooden ones which predate Hadrian's Wall having been built over by later stone structures. One of the consequences is that wooden writing tablets from the earlier periods have been well-preserved in the anaerobic environment created by the clay foundations of the later buildings. These tablets, considered the most valuable objects in the British Museum, give exquisite insights into the lives of the soldiers in the fort and the residents of the village which supported the garrison, ranging from birthday invitations to requests for more beer. Among the other artifacts displayed in the museum, I particularly liked the leather shoes, in many cases intricately  patterned and reinforced with stone studs. All had completely flat soles which made me wonder when the idea of heels was invented. The excavations have been progressing for forty years and it is estimated that the site will continue to yield up its secrets for another two hundred years. So the relics of the past represent the employment of the future. 



© David Thompson 2012

Garrigill to Greenhead via Knarsdale

After the rigours of Cross Fell, the walk to Knarsdale was an easy 10 miles. I dallied in Alston, the highest market town in England complete with cobbled streets, marvelling at the property prices and tracking down a couple of map postcards for Andy. In the obligatory outdoor shop, I bought a buff, a curious garment worn around the neck and head which, according to the promotion video, does everything except feed the cat.  
The PW takes a convoluted and tediously confusing route from Alston to Knarsdale and my guidebook recommended following the South Tyne Trail instead. The STT follows the route of a former railway and would doubtless have been incorporated into the PW, had it not been a functioning line until the 1970s. It was a relief to walk along a level surface without worrying about checking the route, dancing round bogs or circumventing cattle. A narrow gauge service is now operated by the grandly named South Tynedale Railway for just three miles of the original twentyfive. The STT parallels the track and leaving Alston I eagerly anticipated the sight of a majestic steam train. Halfway along the route, I heard a promising sound in the distance and extracted my camera. Disappointingly, only a diesel loco, for all the world like an oversized lawnmower, trundled towards me pulling three dispirited carriages at not much more than walking pace. I reached Lintley Halt, the northern terminus, as the train was about to leave for the return journey, with as much fuss and preparation as if it were bound for Vladivostok.
My hosts at Knarsdale were retired sheep farmers. They had built the bungalow where I was staying and moved into it when their son took over the family farm, just like David and Ruth. Margaret explained apologetically that her husband would be getting up at 4am to help his son take lambs to the market. They kept sheep on Blenkinsopp Common which I was due to cross the following day and Margaret advised taking an alternative route as walkers had recently emerged from that section very muddy, the worst example being a Dutch couple who had sunk up to their knees in a bog. Instead she recommended continuing along the STT then following a minor road into Greenhead to join the PW. I consulted the guidebook and after reading that even Wainwright dismissed the section as "uninteresting" I resolved to follow her advice.
For the first couple of miles, the STT passed through woods then across a magnificent viaduct, a monument to mid-Victorian civil engineering. Leaving the STT, a dilapidated confection of turrets and castellations came into view. Featherstone Castle, pictured below, had no sign either inviting or prohibiting entry so I decided to investigate, with eyes peeled for a red-faced chap with a shotgun. While I was gazing at the building, a man carrying a knarled stick approached from a field which ran down to the river. He introduced himself as Fable and explained that the place had been rented for a week by forty members of the Edward Carpenter Community. The castle was reportedly haunted and periodically attracted amateur ghosthunters. Fable claimed to have seen an unexplained shadow that morning but admitted it could have been a man, which considering the number in residence did seem a likelier explanation. He gave me a tour of the interior which was labyrinthine and dusty, typical of grand houses which have been transformed over the centuries from fortifications to family seats to educational establishments and whose fortunes have now declined into retreats for impecunious or worthy groups. Fable showed me the timetable of planned activities ranging from led walks to storytelling workshops, hence his name, I realised. In the large communal kitchen, men were enthusiastically baking bread and preparing lunch. With its vaulted ceiling and high windows it seemed the perfect setting to find Swelter, the vindictive chef from Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast. Elsewhere men were participating in workshops or, in a couple of cases, just painting their nails. Everyone was friendly and it was easy to believe that, as their website claims, this is a community committed to personal growth and mutual support.
After a relaxed morning's walking searching for elusive otters along the South Tyne River I arrived at Greenhead with time to explore the newly expanded Roman Army Museum during the afternoon. An impressive 3D film dissolved images of reconstructions of Roman forts into their present day outlines and made a good prologue for my walk along part of Hadrian's Wall the following day. The Roman army comprised 500,000 men at its peak. These were divided into legionaries, who were Roman citizens, and auxiliaries who were men with valued skills, such as horsemanship, from conquered lands. After 25 years' service, auxiliaries were granted a pension and land rights in perpetuity. To avoid conflicts of loyalty, auxiliaries were not deployed in their home territory which must have demanded considerable efforts of administration. Thus it appears that in addition to roads and currency, the Romans bequeathed us the seeds of human resource management.



