Day Fifty Four, The End

So the final leg of my journey, and only a short hop to the hospital. I looked at the map to plan my route, for the last time, up the hill and then off the road and on to a footpath across some public moorland, into the village where I was born. A strange mixture of feelings; exhaustion, relief, gladness but also a strange tinge of grief.

It was a beautiful morning to be out in, cold but clear blue sky and brilliant light, so that I felt lighter than I had yesterday in the strong wind under heavy skies. A man stopped me on the road at one point, and seeing my map asked me where I was going. I explained, and he completely ignored most of what I said but told me I was going completely the wrong way and it would be much quicker if I went his way, up there, left at the lights etc. I said thanks and carried on, my way. I could see from looking at my map that his way was much further, and also didn’t cross the moorland I wanted to.

At the hospital gates a woman stood, idly looking around. As I walked past she said hello and fell into step with me, asked me what I was doing here. It seemed strange, but I felt quite alive and open, and so I told her, and asked her if she knew whereabouts the old maternity unit would have been (I knew that department had moved to a larger hospital nearby sometime in the ‘90s). She wasn’t sure exactly, but took me to the entrance she thought was right and told me which floor to get out of the lift to find the main nurses station, where a stern male nurse greeted me. I told him of my quest, and he seemed not the least impressed, but went off to find someone who might know. He came back after a while and sent me off to a higher floor, where I found another nurse, who in turn went off to find the head nurse, Elaine.

I sat down in a tiny sunlit waiting room and waited several minutes. It was very peaceful. Elaine arrived, and for the fifth time that morning I explained what I was doing. She seemed soft, and interested, and told me that I would have been born in the theatre (by Caesarean), but that unfortunately it was still an operating theatre and they had a full day of operations on and so I wouldn’t be able to get in to it. I tried to persuade her, but not really that hard, because suddenly it didn’t really seem to matter. The journey had happened and I had experienced it, and the end, which I had been thinking about a lot, didn’t really seem important any more. I don’t know how much of that was cosmic realisation and how much just sheer exhaustion, but that was how it was. I chatted to Elaine about the hospital, which apparently had been built in the war for wounded soldiers who were taken there by train, which explained why there was such a significant hospital in such a small place.

I took some pictures at the doors of the theatre, and went to get the bus.

At the bus stop I got a lump in my throat. I phoned Natasha to tell her I was on my way home, but she was busy doing something, and didn’t seem to have much time to talk. The bus came after 20 minutes of waiting – the first waiting I’d done for 7 and a half weeks. I hate waiting, but on this occasion I felt so lost I wasn’t sure whether I wanted the bus to come or not. When it came and I got on, I felt immediately invaded by people’s conversations and put my headphones on to block it out, and sat staring out the window gradually getting a headache.

We headed back into the city the same way I had left it two days ago (having double-backed Southwest for the final trek inland), and I felt suddenly nostalgic for the miserable exhausted walking of two days before. In the city centre I got off and wandered down to the station. I needed a wee, and so looked for the toilet. It turned out that the toilets at that station are on the platform, and so you can only use them once you go through the barriers. I didn’t want to have to stand on the freezing platform for two hours waiting for my train, so I asked the attendant if I could go through and come back out. ‘Sorry, once you’ve gone through you can’t come back out without relinquishing your ticket’. Thinking of it now, if he had only not finished his sentence it would’ve sounded quite cosmic, but at the time I felt suddenly enraged. ‘But it’s only there!’ I said incredulously, pointing to the toilet and showing him my ticket simultaneously. ‘Sorry mate, can’t do it’. I swore at him and walked off and into the station pub, which had a toilet with a large ‘For customers use only’ sign on the door. I walked up to the bar (which the toilet was next to) and asked the barmaid if it was alright if I used it. ‘You’ll have to buy a drink first’. ‘’Fucks sake’ I said, and turned my back on her as well. I should have just gone in and used it, but I think I was totally taken aback by the unhelpfulness of these people – I don’t know how many times on the walk I’ve walked into pubs and asked to use the toilet, or fill my water bottle up, and not once been refused. And now suddenly, I catch a bus and everyone’s being horrible to me. That’s how it felt; like I was suddenly isolated in a world of hostile strangers.

