I have joined a few different people taking on the challenge of walking the whole of Britain’s coastline (them, not me) – just over eleven thousand miles if you follow the footpaths. They all proclaim how varied it is from one day to the next. Nerdy fact alert: did you know that nowhere in the UK is more than seventy miles from the coast?
I was soon planning to move to the east coast of Scotland and visit the Sands of Forvie every day.
Only one thing put me off. Normally at the end of a walk we head to a pub for a warming bowl of soup and a glass of ginger beer. (Drinking alcohol in the daytime makes me sleepy, but this at least sounds as if I’m drinking beer and it has a little kick of ginger to make my taste buds feel naughty.) Buffeted and blown by the Aberdeenshire air, I was mentally choosing between French onion with a Parmesan crouton, blue Stilton and broccoli with ground black pepper, and creamy cauliflower.
I may have been over-optimistic in my culinary expectations. On the south–north route we’d taken along the Sands of Forvie our end point was the village of Collieston. It sounded promising. It sounded just like a village with two or three pubs, a roaring fire in each and a buxom landlady ready to wrap exhausted walkers in a tartan rug.
I discovered that Collieston was the burial place of a renowned smuggler. It’s also known for a folk dance called the ‘Lang Reel of Collieston’, a favourite at local weddings. All well and good, but the crucial information for walkers is that Collieston is rare in Scotland (and in the UK in general) for not having a pub. Not a single pub.
My home village of Kingsclere has the Crown, the George and Horn, the Swan, the Star and probably another couple I don’t even know about. It should lend one of them to Collieston.
Apparently, there was once a fine and alcoholically ambitious local hotel. But in 1911 the women of Collieston got fed up with their menfolk indulging a little too enthusiastically in the spirits on offer. They formed a temperance group and had the hotel closed down. There has been no replacement since. Not in over a hundred years has anyone dared to trample on the desires of that temperance group.
Now, I am a proud feminist and fully respect the women of Collieston for wanting their men to work a little harder, but all I wanted was a bowl of soup, a ginger beer and a warm place to sit down and dry out.
Short of knocking on doors, that wasn’t going to happen. We went back to Elizabeth’s house and I peeled off my wet clothes, this time without Lucy recording me as I did so. I thought of Major Harrington-Harvey and wondered how on earth anyone could think taking off wet clothes constituted erotic radio.
Each to their own.
2
You would think that all you need to record a walking programme, apart from good walking boots, a microphone and the promise of a pub at the end … is a voice.
It helps. It really does. But Lucy and I have proved that you don’t necessarily have to be able to speak to make a radio programme. Whether it’s any good or not is open to debate (this one ended up being discussed on Radio 4’s Feedback, and the reviews were, let’s say, ‘varied’).
It was March 2003 and we were on our way up to Scotland. The night before, I had rung Lucy and croaked, ‘I’ve lost my voice.’
For some reason, I was expecting her to show me some compassion, suggest we postpone our trip to Scotland and send me a bunch of flowers to make me feel better, or at least a packet of throat lozenges.
‘You’ll be fine. And I’ve already paid for the tickets’ is what she actually said, before launching into travel arrangements and where she would meet me at Edinburgh Airport.
My throat in those days was often a little tender. Perhaps it was my body’s early warning system and I should have noticed sooner. I would routinely lose my voice or get an ear infection (probably from always having an earpiece in my left ear with TV talkback blasting its way into my brain). In 2006, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and had three operations over the next couple of years to remove my thyroid and then lymph nodes in my throat. It’s not much fun when a surgeon is about to slice into your neck and you have to sign a piece of paper saying that you understand you may suffer permanent damage to your voicebox. I asked him to be careful.
When I was suffering from just a sore throat, I could usually fix it with cups of hot lemon, ginger and honey and a regular supply of sucky sweets, but this time it was serious. I felt fine, but I sounded like a Basenji trying to bark. (A useless fact for you – the Basenji is a hunting dog originally bred in North Africa which has a strange-shaped larynx. Instead of barking, it comes out with a croaky sort of yodel.)