© David Thompson 2012

Langdon Beck to Garrigill via Dufton

The morning started with a pleasant riverside walk along Langdon Beck which soon turned into a scramble over boulders followed by the ubiquitous slabs and intermittent stretches of duckboards. (Why are they called that, ducks are the last creatures to need them?)  A proper climb, requiring hands as well as feet, took me round Cauldron Snout an impressive waterfall in full spate, pictured below. Soon after, the weather closed in with persistent rain and mist obscuring the route. Just as I reached High Cup Nick, the mist parted and an enormous chasm appeared as if a scoop had been taken out of the hillside with a giant trowel. Under a ceiling of cloud in the middle distance, a pastoral landscape glowed under slanting sunlight, like AE Housman's land of lost content. The mist descended again as I picked my way around the rim of the crater, inches away from a thousand foot precipice. For a while, it was so overcast that I thought I might finally have an excuse to use the headtorch I'd bought, but once again the weather brightened as I descended to Dufton.
The local pub had decided to have an unscheduled night off from serving dinner so my landlady arranged for me and a Dutch walker who was staying with her to eat at the YHA housed in an impressive building which was the local doctor's home until such facilities were no longer provided in Dufton. The Dutch guy had walked south from Alston and would be going to Langdon Beck, where I had just come from, the following day. He was carrying a tent but in view of the poor weather was contemplating upgrading to B&Bs and leaving the tent at the YHA to be collected later.
My room was in an annexe to the main house and the landlady supplied my breakfast requisites and packed lunch in the evening so that I could make an early start if I wanted. Dufton to Garrigill is 16 miles, one of the longest sections on my itinerary, and also includes the traverse of Cross Fell which at 893m is the highest point on the PW. In view of the prediction of unsettled weather, I resolved to set off early as better conditions were forecast for the morning. I was on my way soon after 7am in bright sunshine and within two hours reached Knock Fell which comprised most of the ascent. A welcome breeze, like someone turning on the air conditioning, greeted me at the summit. The weather was perfect and the way straightforward with slabs masking the worse of the bogs. By 11am I was at Cross Fell and making my way towards the bothy known as Greg's Hut after the climber John Gregory. The hut was originally used by lead miners who would live there during the week and go home at the weekends. Now it's a refuge for tired and bedraggled walkers, some of whom stay overnight. I looked into the grimy and caliginous interior, grateful that my own accommodation arrangements were more indulgent.   By 2pm, after a wearying trudge along the aptly named Corpse Road, an interminable rocky track, I reached Garrigill.



