Culture clash

The more time I spend with Americans, the more I'm struck by the chasm separating our cultures. Our group included three Philadelphians, all well-travelled professionals. Flapjacks, that staple of the rural tea shop, intrigued and delighted them and there was much lively discussion among the Brits of the proper ingredients. Coconut, it was generally agreed, was not part of the traditional recipe, ginger on the other hand was acceptable. Some of the more exotic items on the Newfield Hall dinner menus, such as Yorkshire fettle, had me foxed too (it's a sheep's cheese, since you ask). If the food baffled our cousins, this was nothing compared to our pastimes.

Newfield Hall also plays host to special interest groups and on the third day we were to be joined by a party of train spotters. I was detailed to explain this arcane activity to the Americans who found the concept incomprehensible and would probably have accepted bear baiting more readily. I explained that this subspecies would be instantly identifiable since not only would they invariably be white, male and middle aged and but also uniquely attired, hence, I added, the metonymy 'anorak', hastening to caution that the politically correct nomenclature is 'railway enthusiasts'. We chuckled hugely over the impending arrival of these outlandish creatures.

Monday is the changeover day when the three day breaks end and the four day holidays start, so as well as the train huggers, a dozen additional walkers were expected and there was an atmosphere of anticipation as everyone gathered in the lounge for the predinner briefing. After the house manager had explained the domestic arrangements, the railway enthusiasts were invited to move to another room where they would be briefed about their activities for the following day. Five people stood up to leave. Three were women, all smartly dressed, while the men's apparel was indistinguishable from that of the walkers remaining in the lounge. I caught one of the Americans' eye. Clearly he was not impressed by my stereotyping.

HF evening activities are pitched somewhere between children's party entertainments and Victorian Christmas games. By and large I found them eminently resistible but on quiz night, emboldened by years of practice with the Radio Times weekly 'Eggheads', I considered it selfish to deprive the company of my expertise. The competition operates at two levels. Members of the winning team each receive a small prize, then the best score from each HF house is forwarded to central command and the overall winning team bags a bottle of champagne. Conventionally the prelude to all quizzes is the selection of names, ideally reflecting some pertinent feature or shared experience. We'll be 'The Anoraks', hissed one of the Americans. Compared to the other team names, it turned out that this was in good taste, but a witty handle did not guarantee competitive success. We led the first round but collapsed in the sports and TV sections, finishing in a creditable but unrewarded second place.

On the last day, I volunteered as back marker. The final event, an ascent of Ingleborough, the second highest peak in the Dales had a cachet which tempted extra participants so a more organised approach to managing the group was required. Lingering at the back suited me. I was wrapped in my own thoughts when, to my surprise, the taciturn Dutchman joined me. He expressed pleasure at the landscape, having expected moorland to be rough and boggy. I decided it was impolitic to voice my own views about moors, which after a day or two of enjoying the open space, I find desolate and depressing. Instead I asked whether he'd been to the Lake District. He had, and moreover had been planning to do the Coast to Coast walk this summer. What had intervened I enquired, innocently. My wife left me, was the reply. I murmured sympathy. We'd been looking forward to the Coast to Coast for years, he said. What sadness was freighted in that simple sentence.

The week ended with the customary promises to keep in touch, most of which will be more honoured in the breach, I expect. But for me the holiday was a success and I will be honing my general knowledge and hoping to be part of the winning team at the next HF houseparty.