In those days, we had a sound assistant, whose job it was to carry the microphone and monitor the sound quality so that Lucy, attached by a pair of headphones to the DAT (Digital Audio Tape) machine, could concentrate on the content. Our soundman was called Pete and he was very kind. I could guarantee a more sensitive reaction from him.
When I arrived at Edinburgh Airport, I walked sheepishly across to Lucy and Pete, who were waiting for the microphone pole to appear on the baggage carousel from their flight from Birmingham. (It has to be checked into the hold, I guess, in case it’s used to assault the pilot. Is that a thing? Has that ever actually happened?)
‘Hello,’ I whispered.
‘Jeez,’ said Pete. ‘What’s happened to you?’
I pointed at my throat. ‘Gone,’ I mouthed. ‘Can’t talk.’
He looked at Lucy, who ignored him and offered me a coffee – as if that would magically solve the problem.
‘She’ll be fine,’ she said, with a confidence I suspected she did not feel.
Pete furrowed his brow and shook his head at me. I sipped the sugared coffee and wondered what the hell we were all doing.
We broke one of our golden rules of Ramblings on that trip. Usually, we try not to spend any time with the people we’re walking with before we start recording, not because Lucy and I are unfriendly, but because they tend to share all their best stories as soon as you meet them. However good a storyteller you are, it’s hard to tell a person a tale for the first time twice.
On this occasion, we were intending to walk near Lochearnhead (OS Explorer Map 365, if you’re interested) with a group of women who called themselves ‘The Monday Walkers’.
That would be because they walk together – you guessed it – every Monday.
We had come across them while we were recording another programme in Lanark. We heard them in the woods because they were loud and lost. We’d got chatting, they offered us some whisky and asked us to come and walk with them. So we did, two months later.
The Monday Walkers liked to really walk. Not for them a 6- or 7-mile stroll. No, they were 14- to 16-milers. They didn’t care if they were out on the hillside for seven hours.
Keenly aware that it was going to be a long day in Perthshire, we had come up the night before. We’d accepted an offer from Ulla Ross and her husband, who run a B&B, of a room and dinner. Ulla held out two keys.
‘Now, one’s a double and one’s a twin,’ she said, ‘so who’s sharing with who?’
She looked at Pete and then at me. Then at Lucy and then at Pete. His life flashed before his eyes at the prospect of being forced to share a room – or worse, a bed – with either of us.
Finally, Lucy grabbed a key and said, ‘Clare and I will share. Pete, you’re on your own.’
We took our bags up to our room, to find two twin beds side by side. I like Lucy very much but I didn’t really want to sleep right next to her. She felt the same, so without saying a word we moved to the side of the twin beds and pulled them apart, leaving a respectable gap of a couple of feet.
I tried not to worry about making strange noises in the night that might destroy our working partnership. At the very least, losing my voice might mean I wouldn’t snore.
We had dinner with the whole gang. My voice was working just fine at midnight when the wine was flowing and they were telling tales about their expeditions, husbands, first boyfriends and various illnesses. I t
hink Pete learned more about women in that one evening than he had in his previous thirty-five years on earth.
By nine o’clock the following morning, I wasn’t feeling so clever. My head throbbed and my voice had disappeared completely. It would have been fine if we were just walking, but walking and talking was going to be a challenge.
Ulla was from Sweden and told me she had never really walked there, but since she had come to Scotland and met Anne, Annette and the others she was a convert. She was quite wild, with an extended Swedish family who seemed to get naked at any opportunity. She had skinny-dipped in the sea, in various rivers and in many lakes.
Call me a prude, but I am not generally a fan of nudity.
At school I perfected the art of taking off or putting on clothes without revealing any skin to the outside world. I can take a shirt off from under a jumper, remove a bra from under three layers, and use a towel to protect my lower half in case anyone should ever know that I have a bottom. On my occasional visits to the gym, I am the only one who uses the corner changing room with the door that shuts. Everyone else stands there applying talcum powder all over, chatting about the new Zumba instructor, and I just want to scream, ‘Put some clothes on!’
