In the beer garden, I found a place to pee that was hopefully out of sight of people going to collect their morning papers, then set up and lit the Trangia. I started to pack away the things inside the tent as I waited for the water to boil. It was too early for the day to have shown its cards, but it was overcast, dank and misty with not a breath of wind. It was the sort of weather that often precedes a scorcher once the sun has burnt through. I managed to get away by nine o’clock and covered the eight miles along quiet roads to Lutterworth where I picked up two postcards for MR and for Dominic and Helen, friends of mine from school. There was also a Safeway store in the town so I availed myself of a breakfast at their customary knock-down price including coffee – wonderful.
I then headed off for Market Harborough, twelve miles away, which turned out to be a bustling hive of a place. I pushed my bike through the pedestrianised part of the town half-heartedly looking for a pair of trainers, sandals or anything that would look better than the sorry articles I still sported on my feet. I actually ventured into one shop, slightly worried about my bike outside, but I just couldn’t decide what sort of footwear I wanted. I also didn’t relish facing the likely prospect of festering blisters to add to my other discomforts, so in the end I walked out, in my confusion only managing to mumble an unintelligible apology to the lady serving me, who had really done her best to help.
As I got back to the main road and the chaotic traffic, rain started to fall heavily for the first time since I’d left Merthyr. I wasn’t really hungry but I felt I needed a rest and I had to stop to don my waterproofs. They were encased in a plastic bag that was bungeed on to the bike at high breaking strain. The little café I found on the outskirts of the town centre served the purpose. It was very small and family run. The tables didn’t seem to fit into the room and making progress from one side to the other involved clumsily dancing with the chairs. The food in the display cabinet was clearly homemade but there wasn’t anything there that I actually recognised. Perhaps not being a ‘sweet’ person didn’t help. I ordered black coffee and something called a ‘Chocolate Oatey’ that turned out to have the consistency of a rotting brick and took just as long to chew and swallow. I must have spent the best part of half an hour in the place. The coffee was excellent and I ordered a second. On both occasions I asked for black but they insisted on bringing me a full stainless steel jug of chilled milk. So, after finishing each coffee, I emptied the milk into my cup and polished it off.
'It’s all energy,’ I thought as the time came to go.
Having awkwardly wriggled into my wet gear I went out to face the elements. My easterly route started to head more to the northeast as I struck out for Uppingham in torrential rain along the very pretty B664. After about an hour the rain stopped and the air started to heat up again. The smells were nothing short of mind blowing. With the past few days of dry hot weather, it seemed that the rain had opened a cask of perfume as the countryside hit my olfactories, stirring my emotions and taking me very much by surprise. The vista was of undulating hills; the fields were small, bounded by vibrant green hedgerows and with scores of deciduous copses scattered about. This was chocolate box Britain with intense fragrance to boot.
I was in two minds whether to go to Rutland water. I remembered learning back in school that Rutland was the smallest county in England and I seemed to recall someone the night before in the pub, telling me that it still was a bona fide unitary authority. I could see Rutland Water on the map and I felt confident there would be campsites there. It would have brought up the forty-mile mark and I was fairly sure the lake and its surrounds would be quite picturesque. Despite this, and with me feeling pretty good, thanks to ibuprofen, I felt I could keep going. I decided to just head straight for Stamford. That would bring me to fifty miles for the day and put me on the edge of the Fens. I also realised that it was Friday and it would be good to be in a town where there was a bit of nightlife. Not for the first time, I felt that I had been through some hard times physically over the past few days and I deserved to give camping a miss, for one night at least.
Although when I reached Stamford, I still felt I could have kept going; but, the seed had been planted and the thought of a bath, bed and nightlife won over. Stamford took me by surprise, a place I hadn’t even heard of before. It was very oldie-worldie with a maze of little streets and alleyways filled with nick-knack shops. I was later told that the BBC series 'Middlemarch' had been filmed there. All they had had to do was cover the double yellow lines with grit, remove the street furniture and keep the traffic out and they were convincingly back in the nineteenth century.