© David Thompson 2015

Celebrating the unexpected

Walk designers invariably fall prey to the urge to make walks interesting. Here is a notable church, they inform us, there an unusual rock formation. I plead guilty to this myself although I try to leaven my walk commentaries with humour which is better received than leaden facts obviously culled from Wikipedia. We should resist the urge to justify walking by ornamenting the activity with incidental attributes. For the true adherent, walking is an end in itself. The simple act of repeatedly placing one foot in front of the other in a gentle rhythm facilitates the detachment of mind from body which is so prized by ascetics and yogis. Sullying this higher state with historical trivia or geological statistics is unnecessary and counterproductive. And in any case, the most memorable observations and incidents encountered on walks are generally neither planned nor repeatable. The routes of final three days walks during the Dales holiday were replete with rivers, gullies and caves, none of which, even at only a week's remove, I can recall. Instead there were the unscheduled curiosities. Returning to a National Trust car park to meet the coach at the end of one walk, we were confronted by a single chicken, loose on the verge and quite unfazed by the surrounding 4x4s and camper vans and pecking methodically across the dusty grass, hoovering the crumbs drizzled from visitors' sandwiches. This bizarre sight was was made even more remarkable by the complete lack of attention it received from passers by. One child yanked its parent's arm to draw attention to this displaced fowl but the adult took no notice, as though the presence of farmyard animals in a public car park were quite to be expected and no more worthy of note than a parking meter. I wondered what wrinkle in the fabric of normality would have been sufficient to merit remark, a python dangling from a tree perhaps. The Dales are tricked out with a bounteous supply of waterfalls but my Iceland experience has inured me to their charms so the prospect of a picnic by one of these watery wonders did not particularly thrill, especially as the day was hot and there was no shade to be had. But our lunch was unexpectedly enlivened by the presence of four teenagers skiving from school who were apparently engaged in a race to determine who would drown first. A long rope had been hung from a tree on the far side of the river from their encampment. Taking it in turn, the boys waded across the head of the waterfall - itself no mean feat given the ferocity of the torrent - climbed the slippery limestone rocks on the far side and, grasping a short stick tied to the rope, launched themselves from the bank, letting go at the furthermost point of the arc to plummet into the deep pool at the bottom of the falls. The drop was only six or seven meters so the main hazard was ensuring that they gave the rope enough wellie to reach the safety of the pool, since the alternative to plunging into the icy water was being dashed against the rocks when the rope swung back. Tiring of this game, one couple made their way across the river and climbed the bank, preparing to launch themselves into the pool without the rope. It was a daunting precipice and the boy teetered on the edge for several minutes before jumping. In midair, arms flailing he yelled 'Alleluia' a curiously inappropriate cry, I thought. 'Geronimo' would have been my choice, but perhaps the possibility of imminent death inspired a final appeal to the Almighty. He surfaced successful but entreaties to his girlfriend to follow his example failed; possibly she had less faith in the redemptive powers of biblical exhortations, and she paddled back across the river. Our group watched this bravura display with a mixture of awe and disapproval and I wondered what the reaction would be if one of the daredevils encountered subsurface rocks with grisly consequences.

© David Thompson 2015

Gordale Scar

Novice consultants are warned: fail to prepare, and prepare to fail. Trite it may be, but its truth is repeatedly demonstrated. I had not anticipated the obvious opening gambit of fellow holidaymakers: had I been on an HF holiday before? I trawled my memory and recalled a week in the early nineties at Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight. It was not a success. Hermione didn't suit a walking holiday, she was too heavy to carry and too young (or inadequately motivated) to walk. So when pressed I murmured something non-committal about a faintly remembered week long ago. It was Bob Morris, a rather self-consciously worthy fellow, typically Quaker, who I think first mentioned HF to me and in those days the properties still retained the faintly ascetic atmosphere associated with their founder, Thomas Arthus Leonard, whose admirable mission was to bring the benefits of outdoor activity to the masses.

Newfield Hall, magnificently refurbished with a well-stocked bar and heated indoor pool, has moved with the times and the expectations of its clientele. Despite, or more likely, because of the modernisation, HF boasts a loyal following. No one I met admitted to being a first-timer and many, including my erstwhile walking companion Eileen, had a dozen or more venues under their belt, in the UK and abroad. I boarded the bus promptly the next day and identified my walk leader; I didn't want a repetition of the previous day's blunder. The three groups all set off in the same direction towards Janet's Foss, a waterfall that delighted many of the party but which the taciturn Dutchman and I regarded with disdain; we had both been to Iceland and it's hard to compete with those cataracts coursing down mountains, wreathed in the sulphurous smell of geysers. Moving away from the water I noticed two of the leaders locked in conference and looking worried. I sidled up and heard them say that one of the group had been left behind at the hotel. Evidently there was some confusion about whether the group size was 29 or 30. It reminded me of the old joke about mathematicians: there are three types, those that can count and those that can't.

