Walking with Plato (27 page)

We arrived at our destination, a neat little B&B in Newquay, early in the evening.

Newquay is a major tourist destination, principally on account of its long sandy beaches, especially Fistral Beach, which is a Mecca for surfers. And, like many popular seaside towns, it’s bursting with clubs, pubs, bars, cafés, and amusement arcades.

Normally, I quite like busy seaside resorts. And, although I’m not one for clubs and bars, I’m as likely as the next man to stuff myself with hot donuts and to pour money into a slot-machine.

But, after spending so much time in the countryside, I found it all a bit tawdry and depressing. Well, not
depressing
, exactly. But I can’t say that I liked it much.

That night, Wendy and I sat in a very cheap and very cheerful fish-and-chip shop, and looked forward, with as much sadness as anticipation, to the final section of our End to End adventure.

The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Chapter Eight

Bittersweet

Newquay – Perranporth – Portreath – St Ives – Pendeen – Land’s End

For Wendy and me, the contrast between how JoGLE began and how it ended could hardly have been greater.

It started with a 120-mile trudge from John o’Groats to Inverness: a road-walk of such epic dullness that no right-minded person would ever undertake it except as a means to an end. It ended with a seventy-mile hike from Newquay to Land’s End: a coastal hike of such constant yet varied beauty that no right-minded person would ever want it to end.

For this final part of our journey, we followed a short – alas, all too short – section of the South West Coast Path.

The SWCP, in its entirety, stretches 630 miles from Minehead, in Somerset, to Poole Harbour, in Dorset, encompassing the whole of the Cornwall and Devon coasts. Its origins date back to the nineteenth century when coastguards patrolled the cliff-tops of the southwest coast, scanning the bays and inlets for evidence of smuggling. Today, it’s the longest and most popular long-distance footpath in Britain.

The remarkable thing about the SWCP is that for almost its entire length it passes seamlessly from one scenic splendour to the next, and the next, and the next.

At any given moment, you may be navigating along the edge of a cliff, looking down upon the breakers crashing into the rocks below, or traversing a stretch of sandy beach, gazing out across an expanse of turquoise sea. Later, you may pass a remote lighthouse perched on the farthest edge of a grassy headland. And shortly after that, you may be clambering down the steep side of a rocky inlet.

At each stage, you say to yourself that this can’t possibly last, that sooner or later all of this grandeur and beauty must give way to something less inspiring. But it doesn’t. Each twist and turn of the trail brings fresh delights.

The gods were smiling upon us as we started out from
Newquay
. We had always expected that by this stage of our journey we would be battling with autumn winds and wet and cold. But instead we found ourselves bathed in the warm sunshine of an Indian summer.

The thirteen-mile stretch of coastal path from Newquay to the seaside town of
Perranporth
is categorized as challenging. But we were now so fit and lean, and so used to carrying our backpacks, that it felt like a mere stroll in the park.

About two miles from Perranporth, the SWCP winds its way across Penhale Sands, an area of grass-, moss-, and lichen-covered dunes to the rear of Perran Beach. The route is waymarked, but the waymarks are so often hidden by the dunes that they’re difficult to follow. So we abandoned the ‘path’ and walked along the beach instead.

Perran Beach is wide and sandy and spectacular. It overlooks Perran Bay and the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and is backed by Penhale Sands to the west. At its southern end, close to Perranporth, the dunes give way to cliffs, arches, and stacks.

As I walked along, enjoying the autumn sunshine and the gentle breeze blowing in from the sea, my thoughts wandered back twenty years to one of the best days of my life. Wendy and I were travelling around Australia at the time, and were camping by the sea, a few miles from St Kilda, a suburb of Melbourne.

We had nothing planned for the day. So Wendy decided to hang around the campsite and catch up on some personal chores while I opted to take a walk along the beach.