© David Thompson 2012

Baldersdale to Langdon Beck

Those of you who are itching to get out there and start the PW will have been anxiously waiting for me to share my clothing tips for the expedition. So here goes. Alternatively if you subscribe to the view that just as patriotism is the last resort of the scoundrel, so lists are the last resort of the bankrupt blogger, you may skip this bit.  
My general philosophy concerning outdoor clothing is straightforward: just buy the most expensive. Designer labels have not yet infiltrated the outdoor clothing market, so value is broadly proportional to cost as prices are not distorted by brand premiums. Since significant advances are still being made in outdoor clothing technology, higher cost normally translates into better performance.   It is axiomatic that the most important piece of equipment for the walker is a decent pair of boots. Nevertheless, many people take the view that nowhere in England really necessitates boots and that less damage is done to the environment by walking in lighter footwear. My fossil friend is undertaking the PW in trainers following the advice in his guidebook, but regrets the decision in view of the exceptionally wet ground following months of incessant rain. My own footwear is a pair of well-used leather boots made by Berghaus. For socks I favour Bridgedale, and couple a thin inner pair with a well-padded outer pair. Protected by Gortex gaiters, this combination of socks and boots has kept my feet dry in all but the most penetrating downpours.
I'm very sensitive to sun so while many walkers favour shorts I always wear trousers. For this trip, I have used only Arc'teryx trousers. They are thin enough to be cool in summer and dry so quickly that there is no need for waterproof overtrousers. I wear a Craghoppers shirt, with a high collar to protect my neck from the sun, over a Berghaus Argentium T-shirt which supposedly neutralises sweat related odours, but it has never been put to the test since I rinse it each evening and it dries in a few hours, ready for wear by the morning. My midlayer is a very thin windproof Mountain Equipment garment, halfway between a shirt and a fleece. It's invaluable on winter mornings walking to the Tube as it disappears unobtrusively into my computer bag as soon as I reach the warmth of the station, but so far on the PW it has stayed in my rucksack.   My most recent acquisition is a multi-pocket waistcoat made by Paramo. I like to support Paramo as their products are excellent and they are manufactured by a women's cooperative in Colombia. The waistcoat is lightweight and has a plethora of useful pockets (I found a new one yesterday after wearing it for a week) including one large enough for an OS map and a concealed compartment for documents such as passports.   I have a heavy duty Arc'teryx cagoul but for summer on the PW a Gortex Paclite Shell by Berghaus is adequate and more compact to carry.   I've always been partial to hats and as a student affected a thick Russian-style pork pie continuously for three years. My dream is to wear a tall top hat like the ones in the crowd scenes of Victorian costume dramas.  That might look out of place on the PW, even if I was shooting grouse, so I content myself with my trusty Tilley Airflo, the third incumbent as its predecessors sadly met untimely ends.
Most of the equipment required for walking is uncontroversial. Unless you're strolling the grounds of a National Trust house in sight of the teashop, a map is mandatory. Even if you don't know how to use it, it's worth having a compass as with one in your possession you'll feel less embarrassed being picked up by mountain rescue. The GPS divides opinion. Frankly I wouldn't go beyond the M25 without one, but many people view them as little short of cheating. However even those who sneer at them occasionally ask me for a quick peek to confirm their location when lost. In retrospect, I'm pretty certain that the reason for my rapid acceptance into the group I met on the Coast to Coast was that their GPS had stopped working.   The issue which really excites walkers is trekking poles. Meet any large group of walkers and you'll see people using none, one and two with the number of poles per person normally increasing in proportion to age. Two-pole users are the most vociferous advocates of their cause and it wouldn't surprise me if some of them fantasise about carrying even more and privately intone "four poles good, two poles bad" like latterday inhabitants of Animal Farm. It reminds me of a riddle which seasoned travellers use to scare nervous fliers. Q: why do 747s have four engines? A: because there's not room for eight.
I first encountered walking poles 15 years ago during a holiday in the Lake District. My friend Richard had recently acquired one and I spent the first day being sceptical until he let me have a turn and I was hooked. It had a horizontal cork handle, well-shaped so that it felt very comfortable in the hand. Before our next walk, we nipped into an outdoor store and I made a beeline for a similar pole. The sales assistant intercepted me saying that the horizontal design was intended for elderly users and offered me one with a vertical grip instead. I could see Richard wincing in the background; curiously that pole didn't put in an appearance on our next trip.  
I decided to detour to Middleton-in-Teesdale to stock up on bananas at the Co-op. Middleton is an attractive village with more facilities than it has a right to given its size, and I couldn't help noticing that for the price of a London flat you could buy a small estate. As usual, I briefly contemplated the exchange before concluding, as usual, that I'd miss the Arcola too much. Outside the cafe where I treated myself to a cappucino, a small knot of people was gathered around a man holding an Olympic torch. This being the north of England it is quite acceptable to sidle up to a group and join in the conversation. I learned that he had been nominated to carry the torch because of his voluntary work with young people running youth clubs and the like. Now he was touring the area, allowing people have their photo taken holding the torch in return for a contribution to a guide dogs charity. One elderly woman, very excited at the prospect, didn't have an email address so he offered to send her the photo by post. All very heart-warming, even to an Olympic cynic like me and as you can see from the photo below I too succumbed to the temptation.
PS I'm obviously becoming psychic since  I saw the women in the photo below a couple days after posting this blog.