The highlight of the walk would be Gordale Scar, an immense limestone gorge guarded by boulders the size of bungalows. As we approached, we saw a party of Scouts ascending with the use of ropes. HF doesn't do climbing, so in an outbreak of newspeak worthy of Orwell, we had been informed that 'scrambling' would be required to conquer the gorge. As planned, the three groups split at this point, those with friends and relatives who might mourn their loss skirted the gorge and headed for a cream tea, while the rest of us looked at one another, raised our eyebrows and mentally checked the provisions of our wills. We approached the base of the rocks across the shallow river, littered with small rounded rocks which formed slippery stepping stones, offspring of the colossus we were to climb. The roar of the water was deafening as the group gathered at the start point and we could barely hear the leader, querulously brisk, announcing he would go first to show they way. He reiterated the mantra: three points of contact, meaning that you should only move one hand or foot at a time, leaving the remaining limbs holding the rock face. I recalled a similar injunction from my mother when I used to climb trees and, momentarily, found comfort in the memory. I duly followed after the leader but after a moment he was out of sight, leaving me with only guesswork or intuition to determine the next move. All I knew was that it had to be upwards; the rest of the group was watching so, despite the alarms bells of my self-preservation instinct, I couldn't turn back. Unbidden, a jumbled recollection of the words of Macbeth came to mind: I am in blood steeped so far, etc. I flailed for a handhold and found one. The next foothold was less obvious but gradually I gained confidence and managed to clamber inelegantly to the top. The rest of the group followed and we stood at the summit, admiring the view and congratulating one another on our achievement. Then we saw something curious. A man was following the route we had come, ascending the rock. But unlike us, gingerly clawing our way up while religiously observing the three point rule, he was gaily ascending while carrying his dog.

The 'hard' group had grown from three to nine and I spent some time in conversation with a German from Cologne. He riffed on the social changes engulfing the country and, in particular, how young women were now obliged to work since as well as supporting their children, increasingly they would be under pressure to supplement the inadequate pensions of their parents. The squeezed middle, to adapt a Milibandism. He went on to describe the influx of immigrants into Germany. While young Spaniards fleeing high unemployment (just over 49% at the time of writing) are well placed to get work since they are educated, refugees from central Africa typically had few marketable skills, but, in a civilised society, their needs could not be ignored, with the attendant financial implications. I pointed out that the problem is not new. Poverty and deprivation, exacerbated by periodic famines and wars, have been endemic in central Africa for decades, as evidenced by the fundraising efforts of charities such as Oxfam. All that has changed is the proximity of the problem. While it is simple to ignore the tribulations of peoples on another continent, it offends western sensibilities when they are in our midst. I expanded on the theme. Altruism is attenuated by distance, whether geographical or generational. This is why craven politicians, motivated primarily by reelection prospects, laud the benefits of policies accruing to their constituents and immediate families, not the wider community or our descendants who in a century's time will occupy a world looted by their forbears. He listened politely but seemed unmoved.

Towards the end of the day we joined the Pennine Way, looping past Malham Tarn and across the famous limestone pavement. We were proceeding in the opposite direction to my epic journey and combined with better weather and companionship it felt less gruelling. We passed the guesthouse where I'd spent two nights having taken a rest day in Malham. Rewalking the path made me thoughtful. What had I accomplished in the intervening three years? Angling for melancholy, I dredged up achievement. There were at least two successes to celebrate in different ways: Sally and Xanthia.

