Coast to Coast Across the North

"I fucking hate Manchester. Everybody's miserable there, and they're always going on about being from Up North. It's not even Up North! Scotland is Up North. Manchester's just Over To The Side A Bit. And it's always fucking raining."

Not my words, of course, but the words of Jerry Sadowitz, at the Leicester Square Theatre several years ago now. Personally, I really enjoyed Manchester when we went there recently (but I was a little surprised to see that a house on a nice road in Chorlton costs about as much as a comparable one in Lewisham... right, that's enough about house prices for another six months). But Sadowitz was mostly right about the rain (at least on the evidence of the week we spent there) and about the latitude.

After a cosy night in Carnforth cuddled up to the canal we were miserable in Morecambe where the amusements were banal. In an empty seafront car park near the statue of old Eric we were tossed about in high winds and said, "It's going to be hard to sleep in anything worse than this."

We then spent a relaxing couple of weeks in Cumbria, at first on an excellent caravan site called Skelwith Fold, right near Ambleside. I've always loved the Lake District, and now it seems to be a much better place to live than it used to be, at least for people who like beer and food. I'd pretty much expected the Hawkshead Brewery to be one of the only places I could buy a heavily-hopped, unashamedly-alcoholic American-style IPA inside the boundaries of the National Park, but I couldn't have been more wrong. 

A fabulously friendly cafe called Freshers in Ambleside (staffed by a nice bloke of about thirty and a wonderful woman who may well have been his grandmother) led us to the town's specialist Beer Shop, which was one of the best I've seen on the trip so far, maybe even as good as the one in Bath. On the wall they had a relief map of the sixteen or seventeen wonderful lakes and the even-better mountains and fells in between, very like the one I had up in my bedroom for most of my childhood. They'd affixed a little sign saying BEERIST INFORMATION and had marked on all the best places to get good beer, which seemed to collectively form a neat ring covering the whole region. The middle of the circle, Ambleside itself, was left modestly unmarked, but just above, in Grasmere, was a little sign that brought memories pouring forth like a broken beer tap: TWEEDIES.

We had liked the naffness of the name when we went there in the late eighties, so it's beyond me to say how ironic or post-ironic it might be now. We liked it even better when the landlord not only served us pints of Theakstons Old Peculier without any questions asked, but also gladly took the extra coin for dropping a shot glass of vodka into each, telling us this was called a 'Depth Charge'. Amusingly, I realised as I chatted to a friendly but businesslike member of 21st Century Staff, things haven't changed all that much in thirty years - for the second day in a row I was drinking Hawkshead's Tiramisu Imperial Stout, a gloopy, sweet, black beer almost as strong as wine. The chainsmoking and repeated plays of Baker Street (can that really have been the best thing on the jukebox?) - in fact, the jukebox itself - were gone (which is probably for the best) but this was still a fine pub with a charmingly awful name. I ate my Vegetarian Stack - goat's cheese, avocado, a poached egg, sourdough toast and a bunch of other things I'd've paid to avoid in the eighties - and it was delicious. Then, by careful application of physics, I was able to gently shove legions of seated children out of my way and leave. This would not have happened in Tweedies in the eighties, because we were not only the youngest people in there, but also, many times, the oldest. We also never left before closing time.

The way that businesses in the Lakes have adapted to the apparently increasing middle-classness of fell walking (or perhaps just everything) is quite impressive. There are probably more outdoor equipment shops than are absolutely necessary, but is the region ready for a secondhand record shop with the full back catalogue of Nick Perls's Yazoo label? Probably not, at least until they are available in waterproof sleeves with fleece linings.

The following week, for H's birthday, we went to the Center Parcs near Penrith. This served a number of purposes, very few of which will be part of Center Parcs's business model moving forward. More than anything, H had wanted to go back to London for his birthday and to have a party with all of his friends, but it's still too early for that. We are all looking forward to parking up outside the Ivy House for a few nights at some point before Christmas, but when this does happen it will mark the completion of Phase One of Project Rest Of Our Lives. For one thing, if we were to go back and see friends and familiar settings and say 'This is stupid, lets just move back here,' we could do so (admittedly to a much smaller / less ideally-located / more Stannah-stairlift-and-smell-of-deathy house) and say "Well, we gave it a go!" And for another, if we don't feel like moving back, we could look at London through the eyes of people who've been to dozens of towns in recent months, then go back to places we've already been and take it more seriously this time, or visit places we missed on the first circuit. There's a plan in there somewhere.

