Walking with Plato (22 page)

Or, to put it another way, this was
my
England.

If you were to step, for a moment, into my England, you would find William Brown on a half-holiday, Isaac Newton sitting beneath an apple tree, Robin Hood squaring off against Little John, Mr Pickwick beaming upon the assembled members of the Pickwick Club, Lucy Pevensie stepping into a wardrobe, Marianne Dashwood walking through the wet grass at twilight, Mr Crawley walking from Hogglestock to Barchester, The Lady of Shallot making three paces through the room, and Bess, the Landlord’s daughter, plaiting a dark-red love-knot into her long black hair.

This England is, I confess, a fiction. But it is an entirely
English
fiction. And it is every bit as precious to me as the real England. And the setting for this England of the imagination, which I hold so dear, looks uncannily like the Heart of England Way.

So, on that day, my heart swelled with love for England, and for the countryside, and for churches and footpaths and trees, and for rivers and streams and canals, and for Charles Dickens and Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope . . . and for JoGLE.

At one point, Wendy and I crossed a ploughed field that was so vast, and so perfectly level, and patterned with such precise furrows, and composed of such rich brown soil that I almost wept with the beauty of it all.

But it was a long, hard walk for all of that. And we weren’t sorry, at the end of the day, to reach the Swan Hotel in Coleshill, where we enjoyed the less poetic pleasures of beer and a carvery dinner.

It was strange to think that there, in Coleshill, we were scarcely a mile from the eastern edge of the sprawling industrial metropolis of Birmingham.

We had arranged to stay, the following evening, with our friends Brian and Karen in the centre of the ancient market town of
Henley-in-Arden
. As luck would have it, they rent a flat there that’s pretty much
on
the Heart of England Way – certainly within a dozen yards of it.

By this stage of JoGLE, we were such experienced hikers and map-readers that we could estimate with uncanny accuracy the finishing time of any day’s walk, taking into account the distance, terrain, and weather conditions.

Consequently, we were able to inform Brian and Karen with smug self-confidence that we would arrive at their doorstep at some time pretty damned close to six o’clock.

The walk itself turned out to be another glorious romp through twenty-one of the greenest and pleasantest miles of England’s green and pleasant land: mostly field-walking, but with a bit of woodland-, canal-, and village-walking thrown in for good measure.

At ten to six, with just half a mile to go, we were on schedule to impress the hell out of our hosts by ringing their doorbell at six o’clock
precisely
. But, as we reached the crest of a small hill at the edge of town, disaster struck.

As my right boot came down, it made contact with a slippery wet substance, and went sliding along the grass. At the same time, the unmistakeable aroma of newly passed dog-shit filled the air.

I swore and looked down. There, embedded in the nooks and crevices of my boot-tread was a cloying mass of freshly passed, mustard-coloured crap.

I swore again, and began scraping the sole of my boot back and forth across the grass. But to no avail. Almost all of the mustard-coloured dollop remained embedded in my sole.

I rubbed and scraped some more. But still to no avail. Bizarrely, the words of Jesus, from Mark 9:29, came into my mind: ‘This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer and fasting.’

I swore again, sat down on the grass, and did the only thing that any reasonable person could have done, given the circumstances. I asked Wendy to find a twig and scrape it off.

Wendy said a few words to the effect that perhaps I ought to scrape off my own dog-shit. Fortunately, however, I was able to convince her that this would be an inefficient course of action, since it would require me to remove my boot.

If you have never scraped clingy-wet dog-shit from the tread of a hiking boot, then you can hardly appreciate what a time-consuming task it is. It kept Wendy and me (she scraping, me holding my foot nice and still) busy for an entire ten minutes.

The net result was that, instead of making a triumphant entrance at our friends’ door at six o’clock precisely, we arrived ten minutes late.

Close, but no cigar.

We stayed for two nights in Henley-in-Arden, and were wined and dined royally by Brian and Karen – even to the extent of champagne on arrival.

We could happily have stayed longer. But, on JoGLE, friendship and comfort, too long indulged, become a snare. So, on the second morning, setting our faces like flint, and bidding our kind friends
adieu
, we pressed on for fourteen miles to the village of
Bidford-on-Avon
, which, as the names implies, lies on the River Avon.

It was a typical – and, hence,
glorious
 – day on the Heart of England Way, which took us through woodland and pasture, through ploughed fields and fields of towering maize, and through the ancient Warwickshire town of Alcester with its enchanting Tudor cottages.

