The Road to Little Dribbling

by Bill Bryson

  I couldn’t for the life of me work out where I was on the map. I couldn’t even find Widecombe. A stiff breeze kept trying to refold the map for me. (Only later, when I was back in the car, did I realize that the map was printed on both sides and that I had been looking at the wrong side.) Wherever exactly I was, it was a lovely walk with top-of-the-world views. Eventually I came to a trig point – always an excitement on a country stroll for they usually indicate that you have reached a summit. ‘Trig’, if you don’t know, is short for triangulation, and a trig point is a small concrete pillar with a brass inset on the top to which a surveying instrument was once attached in order to make an accurate map of the landscape. Every trig point is within sight (albeit distantly) of two others, so that each is at an apex of a triangle. I am not at all sure how a series of triangles gives you a map of Britain – and please don’t write to tell me; I’m not saying I want to know – but somehow it does and that’s what matters. Sarah Palin named her son Trig. I wonder if he knows that he is named after a concrete block.

  The whole of Britain was retriangulated between 1932 and 1962, which is what accounts for all the trig points you find on any walk in the hills. Nowadays of course it is all done with satellites and trig points aren’t needed, so many of them are vanishing, either through neglect or because they are intentionally removed, which I think is sad.

  I expect there is somewhere in Britain a Trig Society. I also imagine that now that I have written this they will ask me to come and speak at their annual meeting. So let me say here that I miss trig points a lot, but not that much.

  Chapter 12

  Cornwall

  I

  FOR SOME TIME, I have believed that everyone should be allowed to have a dozen or so things that they dislike without having to justify or explain to anyone why they don’t like them. Reflex loathings, I call them.

  Mine are:

  1. Salmon-coloured trousers and the men who wear them.

  2. People who say ‘stonking’.

  3. Tasting menus.

  4. The parents of any child named Tarquin.

  5. People who give their telephone number so rapidly at the end of long phone messages that you have to listen over and over and eventually go and fetch someone else to come and listen with you, and even then you still can’t get it.

  6. Calling an invitation an invite.

  7. The BBC red button.

  8. Most book reviewers, but particularly at the moment Douglas Brinkley, a minor American academic and sometime critic whose powers of observation and generosity of spirit would fit comfortably into a proton and still leave room for an echo.

  9. Colour names like taupe and teal that don’t mean anything.

  10. Writing ‘mic’ instead of ‘mike’ for microphone. (Would you write ‘bic’ for ‘bike’?)

  11. Meryl Streep when she is being adorable.

  12. Saying that you are going to ‘reach out’ to someone when what you mean is that you are going to call or get in touch with them.

  13. Kettles that don’t have a little red light to show you whether they are on or not.

  14. Radio 4 afternoon plays.

  15. Harry Redknapp.

  I know that is more than twelve, but this is my concept so I get to have some bonus ones. You might think that driving in the West Country of England in the summertime would be on the list, but it doesn’t qualify because it’s an obvious and rational loathing. It’s the same reason you can’t put Theresa May or men who wear cravats on the list. It has to be something that some people don’t necessarily agree with, and no one can dispute that driving in the West Country in the summertime is a nightmare.

  It took me over an hour to cross the Tamar Bridge, which was only one lane wide going west. What on earth were they thinking when they built it? That was in 1961, at the very time they were trying to put motorways everywhere, but in the one spot where a bit of expansiveness would have made obvious sense, they decided to economize. Go figure.

  Beyond Plymouth, traffic would zip along for a couple of miles, then back up for hundreds of yards at the approach of a roundabout. Everybody would creep forward in increments of two feet for about ten minutes, proceed through the roundabout, speed along for about two miles and then repeat the whole tedious process as the next roundabout came along.