So going back to London wasn't yet an option, and we thought we could distract both boys a little by taking them somewhere else they always bang on about wanting to go. And we needed some time out of the van, with proper beds and a proper bathroom. That relativity of scale of a family's living space was quite striking - a two-bedroom bungalow seemed frankly enormous for the four nights we were in it, and it was difficult to see how or why four people would even need any more room than that. Unless they happened to have thousands of records and a shipping container full of crap to accommodate, of course.

There was a Top Tip in Viz several years ago that said something along the lines of, "Give your family the CENTER PARCS experience by cycling to your local Swimming Pool every day and setting fire to a pile of fifty pound notes," which is pretty much bang on, but we spent Glasgow-and-Edinburgh-Half-Term-Week in some lovely woodland near Penrith having as relaxing a time as one can have while surrounded by people who sound like Francis Begbie.

From there, we stopped off in Hexham, Northumberland, which is a pleasant market town near Hadrian's Wall. For two boys who will cheerfully mimic Donald Trump saying "We Will Build a Wall" from some memey Internet video, my sons showed a surprising lack of interest in its ancient equivalent - the Northwestern Frontier of the Roman Empire and the single largest remaining piece of evidence of that great civilisation. Well, I thought it was surprising. So we didn't even bother going to look at it, to teach them a lesson.

We moved on to Newcastle, another town I just can't separate in my mind from the memory of the first time I visited it. As we strolled down the fairly-newly-developed riverside, my friend had looked over the edge and saw there was no Fog on the Tyne, but a dead man floating face down in it instead. This is the sort of memory that stays with you, and no amount of pleasingly-orange Geordie-Shore-type ladies posing for photos on the bonnet of a white stretch Audi limo can stop me thinking about it when I'm back in the same spot. 

There was also, at the end of the Gateshead Millennium Bridge, the best busker we've seen on our tour (my GOD we have heard some dreadful ones) who played The Archers theme on kazoo and a version of Always On My Mind in which the last line of each verse was delivered as an agonised scream. This also did little to take my mind off the subject of death.

Za Za Bazaar is a temple to globalisation and gluttony that would be wonderful if it didn't make me feel a bit sick. It's about ten different all-you-can-eat buffets of curry, pizza, noodles, and every other national fast-food dish in which Brits have a tendency to over-indulge, and you just help yourself to one after the other (or the same again) until the tidemark reaches your epiglottis. The fact that E was more enthusiastic about Newscastle than he's been about any other city since Bristol was not lost on me - these are the only places where ZZB can be found. We went again, of course (although M decided she'd seen enough the first time around) and got our money's worth again, but I wonder if I would be selling my son's soul to the Diabetes Devil if we settled in either of these fine cities.

Looked after by terrific hosts, we were fed and watered (or boozed) well, and able to service the van with clean water in and (very) dirty water out. We were shown that Tynemouth is a quite lovely part of Toon (which I didn't expect, probably because of my first Tyneside experience) and then looked to move on further North. I've placed a lot of importance (in my attempts to imagine how this tour will unfold) in getting over the border into Scotland, for a number of different reasons. A disproportionate number of my heroes were Scots, I know it's a really beautiful country, but I've hardly been there. I'm fascinated by their political momentum toward independence, awed by the integrity of their national identity, and intrigued by how much significance religious sectarianism still seems to have. Also, this blog's description says 'exploring the UK' but we still haven't made it out of England. And we were getting so close - already a hundred miles further North than Manchester, but not into Sadowitz's Scotland yet. So we headed to Rothbury, a pretty little town in the right direction, that once saved me on a mountain biking tour when my blood sugar tanked, and was later the scene of a dressing-gown-clad Gazza's attempts to persuade Raoul Moat to give himself up, with offers of chicken and lager.

The dark road to Rothbury went up and down hill and dale through three fords, one of which was deep and wide and fast-moving between two 20% climbs, but Vanny (as she's known when we haven't time to remember the other more complicated names we've given her) repaid my good faith as she always does, albeit with wet tyres skidding on leaves and gravel as Former Hurricane Ophelia closed in.

Now we are sitting in a five-star car park a few metres from the River Coquet in what looks a fairly sheltered spot, but away from any trees that are big enough to squash us if they come down. The wind is bouncing our accommodation in all directions at once, threatening to tear the awning (rolled in, of course - we've barely used it) and the now-almost-financially-irreplaceable windows off of the thing, and somehow seems able to loosen the locked side door such that it has to be opened and slammed again every half-hour in a quieter moment.

Tomorrow we will gratefully observe that no real damage has been done, that the many sets of stone steps in Rothbury have all become enormous bulging piles of leaves, but that the town that once saved me is otherwise pretty but unremarkable, and that if there's any chance at all of more of that weather further North, we'd better head south again like the Southern Jessies we are. 