It strikes me here – and not for the first time – what a poor hand I am at this travel-writing lark. I have no eye, or ear, or heart for detail. My descriptions are always vague.

I can tell you that I walked through woodland, but I can’t tell you the types of trees. I can tell you that I walked across cultivated land, but I can’t tell you the types of crops. I can tell you that I climbed a crag, but I can’t tell you the type of rock.

I can tell you, right now, that, at various times on the journey from John o’Groats to Land’s End, I saw deer, a mole, a shrew, an otter, wild ponies, and diverse other notable fauna. But I’m damned if I can remember when and where. And I have no doubt that, had I been able to recognize them, I could have told you about a whole host of interesting birds that I spotted along the way. Ditto for flowers, shrubs, insects, and the like.

But I’m ignorant of these things. And therefore, gentle reader, so must you be.

In my defence, I should say that, while doing JoGLE, I never had any thought of writing a book about it. If I had, I’d have kept copious notes. But I hadn’t. And so I didn’t. And I thank my lucky stars that I didn’t, because it would have
ruined
the experience.

It would have ruined the experience because it would have reduced it to something to be recorded, communicated, and ultimately sold rather than simply lived.

In C.S. Lewis’s allegorical novel
The Great Divorce
, a number of departed souls, or ‘Ghosts’, are taken on a bus-trip from Hell to Heaven, and are given the option of staying there. One Ghost, who was a famous painter in his lifetime, takes a look at the heavenly landscape and is seized with a desire to paint it.

His guide – a former friend and fellow painter, now a Spirit – tells him that, for the present, he should forget about all of that and concentrate on
seeing
.

The Ghost is unhappy about this. He wants to get right down to painting. So the Spirit tells him, ‘Why, if you are interested in the country only for the sake of painting it, you’ll never learn to see the country.’

Sadly, the Ghost, who is driven by his ego,
is
interested in the country only for the sake of painting it, and decides to return to Hell rather than to endure a Heaven in which he can’t display his artistic talents.

Luckily for me, I had no idea, while doing JoGLE, of writing a book about it, and was therefore spared the temptation to regard it as something to be written about rather than experienced.

The downside is that I’ve now had to recreate the entire journey from three imperfect sources: my memory, the route I plotted on my smartphone, and the one- or two-sentence daily updates I posted on my Facebook page.

But perhaps that isn’t such a bad thing. I am, after all, not the kind of walker who cares much about naming and labelling things. Nor am I the kind of walker who likes to bother himself with too much biological, geographical, or historical detail. Instead, I’m the kind of walker who prefers to let his mind wander where it will. So I guess that this book ought to reflect that.

Anyway, Wendy and I eventually arrived at Bidford-on-Avon, where we spent the night at the Harbour Guest House, a black-and-white period building complete with beamed ceilings, log fires, and a panelled dining room.

Although it was a week since we had posted home our backpacker tent and camping paraphernalia, the thrill of staying in such comfortable surroundings hadn’t yet worn off. Hadn’t even begun to diminish, in fact.

I think that this was because the memory of all of those days and nights of taking down and setting up camp, and of squeezing into a tiny space, and of enduring all kinds of inconvenience and privation, remained with us. We still appreciated the
contrast
.

From Bidford-on-Avon, our plan had been to walk to the village of Chipping Camden, where the Heart of England Way connects with the northern end of the Cotswold Way.

Unfortunately, all of the accommodation at Chipping Camden was fully booked. So we were forced to re-route off the Heart of England Way, and walk fifteen miles to the village of
Dumbleton
instead.

During the morning, we followed the course of the River Avon to the market town of Evesham, and during the afternoon we improvised a route, mostly along the banks of the River Isbourne, to Dumbleton.

We spent the night at the Dumbleton Hall Hotel, a nineteenth-century manor house set in swathes of gardens and woodland, and felt very grand – but not too grand to eat pots of instant noodles in our room rather than splashing out on dinner in the restaurant.

The next day, we followed a section of the Winchcombe Way, a waymarked figure-of-eight trail centred on the town of Winchcombe, for fifteen miles to the spa town of
Cheltenham
.

Ironically, after dumping our camping equipment, we now found ourselves in the middle of an Indian summer, and enjoyed a delightful walk through lush farmland.

We arrived in Cheltenham too late, too tired, and too hungry to seek out or to care much for its Regency terraces, its celebrated pump room, its broad avenues, its fine parks, or any other of its elegancies. In fact, having settled in, we left the modest comfort of our inelegant hotel room just long enough to find an inelegant fish-and-chip shop. And that was it.