© David Thompson 2015

Simons Seat

An enormous coach, looking as out of place as a parking meter on a fell, dwarfed the limestone portico of Newfield Hall the next morning. Visitor numbers had swelled overnight and close on forty people surged into the venerable charabanc. Like a whale in a canal, predictably this colossus caused major blockages in the narrow Yorkshire lanes. At one point, confronted by our stationary and intransigent conveyance and faced with the prospect reversing between unforgiving drystone walls, a nervous lady driver relinquished the driving seat to her husband and scurried round the back to hop into the passenger seat. After annoying a Chelsea's worth of 4x4 drivers, intent on bagging prime parking spots at local viewpoints in time for lunch, the result of these antics was that we were 15 minutes late arriving at the designated start point.

Now 15 minutes here or there starting a country walk may not seem much to you or me (Sally wouldn't know the difference anyway as her achingly stylish watch eschews numbers) but in the precision world of HF, that makes all the difference between a tea stop and, well, no tea stop. After an hour in cocooned in the coach, we trooped into the toilets in the adjacent pub before joining the group leader for the walk we had chosen. Mine was nowhere to be seen, and one of the other group leaders cheerfully informed me that, being the 'hard' group, they had already set off, believing everyone was present. There aren't many imperatives associated with being a walk leader but ensuring your party is complete at the start is, not unreasonably, one of them. I started in the direction indicated, up a steep and winding track, with no idea how far they'd gone, hoping at least they were still on the same path. When I spotted them, the leader trotted down to meet me, effusively apologetic and muttering that it was difficult to distinguish between guests' markings of 'M' and 'H' on the sign up list for medium and hard walks and consequently they were uncertain of the numbers on each. He seemed a decent chap and bumbling is not a hanging offence so my annoyance dissipated, a tribute to my holiday mood.

I spent much of the walk talking to Eileen with whom I'd shared a taxi from Skipton station. She was recovering from an ankle injury and wanted to test her capabilities before an upcoming walking holiday in the Dolomites. She was using two poles, often the sign of a less confident walker and, to establish the pecking order, I mentioned airily some of my previous treks, such as the Pennine Way. She listened attentively. Had I been to Jersey, she wondered? Oh yes, I'd walked the entire coastal path, it's about 55 miles, I explained, so it takes about a week. She'd done it too, but for charity; they started at 3am and finished at 9pm. I was confused. You mean, you did the whole thing in less than 24 hours, I spluttered? Yes, they'd got lost a couple of times, she said regretfully, that's why they finished so late.

With only four of us, including the leader, we made reasonable time, and stopped for lunch at windswept Simons Seat, very welcome after half an hours steep climb, the only part of the day which generated any sweat. I'd noticed one of our party, a taciturn Dutchman, sneak occasional glances at his GPS and assumed that his confidence in our leader had been somewhat eroded by the earlier faux pas, but while we ate lunch he explained he did geocaching. He had located a cache nearby and wanted to find it if we were game for a short detour. Geocaching has always struck me as a rather elegant fusion of the archaic treasure hunting urge and the challenge of finding new ways to harness the capabilities of modern technology, so I was intrigued to see the process in action. The GPS took us to the base of the imposing rocky outcrop which comprises Simons Seat, on top of which is the trig point. But amongst large boulders, small rocks and stones there was no obvious clue as to the whereabouts of the cache. The Dutchman found it in seconds. Behind a group of artfully arranged stones, which his practiced eye immediately distinguished from the general debris, there was a small plastic box of the type used for sandwiches. As well as a logbook, in which he entered his name, there were various trinkets and also a 'geocoin' which he explained you could take and relocate to another cache and whose trajectory could be tracked online.