Best Coffee - Worst Cheese

Best Coffee

I've never really liked coffee all that much. I can remember needing it on many occasions - staying up all night before a dissertation deadline, or working a Saturday at Music and Video Exchange on Berwick Street, I might have swigged it down like a thirsty man drinks from a canteen of water. The flavour and mouthfeel of a good cup of coffee is very enjoyable of course, but the specialist market that has developed around the crop fascinates me more because of how many not-particularly-nice cups it seems possible to buy, rather than the myriad opportunities to over-indulge thrown up by what might as well be called Craft Beer. During this trip, I've drunk about a hundred quid's worth of no-great-shakes, nothing-to-write-home-about coffee. Shops that had come highly recommended in Bristol and Lancaster have served unpleasant Americanos or long blacks with milk on the side that remind me in many ways of a mean old lady's hands - thin and bitter, almost translucent in the wrong light, yet covered in ugly dark liver spots.

Maybe I should move on from the Americano as it is certainly not the coffee style-choice of the connoisseur. An enormous, particularly rank effort from one of those Costa machines in a petrol station in Deal was enough to show me as much, two months ago now. I watched in captivated revulsion while a tiny espresso was drowned in a gallon of hot water before gushing cow juice turned it all a whiter shade of beige.

I would like to do some coffee in my record shop one day, but I am absolutely nothing like an expert. It seems to me that it can't be that difficult to consistently do a simple, good, coffee well, but I'm told by friends who have worked with it that it's not that easy. Why? Why is proper coffee so difficult to do well? And is this really why there are so many small independents that seem to be trying so hard, yet failing to deliver? In Carnforth my first cup of instant coffee of the whole journey so far probably ranked in the top half of those I've had, served strong and hot, while we were made to feel welcome by a lovely man I've never known all that well, his poorly mum (nevertheless radiant in her dressing gown), and his whippet (who flew around the room as if he was on his ninth cup). Meanwhile, the St*rb*cks in Skipton made a fantastic flat white when the right barista was on - the strong-looking woman with tattoos on her arms.

The best coffee I have had, ever, I think, was yesterday in a place called Mr Duffin's near the Hawkshead Brewery in Staveley. Not only was this specific single variety cup - a Peruvian - pure gold, it was one of about six they roasted right there, in a big solid piece of impressive engineering, in addition to a few different blends (one of which was a key ingredient in Hawkshead's Tiramisu Imperial Stout, a powerful half-pint that had sent me looking for the coffee shop in the first place).

Worst Cheese

Here's another foodstuff that has been elevated to a position where buying and consuming huge amounts of it can be mistaken for some sort of specialist interest, rather than just being a bit greedy. The Wensleydale Creamery in Hawes, in the Yorkshire Dales, offers gargantuan piles of dozens of varieties for the tasting of. Many of these were exquisite in their single-cubic-centimetre taster portions, but were never savoured nearly so well in the massive slabs I cut and jammed into my hairy gob after spending about thirty quid.

All cheese is good. Once again, my ill-educated palette is exposed. I enjoy pungent French soft cheeses, big blue mouldy stuff, dry-as-dust parmesans and even those yellow slices of processed fat that go well in cheeseburgers, and my whole family refers to as "'sgusty cheese". Sweating yellow rubbery Best-In blocks that look and taste like Semtex can serve a purpose if no other cheese is available.

So the worst cheese on this trip has, and I apologise in advance for this, been self-produced. You do not need to spend very much time with me (or any at all, thanks to this blog) to know that there are a range of things about me that are quite unpleasant. But smelly feet have never really counted among these demerits. Until Thursday morning in Skipton - gateway to the Yorkshire Dales and a whole new kingdom of self-loathing for me. The day before, we had been at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, paying handsomely to be drenched with water by Valhalla and shitted right up by the octogenarian woodwork project rollercoaster Grand National. The night before this, we'd been rained on most thoroughly during an abortive attempt to admire the illuminations, which appear to be the greatest rebuttal of humankind's supposed recent technological advances, as they are less sophisticated than they were thirty-five years ago.

My shoes were so wet that I broke out my gore-tex oversocks, stalwarts of very many happy days' mountain biking and very few washing machine cycles. The combination of new and old, moist and desiccated footcheeses, had a simply overpowering aroma which I attempted to ignore by drinking so heavily that I fell right out of the overcab bed on my return, thankfully avoiding knocking a BLUES NIGHT - shaped hole through the floor of the van. Two industrial washing machines later, this perfume is losing its bite, thankfully for anybody who has shared a room with me recently, let alone a compact motorhome.

