Life Less Literary

It is to my frequent shame that, whenever I do something really exciting which deserves a long blog entry, I end up putting it off and putting it off and putting it off and eventually either giving up completely or writing, months later, whatever fragmented memories I have left by that stage. I felt particularly bad that I wrote nothing about my no-longer-so-recent
trip to Antwerp (who knows, it may still come… one day) and for the last few weeks I’ve been very aware that I need to tell about my glorious August before summer turns to autumn turns to winter. So here goes…

It started, as all good months do, on the 1st. Our annual “family camp” (photos
here) was at Graig Wen in Arthog, close to the middle of the Welsh coast. This
was
our
second year running on the same site - as well as camping
there with the family last spring, we also visited
in the summer with friends, and we had stayed at the same site a
few years previously. In-between times, various other members of our family
also frequented, so by now this little green field on the side of a prehistoric-looking
estuary had become a home-from-home.

Previous family camps had lasted a weekend - this time we arrived on Thursday
evening (OK, not strictly speaking the first) and didn’t leave until the Tuesday
morning. So although as ever there was lots of hanging around the campsite,
reading newspapers, nibbling snacks, and feeling like we ought to be doing
more with
our precious holiday hours, we did get stuff done. Most of all, we spent a
wonderful day walking, climbing
Cadair Idris from the South. I’d climbed Cadair with my family several
times in childhood, although always from the Northern pony path approach. We
even made
it half-way
up with Rowan when she was four. So we left the kids behind for the day -
except for Lily, who rode up on Jon’s back. Dad and I, Hannah, Jon, John and
Jess the dog began the trek from the car-park, up the last lonely stretch of
road and onto the track, climbing all the time. The trees thinned out, then the bracken too. It seemed
we’d only been walking for ten or fifteen minutes, but the clock said nearly
two hours and, looking behind us, it was staggering to comprehend how feeble
human legs could propel a body so dizzily high in such an apparently short time.

We
snacked next to the point where the North and South paths meet, where we had
turned back with Rowan three years before, and carried on up the wide half-path.
Since previous climbs this had been covered with some kind of tough netting,
to combat the damage done by hundreds of pairs of feet per day. Further up, the
rocky section of the path was far rockier than I ever remember. We scrambled
over quarry-bottom terrain, our group now spread over
half-a-kilometre or so. The last
twenty metres to the summit was a near-vertical scramble. From the top we looked
down at the sea 893m below. Dad
brewed
tea
on his hiking stove and we sat eating our picnic, watched by a hungry
seagull.

On the way downhill, we reached the point where the paths split, and debated
where to go next. The others wanted to get back to the car by the shortest route
possible - Hannah had been dragged along by Jess, Jon was weighed down by Lily,
and John had shorted legs than the rest of us - but Dad was keen to go further,
and I was just beginning to rediscover a love for long walks in the wilderness,
something which seven years with kids and other agendas had driven utterly from
my mind. We walked together the rest of the way along the ridge, following sheep-paths
and making our own way through the peat-bogs and scrub. Descended at an ankle-twisting
pace down the slope, dodging man-high thistles and stagnant
holes of sheep-water, following our noses and the GPS to try and find the main
path back to the village where our car was parked. As we strolled the last leg
of the walk, back among trees and bracken once more, my heart surged and I felt
all those inexplicable feelings of fullness that only a day lost in the incomprehensibly
complex simplicity of nature can bring. I determined to do more of this!

So that walk up Cadair was certainly the life-changing event on that holiday.
But There was plenty more of note. There was the badger which emerged snuffling
for snails in the field next to ours each evening, which we’d go to visit en
masse,
watching it ambling closer and closer until, at a distance of a few feet, it
realised we weren’t trees and suddenly turned tail (and what a bizzarre tail!)
There were the numerous "little trips" which I took in the car, excuses
to enjoy my new MP3 player and drive faster than adviseable down empty Welsh
mountain
roads. Unfortunately the roads weren’t, for the most part, all that empty,
and at one point I skinned the edge of my tyre as I hugged the kerb trying
to
avoid a head-on collision on a suddenly-narrowing twist of coastal road. The
tyre needed replacing (although thankfully it held its own for the rest of
that thirty-mile round trip), and I was glad at being directed to the small
garage
just outside Dollgellau, set backjfrom the Bala road and advertising Goodyear
4×4s. The young guy working there was lovely to chat to (again I realised what
a crazy sped-up life I lead, I needed to get down to this guys pace and take
time
for
the better things), knowledgable on many subjects, and certainly gave the lie
to
the
simplistic belief
that the Welsh are all a bunch of English-hating yokels.