I left the station and went into Starbucks across the road and used the toilet there (I did buy a coffee – though nobody demanded I buy one). Sitting at the window I slowly calmed down, watched the people passing.

Later, speeding south on the train, I watched the weather instead, through the thick grimy glass as it changed from blue skies to grey and then later into rain. It occurred to me that this was the first time since before I’d set off that I was moving through the weather, rather than it moving over and around me. The first time that I’d moved faster than the natural world around me. It took me almost exactly seven and a half hours to get home, after seven and a half weeks of walking.

It was dark when I arrived home on my street, where 54 days before I had set off, fretting about what I’d take pictures of and what the project would be about. I had done it, but still wasn’t sure what it had been about, although I felt like I had learnt something. Maybe it will become clear in the weeks and months to come.

Day Fifty Three, ‘Over There, Where Aldi Is Now’

I woke to another cup of tea from Frank and packed up quickly to get on my way as I was due to meet my Dad in the town where he grew up, around midday. The first stop though was the bungalow I lived in for my first three years of life. It was on a little street in a tiny village on the side of quite a big hill. I remembered the area as a wide-open landscape of surrounding fields and a road that ran along the ridge of the hill that towered above the village, before it ran down into our street. Actually it was quite different: the surrounding area was a largely forested winding valley and the towering hill I’d remembered was a slope of 20 yards height or so – that same distortion I’d experienced seeing my old primary school again had somehow shrunk my childhood home to much less epic proportions than I’d recalled.

Apart from the general lay of the land, the only other things I remembered about the house were that it was on the corner, and that the people at the top of the road had a Saab, which I think was a sort of muddy green. Apparently as a child cars were very important to me, and in fact I had an ability to name all makes and models of car on sight, and often would as I was chauffered around by my parents, sitting in the back pronouncing ‘Renault 4!’, ‘Ford Fiesta!’, ‘Morris Minor!’ etc as each swished past.

Unfortunately I couldn’t pronounce the hard ‘c/k sound, so couldn’t actually say the word ‘car’ (or presumably Volkswagen, Escort, Clio etc) (actually, not sure Clios were around in those days but I can’t think of another car that begins with C). I can imagine for a young car aficionado the fact of pronouncing ‘cars’ as ‘’ars’ would be quite embarrassing, but maybe that’s my adult mind fretting. Anyway at some point before my modern memory begins I lost interest in all things car-related, though happily I also gained the ability to say ‘c’, which on reflection seems like a good swap.

I found the bungalow OK after a couple of minutes wandering up and down the roads on the little estate, The village was silent, seemed deserted and I felt slightly weird taking a picture of the house, and myself in front of it. I wandered up to the top of the road, only to find that a load of new houses had been built and the road extended (it was a cul-de-sac). Anyway, the green Saab wasn’t there.

I walked from there through a thick wood, getting lost momentarily on a circuit of paths and coming across a beautiful line of saplings, their upper branches entwined with each other and creating beautiful patterns of light. I thought I would have liked to grow up there.

After the forest I joined a main road which took me straight as an arrow across a high, windy plain. The Autumn is really starting to bite and I felt glad to be on the penultimate day.

I met my Dad in a charming little pub in the place where he grew up, a once bustling steel-town that was one of the former centres of the British steel industry. His father and grandfather had both spent much of their working lives at the steel plant there, and the way he described it was quite epic – a vast tract of land covered in industrial buildings with a road that wound through it for about a mile, under gantries and around huge furnaces.

It’s all gone now – the company dwindled in the 70’s and 80’s and was ultimately shut down by the Thatcher government. Amazingly, the only physical signs of the once-mighty works are a few pipes that poke up from the poor quality grass in the fields at the edge of town where the works once were. My dad said he thought it to be a deliberate policy of that government to completely eradicate signs of the industrial past, to hasten the march of Britain to a shiny future of commerce and high finance.