A Return Visit to Merseyside

It was, he supposed, inevitable that they would return to Liverpool, the city where the course of their lives had been set some twenty years before. They were not alone now, of course, sharing their carriage by day and at night with two bright-eyed young boys - living, breathing evidence that what he had done in the faded glamour of the Adelphi Hotel last century had not, thankfully, forced her away.

The place was different now, of course. Bright lights shone from new steel buildings and converted warehouses that had stood in silence two decades before. The docks provided a peaceful place to park and rest where once the van's wheels might not have lasted the night. Fine food from all over the world and beer of which they once could not have dreamt stood in the way of a visit to Chinatown just for old times' sake, and the faces of the city's favourite sons were everywhere, but EVERYWHERE, instead of peering modestly from just one shop window or two, and a plastic statue by The Cavern made to look like bronze.

However, this great love was forbidden to them - the red-haired child was small but strong and he laid down the law from the start. "I CHALLENGE YOU," he declared in a voice that, though reedy and nasal, demanded attention, "NOT TO MENTION THE BEATLES, OR ANY MEMBER OF THE BEATLES, OR ANY OF THE NAMES OF THEIR SONGS, OR ANYTHING ABOUT THEM, THE WHOLE TIME THAT WE'RE HERE." This was a relief, in fact, and the man enjoyed infuriating his son for 48 hours by finding it easy to do.

And so it was that as they approached Matthew Street, the ever-competitive young scamp pointed up at a life-size silver figure leaning down from a building with drumsticks in hand, and enquired innocently, "Dad, who is that?" Luckily, this most unlikely of likenesses bore precious little resemblance to the usually-easy-to-recognise Richard Starkey, so the man was able to be honest and still not fail to meet his challenge, "it's actually really difficult to tell." As they moved along the side of the building, other unrecognisable musicians came into view, holding Rickenbacker guitars or a Hofner bass, so he was unable to hold in the loud afterthought, "but I assume that they're the famous Liverpool band Gerry and the Pacemakers."

"NOOOOchkOOOOOchkkOOO," groaned a homeless scouser from the doorway behind them, shaking his head miserably while inserting even more guttural sounds into a word in which they did not belong. The situation of desperate homeless people, virtually everywhere they had been on their tour, had affected the man of the family a great deal, and so he flashed this one a knowing smile in order not to make him sad. It went unseen. "Yer cahrn't seh daht," he wailed, still tossing his sunburned face left and right in apparent agony, eyes screwed shut against the sight of this Southern Dichkh who didn't even know the Beatles when he saw them.

The slow lane, M6, 1998: the only time in his life that the young man had travelled by coach some distance alone, and all of the way he became sicker and sicker. His nose was running, he coughed and he sneezed, and his guts were churning within him as he attempted to digest a moist sandwich of thin ham and tasteless tomatoes. The toilet on this coach offered little refuge, but he was determined to make it to Liverpool to meet M more or less in one piece.

In the pub that evening there were many other young men too, skinny, big-nosed scousers with the carefree manners and dark hair he knew she liked so much. A guitar was passed around the pub and everybody who knew how to play a song did. "Diwyew know enny Beatles songs, mate?" As he drank, he began to forget that he was ill, a new vigour coursing through his veins, so he struck up a version of I've Got A Feeling worthy of the beard he did not quite yet have. But these were the semi-old days, and nostalgia for the Beatles' canon had not yet completed its tour of duty, and not one of these young Liverpudlians recognised his song.

Liverpool in 2017 is a fine city, perhaps even a nice place to live, that might yet have need for a record shop where the good stuff isn't buried in tons of crap, where you can sit down and relax, listen and peruse, rather than stand on tiptoes forcing the racks apart for long enough to catch a glimpse of each sleeve as you flick through... as those who never gave up on the format have cheerfully done for decades. 

Other attractions lay further up the coast - a hundred six-foot iron men less than half his age whose penises were already rusting off, and their equally-rusty-coloured neighbours further north in Formby. Though they are smaller, quicker and nimbler than the lumbering oafs who have almost completely replaced them, it seems that the latest initiative to save the endangered red squirrel is a return to the culling of the grey. Making sense of the need for slaughter as part of conservation was one of the more complex lessons so far in the home education of the man's children - one of whom bears a remarkable resemblance to a red squirrel. And the other, therefore, the grey. This made the man think of himself as a hungry pine marten.