I started to worry that the Monday Walkers would begin to strip off halfway up a Munro and insist that we join in. At least we had Pete with us, who although in touch with his feminine side in a kind and gentle way was, undeniably, a man. That should be enough to save us all, I hoped.
Anne Hunter and Annette Mackintosh seemed to be the leaders of the gang. Anne was tall, with dark hair, and possessed an innate elegance, even in walking gear. Her voice was soft and deep, with enough of a Scottish accent to indicate where she came from but not so strong to make it difficult for an English ear to understand. She explained the genesis of the group.
‘We’ve been friends for a lot of years. We used to meet on a Monday for lunch, then we discovered we were all getting a bit fat, so we started walking.
‘We started by always walking six or seven miles. Sometimes we would start one walk and then change plans and “chase the blue skies”, which started to take us further. Now, we’re quite adventurous. I can’t say any of it has made us any thinner, but it’s been great.’
Annette was the life and soul of the party. She was the naughty one, the one who would talk the rest of the group into drinking shots and start dancing on the table. Her day’s walking would usually end up with her and Ulla back at her house, drinking whisky and singing along loudly with a 1950s singer I’d never heard of called Freddy Fender. She had the quick one-liners and the warped outlook on life.
‘Don’t be taking a photo from behind me,’ she shouted. ‘It’ll be all backside.’
Annette liked metaphorically to throw the map away and take ‘interesting tracks’. Her knowledge of the various landmarks would ensure that ‘although we’re lost, we know where we are’. It made perfect sense to her, if not to me.
She also seemed to be a walking distillery.
‘As we’ve got older, we need a few little bottles of malt whisky in our bags,’ said Annette. She wasn’t joking. I could hear the rucksacks clinking as they pulled them on the next morning. A better name for the group might have been ‘The Whisky Walkers’.
They were surprisingly jolly, considering the night before. Maybe they were just more used to heavy drinking than I was. The average age of the group was sixty, and they had all been through the sort of experiences you would expect from women who have lived and loved. Ulla had recently had breast cancer and a mastectomy.
‘She just did it to get one up on me,’ said Annette. ‘I mean, I was leading, because I’d had a hysterectomy, and you can’t join this group unless you’ve had a sexual organ surgically removed.’
‘Does a cartilage count?’ I asked.
‘Not unless you’ve been having sex with your knee,’ laughed Annette. ‘Also, you have to be half blind, losing your memory, be having or have had your menopause, have varicose veins and have had them done. And, of course, be a whisky drinker.’
That’s the kind of group they were. I loved them and wanted to be one of them. As we set off into the Perthshire hills, I realized I might be younger than all of them, but I certainly wasn’t fitter. I was breathing deeply after a mile and hadn’t been able to talk even before I’d started puffing.
I learned a valuable lesson that day. Although it’s not ideal to broadcast when you can’t speak, there’s a lot to be said for leaving room for others to talk.
Anne was immediately protective and took over for me, by giving most of the descriptions. Annette jollied me along with whisky and jokes while Ulla recommended a spot of skinny-dipping in the burn.
‘You just take your cloves ov and dive in,’ she enthused. ‘It’s so invigorating.’
I smiled nervously. Lucy saved me.
‘It’s a lovely idea, Ulla,’ she said, ‘but I think we’ll leave it for now. The BBC Health and Safety regulations don’t really cover skinny-dipping in freezing water.’
Lucy is hard to impress but, occasionally, I will manage to invent a description or ask a question that makes her smile. It’s pathetic, really: I feel as if I’m trying to get a good mark from a teacher. She will constantly remind me to describe what’s around us, where we are, where we are going, so that the listener can feel the progress of the walk.
My vocabulary varies depending on the book I’m reading, so I try to read something on the train that will help the descriptive side of things – poetry is particularly good. Once, I’d been reading some U. A. Fanthorpe and then described a moody, purple-grey sky as looking as if it was ‘bruised’.