On leaving Arthog, we continued South until we hit the
Druidstone Hotel in the
very bottom corner of Wales (pictures
here). Again we’d been here before, this
time five years ago, again to visit our friends Phil
and Lola Franks who
were
on
their annual pilgramage from their home in Spain to the Druidstone. Continuing
the tranquility theme, the Druidstone and its surroundings
are
relaxation
in
its pure form. They’re so laid back that they let us pitch our tent in their
beautiful back garden, the hotel being, as ever, full. We
couldn’t
help
but
chill
out
here.
So
much
so
that,
as
with our last visit, I’ve very little memory of what we got up to. There was
a bit
of time spent on the beach below the hotel, a day in nearby St David’s, visiting
the cathedral and bishop’s palace, a couple of hours in Solva where we had
tea and ice-creams and visited the converted
chapel gallery of Cuban artist Raul
Speek (in another of life’s bizarre coincidences, I discovered on returning
home that this very chapel is where friend and former Hard Reality-employee Tim
Heyes’s dad used to run his chocolate business from). We also had a gorgeous
Druidstone dinner in the dining room with Phil and Lola - but again, the conversation
was flowing so I’ve totally forgotten what we ate.

After two nights at the Druidstone we drove home - across Wales, then a couple
of hours break near Abergavenny where we visited Emma, her chap Nathan and
the girls Megan and Bronwen (my god, how they’ve grown in the couple of years
since we last saw them!) We were there long enough to miss the rush hour, then
completed the drive home. Although the journey was six or seven hours in total,
it flew by thanks, once again, to the MP3 player and several long car journeys’
worth of Harry Potter MP3s.

We stayed at home for a couple of days and then I headed down South again,
this time alone, no Gill or girls. I delayed setting off until about 9pm,
which meant that I didn’t arrive in the New Forest until 1am. This time I
replaced Harry Potter with Douglas Adam’s last Hitch Hiker book, Mostly Harmless.
Funny,
I thought I’d retire the entire "trilogy in five parts", but somehow
this one slipped under the radar. It’s brilliant - more mature and finely
honed than
his earlier works, and it shows big chunks of genius from a story-telling,
scientific, humourous and philosophical perspective. Awesome

So I arrived on New Park Farm for
Jon’s festival (pictures
here). It was Thursday night, ten people or so had
turned up already, pitched marquees and fueled generators, and everyone was
sitting around the fire getting quietly drunk and listening to an interesting
mix of sounds. This was the tenth year that Jon Makepeace had organised a mini-festy
for all his friends and friends-of-friends, ex-Woodcraft Folk chums and others.
I hadn’t been for the last two or three years, and in previous years I’d perhaps
found things were getting a bit cliquey - possibly just because there were
more groups of people I didn’t know as the event grew beyond the original
circle of friends. This year things couldn’t have been more different - although
there were plenty of people I didn’t know, I left feeling close to pretty much
all of them. I think that going on my own had a lot to do with this - I didn’t
have close affiliations with any one group, so I spent my time drifting between
one and another, latching on to the one or two people in the group whom I knew
vaguely, and getting to know all their friends by osmosis. But I think the
biggest reason was that, two years later on, all of the people there (most
of whom are three or four years younger than me) had matured, mellowed, become friendlier
and less deliberately cool.

So I awoke four hours after going to bed, at around 6am, head blistering
inside from the chilli vodka I’d knocked back with such gusto the previous
evening.
I managed to wait it out in the slowly-heating tent for about twenty minutes,
before accepting what I knew already, that it would be more enjoyable, worthwhile
and allround better for me if I could just get up and start doing something
- like walking. Which I did. I was keen to explore the area - I’d first been
on this farm when, aged about ten, I camped here with Woodcraft Folk The
camp was legendary for many reasons, not least the non-stop rain which meant
we
got to have a floating campfire on our last day, and the ongoing rivalry
with another Woodcraft group camped next door which culminated in the Battle
of
Frog Island.