The landscape at Formby reminds him of his native Suffolk's coastline - specifically at Thorpeness where the tour began. Scrubby grass projecting in defiant tufts from dunes of the softest sand at the edges of evergreen woodland, it differs only in its hilliness. A sign declares it to be 'some of the most rapidly changing coastline in Britain' and seems unconcerned by the fact that 'the dunes roll back across the land by as much as four  metres a year' so he made a mental note to visit the place again before all of its excellent facilities are buried and unusable. This lifestyle, he then declared, shall surely defeat any ambition I have had, as the sense of achievement gained from simply emptying the toilet cassette is enough to satisfy me for two days, or about as long as it takes to fill it up and start all over again. There must, of course, be more to life than finding an appropriate place to put the shit for which you are responsible.

And then he saw it again, or didn't - the inky blackness of a perfectly unlit room in the Adelphi Hotel in 1998. Half drunk yet and his insides burning, he had awoken in the middle of the night and felt his way around the invisible walls, hoping for the bathroom door, or lightswitch, and not finding either. The pain inside him ever growing worse, in the end he had given up, and when she turned on the bedside lamp and bathed the room in colour and detail, there he was, squatting in the corner, crapping wetly on the carpet. 

Notes on The North

Leeds - great city centre, lots of pleasant quieter neighbourhoods and towns (none seemed very exciting tho) dotted around it. Lots of places we didn't see - seemed to swerve most of the Northern Grit stuff, albeit unintentionally. Still want that curry in Bradford and to visit Magic Rock in Huddersfield.

Harrogate - great town in own right, lots of good places to go, would be a good place for my business if I got it right. Didn't get the 'loads of rich twats' thing I've heard so much about. Might be blind to this after quarter-century in London. Or maybe I just don't have a problem with rich twats.

Saltaire - was okay. Too busy with street Food Fair - last thing I need in my Post-Peckham Period. Impressive Industrial stuff. Average Artworks. Still haven't forgiven Hockney for being rude to my dad in late eighties.

Hebden Bridge - Vocation and Co one of nicest, friendliest bars we've visited so far. Most duck-filled body of water too. Water wheel in mill cafe quite impressed kids but not as much as cheese toasties. Failed to track down friend who works as life coach by river. Nice town, but I'd need more than counselling and good beer to live there.

Manchester - parked in Chorlton, part of town Mancs and near-Mancs we've known said would suit us best. Seems they're right. Discovered mum and dad lived here in mid-late sixties, so advisors can't be quite right when they say it's always been hip.

H smuggled his 3DS on 'educational' trip to Museum of Science and Industry, promptly left it on tram. Cue worst look of distress and misery I've ever seen on his cute little freckled face. E devastated too. Neither kid interested in my philosophising that if this is the worst thing that has ever happened to them, they're very lucky boys.

But this IS the end of the world in a way - a world they've created and inhabited merrily whenever they've needed to escape the confines of van life. I realised that the complexity and subtleties of their interactions and communications in and around Tomodachi Life or Miitopia take them miles further in developing their minds and characters than the English or Maths activities I sling them as a token bit of School. Their relationship is the most powerful social glue in this family on wheels, and deserves all the support we can give it.

Visit to Cloudwater Brewery taproom cheered me no end - it's like somebody lent that guy the Half Blood Prince's potions book. Did little for the boys as they had to stand outside and didn't even have any proper crisps. Got them each a new (secondhand - God bless CEX) 3DS on way back through town so they can play together. Their gratitude knows no bounds.

Stopped in on M in Chorlton library, where my dad used to work. Took her next door into the 'Spoons for a late lunch. As M says, this is always a good way of sneaking a peek at the underbelly of a town, but this one was a joy. A grand old Temperance Society Billiard Hall, it proudly displayed a black and white print of George Best, cue in hand. If he'd paced himself a little better, he might have enjoyed a few pints with some of his contemporaries who were enjoying the place in its new guise. 

Really like Manchester but strangely we're all craving a more peaceful, more rural setting. Maybe, as we pass the eight-week mark, we are starting to adapt and adjust our requirements a little. I'll be sure to let you know.

A conversation that didn't happen in Otley.

Well, half of it happened. A woman in her thirties did say the exact words I have recorded as her lines below. But I did not respond in anything like the detail that I am suggesting, as there wasn't time and I couldn't be bothered. Instead I responded by sighing gently (I had not yet brushed my teeth that morning and so this was probably quite unpleasant for her) and waiting for her to go away. I was also rather hungover, so I allowed my eyes to close very gradually as she spoke. I find that this often infuriates people who are trying to tell me off, with its coded message that they are sending me to sleep. It is important to remain calm during the process of parking large vehicles in busy car parks, and if passive aggressive behaviour is the only means of doing so, that is how it must be. 