© David Thompson 2012

Keld to Baldersdale

At Keld I stayed in a converted youth hostel. It's most notable feature is a cavernous drying room, heated by a power plant resembling a small nuclear reactor purloined during the break up of the Soviet Union. The proprietor relieved me of my damp boots and they joined several pairs already enjoying a sauna. I took the opportunity to do some laundry; by the time I went bed it was all thoroughly dessicated. In the morning, my boots were properly dry for the first time in a week and I dutifully applied a coat of water repellent. I'm old-fashioned so I use dubbin, an unpleasant substance rather like earwax, but very effective. When I needed a new supply recently, the assistant in the outdoor shop said sniffily that it was only appropriate for football boots and that I should try a sports shop.  
Keld marks the intersection of the PW and the Coast to Coast and the proprietor confirmed my suspicion that the latter is much the more popular route. Unlike my other overnight stops so far, Keld was almost full, although I was the only afficionado of the PW as everybody else was either on the Coast to Coast or planning circular jaunts taking in its highlights. The number of walkers now attempting the PW annually is around 4,000, significantly fewer than the 24,000 it used to attract probably due to the profusion of shorter, more interesting and more accessible long distance routes both in the UK and overseas. During a group walking holiday in Iceland last year, my companions were extolling the virtues of trails in places as diverse as Corsica and Patagonia. The Coast to Coast also got a good press, but curiously no one mentioned the PW.
Breakfast was served from 7.30 and I decided to make an early start as rain was forecast later. After Tan Hill, a broad plain opened up which looked like easy walking. Closer inspection revealed that it was marshland and I half-expected to see Magwitch loom up from the quagmire. The going was difficult and slow, requiring frequent detours to skirt the worst of the bog and recover the vestigial path. After enduring that for a couple of hours I felt an uncharacteristic wave of fatigue.  From Trough Heads Farm there is a choice of routes. The original shorter one involving a climb or a longer, flatter alternative via Bowes which was introduced to increase the accommodation options along the PW. I was nervous about selecting the original route as it crosses a natural feature called God's Bridge and as a lifelong atheist I suspected that He might take the opportunity to prove His existence by casting me into the river. Eventually laziness triumphed over caution and I decided to take my chances with the wrath of the Almighty. God's Bridge had been recommended as a must-see by a family I'd met, which was another incentive for selecting that option, but when I arrived it seemed quite unremarkable, not even worthy of a photograph.
 
The sun came out later, making a mockery of the weather forecast. It's said that if you want to predict tomorrow's weather simply assume it will be the same as today's and since the UK weather generally follows three day cycles you'll be correct 66% of the time, which is almost as good as the professional forecasters who average 75%.  In the afternoon, I met a couple of day walkers who said they'd come from Durham. Thinking that was a long way to drive for a day out, I was impressed and only subsequently realised that Durham is actually less than 30 miles away and that it was me who had travelled a long way over the last 10 days. In fact, I have today passed the halfway point on the PW, which would certainly justify a celebration drink if only there were a pub nearby.

© David Thompson 2012

Hawes to Keld

 When I started travelling on business, I assumed that one of the benefits would be chatting to fellow travellers. I soon realised that most business people are wary of entering into conversations with strangers, especially on long haul flights, cautious of being trapped by a crashing bore. There were exceptions, such as the well-publicised case of the Canadian telecomms executive who allowed her passion for a fellow passenger free rein during a transatlantic redeye with predictable consequences. On the PW, sensitivity to the preferences of other walkers is polite. Many solitary walkers guard their status jealously and don't welcome overtures of friendliness. Groups of walkers can afford to be more flexible as they have a greater buffering capacity for uncongenial company than individuals. On the Coast to Coast I encountered a set of four friends and, after a screening interview during which it was established that I shared an alma mater with two of them, I was admitted to the group. I walked with them for a couple of days and we shared convivial dinners. Fell runners are in a different category altogether. They rarely deign to acknowledge plodding walkers and would not waste breath on conversation. Clad in T-shirts, running shoes and the briefest of shorts, they skim along effortlessly, paying no more attention to the path with its rocks and bogs than if they were on a treadmill in a gym.
On the long climb to Great Shunner Fell today, I was followed by a lone walker who eventually overtook me. We grunted the usual acknowledgements but after a few minutes he paused to allow me to catch up. He pointed to some stones on the path and explained that the patterns were fossils of prehistoric ferns and that related specimens could be seen in the collection at Kew. I took a photo (see below) and he beetled off towards the next summit.  
The route was easy to follow and I tuned into Radio 4. There was a programme about Tolkein, which interested me as I used to live in the part of Birmingham which was reportedly his inspiration for Lord of the Rings. Supposedly hobbits were modelled on the local inhabitants but fortunately there is no record of their accent.  
When I reached Thwaite, my erudite companion was sitting outside a cafe, airing his feet. He showed me a photograph in his guidebook of the fossils we had seen and said he'd picked up a loose piece. He passed me a flat rock and I could see the characteristic indentations. "A great souvenir of the Pennine Way" I said. "Those regular dimples almost look like the pattern on asbestos sheeting." He examined it carefully and turned it over. The back was machine-smooth. He tested the edge with a fingernail. Small flakes fell off. He looked up, smiled and tossed it into a nearby bin. "Just as well you didn't take it to a museum for carbon dating", I commented.