Philip had brought a Kermit puppet with him that camp. And the wood, crisscrossed
with channels and ditches, was turned by the rain into a series of islands.
And so Kermit became the king of his own island, christened naturally Frog
Island. Many and varied were the games we played around there, but when Solent
Woodcraft Folk kidnapped my secret heart-throb Jessica Banaji and another
girl, just as we were being called back to the campsite for lunch, this proved
to much for me. I demanded the girls back at knife-(penknife)-point and,
to my huge surprise, the enemy took me at face value, for the knife-wielding
psycho I gave every impression of being rather than the scared heavily outnumbered
kid I really was, and they freed the girls to go back to the campsite with
me. I was jubilant - I had rescued my beloved and, in so doing, proven my
manhood.

All quite irrelevant 24 years later, nothing did ever come of my longing
for Jessica, and Frog Island was just another incident, albeit a very memorable
one, in childhood’s tapestry of nostalgia. But I hadn’t been back since,
and I was dying to see whether I recognised it. Well, in part I did, but
the forest was a lot more complex than I’d ever remembered. And it changed
with every few steps.

I entered into a commercial pine forest, all tall straight trees, no greenery
below the forty-foot level, the floor an unwalkable mess of branches and
pine-needles, nothing apparent alive. I was immediately disappointed - it
was so drab, so inhuman, was this really the landscape that had lived on
in my dreams? Twenty feet further it changed though, the pines had been felled
and just the uneven, branch-strewn ground was left, bits of greenery poking
their way up between the cracks. I saw a small plant with round purple heads
which looked vaguely like mint, crushed its leaves between my fingers and,
yes, it smelt minty too. Turned out to be Water
Mint and I had some fun with it later (see below).

Another twenty feet and I was back in woodland, but this time mixed deciduous,
bracken filling the space underneath, far greener, lusher, more what I had
been expecting. I hit a wide gravel track which I also remembered well, and
followed it for a while before continuing on the other side. Here the trees
became sparser, spindlier, more hawthorn-like with a mowed-looking carpet
of grass underneath. Through an ancient barbed-wire fence which had become
part of the flora I saw two New Forest ponies eye me up before galloping away.
Through the fence I crossed a high-sided stream, at least it must have been a
stream once. In fact, I’m sure I remember my ten-year old self swimming in
this stream, ever wary of leeches. Now it was just a series of stagnant pools
joined up by long stretches of sunken pebble causeway. Later on in the weekend,
I found a rainbow trout in one of these pools, it’s sparkling colours stagnated
to brown, head lolling and gasping above the water, ready to die any minute
from suffocation.

Past the stream
the ground
became rough once again, deep troughs cutting one way then the other, like
in the pine woods only far greener here, as if this section of forest had
also been
managed
pine
many, many
years
ago,
but the tall light-suffocating trees had been cut down and local specimens
had taken their place. The further I pushed into this part of the wood, the
boggier it got, and the greener and lusher. More water mint was growing everywhere,
not the tiny isolated plants of half-a-mile back, but three-foot high specimens
growing in huge clumps alongside the rushes. Everything here, from the plants
to the fungi to the tiny frogs to the insects to the beautiful, intoxicating
air, stunk of life. With every band of terrain my soul had swooped another
octave higher, this was surely the best it could get.

Sure enough, the forest was about to end. But if anything the land beyond was
more beautiful still - a typical New Forest moor, patchy gorse and heather
and birch trees poking their heads above the ground, beautiful morning sunlight
warming the ground, the kind of place you expect to find an adder curled on
every stone. I’d originally intended to just explore the little area of woods
around the campsite and then return for breakfast, but it was still early (very),
and I was falling in love with the countryside, so I kept going in what I thought
would be roughly the direction of the nearest village, Brockenhurst. The remaining
hour-or-so’s walking was not as inspiring, but I kept up a warm and happy glow
as I stepped through fields of dew-soaked spiderwebs and followed my (not usually
this good) intuition until I hit Brockehhurst.

By the time I did I was starving - it was about 8.30am and I still hadn’t had
breakfast. I looked for a tea-shop, and was surprised that in such an obviously
twee middle-class holiday destination there didn’t seem to be any. Luckily the
local Spar had a little cafe out the back, so I had tea and buns (much cheaper
than in any twee middle-class holiday destination tea shop too!) and took my
time over a copy of that morning’s Guardian. I started psyching myself up for
the walk back - although getting there had been great, I felt I’d had about enough
chilled contemplation for the day, and could really handle a taxi back to the
campsite. The heavenly taxi-controller must’ve heard me, because I walked out
of the Spar and bumped straight into Angus and Sam, in town for their morning’s
shopping. I squeezed into the car with them and got the lift back I’d been praying
for.