After asking around and trying unsuccessfully to get accommodation, I eventually managed to find a rather grubby pub that had a room at the top of the house and a place where I could securely keep my bike downstairs. I humped all the gear up three flights of stairs and carelessly dumped them on one side of the room. Very little effort had gone into making this place look presentable. The carpet was threadbare and unsavoury brown in colour. There were, of course, no en suite facilities, although I did have a sink. To be fair, the bed seemed alright and there was a good view down to the street where a road cleaning vehicle was going around and around in circles, making a hell of a racket, as it cleared up the remains of what had been a Friday market. The stalls were nearly all dismantled or removed but the mess remained.
The most striking feature about the room was the cluster of televisions. You usually only see them like this in shops - in people’s houses they would be in different rooms, naturally. But here there were three of them to be precise. The leads all mingled together like half-eaten spaghetti and there were two portable aerials of different designs lying on their sides by the biggest telly. It did look bizarre and none of them looked anything like ‘state of the art’. They had all seen better days, were coated with dust and didn't look as if they would feature anything as advanced as remote controls. I wasn’t bothered by their junk shop presence, and I chuckled to think that at least I would be able to watch Corrie that night.
I took the opportunity to wash some socks, underpants and a tee shirt. I had only slight feelings of guilt as I hunted down a few clothes pegs from a rucksack pocket and strung the items along one of the bungees that I now stretched across the sash window that I had managed to prise open. The flapping garments didn’t enhance the appearance of my little grotto in any way and they looked a damn sight worse when viewed from the street as I realised later on. What would the Middlemarch producers have thought? I was just in time to do a bit of shopping. I was still keen on the idea of upgrading my footwear so I thought that, with half hour until closing time, I could easily do the archetypal 'man shop' – in - get what you want – out – job done. In the first shop, I found a pair of slip on shoe/trainers almost straight away. I quite liked the look of them and they were a bit different. They seemed to be comfortable enough although we all know the wicked lies that these inanimate objects will concoct just so as you will provide them with a home. Beds are the same. Taken together, new shoes and a new bed can ruin your life. How much of any twenty-four hour period are you either lying down trying to sleep, or on your feet, walking, running, climbing stairs or queuing. This went through my mind as I asked the woman what size the shoes were.
'Eights,' she said.
'Have you got any sevens?'
'I’ll have a look.' But she didn’t have any sevens – Sod’s law. I tried both eights on but there was a bit too much room in the toe end of them. I wasn’t prepared to take the chance but I thought I might come back if I had no joy elsewhere. I had a lack of concern about my appearance (functionality was more important) that might have allowed me to cycle in my vintage 4x4 squash trainers but it wouldn’t stretch to going around town in them on a Friday night. But now time was running out, even if I was ‘man shopping’. I descended along one of the innumerable alleyways that crisscrossed the town and hit the main thoroughfare - this was more like a conventional high street, pedestrianised as you might expect, but still pretty. A Millets store presented itself and I tried on a pair of sandals that I liked - a bit of a cross between sporty and Jesus, I thought. But I still had about ten minutes left so I thought I’d see if there were any sports shops around. I found one that yielded nothing but some assistants who were eager to pack up and go home, so I shot back to Millets to buy the sandals.
Back at the hotel, I lay on the bed, closed my eyes and fell into my customary late afternoon nap. When I came to, I headed for the communal bathroom and was relieved to find that nobody else had had the same idea as I: I locked myself in and ran a deep bath before descending into the warm water with a sense of eager anticipation. It seemed to have been a hectic day and it was such a treat to now experience some of the finer aspects of civilisation. I ran back over the main events of the day in my mind.