He showed me the site, saying ‘it was over there, where Aldi is now’. Aldi, and KFC and McDonalds, gleaming on a commercial estate at the edge of town. In the town centre there’s plenty of shops too, but the feeling is different – you can tell it’s a shadow of what it used to be. Dad told me about the old clubs and cinemas, a disused bowling alley. He showed me other places too, from his past that had changed uses – the house where he was born, the music shop where he’d bought his first Hendrix LP. It felt good, to see and hear about this unknown area of my family history, but at the same time sort of remote, as much of my experience has been on this trip, visiting old sites of the many branches of my family’s past, even of my own past.

It feels important to me to witness and regard these places, to honour the things that happened in them, and at the same time, I can’t fully connect with them – the past, it’s always out of reach, blind, never quite there. Maybe if you have a different kind of imagination to me, you might be able to bring it back more fully, but for me it seems almost formal in some way, like a stiff old relative I’m introduced to for the first time and can’t find anything to say.

After a while of wandering around in the howling wind – apparently a constant in the town, it being exposed on the top of a hill – we felt the need to retreat for a warm drink, and wandered into a huge Wetherspoons (betraying the vow I made a few weeks ago to avoid the cheap chain pubs – it looked warm and comfortable and I don’t seem to have the energy for principles at the moment!). It was hard to believe that such a small town could support such a vast pub, but I suppose in a town as obviously depressed as this, the thirst for alcohol is probably high, and the need to get it cheap, paramount.

I stayed in a B-and-B, my last night of this trip. Part of me felt it would be more right to camp, but I felt so deeply exhausted that when a barmaid in one of the pubs we went in told me her mum had a B-and-B down the road and she was sure it would be especially cheap, I was tempted.

As I walked down the hill and into the next village, a little out of my way for the final leg in the morning, it started raining and the wind got up again and I was glad to be inside and warm and clean before going to bed.

Day Fifty Two, Geordie Criminals?

I stopped at a pub just before arriving at the B and B last night, and got chatting to two guys at the bar. They were very interested in my camera and my project, though one of them was very concerned by various practical considerations, particularly that I’d left my girlfriend at home for such a length of time. The other was more interested in how many women I’d pulled on the way. When I told him none he looked at me disbelievingly, ‘None? What like, none at all? In seven weeks?’. I told him it wasn’t really my style when in a relationship, and he seemed genuinely perplexed. But then soon after that he did start trying to persuade the barmaid to get her boobs out, so I guess that was his style.

I asked them what it was like around here, and Tony said ‘Aye, it’s canny… you get a better class of criminal round ‘ere like’. I laughed – it certainly didn’t seem like the kind of village where criminals would be hanging out. But thinking about it later, and walking through the city today, I realized that I have a sort of positive prejudice about people who talk with this accent – they just seem innately trustworthy and good; I can’t imagine a Geordie criminal, or even a Geordie doing anything particularly bad. In the same way as people from other parts of the country (I won’t name names – you can choose yourself) sound quite dodgy, or a bit stupid, or just plain unpleasant, Geordies just sound… nice. Canny, like. I wonder if this is a widely held view, or is just my own personal prejudice based on my history and early upbringing – I had a Geordie accent when I was little.

Either way though I’m sure it’s a wrong view – there is certainly a lot of poverty and deprivation up here, and those are two of the main mothers of crime (which could be a funk band from 70′s Harlem couldn’t it – ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, give it up for the Mothers of Crime!’) (I just googled it, and it’s not, in fact amazingly no-one has yet snapped up the domain mothersofcrime.com).

So anyway, today I walked through the first city of my life. I felt both like an alien and like I had some connection to it. In truth I didn’t remember very much, although I visited the terraced house we lived in and my first school, where I think I went for two years. I felt more emotional there than at the house, and took a picture of myself in front of the railings on which I cracked my head open as a child (I still have the stitch, wrapped in a ball of cotton wool inside one of those yellow plastic Kinder surprise eggs). As at my other primary school, it seemed tiny now, far from the towering brown brick structure I vaguely recall from all those years ago.

In the evening just as the darkness was closing in I arrived at a neat little campsite in a wide woody valley, to be greeted by the watchman, Frank, a wonderfully friendly old chap who showed me where to go and then retreated to his static caravan only to return with a cup of tea for me. I chatted to him while I pitched the tent. He was from just South of the river, one of the poorer parts of this Northern metropolis, but spent his summers here outside the city. He had a face that had seen some real weather in its time, and hands to match. He laughed after pretty much everything I said, a fantastic, slow ‘Her-her-her’ that seemed both deliberate and merry at the same time.

