Notes From a Small Island (13 page)

'Oh, you won't be gittin to Moinhead this toim of year, you won't be,' said one.

'No buses to Moinhead arter firrrrst of Octobaaarrrr,' chimed in the second one.

'What about Lynton and Lynmouth?'

They snorted at my naivety. This was England. This was 1994.

'Porlock?'

Snort.

'Dunster?'

Snort.

The best they could suggest was that I take a bus to Bideford and see if I could catch another bus on from there. They may be runnin the Scarrrrrrlet Loin out of Bideforrrrrd, they may be, oi they may, they may - but can't be sartin.'

'Will there be more people like you there?' I wanted to say but didn't. The only other option they could suggest was a bus to Westward Ho! but there didn't seem much point since I couldn't go anywhere else from there and anyway I couldn't face spending the night in an ejaculation, as it were. I thanked them and departed,

I stood outside in a froth of uncertainty and tried to think what to do next. All my carefully laid plans were coming unravelled. I retired to the curiously named Royal and Fortescue Hotel, where I ordered a tuna sandwich and a cup of coffee from a mute and charmless waitress, and rooted in my pack for my timetable, where I discovered that I had twenty-three minutes to eat my sandwich, drink my coffee, and waddle the mile back to the railway station to catch a train to Exeter, where I could start again.

I swallowed my sandwich nearly whole when it came, gulped two sips of coffee, threw some money on the table and fled for the station, terrified that I would miss the train and have to spend the night in Barnstaple. I just made it. When I got to Exeter, I marched straight up to the TV screens, determined to take the first train to anywhere.

Thus it was that I found myself in the hands of fate and bound for Weston-super-Mare.

Notes from a Small Island

CHAPTER   ELEVEN

THE WAY I SEE IT, THERE ARE THREE REASONS NEVER TO BE UNHAPPY.

First, you were born. This in itself is a remarkable achievement. Did you know that each time your father ejaculated (and frankly he did it quite a lot) he produced roughly 25 million spermatozoa -enough to repopulate Britain every two days or so? For you to have been born, not only did you have to be among the few batches of sperm that had even a theoretical chance of prospering - in itself quite a long shot - but you then had to win a race against 24,999,999 or so other wriggling contenders, all rushing to swim the English Channel of your mother's vagina in order to be the first ashore at the fertile egg of Boulogne, as it were. Being born was easily the most remarkable achievement of your whole life. And think: you could just as easily have been a flatworm.

Second, you are alive. For the tiniest moment in the span of eternity you have the miraculous privilege to exist. For endless eons you were not. Soon you will cease to be once more. That you are able to sit here right now in this one never-to-be-repeated moment, reading this book, eating bon-bons, dreaming about hot sex with that scrumptious person from accounts, speculatively sniffing your armpits, doing whatever you are doing - just existing - is really wondrous beyond belief.

Third, you have plenty to eat, you live in a time of peace and 'Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree' will never be number

one again.

If you bear these things in mind, you will never be truly unhappy - though in fairness I must point out that if you find yourself alonein Weston-super-Mare on a rainy Tuesday evening you may come close.

It was only a little after six when I stepped from the Exeter train and ventured into the town, but already the whole of Weston appeared to be indoors beyond drawn curtains. The streets were empty, dark and full of slanting rain. I walked from the station through a concrete shopping precinct and out on to the front where a black unseen sea made restless whooshing noises. Most of the hotels along the front were dark and empty, and the few that were open didn't look particularly enticing. I walked a mile or so to a cluster of three brightly lit establishments at the far end of the promenade and randomly selected a place called the Birchfield. It was fairly basic, but clean and reasonably priced. You could do worse, and I have.

I gave myself a cursory grooming and wandered back into town in search of dinner and diversion. I had an odd sense that I had been here before, which patently I had not. My only acquaintance with Weston was that John Cleese had once told me (I'm not really dropping names; I was interviewing him for a newspaper article; he is a jolly nice fellow, by the way) that he and his parents lived in a flat in Weston, and that when they moved out Jeffrey Archer and his parents moved in, which I thought was kind of remarkable - the idea of these two boys in short trousers saying hello and then one of them going on to greatness. What made Weston feel familiar was, of course, that it was just like everywhere else. It had Boots and Marks & Spencer and Dixons and W.H. Smith and all the rest of it. I realized with a kind of dull ache that there wasn't a single thing here that I hadn't seen a million times already.

