Border This Now

Last week was the worst of the trip so far. No difficulties, no challenges, no unpleasantness from anybody or anything outside of my head. Just my mood. 

Pathetic, isn't it? As Philip Norman said of Jagger's persona, it is the insufferable ennui of being handed everything. I have no work to do, no bills to pay, no deadlines to meet. I have all I want and need right with me and can choose where I want to buy a house at my leisure. And last week it was really getting on my tits. 

My birthday was probably the low point, perhaps because I'd expected something to have materialised in the property search by this landmark date, or 'cos I'd always assumed there would be some record-shaped celebration when I reached Halfway To Ninety. We've visited lovely towns, crossed our first national border into a breathtaking landscape, and all I've been able to do is moan that we're not getting anywhere, every town is starting to look like the last, and I'm not getting my own way.

M says she has been feeling the pressure that she knew sharing one small room with her family for most of every day was sure to bring, but we don't actually argue. We don't even quietly seethe. We just seem to start feeling unhappy, and are probably blaming each other subconsciously even if we don't articulate it. The boys start picking up on the frustration and ask infuriating questions about what is going to happen and when, and we get more and more exasperated with them asking for answers we really don't have.

I found a house I wanted. M seemed to quite like it too, but wasn't as confident she'd be happy living there as I was. The vendor was good enough to spell out exactly how little she would accept, and M licensed me to offer her fifteen grand less. This was rejected, of course, and after a while I became convinced that it wasn't about freeing up cash for paint and plant pots, but about making an intentionally inadequate offer because she didn't really want to buy the house but didn't want to be honest with me either. So I spent the next few days visiting towns and thinking 'Yeah this place is great but what is the point of liking it? If I decide I want to live here, M will just decide she doesn't.' This, of course, is my problem and only existed briefly in a small space on the inside of my skull. I am over it now and would be better off not sharing it with anybody. Whoops.

Shropshire and the Brecon Beacons have been very pleasant places to visit, like everywhere else we have been. The tour has been a success in terms of teaching us there are a great many places to enjoy outside of London, but a total failure (so far) in terms of narrowing things down. In Ludlow, a man running a micropub and bottle shop (that seemed to exist in complete isolation from the big changes in the beer market of the last decade) told us of a number of advantages of living on the other side of the border, principally the free prescriptions and support with tuition fees. He also spoke knowledgeably about the beauty of the Welsh landscape and the cheaper property prices, before saying that the only drawback is that there are a lot of people with very nationalistic views. 'What, like in England?' I wondered-out-loud, but his point was that it is the English that a Welsh nationalist is most likely to despise. 'It makes no difference to me though really,' he continued, 'I'm a Brummie, so I'm used to being hated by everyone.'

Armed with this wisdom, I crossed the border ready to keep my Englishness in check. The first person I met who wanted to speak about this divide was an English chef with that commonplace angry-bitter-controversial chef's sense of humour, who was talking about having a red dragon tattooed on his arse.

Both E and H are dyslexic and are only beginning to recognise reading and writing as useful forms of communication, rather than the stuff of day-to-day slog and chore that is schoolwork. And that's in English. I don't think that returning to school to find there is another, much more difficult, language to read and write in, would go down too well. If we were to set up home on the other side of a border, it might work better for it to be In Scotland, but that's a long way away and one thing we are not struggling with is a lack of options. We need to narrow things down really, before the money runs out or the weather turns too cold to make this viable.

Hay on Wye was a great little town, once the chef stopped trying to talk to me. We enjoyed some tremendous beers at Beer Revolution and some pretty damn good Chinese food ('we just call it "food",' a Chinese bloke said to me once) and revelled in the town's more understanding approach to car park signage - the text above says something like "no caravan or motorhome may stay for more than one night in seven," which seemed very civilised to me, but wasn't accommodating enough for the man who had obviously been there with his car and caravan for a while, feet down, TV aerial up and noisy little genny chugging away into the night.

There was no such crafty beer place in Abergavenny - a huge hotel called The Angel dominates, but within, the traveller discovers a handsome bar with a disastrously poor beer offering. It occurred to me once again that there are still opportunities in the beer market in certain towns. I'd really like to be able to offer the sort of beer that M and I like to drink in a town where there aren't any other places to drink it. There was a great food festival on in the town hall though, with all sorts of options and excellent atmosphere, but H wasn't really able to enjoy his burger.