I went to bed feeling much more relaxed for talking to him, having a bit of company, and felt pleased too that I seem to be able now to just chat to people easily even when I’m exhausted and vague and hard-edged.

 

Day Fifty One, Beautiful Morning, Exhausted Afternoon

I woke up early and left Ellie’s garden before she was up, just as the gloaming was beginning to dissolve into a pinkish sunrise. I walked down to the sea, to the next dene, which was a big one, a rambling, overgrown cliffy valley spanned at the sea end by a beautiful brick viaduct.

I stopped to take a photograph. I love bridges. I can’t really say why, but something about them just makes my heart sing… looking at them, looking off them, walking across them. San Francisco is my favourite city, in no small part due to it’s fantastic, epic bridges, particularly the Golden Gate and the Bay Bridge, colossal steel structures towering above you and across dark expanses of water.

We don’t have many really awe-inspiring bridges of that kind here (although I do like the QE2) but we do have some excellent viaducts of the older brick-built kind. This was one, not really for it’s size but for the setting. Wandering down into the dene along a winding path the central arch of the viaduct, high above the valley floor, was filled with sea and sandy beach. Further down I found the part-brick part-rock structures built into the cliffs that I’d been told were kilns in days gone by, and on the beach was a lone gun emplacement, filled with the usual beer cans and stench of urine. This stretch of coast is wonderful and walking along it I feel a kinship with it. Whether that’s through family history or just a natural affinity for high places in wide open rugged spaces (with regular bridges!) I don’t know.

The morning passed by along the cliffs, except for a little interlude when, trying to press on by taking the most direct route, I descended into a pathless dene that proved impassable. I spent half an hour hacking through thickets and trying to traverse a stream, but ended up falling in and so gave up and spent another half an hour hacking my way back up out of it, and went inland to go round, which took about eight minutes. There’s a moral in there somewhere. Something about needing more bridges.

The rest of the day was a town and another industrial city and suburban sprawl. I walked purposefully through it, wanting to make good time after only covering a few miles yesterday. I’m really yearning for home, walls around me and being able to not move and just be in a place. I think I can finish in three days time and am kind of hanging on to that. As a result much of the time, particularly this afternoon when it was all urban, I feel quite shut down to everything around me – like I just want to get there, wherever there is. It’s a shame in a way because it means a lot of the time I’m not really being open to the journey, this experience. That’s been the root of my angst with my photography too, as I’ve written before – I’ve probably missed a lot of stuff that normally would excite me, just through being edhausted or fed up. I am deeply tired.

Day Fifty, A Sad Town By The Sea

I set off today feeling flatter than I had yesterday, and a bit detached from the project, like I’d sort of separated from what had felt like the core of it – being out there in the world and meeting people, making friends and having conversations and camping too. I haven’t camped since before the last rest stop, or the illness stop as I could more accurately call it. I resolved to camp tonight, and to try and engage with some people today.

So I set off north along the coastal path which rises high above the sea and then drops down every so often into little ‘denes’, steep sided valleys apparently cut by fast flowing streams at the end of the last ice age. The sky was overcast but everything was richly colored, blue-grey clouds and deep green grass, metallic sea and rusty shore. Even the sand along this northeast stretch of coast seems industrial – in parts it’s black from coal deposits, whilst other sections show patches and pools of bright orange, maybe from a certain type of stone or maybe it is rust of some description. It was a beautiful few miles, but I felt quite solitary and detached and tired, very tired.

I hoped that the next town, built around a colliery that closed in 1993, would throw me some interest, and it did.

The first thing I saw was the now-familiar redbrick terraced houses (the village I stayed in last night was also a colliery village). These have a certain down at heel look, but they overlook the sea and are set on very spacious streets, almost like little greens each one, with a patch of grass running down the centre, and so are not without appeal, from the outside at least.