I went into a pub called the Britannia Inn, which was unfriendly without being actually hostile, and had a couple of lonely pints, then ate at a Chinese restaurant, not because I craved Chinese but because it was the only place I could find open. I was the only customer. As I quietly scattered rice and sweet and sour sauce across the tablecloth, there were some rumbles of thunder and, a moment later, the heavens opened - and I mean opened. I have seldom seen it rain so hard in England. The rain spattered the street like a shower of ball-bearings and within minutes the restaurant window was wholly obscured with water, as if someone were running a hose over it. Because I was a long walk from my hotel, I spun out the meal, hoping the weather would ease off, but it didn't, and eventually I had no choice but to step out into the rainy night.

I stood beneath a shop awning next door and wondered what to do. Rain battered madly on the awning and rushed in torrents through the gutters. All along the road it poured over the sides of overstretched gutters and fell to the pavement in an endless clatter. With my eyes closed it sounded like I was in the midst of some vast, insane tap-dancing competition. Pulling my jacket above my head, I waded out into the deluge, then sprinted across the street and impulsively took refuge in the first bright, open thing I came to -an amusement arcade. Wiping my glasses with a bandanna, I took my bearings. The arcade was a large room full of brightly pulsating machines, some of them playing electronic tunes or making unbidden kerboom noises, but apart from an overseer sitting at a counter with a drooping fag and a magazine, there was no-one in the place so it looked eerily as if the machines were playing themselves.

With the exception of penny falls and those crane things that give you three microseconds to try to snatch a stuffed animal and in which the controls don't actually correspond to the movements of the grabber bucket, I don't understand arcade games at all. Generally I can't even figure out where to insert the money or, once inserted, how to make the game start. If by some miracle I manage to surmount these two obstacles, I invariably fail to recognize that the game has come to life and that I am wasting precious seconds feeling in remote coin-return slots and searching for a button that says 'Start'. Then I have thirty confused seconds of being immersed in some frantic mayhem without having the faintest idea what's going on, while my children shout, 'You've just blown up Princess Leila, you stupid shit!' and then it says 'Game Over'.

This is more or less what happened to me now. For no reason that I can possibly attach a rational explanation to, I put 50p in a game called Killer Kickboxer or Kick His Fucking Brains Out or something like that, and spent about a minute punching a red button and waggling a joystick while my character - a muscular blond fellow - kicked at drapes and threw magic discs into thin air while a series of equally muscular but unscrupulous Orientals assaulted him with kidney chops and flung him to the carpet.

I had a strange hour in which I wandered in a kind of trance feeding money into machines and playing games I couldn't follow. I drove racing cars into bales of hay and obliterated friendly troops with lasers and unwittingly helped zombie mutants do unspeakable things to a child. Eventually I ran out of money and stepped outinto the night. I had just a moment to note that the rain had eased a little and that the street was flooded, evidently from a clogged drain, when a red Fiesta sped through the puddle at great speed and unusually close to the kerb, transferring nearly all the water from the puddle and on to me.

To say that I was drenched barely hints at my condition. I was as soaked as if I had fallen into the sea. As I stood there spluttering and gasping, the car slowed, three close-cropped heads popped out the windows, shouted some happy greeting along the lines of 'Nyaa-nyaa, nyaa-nyaa!' and sped off. Glumly, I walked back along the prom, squelching with each step and shivering with cold. I don't wish to reduce this cheery chronicle to pathos, but I had only recently recovered from a fairly serious bout of pneumonia. I won't say that I nearly died, but I was ill enough to watch This Morning with Richard and Judy, and I certainly didn't want to be in that condition again. To add to my indignity, the Fiesta came past on a victory lap and its pleasure-starved occupants slowed to offer me another triumphal 'Nyaa-nyaa' before speeding off into the night with a screech and a brief, uncontrolled fishtail slide that unfortunately failed to bury them in a lamppost.

By the time I reached my distant hotel, I was feeling thoroughly chilled and wretched. So imagine my consternation, if you will, when I discovered that the reception area was in semi-darkness and the door was locked. I looked at my watch. It was only nine o'clock, for Christ sake. What kind of town was this? There were two doorbells, and I tried them both but without response. I tried my room key in the door and of course it didn't work. I tried the bells again, leaning on them both for many minutes and growing increasingly angry. When this elicited no satisfaction, I banged on the glass door with the flat of my hand, then with a fist and finally with a stout boot and a touch of frenzy. I believe I may also have filled the quiet streets with shouting.