If you and a friend are reading this script out loud, it is important that the character of the WOMAN has a Yorkshire accent and a tone of belligerent sarcasm. The character of ME should be voiced with friendly good humour in received pronunciation. Think Stephen Fry.

WOMAN: Can I just point something out? Why are you trying to park a massive great car in a tiny little space when there are two big spaces just over there?

ME: Thank you for your valued contribution. While I'm a little disappointed that you did not await my consent for you to point something out, and you then, in fact, went on to ask a second question rather than make an observation, as you had requested permission to do, you have successfully brought me to reconsider my choice of a parking space.

This is not, however, a 'massive great car,' it is a compact motorhome. It fits fairly easily in a space designed for a conventional motorcar, so long as it is able to overhang a verge or other similar unused space at the back. This has previously caused us small problems in itself - first in Norfolk, where the rear end of the van blocked a pavement running around the edge of a much larger and emptier Waitrose car park than the one in which we now converse, that I simply could not have anticipated anybody wanting to use, until a sour-faced elderly man made a point of walking right up to the van and taking a U-shaped detour around it while shaking his head slowly before returning to the pavement and heading toward even more completely empty space. 

A few weeks later, in Teignmouth, Devon, we parked in a car park just as busy as this one today. There was a 'festival' at The Ship Inn that seemed to consist of a band dragging their sorry musical arses through some poorly-remembered Clash covers while scores of pissed-up Brummies made a good seaside town look crap. This was still the summer holidays, of course, and there were several motorhomes in the car park, most of which were considerably larger than ours, some of them parked sideways across three or even four car spaces. Without the opportunity to overhang a verge, we had found a central space with a small car parked in the one behind it, in such a way as to leave lots of room for us to park our van. When the already unhappy-looking family returned, they made a point of bending down closely to look at the six-inch gap between the rears of our respective vehicles as if they thought they might see some evidence of damage there, or they were concerned that they could not open their boot. Most of the family then got into the car (they didn't have anything to put in the boot) while the Dad (whom I suspect may have been serving a driving ban at the time) seemed intent on standing at the rear of the vehicle to give his partner hand signals for how to drive forwards, directly away from our van. Once he had got back in, the mother of the family drove around to the front of the van and stopped to glare at me for a moment or two before finally driving away, her son grinning out of the back window as if he had particularly enjoyed something his mother had had to say about me - 'stupid beardy bastard' or 'smelly fucking hippie,' perhaps.

It was at this moment that I began to think of the busy car park as the perfect analogy for an overpopulated island. Broken Britain in microcosm, with people demonstrating a territorial obsessiveness over rectangular spaces of asphalt on which they have paid a couple of pounds' rent. I've parked in another one almost every day, sometimes two or three times a day, since, never once hitting anything, never once protruding from the marked bay, and never once failing to observe that England is a lot like one big shitty car park.

But I digress. The 'tiny little space' to which you are referring is no larger or smaller than either one of the 'two big spaces' you have indicated 'over there,' but it would be greedy and unnecessary for me to take up more than one space, and the man might give me a ticket. Also, there is a large and dense-looking shrub very close to the back of those two spaces, and if I try and squeeze up against it I may damage it, or even worse, my back window. I shall not go into the details of how much these parts cost to replace. The 'tiny little space' which happens to be directly next to your car has no such shrub, and, in short, would be much better for me to park my vehicle in.

WOMAN: I mean, should you not be looking for a better place to park a great big thing like this? D'you know you nearly took the front end off my car just then, and I've got somebody coming in a minute and they're not going to be able to get in.

ME: I did not 'nearly take the front end off your car,' because I did not touch your car. If it were possible that I could remove a substantial but ill-defined part of your car by driving very close to it, this would have to mean that your car was extremely unsafe. I would advise you to leave it where it is and walk home. 

Further, I have to say I doubt that you are really worried that I might damage your car, as you would clearly have a whale of a time if I did. You're just unhappy that I am intruding upon the borders of your personal space. You'd be exactly the same if I were five stone heavier and attempted to sit next to you on the tube, my love handles wedged up on top of the arm rests.

WOMAN: You should park somewhere else. It's blatantly obvious, really.

ME: What is blatantly obvious is that you are accustomed to telling people what to do. Perhaps you are a primary school teacher (you certainly look like one) but I don't think you would be sat in your car in a Waitrose car park at eleven-fifteen on a Friday morning in term time if you were. It is also blatantly obvious that if you are waiting for somebody to come and join you in your car, it would be possible for you to pull out of the space and stop for a moment in order for them to be able to open your passenger door easily. But you're not prepared to do that, and you haven't been listening to my reasoning because I haven't really said any of these things to you, have I?