Turning away from the sea and up the main street though, things became much more bleak. I have never seen a street with so many shops boarded up or closed down. There must be around 30-40 shopfronts running all the way up one side of the high street, of which about five remain open, including a bakers, a paper shop, a Co-op… and two bookies. The weird thing though is that in a village of this size, that many shops is probably about average – you wouldn’t expect the amount of shops there obviously were at one time to be there. But the effect of them having been there, and being no longer, creates a very desolate feeling.

I wandered into the bakers and got chatting to the woman, Janet. She said it hadn’t always been like that, but that it had gone downhill steadily after the mine closed in the nineties, and then when the global economic collapse happened a couple of years ago, it had suddenly got much worse. I told her I was interested in the miners (especially after reading The Road to Wigan Pier) and maybe meeting some, and she suggested I go over to the Miners Welfare Club, a huge brick building just up the road slightly. I did, and was welcomed by Geoff, a tall wiry chap who ran the establishment and very kindly made me a cup of tea, sat me down and then proceeded to spend an hour and a half filling me in on the history of the area, and showing me round the building. He had an extraordinary memory and enthusiasm for details, particularly about the building and it’s history.

Downstairs it had an IT suite, reading room, snooker hall, office and bar – much like any well-equipped community centre. But when we went upstairs we emerged into a huge and beautifully decorated ballroom, complete with stage, raised bar area, 1890′s piano, state of the art soundsystem, sprung dancefloor, lighting rig etc etc. When he saw my expression, he smiled and said ‘You know back in the old days the miners didn’t want for anything – they had everything they needed right here in the community – a first class entertainment venue like this, gents outfitters, pubs, all the different shops you might need…’ I can’t remember all the things he listed but he made it sound quite idyllic.

He also said that young boys growing up in these communities had been very lucky – knowing they could leave school and go straight into work with decent pay and excellent training programmes in an industry that had a reputation for turning out excellent engineers, electricians etc – and so could easily get jobs elsewhere if they wished. All this was sounding very different to Orwells description of mining communities and the actual work of mining. I was just asking him about the nature of the work, and had it not been terribly brutal and backbreaking, when another ex-miner, Cyril, walked in. Cyril told me that it had been like that, and dangerous too, before the onset of widespread mechanisation in the sixties, at which point the nature of the work had changed a lot – it was much less hard manual labour and more engineering and operating machines.

They both agreed that the community had changed drastically and irrevocably when the pit closed; that what had been a close-knit self-contained community with a thriving economic heart disintegrated very quickly. Around 2000 people had been directly employed by the mine, all of which obviously lost their jobs. Some used their redundancy payments to retire, others went to Canada or Australia to work in mining there, still others retrained in other fields or went to work for other firms. But very quickly the cohesiveness of the community disappeared, people drifted away leaving empty houses, and the shops and businesses that had thrived on the miners pay packets soon started closing down too.

Then the next phase was that private landlords and housing associations started buying up the empty houses, and renting them out to people who either worked elsewhere, or didn’t work at all – a lot were apparently used to house people on council housing waiting lists from other areas that had too little housing. According to Geoff, Cyril and also Janet in the bakers, a lot of these people were long-term unemployed and some were drug addicts.

It was fascinating and saddening to hear these accounts and then to wander around the village myself, to see the boarded up houses and shops, listless kids wandering the graffitied back streets.

At one point a young lad, lounging on his bike in the middle of the street, shouted out to me ‘What you takin’ pictures of?’. I went over to him and told him about the project whilst he rocked back and forth on his bike, then started circling me so I had to turn around continuously to talk to him. I asked him if he knew how far the South Coast and the place I live is.

‘No. I live there’ he said, pointing at the house we were outside, definitely unimpressed with my exploits, but somewhat interested in my camera. ‘Is that dead old?’ he asked.

I told him it was about forty years old – older than me and much older than him. ‘Oh.. right’ he said. He was either a very cool customer or distinctly unimpressed by facts.

I asked him if I could take a picture of him. ‘No’.

I asked him if he wanted to take a picture with it. At this he leapt off the bike, suddenly transformed from a sullen youth into an innocent kid on Christmas morning. I put it round his neck and showed him how to focus and press the shutter. He took a picture of his bike, then another one of his bike, then at my suggestion, one of me.