© David Thompson 2012

Horton-in-Ribblesdale to Hawes

Over a third of the way now, and the going is getting tougher. As I had predicted at the outset, the main challenge posed by the PW is mental rather than physical. To the untutored eye, one moor, hill, field looks much like another and yesterday the burgeoning monotony started to take its toll. However Davinder had agreed with me that the main purpose of embarking on the PW is not enjoyment but satisfaction, and that would not be forthcoming without facing down some adversary, even if it's just tedium. My usual walking environment is urban, and I was missing the endless variety offered by London with its pulsating street life and oases of countryside-in-miniature. But today the weather brightened and I was able to appreciate the appeal of the fells after the sensory deprivation of interminable moorland. Behind me Pen-y-Ghent glowered like an intemperate monarch, to the left the Ribble viaduct resembled a forgotten Hornby toy and a long curved ridge stretched ahead, dappled by the shadows of high clouds. For the first time, I had the sense I was marking out the backbone of England.
All day the trail followed the old packhorse roads which were the highways for transporting the products of the countryside - wool, iron, charcoal and peat - and are now the preserve of the walker. So clear was the way that I felt safe to indulge in some music and luxuriated in Simon Rattle's peerless recording of Mahler's Resurrection symphony played by the CBSO. Rattle conducted it at the concert which opened Birmingham's Symphony Hall and also selected it to start his 2010 season with the Berlin Phil, which I insisted on attending during a weekend city break with my friend Andy. It formed a powerful soundtrack to the PW and other walkers looked startled to see me conducting an invisible orchestra with my walking pole.
Routine governs the way I pack and unpack for trips, usually putting the same items in the same places. This minimises the effort required to achieve repetitive tasks while reducing the risk of things going wrong. It seems to me the obvious way to organise one's life, releasing time to concentrate on more interesting matters. A colleague to whom I confided this philosophy remarked, with approval, that it was "very six sigma". I nodded sagely, reluctant to admit I didn't have the foggiest idea what he meant.   Despite this much-vaunted efficiency, I can't help noticing that, after 8 days, there are an awful lot of unused items in my suitcase. Will I ever need either of those two new Paramo shirts, bought for this trip, since the one I wear every day dries overnight when it needs washing? And those insulated waterproof trousers would look more at home in Spitzbergen than the Yorkshire Dales. I think of Davinder again; everything he needs for three weeks on the trail is in one rucksack, not much larger than the one I use as a day pack, and wonder whether he has more insights into six sigma than I do.