 

The landscape reminded me of the Pennine Way, not surprisingly as Newfield Hall is itself minutes from the trail, and this first walk evoked unpleasant memories of endless trudging across featureless muddy moors. However the last section passed through woods by the river Wharfe, finishing at Bolton Abbey. Day trippers had parked their cars in semicircles, like the wagoners of the Wild West, creating a barrier of privacy within which to enjoy their barbecues and beer. No such sustenance for us. Despite making good time, we'd barely made up the stolen 15 minutes and we headed back to the coach, dozing as it trundled through country lanes, irritating the lesser minnows.

© David Thompson 2015

Newfield Hall

Walking is a sport for the cautious. Climbing, cycling, white water rafting, even ballroom dancing offer spicier fare, a higher risk/reward quotient if you like, than traversing the land by putting one foot in front of the other.  Thus it is a pastime for the elderly, physically challenged or simply unimaginative. Gradually, I'm beginning to tick all three boxes.  So the selection of a walking holiday is a simple trade-off: what's the most stimulation available for the lowest anxiety premium?  Our holiday in Las Chimineas illustrates this well.  The scenery was spectacular but the prelude to all walks was Land Rover incarceration for mouth-desiccating ascents on roads scarcely wide enough for a mule, with more hairpins than a fifties hairdresser.  The prospect of a sojourn in Arran in July was discarded for different reasons: voracious midges, according to the reviews, are the walkers' bane and susceptible to no amount of chemical armour. In his hilarious account of walking the Appalachian trail, Bill Bryson enumerates the hazards awaiting unprepared novices ranging from from black bears to deranged hillbillies. Having discarded most of the remaining summer walking venues through metereological factors (ie any hint of temperatures over 20C) the process of elimination yielded northern England. There 18C qualifies as sultry, nowhere is more than an afternoon's stroll from a tea shop and the most apprehensive traveller would hard-pushed to raise a tremble.

Newfield Hall, originally a manor house, has been sympathetically restored by HF Holidays (HF no longer stands for Holiday Fellowship - in these secular times the associations are deemed offputtingly devotional) and taut-sinewed guides stood ready to escort our party of elderly gentlefolk, plus a couple of Americans, on an introductory stroll.  In an unaccustomedly warm late afternoon it seemed the perfect introduction to a week of Dales dallying.

As a seasoned Ramblers walks leader, I respect the need to brief groups on safety matters and the tanned northerner took this duty seriously. There might be horseflies, he cautioned.  They land 'on their teeth' he claimed so we should give them no quarter; attack was the best form of defence and we were encouraged to swat freely, an appropriate sentiment in the week parliament is poised to overturn the ban on hunting foxes with hounds. Ticks, too, were a problem and long sleeves and trousers were advised.  I could already feel the skin crawling on my bare arms but before I could decide whether to retrieve a shirt from my room, the catalogue of terror continued. Fierce water buffalo has been spotted on a local footpath recently and although the farmer had been castigated by the council, there was no guarantee they would have been moved.  The final flourish in this awful menagerie was the local Hereford bull, recent proud father to half a Smithfield's worth of prime beef and there was a stern injunction not to make eye contact, let alone enter the field where he resided with his harem and progeny. Eventually we set off. I half expected the leader to offer additional life insurance before we left the car park but he contented himself with scowling at my rucksack and muttering that a walker 'in the south' had recently been snagged by a passing car as a result of injudicious backpack management.

The walk was idyllic: a small river bordered by meadows seemed to offer little in the way of terrifying hazards.  Then a German member, unused to the natural history of Britain, brushed against a stinging nettle.  Our leader rose to the occasion. Brandishing a handful of dock leaves he grabbed her arm and rubbed it vigorously, assuring her that the antihistamines in the leaves would sooth her, although possibly the Chinese burn he gaily appeared to be inflicting simply masked the earlier insult.  Botany again triumphed where zoology fell short.  Soon we encountered some giant hogweed whose legendary toxicity made it a miracle that humankind had survived at all within a 100 mile radius. In case we were not adequately intimidated, our leader recited a cornucopia of dangerous plants, including foxgloves, none of which were in the vicinity.  Against the odds, the party returned intact to the Hall.  Of the three walks offered for the next day, I couldn't help noticing that his route
had the fewest takers.