  And so I made my fitful way across Cornwall, past turnings for Looe, Polperro and Fowey. Initially, I thought I might pop down and have a look at some of these, but all the roads to the sea were dead ends and at each I could see long lines of caravans and cars loaded with bicycles and kayaks heading towards the water, and knew that it would take an hour to reach the spot and then there would be no place to park. Nonetheless, just beyond St Austell, bored out of my mind, I impulsively took a turning for Mevagissey.

  Rarely have I more immediately regretted something that I knew that I would immediately regret. The road to Mevagissey was twisting, narrow and frequently motionless. It took ages to reach the outskirts, where there was a giant car park. Cars were queuing to get in. I asked the attendant if I could just turn round. He said of course, and then recognized me, which pleased me. (It doesn’t happen very often. Ask any author.) His name was Matthew Facey, and he wasn’t the car park attendant but the owner. The car park has been in his family for years and it keeps him busy in the summer, but his real passion is photography. I looked at his website later and he is very good. Anyway, we had a nice chat and he urged me to come back out of season, which I promised to do.

  On the way back to the A390, the main road to Penzance, my destination for the night, I passed a sign for the Lost Gardens of Heligan and made an abrupt, impetuous turn down a side lane, bringing a moment’s unscheduled excitement to two cyclists and a caravan. I had never heard of this place, but I was curious to know how you lose gardens. The Lost Gardens of Heligan turn out to be the work of Tim Smit, a Dutchman who has lived in England for years and who is also responsible for the popular Eden Project, a dozen miles to the north on the other side of St Austell.

  Set high on a rolling hill above the sea, Heligan was once a great estate, with a staff that included twenty-two gardeners, but it fell on hard times and the grounds lapsed into weedy ruin. When Smit and his business partner John Nelson came along in 1990, the gardens had been untended for seventy years. Smit and Nelson decided to restore them. It was a monumental task. After seventy years, not much was left even in outline. Two and a half miles of woodland paths had vanished. Greenhouses had fallen in on themselves. Walled gardens were chest-deep in brambles. More than 750 fallen trees had to be cleared away before real renovations could begin. It seemed an impossible task, but Smit, who had trained as an archaeologist at Durham University, brought an archaeologist’s rigour to the task. The upshot is that after years of hard labour, the gardens were restored and today are splendid and thronged, as they deserve to be.

  They cover a huge expanse, much of it woodland, and I must say I was grateful to stretch my legs after so many hours in the car. The woodland walks seem to go on for miles. At first I thought that is all Heligan was, just woods and ferns, but then I came across a walled cutting garden, full of colourful blooms and dancing butterflies. In the distance the sea was just visible, a bright pale blue beneath a matching sky. It was all very fine. In the café I had a refreshing cup of tea and a lovely dry piece of cake – cautiously flavourful in the British style, satisfying but not so delicious that you would want a second piece for a month or so – and returned to the road feeling gloriously restored, like Heligan itself.

  Once every springtime for several years I took a train from London to Penzance, and spent the night there before continuing on the next day to the Scilly Isles to attend the Tresco Marathon. The marathon was held on behalf of the Cystic Fibrosis Trust and I attended as a kind of cheerleader. I didn’t run the marathon, needless to say, but just walked around a bit and shouted helpful, distracting remarks to the runners as they struggled past. The Tresco Marathon was one of the most wonderful things
I have ever experienced. It was held at the same time as the London Marathon, and it existed because the chef at the island hotel, a lovely guy named Pete Hingston, realized he could never run in London on behalf of his little girl, Jade, a cystic fibrosis sufferer, because it was such a busy time on Tresco. So with his wife, Fiona, he started a marathon on Tresco and it rapidly blossomed.

  Because Tresco is small and can hold only so many visitors, entries were limited to one hundred runners, which made it both exclusive and intimate. There are people in the world who collect marathons, and Tresco was one of the hardest to bag. The course was also very tough. Because of the island’s size, runners had to do eight laps around it, which included eight ascents of a long hill. Marathons don’t usually require you to run up a hill eight times.