‘That was quite good,’ Lucy said. ‘Sometimes I can see why you’re worth it.’
‘Just trying to make your life easier,’ I replied. ‘I know you’re an above-average producer, but I’d hate you to do any actual work in the edit.’
Lucy is in charge of editing down the material we record into a 24-minute programme. Sometimes this is easy (she tells me) and sometimes it’s a struggle, usually because good conversations have to be left out, or she decides there are too many voices and has to lose one. This is hard when we’ve spent the best part of a day walking with a person and we’ve really liked them. But Lucy is unsentimental when it comes to the cut.
In the old days, when I first learned to cut tape, you really did cut it – with a razor blade. There were razors all over the office at Broadcasting House and reel-to-reel tape recorders on which you listened to an interview, made a mark in chalk on the ribbon at the beginning of the word or sentence you wanted to remove, made another at the end of it, sliced through with the razor and then patched the remaining bits of ribbon together with a thin white piece of sticky tape. It was quite an art.
I loved de-umming an interview, taking out all the hesitations, false starts and irrelevant words to make a person sound perfectly fluent. It was a good idea to keep a few breaths on little bits of tape, stuck to the side of the machine, so that you could put one in if it was needed. Believe me, an interview with no breaths at all islikeasentencewithnospaces – hard to decipher.
Now, editing is all done digitally and it’s a fair bit easier to repair mistakes if you accidentally chop out a crucial sentence. There’s also no danger of putting the tape in upside down and back to front, which I did once with an interview with Alex Ferguson. I couldn’t understand why he kept talking about a ‘log’. Then I worked out I’d put the word ‘goal’ in backwards.
This is one of the many reasons why I do not interfere in the editing process. I trust Lucy to make it all sound the best it can. And I know it would really annoy her if I started questioning why she had left one section in and dropped another.
The recording kit itself has shrunk over the years. In the days when we had Pete, he carried a complicated piece of kit across his chest and held the microphone expertly in front of him for miles on end. Now, the digital recorder is barely as big as my hand. Lucy carries that, the m
icrophone on a pole and a rucksack containing the first-aid kit, water and a few flapjacks. I sometimes offer to take the rucksack if I’m feeling really generous, but usually I just fill it with the things I don’t want to carry.
I’m always worried that she has forgotten to press record and that we’ll have to retrace our steps.
‘Are you sure it’s on?’ I say, about five times during the course of the walk.
‘Yes, it’s on. I’m not an idiot,’ Lucy replies, although I notice her checking that the red light is blinking.
In the days of Pete, neither of us had to worry. We just trusted him, then grilled him about his love life during breaks in recording. Pete is married now and runs his own company. I suspect we miss him more than he misses us.
After three hours with Pete, Lucy and the Whisky Walkers, I asked, tentatively, how far we had to go. The women were rather vague. Annette said we were at least halfway; Anne gestured to the view and said, ‘Isn’t it just wonderful?’; Ulla veered off dangerously towards the burn; and the others were skipping ahead. An hour later, I asked again: ‘How far do you think we’ve got to go?’
‘Well,’ said Anne, ‘I reckon we’ve done about nine miles now, so just another seven or so to go.’
‘Seven?’ I croaked. ‘Bloody hell. You don’t muck about.’
Once I’d accepted that we were going to be out in the wilds of Scotland for the best part of eight hours, I relaxed. I started to appreciate the vast open spaces around us, the lack of traffic noise, people and houses, and the strength of the friendship around me. We didn’t need to speak all the time, so Pete could swing the boom microphone over his shoulder and stride on with the rest of the group. He quite enjoyed being an honorary woman for the day.
‘It’s kept us all young, and it’s kept us sane,’ Jess, who had taken over the lead, explained. ‘Getting away on a Monday and talking through our losses and our problems – the ones everyone has – has been so valuable. We really talk and we share everything. You get to know people on a deeper level because you’re not just seeing them in easy, comfortable situations. We come up against all kinds of weather and all kinds of circumstances, and we get through them. I think we give each other an inner strength.’
Walking Home Page 4