Sitting in the Safeway café that morning had reminded me of a whole afternoon spent with Cherie in a similar supermarket ‘restaurant’ in Poole, two years earlier. I remembered just how cool and patient she could be when crossed with adversity. We were on our way to Spain on the motorbike. We had left for Poole in plenty of time for the ferry crossing to Cherbourg at two o’clock. However, I had a nagging worry about having no chain to lock the bike to fixed objects on our travels. It’s easy enough to lock a motorbike, but if it’s not attached to something permanent like a lamppost, thieves just pick the whole thing up and cart it away in a van. My brother Nick had phoned the night before to say I could borrow his. He lives in Gloucester which is a bit of a detour, but I didn’t think it would upset our schedule too much and it would save me fifty quid or more. So, fatefully, I decided to pick up Nick’s chain.
Having reached Gloucester, it took ages to find a way of safely attaching it to the bike. By the time we eventually got on to the Poole road we were cutting it fine. When I realised what a tortuous route it was, I knew we would miss the ferry by at least half an hour. I shouldn’t give the impression here that I made all the decisions without consulting Cherie. But she wasn’t too hot on spatial awareness (at least out of a city) and she was happy to trust my judgement. When we arrived at the near empty ferry terminal, we concurred with a fellow –late arrival in a camper van. He kindly allowed us to use his mobile phone to change our reservation to the midnight crossing. We then had to face the prospect of a long wait. We couldn’t sit and relax as you might in a car. We couldn’t leave the bike out of our sight for fear of having luggage stolen. And to make matters worse, we knew that heavy rain had been forecast for the afternoon. On this occasion the weatherman was spot on, and we ended up in a supermarket café forlornly watching the puddles grow to the rhythm of the emptying skies ... for hours. A brief respite tempted us out for an exploratory ride, but more rain soon had us scurrying back to the supermarket.
In the evening, we found a pub where we could watch over the bike but, of course, I couldn’t drink. Unbelievably, there was a further hitch. A chemical spill in the harbour delayed the docking of our ferry so we didn’t actually board until half past one in the morning. We’d been kicking our heels for nearly twelve hours. All through this, not once did Cherie admonish me, nag me or moan. She just took the totally pragmatic view that the mistakes had not been made on purpose, that there was nothing that could be done and that what was needed now was to consider our next best option.
For all the cursing I directed at myself, she would simply tell me, 'It's Ok. It’s all right - don't worry, Dear.'
In the bath I thought about my progress so far. Again I wondered whether I could make it all the way to the Shetlands and in particular, under my own steam. I knew exactly what Cherie would have said:
'I know you’ll make it.'
She knew how determined I can be when I set my mind on something. On one occasion she stayed home when I decided I wanted to try a cycle ride longer than my usual twenty to thirty miles. We spent the night with my brother Nick and his wife Vicky in Gloucester. The next day, I went off to the London motorbike show on the back of Nick’s ZZR 1100 and Cherie drove home. We had left my mountain bike in Gloucester, so I pedalled back to Merthyr via the Forest of Dean taking a scenic detour up the A40 before crossing the Brecon Beacons. The distance was around a hundred miles, and Cherie said she would stay at home so I could phone to be collected if I got into trouble.
I made it all the way but whenever we retold the story, Cherie always used that same expression, 'I knew you would do it.’
She always had so much faith in me, and the memory of that made the tears flow cool down my bath-warmed cheeks.
Now I wondered why I was making this particular trip. Yes, to get away from it all - to avoid the well-intentioned phone calls and house visits. Yes, to give me time to think. Yes, because I thought a physical challenge would be good for me. So was I doing the trip for myself? It couldn’t be for Cherie I supposed.
'Cherie is gone now.' I didn’t have to remind myself. Still, I thought that maybe I was doing it for the both of us. I knew that Cherie had thought that to cycle to the Shetlands was a good idea and the trip was giving me that essential element - time. Many memories of time we spent together had flowed into my mind as I had been interminably pedalling along.
‘But, wouldn’t I have had these thoughts had I stayed at home?’ I debated.
'I’ll still have plenty of time for that when I get back,’ I answered myself.
I came to the conclusion that this trip was definitely something different. The fact that I knew Cherie would have approved was also another little way that I could carry out her wishes.