I was in no hurry. I had nothing to do, and all day to do it. So, rather than taking a slow, lazy saunter along the sand, I decided to take an even slower, lazier paddle in the sea. I splashed, ankle-deep in the balmy waters of Port Phillip Bay all the way to St Kilda. Then I turned around and splashed my way home again.

My memories of that day are hazy. I recall sunshine, blue sky, warm water, and lapping waves, but nothing more specific. I can’t recall what I thought about as I walked, either. All I know is that my thoughts wandered freely and pleasantly.

It has often struck me as curious that a day like that, with no excitement or stimulation, and with nothing achieved and nothing gained, should stand out in my memory as among the happiest I have known. What was it, I have often wondered, that made it so special?

In the ‘Fifth Walk’ of
Reveries of a Solitary Walker
, Rousseau asks himself the same question as he looks back upon the happiest period of his own life: two idle months he spent on the Island of Saint-Pierre, on Lake Bienne, in Switzerland.

He passed his time there indulging his interest in botany, watching the labourers working at the harvest, and – sweetest of all – taking a small boat out onto the lake.

Of this last activity – or rather, non-activity – he says:

[T]here, stretching out full-length in the boat and turning my eyes skyward, I let myself float and drift wherever the water took me, often for several hours on end, plunged in a host of vague yet delightful reveries, which though they had no distinct or permanent subject, were still in my eyes infinitely to be preferred to all that I had found most sweet in the so-called pleasures of life.

At evening time, Rousseau would often return to the lake shore and sit on the shingle in some secluded spot.

[T]here the noise of the waves and the movement of the water, taking hold of my senses and driving all other agitation from my soul, would plunge it into a delicious reverie . . . and it was enough to make me pleasurably aware of my existence, without troubling myself with thought.

Here, in describing the blissful hours he spent at Lake Bienne, Rousseau identifies precisely what it was that had made the hours I spent on that Australian beach so blissfully and unforgettably sweet. Namely, the experience – which most of us seldom get to enjoy – of
simply
being
.

In our everyday lives, our thoughts, affections, and desires are continually being dragged away from the here and now to some other place, some other time, or some other possible state of affairs. We are forever plotting, analysing, regretting, longing, grasping, or clinging. Seldom just living.

But that day, on that Australian beach, those thoughts were quieted. I was ten thousand miles away from the cares and concerns of my everyday life. The past and the future were sufficiently remote to have lost their accustomed influence upon me. And so the present moment – the lapping of the waves, the warmth of the sun and the blue of the sky – was everything.

At St Kilda, I enjoyed this blissful state for just a few hours. But on Lake Bienne, Rousseau experienced it, day after day, for weeks. And the longer it continued, the more captivating it became, until eventually he came to regard it as ‘the height of happiness’.

As we walked along Perran Beach, that autumn day, with our End to End adventure fast drawing to a close, a thought struck me with such sudden force that I had to stop for a moment to let it sink in.
JoGLE was my Saint-Pierre!

All of those slow miles through towns, villages, farmland, and forests, all of those slow miles over moors, mountains, and hills, all of those slow miles across beaches, ploughed fields, and pastures, all of those slow miles beside lakes, rivers, and streams, all of those slow miles had brought me, little by little, to a very special state of mind.

It was the same state of mind that Rousseau experienced at St Pierre, and which he describes so lyrically and so beautifully as:

a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts[.]

Wendy and I arrived at Perranporth at around four o’clock. It’s a resort town, and popular with surfers, but, unlike its bigger, brasher neighbour, Newquay, it’s neat, tidy, and unspoiled.

We treated ourselves to ice-creams and sat on a rock on the beach to eat them. It was a perfect afternoon. We were surrounded on every side by the freshest, cleanest shades of blue, green, and turquoise. The wide expanse of sea, the even wider expanse of sky, and the grassy headlands complemented one another so perfectly, and evoked such a sense of peace, freedom, and contentment, that they might have been put together for that very purpose by some Cosmic Designer.