  Many competitors were there because of a personal connection to cystic fibrosis, and ran on behalf of siblings or partners or children. On at least one occasion, the runner had cystic fibrosis herself; however long you live, you will never see anything more heroic or moving than a person with cystic fibrosis completing a marathon. It was just the best thing ever. It really was. And at the end of the day, having run a marathon, Pete went off to the hotel and spent an evening cooking.

  The only downside in getting to Tresco is getting to Tresco. Formerly there were two ways. One was to take the ferry. This is the way I came on my first visit, and I have to say it was strange. All the passengers – and there weren’t many – went below and lay down on whatever horizontal surface they could find. Many covered their faces with their coats, as if hiding. Just after we left port, the snack bar closed. All this seemed a little odd, and then we hit the open sea and we began to roll and pitch in a weirdly restrained way. I am not the most experienced of sailors, but I have been on a few boats in my time – including once through the Beagle Channel in South America, which isn’t so much a water passage as a trampoline for boats – and I can say that I had never encountered anything quite like this. It wasn’t rough, but just slowly, cumulatively, peculiarly unsettling. The problem, as it was explained to me later, is that the ferry must have a flat bottom to get in among the shallows around St Mary’s, the main port of the Scillies, but this means that it sits on the water like a cork, which guarantees a lot of motion even on the smoothest days. In rough weather, I was told, you will often have the novel experience of being sick on the ceiling.

  One person on Tresco (whose identity I am sworn not to disclose) told me that once he made the sea crossing from Penzance in winter, and when the ferry reached Land’s End, where the currents of the English Channel, Irish Sea and North Atlantic come together in a foamy vortex, the ship could make no headway. For something like two hours it just rode the bouncy waves, unable to go anywhere, until finally the winds relented or tides changed or something, and the ship was suddenly able to chug forward and complete the twenty-five-mile crossing. But when it reached St Mary’s, the waves in the harbour were too big for it to dock.

  ‘The captain announced that he was going to give it one more try and if that failed we’d have to turn round and go back to Penzance, into even rougher seas,’ my informant told me. ‘I swear to you, no exaggeration, I was holding on to a lifesaver and I was seriously thinking of jumping overboard and taking my chances of swimming to the dock. That’s how bad it can be. Luckily, however, the waters calmed for a minute and we were able to tie up at the quayside. You have never seen twenty people get off a ship faster.’

  The only other way to get there was on a giant helicopter. I wasn’t too crazy about the helicopter either because its record was not entirely flawless. In 1983, when it was operated by British Airways, the Scilly helicopter crashed in poor weather. Twenty people died. I took the helicopter several times and it was always fine, but it did rather feel like something that should have been in the Imperial War Museum in the Korean War section. The helicopter service was ended in 2012, on economic grounds, and what used to be the Scilly airfield in Penzance is now a giant Sainsbury’s. Today if you want to get to Scilly, you brave the ferry or fly in a small aeroplane from Exeter, Newquay or Land’s End.

  In 2010, after ten years of heroic existence, the Tresco Marathon was likewise cancelled on economic grounds after a sponsor pulled out. So the Tresco Marathon is now just history. There is no question about it. We live in dispiriting times.

  I was pleased to be back in Penzance. My usual hotel was closed for refurbishment, so my wife had booked me into a boutique hotel at the other end of town. I dropped my bags and hit the streets, keen to get in a walk before dinner and to see how Penzance had changed since I was last there.

  Penzance ought to be fabulous. It has a superlative setting overlooking the island castle of St Michael’s Mount, surely one of the most romantic views in England. It has a long and agreeable promenade and a harbour that could be lovely with a bit of paint and imagination and perhaps one or two sticks of dynamite. Its streets are narrow and beguiling. The terraced houses have a neighbourly feel and often enjoy lovely views. It must be splendid to look out of your bedroom window first thing each morning and know what kind of day it’s going to be from the colour of the sea.