(Starwipe back into reality. ME shrugs, sighs, mutters something about 'thanks for pointing that out,' and sets about the murder of  a shrub with 3.5 tons of van.)

Bristol v Leeds

It has rained a lot, these seven weeks that we have been on the road - I don't know whether you would've noticed. The sound of it falling on the roof of the van varies from 'child trying to readjust the velcro on their shoes in assembly with impossible patience and care, in the vain hope that the headteacher will not notice' to 'those drummers from the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics,' and it was very much this latter that we heard on Clifton Down on Thursday night.

With one side's wheels in the gutter, the angle is always an extra degree of challenge, but this was one of those ancient roads where several loads of tarmac have been poured on top of cobbles, and either they didn't bother to resurface the gutter or it's all just worn away at the edges. Either way, the sideways slope was sufficient for M to spend the whole night on the point of falling out of bed and for rainwater to be running sideways across the roof and down past the dodgy seal of the bathroom skylight, against the inside of the door and from there directly onto the floor of the van itself. When it rains on the roof of a level van, the worst we get is a few drips on the wet room floor, but with the lean, the effect is much worse. If I need a piss in the middle of the night, it lands squarely in the middle of my bald patch. The rain, not the piss.

An even-worse consequence of parking with a nasty sideways gradient comes when opening an overfilled overhead cupboard. A very nice copy of Terry Reid's River I'd found in the Centre For Better Grooves descended in a tandem jump with an ancient and hefty iPad, which knocked a hole in the laminate of the table and propelled a whole cup of coffee over the crotch of Britain's Favourite Walking Trouser. My self-annoyance in this moment was far too large to accommodate in a compact motorhome, so we went for a walk.

The Clifton Suspension Bridge was just five minutes away and I was able to relax and quietly shit myself while my kids swung on an ancient iron railing that moved as freely as the waters of the Avon, hundreds of feet below on the floor of the gorge. Looking at the bridge from this elevated perspective, I vowed to never drive across - a vow I broke less than an hour later when M's navigation arrowed in on it. Having paid a pound for the privelege, I resolutely stared straight ahead, as I'd seen those churning brown waters in quite enough detail already.

In the Tobacco Factory in Southville, another very smiley young man was serving me beer. I talked to him about my enthusiasm for Bristol for a while before discovering that he was not in fact a local, but from Leeds, a city he liked just as much. 

Bristol and Leeds have a certain amount in common in my mind. Both are said (by all I know who know them well) to be great places, and are homes to excellent breweries and bars that have sprung up in recent years, and good and varied record shops, and a huge range of places to eat. They are also both cities I've only been to once, in 1990, for interviews for dental school. I bought myself Exile On Main St on cassette the first time I came to one or the other. While this certainly changed my life for the better, I doubt whether it was as important a development as my failure to embark upon a career in dentistry.

Bristol, I think, is probably the better city, but this is probably just that it reminds me of London in miniature. Stokes Croft and Gloucester Road might be Brixton or Dalston, whereas Clifton could be Kensington or Hampstead  Sure, Leeds has a great city centre, but doesn't appear to have inner-city neighbourhoods with their own character and identity in quite the same way as Bristol does - in that way that reminds me so much of London. Leeds does seem very clean and tidy, has TWO, count 'em, TWO Brewdog bars, and has the Victoria Quarter and surrounding grand old markets forming 'The Knightsbridge of the North' - but I always hated Knightsbridge anyway.

"I'll be honest with you, seventy-five percent of the predicament I find myself in today is a direct consequence of poor decision-making on my part," said a handsome and articulate young homeless man with homemade tattoos on his face, just outside the Bell Inn in Bath. M had stopped for a chat with him, which is more than I did. I stood at a distance, cherrypicking soundbites. Bath is a beautiful, historic, boring city very close to Bristol, and I can't see why anybody between the income brackets of zero and stinking rich would live here instead of there, but this guy seemed to have made one of his occasional decent decisions - he had far less competition here, just as a record shop would have. Bath does have the best beer shop we've visited so far, however - Independent Spirit.

Meanwhile, in Leeds it seems that anybody with some money and sense lives in a neighbouring town or quiet suburb with good public transport links to the city centre. I'm sitting in the van outside a friend's house in Ilkley while my family take advantage of the facilities - M in the bath and both boys on the Wii U. This is a lovely town with some good cafes, good beers and not a single record shop in sight. I doubt whether Leeds University students venture out here looking for John Fahey albums very often though.