A very mellow couple of days on site - chatting to people, making new friends,
playing football (I hadn’t realised in the few years since I last played quite
how unfit I’d become - five minutes running around the small pitch area was enough
to leave me puffing and panting for the next hour-or-so). On Friday afternoon,
I enticed Suz and her new girlfriend Sarah over. Unfortunately, their arrival
coincided with my shopping trip, my search for ice cubes went on far longer than
I’d hoped, and I ended up missing them - or missing Suz. Shortly after returning
to the campsite I glimpsed a large blue van through the hedges, very similar
to the one Sue had described to me. I chased it frantically, trying to head it
off at the gate. I succeeded, met Sarah for the first time, and then spent half-an-hour
with her retracing my steps backwards and forwards across the field, trying to
find the cover for my brand new car stereo which must’ve slipped out
as I was running. Aaargh. Fortunately, Sarah eventually found it, for which I
owe her my life.

It’s funny how little incidents like this, where you regain something briefly
thought lost for all eternity, can make you so much happier and more full of
life
than you ever were before losing the thing. So when Sarah and I set off for a
walk in the woods I’d so recently discovered, this time my feet were already
floating
a
couple
of inches above the pine needles. So we trekked through all those different types
of woodland I already described so tediously, only this time I was the expert
and gave Sarah the standard guide-spiel as we passed through the multiple layers
of my domain. I was, however, blown away when she started talking tree-shop (Sarah
used to be a tree-surgeon), said she wished she’d brought her tree-climbing gear
and, as I stared up at the canopy 100-feet above me, I couldn’t help but nod
in mute agreement.

I think the real step-up in enlightment this holiday came when we spotted some
deer through the trees. Now, deer aren’t all that uncommon in rural Britain,
in fact in parts they’re a pest, culled because of the damage they cause to plants
and trees and the lack of natural predators to keep them in check. But that doesn’t
make it any less magical when you suddenly come across a group of them in the
woods. We stood watching them through the trees (this was in the "life stinking"
faerie-like part of the woods) for
five minutes or more. We crept towards them but they were wise to that - first
one then more looked towards us and took flight, so that we realised that, rather
than the four or five deer we’d imagined, there was actually a herd of twenty
or more secreted in that little clump of greenery. I think it was something about
our standing still, taking time, soaking in the atmosphere, but after that I
felt like I’d been meditating, time no longer mattered, I just let it pass at
whatever speed felt right. I could happily stand for hours, soaking in more and
more detail. We emerged from the woods into the moorland, where we saw that our
little herd of deer had merely been part of a bigger group, a deer nation, hundreds
and hundreds of little deery faces, ears cocked, poking their heads up in the
air to get a good look at us.

Sadly Sarah had to leave, and Suz didn’t return. The evening was drawing in.
Cocktails
were
in
order:
I’d
bought some Bacardi earlier in the day which
I thought
would make a nice partner to the water mint in a Wild Mint Mojito. I also discovered
that chilli vodka and ginger beer together make one hell of a potent fiery mix.
Damn tasty too. Still looking for a suitable name for this one - suggestions
welcome. Oh, and I also discovered that in terms of the ratio between difficulty
to throw together and pleasure in eating, absolutely nothing beats a Greek salad
(that is, Greek salad made with olive oil. Other
kinds I can very happily live
without).

Then,
on Saturday night I cooked up a stonking huge risotto - cooking for one gets
lonely, so I decided to make something biiig and let everyone help themselves
if they’re hungry. Proper risotto too - lots of arborio rice (plus some Puy lentils),
porcini, mushroom stock (OK, so I cheated and used cubes) and vast gooey gratings
of parmesan. Was supposed to have some saffron too, but those damn semi-wild
ponies which wonder our field after dark, screaming (now I know where Tolkien
got the inspiration for the Dark Riders’ cries) and barging into peoples’ tents
uninvited, they went and raided my food bag - took a few bites of apple,
left
everything else but somehow made off with the saffron. Anyway, the meal was a
resounding success, and even though I made bucketloads (well, a very very large
frying pan-load) it all got eaten.