  There isn’t anything about Penzance that isn’t promising. Yet it is a sad and fading place. I walked through the town and was struck by the number of businesses that had gone since my last visit. The Star Inn was boarded up. A restaurant called the Buttery was gone. Several shops were dark and empty. The London Inn was still going but didn’t look to be thriving. A sign by the door said: ‘This is a public house, not a public toilet.’ I was glad to see that the management had taken a stand on the issue, but I can’t say it struck me exactly as an inducement to enter. The Ganges Indian restaurant, where I had often dined, was also gone, though I wasn’t altogether surprised. It was so bad that it wasn’t even within hailing distance of being dreadful. I was generally the only customer. The service was always excellent.

  Across the street from the Ganges was a good pub called the Turk’s Head. I looked through the window now and it was heaving with a Saturday night crowd, so I walked down the street to another good pub, the Admiral Benbow, and it was even fuller. I went back to the Turk’s Head and waded into the throng at the bar. It took an age to get a pint, but to my joy when I turned from the bar I spied a tiny table by the door being vacated and I grabbed it. When I asked a passing waitress about food, she was happy to take an order, but was candid in telling me that service was going to be very slow. The upshot was that for the rest of the evening about every forty minutes the waitress would bring something to my table, and assure me that I hadn’t been forgotten. Generally what she brought was something that would help me with my food when eventually it came – salt and pepper shakers, cutlery wrapped in a paper napkin – but once she brought a slice of bread and butter, which I devoured more or less in a single gulp, like a frog with a fly. At about 8.40, I got a bowl of soup, steaming and delicious, and after a further long interval I received my main course of fish and chips. In between, I had a little bowl of tartar sauce, a pat of butter and many pints of beer. I also learned that if you drink a sufficient amount, dinner ceases to matter very much.

  At about 10 pm, the waitress asked me if I wanted pudding, and we immediately agreed that I was unlikely to live long enough to enjoy it, so we just settled on another pint of beer and the bill. It was quite a wonderful evening in the end – but then when did anyone ever drink seven or eight pints of beer and not have a good time?

  Afterwards I discovered that it is possible to get so drunk that you walk a mile and a half in the wrong direction to the hotel you used to stay at and then spend thirty minutes circling the building wondering why it is covered in scaffolding and your key doesn’t work in any of the doors. I don’t remember anything in detail after that, but I woke up the next morning on top of my bed in the correct hotel, wearing one shoe but otherwise fully dressed, and in the posture of (and feeling remarkably like) someone who has just fallen out of a tree.

  II


  Isn’t it amazing how many people in the world hate you? Most of them you will never even meet, and yet they really don’t like you at all. All the people who write software at Microsoft hate you, and so do most of the people who answer phones at Expedia. The people at TripAdvisor would hate you, too, if they weren’t so fucking stupid. Almost all frontline hotel employees detest you, as do airline employees without exception. All the people who have ever worked for British Telecom, including some who died before you were born, hate you; BT employs vast teams of support staff in India just to hate you.

  But nobody, absolutely nobody, hates you as much as the people who make English bus shelters. I’ve no idea why, but their most earnest wish, the single-minded thought that carries them through every working day, is to make sure that no user of a bus shelter in the United Kingdom ever experiences a single moment’s comfort. So all they give you to rest on is a red plastic slat, canted at an angle so severe that if you fail to maintain a vigilant braced position you will slide off, like a fried egg off Teflon.

  I mention this here because after breakfast the next morning I went for a walk along the seafront and passed a new bus shelter that didn’t even have a canted rail in it, but just a simple pole – like a scaffolding pole, but shinier – resting on three legs. I went into the shelter and tried it just out of interest. It actually hurt to sit on. Goodness knows what a pensioner would make of it. And the shelter was ugly, too. Bus shelters used to be like little cottages, with pitched roofs and built-in wooden benches. Now they are just wind tunnels with advertisements.