It occurred to me that the trip drew a line in the sand between Chapters Six and Seven in my life. Chapter Six – my life over the last eleven years with Cherie - Chapter Seven – whatever comes next. Chapter One was my early life growing up just outside Cheltenham in a caravan on a small site surrounded by orchards. Chapter Two was the move to the terraced streetscape of one of the less salubrious districts of Cheltenham itself. Chapter Three, the move back to rurality in the Vale of Glamorgan and my secondary school years. Chapter Four, university in Swansea. Chapter Five was my time with my first wife and the formative years of my two children. My life seemed to have been very episodic and I wondered whether this was the same for everyone. I thought not, if only because of the changing locations that were involved for me at each stage.
It seemed that thinking of my life as a book with chapters was quite apt. What was happening to me now did not make full sense without looking at the preceding chapters. But it could stand on its own and whatever happened next, would lay the foundations for subsequent chapters. I wondered what Chapter Seven was going to hold for me and whether it would be the last chapter.
I thought once more of the day’s ride. Today had been the best cycling day so far. It had been surprisingly good to feel cool rain rather than the blazing sunshine that had accompanied me from Day One. Thinking back to the previous day, it occurred to me that I might have been suffering from the early stages of heat exhaustion. I was so relieved to find the Raven after all the other pubs had been closed. Today, I had felt much fitter and I wondered whether it was because I had struck a better balance between pedalling and walking. I climbed out of the bath feeling hot and sweaty as I usually do, and took in the view from the window for a few minutes while I cooled off. Then I realised it was time for Corrie and made moves to get the television on.
The first one didn’t seem to work – a light came on but pressing buttons and twiddling knobs did nothing more. I swapped plugs in the sockets, untangled wires, plugged in various leads – all to no avail. I chuckled to myself at the irony of it all. I did want to see Corrie so I thought it might be an idea to see if the landlord was around. Whether I had failed to notice before, or whether it had just appeared, I can’t be sure, but there on the landing was another telly. It had the same attic look as the others but I decided to purloin it and give a try. It came as a surprise to hear the sound of the pre-Corrie adverts but there was no picture. However, after fiddling for a while, a picture could be discerned through the snowy reception and it was, needless to say, fairly easy to follow the plot. Cherie would have been proud of me.
After a welcome coffee, made with the usual B & B sachets, and a half hour dose of Corrie, I prettied myself up and, on exit, tried unsuccessfully to lock my door in its flaky paint frame. Satisfied with hoping for the best (it’s easy to be blasé if you’ve never been robbed) I set off down the rickety stairs and headed into the town. Cherie would have loved this I knew, as I passed once more through quaint alleys with nooks, little shops and art galleries. There seemed to be plenty of pubs and I couldn’t decide which one to plump for. In the end I probably made the wrong, albeit interesting, choice. I was happy with my own company, but I had been alone most of the day so I didn’t quite know what to do when a character came to sit by me and introduced himself through his hobby rather than by his name. The hobby in question was collecting shells from the beach in Skegness and he was overwhelmed with the brilliance of this unusual pursuit. Naturally, I found it difficult to share his enthusiasm, but I politely listened and nodded at what I felt were the appropriate times.
I noticed my new companion’s tattoos, and in an old fashioned and snobbish way thought, 'What do you expect?'
After a little prompting, he picked up my Welsh accent, then went on to tell me a story about a lorry driver he used to know who was from Cardiff. The trucker in question seemed to have been OK but when he jumped up into his cab and put his hands on the wheel, my shell- collecting companion noticed that his hands shook all over the place. It turned out that the man had cancer from which he died quite soon after.
I finished off my drink and made my apologies. As I sauntered in search of the next pub, I thought about the man I had just left. He was definitely strange, but it was still fairly early and I concluded that I should expect some of society’s more peripheral characters to inhabit near empty bars before the mainstream drinking hours. I went into two other bars and struck up less interesting conversations. It occurred to me that I could wander around Stamford all night and miss the sort of place I was looking for – fairly crowded with a mix of ages and some women as well as men.