© David Thompson 2012

Malham to Horton-in-Ribblesdale

Malham must be one of the few places in England where you'd feel conspicuous if you weren't wearing walking gear. The entire village appears to be organised around outdoor activities, walking and climbing especially, with cafe signs proclaiming "muddy boots welcome" and the only shop of any size displaying boots and cagouls more prominently than postcards and ice cream. I had plenty of time to explore as Malham was the first of my two scheduled rest days, although I felt somewhat of a fraud since, with the exception of the first day, my exertions have not hitherto been excessive. Nevertheless my legs have felt increasingly tired at the end of each day, so planning a break before the challenge of Pen-y-Ghent was probably wise.
My earlier post about solitude was, I confess, slightly disingenuous. I do derive pleasure from the company of other walkers, many of whom have unusual life stories which they will share more candidly with acquaintances who pass quickly into obscurity than with friends or family. The strange intimacy produced by sharing a walk, jointly finding the way or agreeing it's time for a water break, is reminiscent of the ad hoc sense of community I used to enjoy on overseas work projects. Being away from people's various incarnations of home and cast adrift in an alien environment, whether it's incarceration in an office in an insipid mid-West city or tussling with an inscrutable map on the PW, is a potent leveller.
When company is not available and I'm bored with my own thoughts, I can turn to my Pure radio, a splendid device the size of smartphone which boasts FM and DAB capability and a battery that lasts for yonks. Reception is patchy on the PW so I also have my iplayer stocked with music and audio books. Pride of place is taken by the BBC's recent dramatisation of Ulysses which was broadcast throughout Bloomsday this year. Despite several half-hearted attempts, I have never progressed further than the first few pages of the book, so Radio 4's abridged marathon was a boon. It sustained me through the first phase of the PW and was sufficiently engaging to cause me to miss the way more than once. My polymath father devoured Ulysses and used quotations as chapter headings in one of his books on applied optics. Hearing the radio adaptation made me realise that it must have had a particular resonance for him. Leopold Bloom is a Jew married to a gentile who lives in an overtly anti-semitic society, a scenario which mirrored my father's situation pretty accurately. Who knows what other parallels he might have discerned. The extent to which I didn't really know him was apparent when I read the memories and tributes from his peers and former students on the occasion of his retirement. Universally they regarded him as affable, warm and supportive, which was not always the persona he presented to his family.
Today I eschewed iplayer distractions and focussed on the walk. The steep climb at Pen-y-Ghent was accompanied by a strong wind and the rocks were slippery following earlier rain. My sense of achievement at reaching the summit was rather diminished by finding a family, including two young children and a grandmother, airily picnicking there, quite unfazed by the ascent.




© David Thompson 2012

Thornton-in-Craven to Malham

 Four days of fine weather were followed by a return to wind, rain and overcast skies for the last stretch of peaty moorland before the transition to limestone. The change in the weather had a curious consequence: it revealed to me the particular appeal of the wild and lonely moors which warmth and sunshine had masked. I found Mendelssohn's Scottish symphony on my iplayer and gorged myself on its lush melodies and plangent brass, my head down against the elements.  
The approach to Malham is through pasture land and water meadows. Farm fields are my least favourite walking terrain. Guidebooks blithely issue instructions such as "proceed diagonally to a gap in the hedge opposite" which is infuriating when neither the shape of the field nor the target boundary is discernible. Fields are also apt to harbour livestock and while I have no objection to sheep, which I enjoy taunting with cries of "mint sauce", cows are another matter. Every year, several walkers are injured by cattle and I avoid them where possible. When mingling with the bovine is unavoidable, I check my exits carefully and give them a wide berth. For a long time, I shunned red clothing in the belief that it might antagonise them, until one day I realised that the facing of my rucksack is pillar box red, specially chosen to maximise visibility in the event of an accident. Last year while walking a section of the magnificent Coast to Coast I approached a field patrolled by a herd of bullocks with several of them comfortably ensconced across the path. There was no alternative route so I screwed my courage to the sticking point and climbed the stile. As one, they rose to greet me. Resorting to my only source of agricultural knowledge I bellowed "Garn" at a volume which would have made Ruth Archer proud. The beasts were obviously intimidated by my masterful behaviour and backed off, allowing me to pass. I scuttled down the path towards the safety of the next field. Nearly at the gate, I looked back gingerly and to my horror saw the entire herd following a few paces behind. Clearly "Garn" had a more complex meaning than I had appreciated and it was with great relief that I wrestled the gate open and closed it behind me. I fancied the bullocks looked crestfallen, but maybe they were just missing their feed.
 My main objection to traversing fields is mud. Blindfold I could tell you which part of the country I'm in by the texture of the stuff. Kent favours an especially claggy variety which seems predominantly composed of glue and treacle. Hereabouts mud has a gloopier consistency which means you sink further but at least it's easier to wash off. Farmers, anxious to ensure that walkers are not deprived of one of the defining experiences of country life, take great pains to ensure that gates and stiles are protected by generous quantities of the best local vintage. These sludgy moats are often furnished with stepping stones, which are either deceptively slippery or tantalisingly separated by a fraction more than an easy stride, in either case guaranteeing a bootful of slimy mud laced with pungent dung.
I started my walk on a Wednesday but most people set out on a Saturday or Sunday to fit the whole enterprise neatly into three weeks. So being out of synch with the usual calendar partly explains why I have encountered so few other PW walkers. Also B&B proprietors have told me that occupancy is down this year, which they ascribe partly to the miserable weather and partly to the recession. So it was refreshing to spot Davinder during the approach to Malham. He had completed the 300 mile Irish Coast to Coast last year and recently breezed through Offa's Dyke as a warm up for the Pennine Way. I was reassured to hear that despite this impressive pedigree he was as terrified of cows as me. We stumbled along the route together, conclusively disproving the theory that two heads are better then one when it comes to finding the way. Two day-walkers joined us and we all trooped into Malham like old friends. Davinder and I met for dinner later and he regaled me with stories about life in Oman, where he teaches English, while we ate homemade steak and ale pies. At the only other pub in the village we came across Lee, who had invested in a pair of insoles to remedy a pain in his legs (successful apparently) and a couple, Mel and Simon, also PW walkers. None of them were taking a rest day in Malham, so it's unlikely I'll see them again, but the unpredictability of encounters on the trail is part of its appeal.