Then his mate Elliot turned up yelling ‘Aah can I have a go Jack?’, so he took a picture of Jack (who suddenly didn’t seem to mind him having his picture taken)). They were thrilled, but had to go when an adult shouted them from the next street. ‘See yer mister’ they shouted as they ran off.

I wandered on to the site of the pit at the bottom of the village, near the sea. All that remains is the head of the elevator shaft, a black metal monument about two storeys high jutting up from the lush grass and into the sky above the sea. Just below it, at a kids playground, I encountered another couple of ex-miners, Fred and Albert, with Alberts wife (whose name I forgot!) and Fred’s son. They told me more about the history of the village, and various scrapes they’d got into in the mine. Albert had lost half a finger in some kind of explosion and showed it to me shyly (or the absence of it). They also told me that many of the scenes in Billy Elliot were filmed here, and that Fred’s nephew, who grew up in the next village, is now playing football for England. Their excitement in everything they talked about revived my flagging energy.

They were admiring my camera when Fred remarked that there was a lady that lived over the way who was involved with film productions and a photography gallery in Newcastle, who would probably be interested in my project. He offered to take me over there, saying she would probably let me camp on her farm too. At first I was reluctant since I wanted to cover some more miles with the hour or two of remaining light, but Fred’s enthusiasm won me over. I did insist on walking there though – so Fred pointed me across a field then drove round to the other side of it and told me to follow him from there.

Ellie was very happy for me to camp there (although being as Fred had taken me all the way there I felt a bit anxious we were forcing her hand), and took me in and made me tea. We had a good chat about photography, my project, her gallery and film company, and it was great to meet someone involved with photography that I could talk to face to face, though I think my thoughts might have come out a bit tangled and rambling.

I crawled into my tent feeling like openness and serendipity had turned what could have been a pretty bleak experience of a very (economically) depressed village into… something more complex than that, with some hope in it.

Day Forty Nine, What You Don’t Kmow

I woke up this morning on the third floor of this B-and-B and looked out on to a spectacular view down the coast, the breakers rolling in under bulbous white clouds, the promenade of the town with it’s chip shops and candy floss stalls in the foreground across the green in front of me, and in the distance the factories chimneys already smoking, and every few seconds a huge burst of fire flashing up from some outlet in amongst them.

Talking to Sue (the owner) after breakfast, I asked her about the place, what it was like to live in this quaint seaside town right next to a broiling, belching mass of industry. She said she liked the town, and didn’t mind the other stuff because she saw it as work for the people there, and also for people who stayed with her. She has 23 bedrooms and provides evening meals as well as breakfast, so it’s more like a hotel than a B-and-b, and she also has a lot of long term and regular customers, most of whom are contractors working on short or medium term contracts at the plants.

Sue was a charming woman, very friendly and eager to talk with a lovely chuckle that seemed to emanate from her short but not inconsiderable frame. She had moved out from the city with her husband twelve years ago to start this business, and she said for most of the time they had been pretty successful, but just recently business had been very slow. It wouldn’t have been a problem if they still had their savings, but they’d just had to spend them all on a new Fire Safety system.

She ran through all the things they’d had to do – smoke alarms, fire escape, fire doors etc., and told me how much it had cost. ‘You can’t argue with ‘em though, you’ve just got to do it’, she said. I nodded. ‘But if I was black, or Muslim, do you think I’d have to do it then?’. I looked at her, somewhat incredulously, and asked if she really thought Fire Safety Officers discriminated against white people. ‘Oh yes’, she said, ‘they get out of everything – do you know the thing about mosques and council tax?’. I didn’t, but she told me – that a Muslim person could register their house as a mosque and thereby not pay Council Tax, and that there were literally thousands of houses all over the country in which Muslims were getting out of paying their Council Tax. I told her I didn’t know anything about that but that I would look into it.