Eventually the proprietor appeared at the top of some basement stairs, looking surprised. 'I'm so sorry, sir,' he said mildly as he unlocked the door and let me in. 'Have ypu been out there long?' Well, I blush to think at how I ranted at the poor man. I used immoderate language. I sounded like Graham Taylor before they led him off and took away his warm-up suit. I accused him and his fellow townspeople of appalling shortages of intelligence and charm. I told him that I had just passed the dreariest evening of my life in this God-forsaken hell-hole of a resort, that I had been

soaked to the skin by a earful of young men who between them were ten IQ points short of a moron, that I had walked a mile in wet clothes, and had now spent nearly half an hour shivering in the cold because I had been locked out of my own hotel at nine o'clock in the fucking evening.

'May I remind you,' I went on in a shrill voice, 'that two hours ago you said goodbye to me, watched me go out the door and disappear down the street. Did you think I wasn't coming back? That I would sleep in a park and return for my things in the morning? Or is it merely that you are a total imbecile? Please tell me because I would very much like to know.'

The proprietor flinchingly soaked up my abuse and responded with fluttering hands and a flood of apologies. He offered me a tray of tea and sandwiches, to dry and press my wet clothes, to escort me to my room and turn on my radiator personally. He did everything but fall to my feet and beg me to run him through with a sabre. He positively implored me to let him bring me something warming on a tray.

'I don't want anything but to go to my room and count the minutes until I get out of this fucking dump!' I shouted, perhaps a trifle theatrically but to good effect, and stalked up the stairs to the first floor where I plodded about heatedly in the corridor for some minutes and realized that I didn't have the faintest idea which was my room. There was no number on the key.

I returned to the reception area, now once more in semi-darkness, and put my head by the basement door. 'Excuse me,' I said in a small voice, 'could you please tell me what room I'm in?'

'Number twenty-seven, sir,' came a voice from the darkness.

I stood for some time without moving. 'Thank you,' I said.

'It's quite all right, sir,' came the voice. 'Have a good night.'

I frowned and cleared my throat. Thank you,' I said again and retired to my room, where the night passed without further incident.

In the morning, I presented myself in the sunny dining room and, as I had feared, the proprietor was waiting to receive me. Now that I was dry and warm and well rested I felt terrible about my outburst of the night before.

'Good-morning, sir!' he said brightly as if nothing had happened, and showed me to a window table with a nice view of the sea. 'Sleep all right, did you?'

I was taken aback by his friendliness. 'Uh, yes. Yes, I did as a matter of fact.''Good! Splendid! Juice and cereal on the trolley. Please help yourself. Can I get you the full English breakfast, sir?'

I found this unmerited bonhomie unbearable. I tucked my chin into my chest and in a furtive grumble said: 'Look here, I'm very sorry for what I said last night. I was in a bit of a temper.'

'It's quite all right, sir.'

'No really, I'm, um, very sorry. Bit ashamed, in fact.'

'Consider it forgotten, sir. So - full English breakfast, is it?'

'Yes, please.'

'Very good, sir!'

I've never had such good or friendly service anywhere, or felt more like a worm. He brought my food promptly, chattering away about the weather and what a glorious day it promised to be. I couldn't understand why he was so forgiving. Only gradually did it occur to me what a strange sight I must have presented - a middle-aged man with a rucksack, visiting a place like Weston out of season for no evident reason, fetching up at their hotel and bellowing and stomping about over a trifling inconvenience. He must have thought I was mad, an escaped lunatic perhaps, and that this was the safest way to approach me. Either that, or he was just an extremely nice person. In either case, I salute him now.

Weston was surprisingly lovely in morning sunshine. Out in the bay an island called Flat Holm basked in the clear, clean air and beyond it rose the green hills of Wales, twelve miles or so across the water. Even the hotels that I had disdained the night before didn't look half bad.

I walked to the station and took a train to Chepstow and a bus on to Monmouth. The Wye Valley was as beautiful as I remembered it from years before - dark woods, winding river, lonely white farmhouses high up on steep slopes - but the villages between were rather astonishingly charmless and seemed to consist mostly of petrol stations, pubs with big car parks and gift shops. I watched out for Tintern Abbey, made famous, of course, by the well-known Wordsworth poem, 'I Can Be Boring Outside the Lake District Too', and was disappointed to find that it didn't stand out in the country as I recalled but on the edge of an unmemorable village.

Monmouth, however, seemed to be a fine, handsome town with a sloping High Street and an imposing town hall. In front of it stood a statue of Charles Stewart Rolls, son of Lord and Lady Llangattock, 'pioneer of ballooning, motoring and aviation, who died in a crash at Bournemouth in July 1910', according to the