He had toothache every time he ate for a few days back there, so we needed to get him to the tooth doctor, as well as getting Vanny to the van doctor (the skylight leak is fixed - hurrah - but we had to wait for them to order the tap, so they'll fit that after Christmas. It's not exactly a long walk to the bathroom tap though.) We couldn't just take him to the dentist like you do when you're living at your home address. Finding a dentist who would give him an appointment took several days - in fact it's difficult enough just to find a practice that will take on new NHS patients even if they do live locally. So we went back to M's mum's place to sort this out. H now has a very nice young dentist who cares enough about him to tell his mum he should never have any sugar. Since then, he's managed to lay off for the most part, even during a visit to see his very bestest friends on the South coast. We've stopped off in Southampton and checked my penultimate English Brewdog bar off the list (very nice it was too) and narrowly avoided paying TWENTY-FIVE QUID to drive Vanny across a toll bridge. Now it's time to head for Cornwall, which we missed on our first journey to the Southwest for reasons I can no longer remember. 

When we have been there to our Satisfaction, we will have driven through every county in England, and I think we should be ready to make a serious move on a place that has caught our collective eye. The boys have been amazing together, and so positive about the whole thing, but they probably need to start spending more time in the company of other children their own age. They're not bumping into kids in playgrounds and places as often as they did when the weather was warmer.

While watching Blue Planet II, E expressed genuine concern that we were not recycling enough. It's very difficult to organise recycling when you are in a small space and have no bins of your own, so we do it when we can, but have thrown away a hillock of glass and plastic on this trip. We would all much prefer to put this guilt behind us as soon as possible. In stark contrast to how we lived, skint and time-starved in London, we've been huge consumers too, as much so as the muscly bulging young men we saw in Worcester, nearly bursting out of the ripped skinny jeans that go so badly with their Fred Astaire hairdos. Eating out virtually every day is expensive, fattening (when you hoover-up everybody else's lefties) and does something to my soul. Every oversize, open-top refrigerator and freezer exhaling dry-ice fog into the air, every bright red lamp heating an empty outdoors causes me insane amounts of worry. I need to get somewhere to live so I can hide away from all these smoking guns at the scenes of our suicide. I hate feeling like I am being bought and sold in the marketplace, and I hate being the trader too.

A Capital Idea

Rocket Man, it transpires, actually did manage to get out of the car before it went off the cliff and exploded. It's just that we didn't see him doing so last week. Misery Chastain was allergic to bee stings and in some kind of a coma, not dead, when they buried her, so she was able to come back and save Paul Sheldon's life. And motorhomes reflect light off their rear end in a way that bamboozles speed cameras with surprising regularity. 

It's somebody's job in the police station to look at the photo, and bin incidents where large vehicles have been clocked at ridiculous speeds, but occasionally one slips through. If you get a letter, all you need to do is call up and they'll re-examine the photo and quickly put the matter to bed. Whether this means you could soup-up your motorhome's engine and drive everywhere at insane speeds like a total arsehole without ever getting in trouble remains unclear.

I tried to blame my dad's easy submission to authoritarian language for our 500-mile round trip to the South, but in the end I was glad for the break. Sorting out the speeding business took about five minutes, and also gave me the chance to play a guitar I'd won at auction, by telephone from the top of Loughrigg Fell. It's likely I'll be playing it if and when you ever walk into my record shop, but I promise I'll put it down when I see I actually have a customer for once, and stick some John Renbourn on instead. 

Having made an emergency return to the South, and with Halloween looming spookily, we realised this was the right time to return to Sunny Nunny, SE15. I'm frankly disgusted by what my kids have come to expect of what was only a very minor date in 1981, but it was clear that they would resent having to spend it anywhere else, so this visit was an opportunity to catch up with some friends and see if we could stomach a taste of the life we've left behind. The boys duly managed to acquire and consume a half-bin-liner of confectionery each, M spent some quality time with former colleagues, and I achieved one of my great ambitions for this trip, parking the van with the door immediately opposite that of the Ivy House. For a while I contemplated winding the awning out.

E also bumped into the nice lady who bought our house, and she very kindly showed him around. He came back to the van a little tearful, but saying ridiculously grown-up stuff like 'They've made some very interesting changes.' In truth, neither of his parents would have handled it so well. I had an opportunity to play some records to a reassuringly empty room at the UK's first tank room bar, and the crowded tube journey gave me a chance to reflect on how little I'd seen of 'London' London in the last decade or so, as well as to wrack my brains for when I'd last had a wash.

We've realised that what we were living by Peckham Rye was not an Urban Existence. Despite how little respect I've shown for Estate Agents and their work elsewhere in this blog, I'd now agree that we were effectively living in a village on the outskirts of London. When I was first sent (as a supply teacher, from my Bermondsey flat) to East Dulwich fifteen years ago, I would ask myself Why would anybody want to live all the way out here? You might as well live in Kent. And this is what we always do - perceive a place to be remote and uninviting until we have made several visits. We are all cutting new tracks in the part of our brain that stores our personal geography, and having done this in London over a quarter of a century, we are finally extending it to the rest of the country. A nice place to visit, like a good film or book, needs a second or third rinse for the subject to see beneath the surface.