Also on Saturday, we were entertained by several bands. It was a disappointment
that I didn’t get to play anything, I only ever managed to drag a complete band
along to one of these festivals, but it was great hearing how some of the others’
musical talents have developed over the years, and how they have all found their
own styles and become confident in them. Especially surprising and pleasing to
hear what a damn fine singer my cousin Jacob is (and what an incredibly high
singing voice he has compared to his speaking tone - works really well with his
Radiohead and Oasis covers, as well as his own material). Highlight of the evening
had to be Jollity Farm - a bunch of old-time (1920s-style) jazzers led (?) by
Lou’s dad (whose name I still don’t remember), a trumpeter who apparently used
to play with the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah band in the 1960s ("before they went professional").
As my parents went to a Bonzo gig shortly before my birth, and I apparently kicked
along to the music with gusto, scaring my mum that I’d injure the guy in front
of
her, this was something I had to see and hear. They were great, and we made an
appreciative audience, and I think they greatly appreciated our appreciation.
Ah, I love it when everyone gets on The rest of the night was spent around
the campfire, again making more friends, getting embroiled in increasingly bizarre
conversations. Somehow it got to be 4am, and I realised that I hadn’t had a bike
ride all camp, so I scrounged Aaron’s bike, plugged my torch onto the front,
and went careening off into the pitch-black forest like a somewhat crazed thing.
It was fun, and by the time I got back the sun was rising, the number of people
around the campfire had shrunk from about 20 to precisely four. It was (nearly)
time for bed.

By the time I woke up, after sever hours baked in a sun-drenched tent, I was
really feeling it. Sunday was played at a much slower pace than the rest of the
weekend. I left early in the afternoon. And had a cream tea in Lyndhurst. And
drove very slowly North along B-roads, listening to more Douglas Adams. At Hungerford
I
stopped
for
another
cream
tea and a slow and contemplative walk up and down the canal (where, curioser
and curioser, I found more water mint growing in the nature reserve) before driving
even more slowly North along more minor routes. I stopped several hours later,
somewhere in the midlands, for a passable dinner and a pint in a random gastro-pub
(actually, it was excellent for pub food) and continued North, eventually conceding
and
migrating to the M1 once darkness had made the backroads too much like hard work
and
not
so
beautiful as in the daylight. I must’ve stretched this four-hour journey out
to at least twice that length, inspired by a mixture of zen calm and MP3 audio-book
captivatedness.

The final leg of our August away was spent, after another couple of days at home,
in the far corner of Cornwall. We camped at Noongallas
campsite just outside
Penzance (photos here).
Other
than a one-night visit
to
St
Ives
for
a
friend’s wedding, I hadn’t been in this part of the country since I was four.
Everything about it impressed me. With hindsight, I wonder whether some of
this might have been just a reflection on my own happy nature, but at the time
I was
blown away by the friendliness of the people (they wave when they drive past
you! They say hello in the street! They have so much time for you!
Even though
they
know
you’re
nothing
but
a
scummy tourist!), the beauty of the countryside, the fascinating sea. I’d love
to list every aspect of this holiday but… read back to the first paragraph
of
this
entry again, and bear in mind that I’ve just written over 4,000 words and still
have another 11 days of August left. So in summary…

Weather perfect, the
sea was far clearer, more mediterranean than anywhere else in Britain, snorkelling
in Marazion, spotting a gurnard walking
along the sea floor with its distinctive fin-legs, saw weird and wonderful
automata at the automata museum in Penzance, tried body-boarding and failed
on the beach at St Ives, tried body-boarding and succeeded magnificently at
Porthcurno (home of the British end of the original trans-atlantic cable link,
as well as the biggest waves I’ve ever seen away from the Cote Sauvage in Brittany),
found and used a plethora of rope swings in the woods below the campsite, got
severe rope burns and spent four hours with my hand in a bucket of water due
to somewhat foolish use of one of these swings, found unbelievable numbers
of blackberries everywhere, made not entirely succesful blackberry polenta,
attended parties thrown by the camp-site’s owners, where we danced to excellent
local ska/jazz/hip-hop band Prime Skandal, went for solo walks and drives on
the moors of North Cornwall, took another dawn ramble where I surprised a local
farmer in the middle of milking his cows, etc etc etc.

It wasn’t perfect - towards the middle of our stay Rowan got moody, I got moody,
and Gill got the brunt of it. But once again I felt so connected to nature,
I felt like I was making progress, finding out how life should be lived, and
regaining a mellowness which I once had but seem to have lost somewhere in
the last few years of kids, computers, ad agencies and dot-com madness.

We drove back - another long, slow, Harry Potter-fueled one - along the West
of England and spent a weekend at Lib, John and Alice’s in Chester, where we
had an enjoyable family karaoke session, a gorgeous Chester-apple and Cornwall-blackberry
crumble, and caught the last of the August sunshine in the garden.