I looked it up on my phone as I was packing my stuff after breakfast, and found that it’s a fairly widespread rumour, apparently circulated by the BNP, and the root of it is that any building registered as a place of worship doesn’t pay Council Tax. Anyone can apply to register, but the building needs to be advertised in public. Before I left I told Sue this, and also that she could get a list of all the registered places of worship in her area by writing to the council, but she immediately said ‘Yes but how is it that they always know about all this stuff and we don’t?… sometimes I think we’re a bit backward”. I suspected that she had never had a conversation with a Muslim about anything (there doesn’t seem to be many about up here) let alone the avaliability of various benefits, but every time I challenged her opinion or suggested she find out more about it she resorted to these vague generalisations. I found it quite depressing that such a warm and lovely woman projected so much hate and negativity on to a people that she probably had virtually no direct experience of – but I guess that’s human nature, to project your fears on to what you don’t know.

Later on in the day, as I emerged out of the other side of another depressed coastal town, I came across the most extraordinary place I’ve encountered on this trip – a huge derelict industrial works, standing there right on the beach, the remains of six huge circular structures eroding away like Ancient Roman amphitheatres arranged on different levels. They were all filled with water to varying degrees, the lowest with just a small pond, the upper ones completely full creating a large swimming pool. Two of them had a tall scaffold tower in the centre with a tin shack perched wonkily atop, looking like they could blow off in the gusting wind at any moment. It was like I had wandered on to a set from The Road http://www.theroad-movie.com. I was completely enchanted, and wandered about amongst the rust and debris for a while. Give me a place like that over a cathedral or a museum any day, somewhere you can see and feel the passing of time and the real heart of modern human culture, even in it’s dying form. After a while the rain and wind blowing in off the sea got stronger and I turned away and headed North up the coast once more.

Day Forty Eight, Soldiering On

I woke up today with a bad knee. I don’t know what I did to it yesterday (or in the night!?) but it hurt every time I bent it. This in addition to my still-dicky belly and aching right foot meant I set off limping like an extra from Dawn of the Dead. There is only onward. I will not quit, and I can’t face stopping to rest anymore – I want my next rest to be one when I don’t have to walk anymore. To be this near the end but not getting nearer would be too frustrating.

I needed to go to the post office to pick up my last maps and film parcel, and decided for the sake of my knee to send a bunch of stuff home, cooking gear and the like – anything i could conceivably do without – to get as much weight off it as possible. My mood was already pretty dark before I got to the post office, but unfortunately when I asked to pick up my parcel the manager decided to lecture me, telling me that I couldn’t just go sending parcels to post offices without permission. I started to tell him that I bloody well could and had been doing so for the last seven weeks without any trouble, and had been told I could by the Royal Mail website and several other post office workers, but realised just in time that I wasn’t going to win the argument, and he was the one holding all the cards (or the parcel) and so trailed off and bit my lip and nodded to his lecture (his concern seemed to be that it might be a bomb) and thanked him for giving me the parcel anyway.

I didn’t really engage with anyone else for the rest of the day, just hobbled on through housing estates and down roads flanked by high metal fences. The industry is visible from everywhere here – it floats over the roofs of houses, hovers at the edge of football pitches, stretches off to the horizon. In the early evening I crossed the river on a transporter bridge, a sort of moving platform that was the closest I’ve come to vehicular transport on the journey. I decided It wasn’t cheating. Or if it was I could live with it.

On the other side of the river there was no city, just open marshland and fields, but the industry carried on. Huge steel structures loomed out of the gathering dark every mile or so. Much of the land is protected habitat for wading birds, and so the buildings and structures are very spread out, but that just seems to pronounce their brutal massiveness all the more. I followed the single straight road through this semi-wilderness, feeling that the external landscape somehow fit my worn-out, battered internal world.

It was pitch black when I got to my destination, a little seaside town on the edge of this vast expanse, and so I didn’t get to see the sea for the first time since I set off on the trek, but I could hear it in the distance. I checked into another B-and-B – my belly is still playing havoc in the night, and I can’t face the tent.

Once I’d checked in, I went into a pub to eat. It was a hotel, and quite grand inside, but it was another of those places where everybody knew each other. There were two big groups of blokes sat at tables, one playing a game of cards, and the other all arranged in a sort of semi-circle facing the TV, some sitting and some standing, and sort of half watching and half chatting to each other, occasionally shouting something out to the other group. More guys came in while I was there to be greeted by one or both of the groups. I felt lonely and fed up of being an outsider, and determined to create something more of that for myself when I return to the world.