Indeed, the first time we park up somewhere for the night, we are still sometimes a little insecure, whereas our old neighbourhood felt perfectly comfortable - we didn't even feel we were treading on the toes of the people whose house we parked outside on our final night there (the sideways slope right outside the pub having rather spoiled our enjoyment of the exclusive location), despite sitting up late into the night with half a dozen beer drinkers in the van.

But the striking thing about this Wild Camping (if that term means what I think it does) is how easy it is. When we set out to do this, we didn't really find anything to encourage us, so I would like to contribute this wisdom to the web: if you have a campervan or motorhome, nobody is going to stop you from parking up and sleeping wherever the hell you want, unless you're on private property. Parking up by the roadside? Well, how many times have you approached a vehicle near your house to ask them what they think they're doing there? Town council car parks? Sure, the sign says No Camping or Overnight Sleeping, but how many people do you think are employed in the UK to enforce this? My guess is fewer than one. 

Even if somebody did knock on the window of my van at three in the morning, I expect I'd ignore it and leave them with little evidence that there was anyone in the vehicle at all, what with all the blinds down and the curtains behind the cab closed. And if I did, irrationally, stick my head through these curtains to see what they wanted, would I really accept their charges of overnight camping? No, I'm just sitting in my vehicle in my pants waiting for daylight because my lights aren't that great. I'm not sleeping, as you can see, because I'm talking to you at three in the bloody morning.

Of course, any Sherlock-Holmes-types could tell at a glance whether there are people in the van now the weather has turned colder. A thick layer of condensation clings to every window, obscuring any parking ticket we might have bought as a token gesture of having kept our ends up, and gradually feeding and watering those little spots of black mould that are so hard to shift if you don't wipe them away the moment they appear. Now we are using the heating, there's sometimes a cute little wisp of vapour curling out of the chimney at the back, too. But who is going to knock you up, even if they do know you're in there? 

When the weather is this cold and you're spending the bare minimum amount of time outside, paying for a campsite is an even bigger waste of money. Unless it's a tenner to park in the grounds of a good pub, of course. But if it gets much colder than this, we might have to shelve the project for a while, so we've been zipping around checking off places as quick as we can.

Norwich is, as the sign says, A Fine City, with my equal-favourite (with Liverpool) Brewdog bar of the fourteen I've visited, but I fear that it may be just a tad too familiar and close to my roots that are still unpoisoned in the fertile East Anglian earth. I feel inclined to break new ground, to plow a new furrow in a field far from home, to cut new tracks in the topography of my cerebellum.

Holt (Norfolk) isn't a place that will allow this either. A nice little town filled with old people, I would struggle to get comfortable there. My previous visit was one of exactly two occasions that I've found myself telling a stranger to fuck off. E was about eighteen months old and screaming blue murder as I strapped him into the buggy and put the rain cover on. Each time I looked in there, the screaming intensified exponentially, so I decided to ignore him at about the same moment a well-to-do older woman began watching me. I'd been pushing him along for one very noisy minute when she approached me and said, meaning well I'm sure, "You should talk to your children, you know." But I've already ruined the punchline.

Almost completely out of character with the rest of the town, but seemingly happy and successful within it, is Holt Vinyl Vault, a well-stocked and interesting record shop that does more than just open the doors and hope somebody will come in. When I was there last Wednesday, an enthusiastic man even older than me was actually DJing - not just spinning discs but weaving a musical tapestry, or at least sewing together some really lovely bits and pieces to make a smashing patchwork quilt. I was sold my records in a big plastic Recorded Delivery mailer, left over from the shop's recent past doubling as a Post Office. M's local friend says it was a curious scene to watch not long ago - senior citizens queueing up for their pension cheques with a soundtrack from the Velvet Underground.

From Holt we rolled all the way back up North to look at Richmond again, beautiful in sunshine and cold air; Darlington, which is a much nicer town than I'd always assumed, and has a fabulous pub in Number 22; Heaton Moor in Greater Manchester, a pleasant and diverse suburb not dissimilar to Dulwich; and the ever-lovely Shrewsbury, via a freezing night in the Peak District near a village called Tintwhistle. 

We are working our way South-East again as we have an appointment with the van doctor. In addition to the little leak above the shower room, the electric switch in the kitchen tap has given up and the leisure battery lost all of its charge in one evening in London (although it hasn't been a problem since.) Our teenaged van passed forty thousand miles in North Yorkshire, ten percent of which have been added to the clock in the three-and-a-half months we've been living in her. So actually she's been incredibly durable, I think, and I shall repeat here what I've said in person to anybody who will listen: wherever we end up living, whatever form the shop eventually takes, you will have to pry my cold, dead fingers from the wheel before you take this van away from me.