In the event, the way I put it to the only other person in a rather hollow wooden floored bar was: 'Are there any oldies places around?'
He was younger than I, but he understood what I meant and gave me directions to The Crown. I found it easily and walked into exactly the sort of place I wanted. It reminded me of a pub in Merthyr that I used to go to with Cherie and also BC ('Before Cherie', as we used to call it). It was called The Wellington, referred to by everyone as ‘The Wellie’. It was fairly small and more or less square in shape. The beauty of the place was that it was well run and it employed plenty of bar staff on busy Friday nights. There were quite a few seats but most of us ended up standing. The room would be shoulder to shoulder by half past ten as people made sure they got in before the door closed at eleven. A trip to the toilet took ages, not only because of the jostling bodies, but because every other person would be a friend, ex squash partner, colleague or stranger, equally fuelled with intoxicated sociability and all caught up in the general atmosphere of good cheer and just as eager as I was to engage in conversation.
The Crown could not be exactly the same for me, being a total stranger, but it did have the same happy feel about it. I didn’t really want to stand and I managed to slip in to a seat as someone left. With my back to the wall, I had a good view of the rest of the room and I settled down to people watch for two pints worth of time – in effect about forty minutes. As I looked around, I couldn’t help imagining Cherie walking into the room. She had excellent posture and she always moved with a deliberate sense of purpose exuding the confidence borne out of her fit athletic figure, good dress sense, careful preening and quite often, a striking hat, that everyone would want to try on – although they wouldn't have the confidence to wear it for real. Predictably, no woman came through the door to compare and I was warmed and saddened at one and the same time. My eyes fixed on a lady who was holding a large glass of red wine and stood near the bar. She was mature, I’d say late forties, and she was teamed up with another younger woman who had ‘Done a Cherie’ on me earlier on at the bar. Like Cherie, she was quite petite and she had used this to great effect in slithering through the crowd to the front, presumably catching the eye of the barman and unfairly cheating me out of my rightful turn to be served.
The two women moved to sit at the other end of the room and I wondered whether I should go and talk to them. I had been sat on my own for some time now and the prospect of female company appealed to me. Still, in a busy pub on a Friday night, I felt uncomfortable with the idea because of the obvious connotations that would be drawn. I suppose that these days the same inferences may well be drawn if I were to approach a strange man for conversation but that didn’t occur to me. By this time, I had drunk quite a few pints of assorted beers, I’d say about five and it was this plus a resolve to bite the bullet, that prompted me out of my little cubbyhole.
'Do you mind if I join you for a while?' was the totally unoriginal line that came out, half expecting them to tell me to 'sling my hook', but the two women were fine - in fact they were very welcoming. I chatted to them for about an hour though I couldn’t really remember much of it the next day; I’m sure they did send out signals that they were married, so perhaps they did think I was on the prowl. I remembered telling them about Cherie at some point – maybe this was because I wanted to talk about her – she had certainly been in my thoughts a lot. Perhaps it was to put them at ease so they wouldn't consider me a nuisance. But the main reason I told them was because I had already decided that I would not keep Cherie’s death a secret. I asked her once, what exactly she wanted me to say to friends and people in work about her terminal cancer.
'Yeah - tell them – I need all the sympathy I can get,' was her response.
So I had decided that if it was good enough for her, it was good enough for me. Why try to hide the truth or bottle it all up? As far as these two strangers were concerned, I hoped they wouldn’t mistake me for a fitness fanatic or worse, a sad freak with no friends and no life. With the love and support of all those around me over the past months, what could be further from the truth? I did enjoy the company of those two ladies that night, and it made a change to be in a bustling pub in a busy town with a real bed and a cooked breakfast to look forward to. All the same, it was a lonely walk back to the hotel.
The Ride:
Brinklow to Stamford
Distance: 50 miles
Serialisation of Hill’s Ups and Downs by Tony Hill with permission. The book is published by Cambria Books and is available to buy HERE.
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