Bradford on Avon is a gorgeous little town in a comparable position for Bristol, and where my closest friend moved, from London earlier this year. We spent last weekend there, walking the canal, paddling in the river and even making politely interested noises about the aqueduct while observing that, as with all of the other Friends Outside London we have visited, we can see why they moved there.

But the question remains, can we see where we would move?

Devon - Somerset

'Have you ever heard of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs?' asked an intelligent and sensible friend (of a friend), briefly spoiling the Glastonbury Festival of about 2004 or 2005.

'Oh ye- no,' I replied. I was drunk, and I hadn't. All of my needs were being met at that moment in time, as I had a two-litre bottle of Brothers Bar cider under each arm. His observation - that Maslow's coincidentally-pyramidical model fitted with the day-to-day business of festival attendance for most mature adults - didn't really apply to me. I did not spend much time thinking, preparing, researching or planning for where I was going to get some food or water, or find a slightly-less-revolting portaloo to shit in, or a person who can lend me some sunscreen, or join the queue for the cash machine, or get into my tent without spreading mud across my sleeping bag - because I had skipped straight to the self-actualisation level via cheap hallucinogenic cider.

My first visit to Glastonbury (the town itself) has been a rather more sober affair, not least because I couldn't seem to find a decent pub. We had a much-less-effective pint of cider in what looked for all the world to be a pub, but turned out to be a restaurant, and experienced, if not enjoyed, an open mic night in an almost-empty characterless locals' local that had glitter glued to the flat surfaces in the toilets to deter cocaine use (a remarkably unglamorous effect) and a strong disinfectant aroma throughout. 

Glastonbury, I concluded, was a bit like Stowmarket with hippies. Absolutely loads of hippies. And hippies, I noticed, looking at some of the ones in Glastonbury, are not necessarily just middle-class, well-educated people who have embraced spirituality while turning their backs on personal grooming. Some of them are real lost souls at the very margins of society with the same money and drug problems as the rest of us, amped up to deafen Dreadzone. A stroll up Glastonbury Tor provided us with a wonderful panoramic view of Somerset, but did little to cater for my spiritual needs. It did give us the chance to further explore the idea that 'going for a walk with your family is really quite a normal and nice thing to do,' but this will have to be an ongoing project.

A restorative few days in North Devon followed our near-disaster on Dartmoor. All of the van's needs were met by my friend's garden tap, septic tank and recommendation of a local Fiat garage that gave our tyres and clutch a thorough going-over. We were in great company, ate very well and were able to access real 240v electricity and broadband for a few days. The kids got even more out of it than we did, thanks to our friends' younger son and his new dog. He is as happy a ten-year-old boy as I think I have ever met, and enjoys all of the same things that our boys do, despite having lived his whole life on a lane with grass growing down the middle. To spend so much quality time with a boy they've never met, but with whom they have so much in common, who is growing up in a place so different to all they have ever known, can only help them adjust to life outside the big city.

North Devon is staggeringly beautiful in places, but much of it feels very remote indeed. I tried to contribute by picking up some fish and chips one evening, but got so lost on the way back (with a dead phone battery) it had all gone quite cold. We managed to navigate visits to two beautiful places on the coast to which we had previously taken E when he was a baby. As we say to H, this was 'when he was still dead' so it was new ground for both of them. Clovelly, like Abbotsbury before it, is a village that makes you say, 'Wow! How have they managed to preserve these ancient buildings so perfectly, and keep the place so unspoiled by ugly modern constructions? Oh, of course, it's because it has all been owned by the same aristocratic family for generations, and they will never need to consider selling any of it, especially since they started charging for admission to the bloody village.' Feudalism is alive and well and living in the English Countryside. And probably in the cities too, but just a little less noticeably.  Nearby, Hartland Point is a beautiful beach framed by cliffs and rocks that would give a geologist geekgasms. And it's free.


At the weekend we spent a couple of days in Frome, which is a wonderful town, (despite only having a handful of decent pubs - The Three Swans by far the best). 'It wasn't this good when I was a kid,' said the young woman in a new bottle shop who sold me some delicious and powerful beers from Northern Monk and Cloudwater. 'Just eight years ago, all those shops around the corner were boarded up.' On Sunday we woke up in the midst of traders setting up for the Frome Independent, which sees pretty much the whole of the town centre turned into a street market for the day. If we had known about it, and carefully thought, prepared, researched or planned for where  we were going to park, we could not have found ourselves a better space. That first nervy night in the car park in Walberswick seems an awfully long time ago, and now I can relax in the van, watching old episodes of Father Ted and flouting the rules about camping in car parks without a trace of self-consciousness, it seems. Especially if I am pissed.