© David Thompson 2012

Ponden to Thornton-in-Craven

As my walking feet slowly rotate treadmill Earth, I start to reflect on why I am here on these windswept and, today, rainy, moors. Is this simply the point to which my life has been leading? It is true that all the previous events in my life have, somehow, conspired to culminate in this odyssey. But was it inevitable? I defer to my friend Richard for a properly informed philosophical analysis of that question and ponder instead how my experiences might have shaped me to this destiny. But I attempt even this modest account conscious of the lessons of Julian Barnes' elegaic novel The Sense of an Ending, which explores the limitations of memories and their faultlines with history.  
When I learned, after his death, that my father had enjoyed walking in the Lake District, I recalled finding his old rucksack many years earlier in the loft of our family house. A thing of stiff canvas and metal buckles, its empty weight alone would have exceeded the cabin baggage allowance of a budget airline. Tramping the Lakes in nailed boots and woollen clothes while burdened by this behemoth must have required dedication much exceeding my Gortex-pampered efforts. The pincer movement of career and marriage ended his serious expeditions but he continued to be a dogged urban walker into old age. A dedicated Londoner, after retirement a favourite occupation was to take the Tube to an unknown destination and walk, more or less at random, in fresh territory. I can relate to that.  
My own formative walking was the result of necessity not choice. I walked to and from bus stops and train stations as unavoidable components of the journey to various schools. Even kindergarten involved walking with my mother half a mile each way across Blackheath, which is almost as windswept as the Yorkshire moors. The notion of walking for its own sake did not arise until teenage years. My best friend had enjoyed activity holidays with an organisation called Forest School Camps and I eventually persuaded my parents to entrust me to their tender care. FSC was essentially a variant of the Scouts where religious zealotry and patriotic fervour were replaced by a hippyish, soft-left ideology. Also they admitted girls.  It attracted a relentlessly middle-class clientele, including the daughter of a cabinet minister towards whom I developed fervent but unconsummated desires. FSC holidays always included several days of trekking, complete with camping gear, up to 20 miles a day and I can date my embryonic obsession with walking from the satisfaction that achievement produced. Competitive sports were never my strong suit but school visits to a Welsh outdoor pursuit centre where trekking also featured enabled me to accrue some of the status foregone through lack of sporting prowess.   As a diversion from A-level studies, I took to evening wanders in the distant reaches of Blackheath and gazed into lamplit windows wondering and speculating about the lives contained within. Later this dubious activity transmogrified into the game of cosiness rating, the rules of which, like Mornington Crescent, were never entirely clear but which entertained my children as we paced the streets of Moseley. During my working life, lone evening walks helped me to organise my thoughts and devise increasingly fiendish schemes to inflict on my clients.  
Nowadays walking offers the perfect combination of exercise and, crucially, mental relaxation. While I can't claim to achieve total mindfulness through walking, it's probably as close as I can manage, and is certainly more effective than yoga. So while many people regard leisure walking as a means to achieve another object - time with friends, opportunities for photography, uplifting scenery - for me the primary attraction is simply the rhythm of walking. But wait, if this is true, why not walk in the comfort and security of the gym? No need for rain gear, hot showers on hand and home for dinner. Perhaps there lurks within even the least competitive of us a desire to prove ourselves.  For me to be able to justify the label "walker" I need to namedrop routes I have conquered, and none is more iconic than the Pennine Way.   So for the moment that serves as the explanation for haunting the moors. But Barnes' protagonist goes further and speculates on the challenge of imagining how he will perceive the present from the vantage point of some future date. That requires mental agility which is beyond me, so discovering how I view today and its precursors from the perspective of the end of the PW will need to wait until I reach Kirk Yetholm.

© David Thompson 2012