© David Thompson 2015

North

Poised between an election victory and a two month parliamentary recess, a triumphalist government tried to galvanise the economy and mollify the natives by coining the opiate 'northern powerhouse' which, depending on your perspective, can be either patronising or comforting.  A veil of impenetrability is essential for political phrase makers: if no one comprehends the meaning, how can they challenge it?

Denied the opportunity to go further north, I had already decided on Yorkshire for my walking holiday, and jocularly referred to it as 'going North'. When weekends trips to Budapest or Dubai are commonplace, there is an enduring poetry to travelling by reference to the points of the compass. Why else would a celebrity name a child North, or a pop group entitle itself The Beautiful South?

Londoners are burdened with a new connotation for East. No longer does it conjure oriental exoticism; now it signifies the burgeoning arriviste East End, still the cheapest (so necessarily the coolest) zone in the capital. Of the four compass points, confusingly South is the most alluring to Londoners for holidays, but the least for residing.  The Thames is London's unforgiving hinge: those living above it disdain the South as fervently as the superior Eloi enslaved the subterranean Morlocks.  Denizens of those lower reaches, bereft of efficient public transport merely through geological happenstance, are abandoned by friends on the favoured side of the great divide.  As Will Self has observed, they cling to the comforting illogic that it must be simpler for their acquaintances to amble northwards than for them to trek to a wilderness serviced only by buses and, probably, stage coaches.

Unpacking the concept of West is more complex. My schoolfriend aspired to be a rocker - as the biker gangs of those days were known - but he was a timid chap with a weak heart and his most dastardly exploit was going 'Up West' on a Saturday night where he would join co-religionists revving their machines on Chelsea Bridge and glaring at passers by. Occasionally I would see him on his way home visiting the Blackheath tea hut, a traditional biker haunt, looking disconsolate. The West is London's exit door. In the fifties we would embark on the interminable journey to Cornwall's dank beaches, condemned to driving through the night along ribbon-developed A roads before the relief of the motorways.  In the sixties, West London Air Terminal in Cromwell Road was the anteroom for Heathrow. My mother would deposit my father there for his annual trip to Chicago, solicitously ensuring he bought life insurance from a self-service machine in the ticket hall before departure.  Comets, with their fatally flawed windows, were still flying then and the chances of getting safely across the Atlantic were only slightly greater than winning the pools, or so the machines dispensing comforting reassurance would have you believe.  And now the West still means Heathrow. More and more of it if runway 3 gets built, so that as the city becomes more accessible, by a delicious irony, there is less and less point in going there: tarmac in London much resembles that in New York.

My North is a concatenation of childhood stories and adult experiences. I sense the freezing blast of the Snow Queen, the lattice landscape of ice, valleys and summits air-conditioned to within an inch of their life, like a summer office in the US, the only time it's necessary to wear more than a teeshirt indoors. The air in my North jangles with the clatter of ice-sheathed branches tickled by the wind. I glimpsed this North briefly in a Swedish Christmas and a New England winter solstice. But as my train rattles through lurid green English farmland, irredeemably agrochemicalled by ejaculating sprayers, the fantasy subsides and grim reality takes hold.  This North will be damp and windy, poverty-stricken and hopeless.  So far forgotten is the North that the idea of releasing London as a separate sovereign entity is gaining traction. There may be brass where there's muck, but where there are bankers there's gold. Hence the need for the soothing phrase 'northern powerhouse'. Despite the abandonment of steel manufacture, the slaughter of coal mining and the migration of ship building, the UK's economy, we must believe, can still be resuscitated by dour sons of toil in overalls and flat caps. Decades of under-investment and denial of existence, in no way prejudice this fantasy. In this island, North it seems, is misspelt: the 'r' and 'h' are superfluous. For everything that the South is, the North is not; everything the South has, the North has not.

© David Thompson 2015