by Jon Bounds
* * *
Walking down the hill, I remember something.
'We should get something to eat after this one.' As I say this, I see Midge visibly sags with relief.
Jon hesitates. 'Three or four more piers today and I don't want to be late meeting Dean.'
'You guys haven't eaten since we started,' says Midge.
'That's not true.' Jon doesn't sound too sure.
I start thumbing through my notebook. To be honest, it could be true; I fried my hunger glands long ago with cheap speed and cider, and I now rely on cues from the people around me to remind me to eat. But if the people around you are a body-conscious mod and a tiny punk too polite to mention that we promised to sort out his food arrangements, it could just be possible that Midge was right.
'Ha, that's a lie!' I pound my notebook with satisfaction. 'We had toast for breakfast.'
'That was yesterday…' Midge's eyes narrow, checking if I'm joking.
A couple of pages in my notebook pop unstuck.
'Oh, okay, let's get some food, food is important,' I say.
Jon just shrugs, his bin-liner coat shining despite the cloudy sky.
To get on to Swanage Pier you have to purchase a strolling ticket from a nice old gentleman in a booth. He carefully rips off the ticket from a large roll with his stiff fingers and pushes them over the counter before you have a chance to ask for them. I give him a pound coin and he stares at it like it's the Gordian Knot. I instantly feel bad for being so flash. But then I remember not to be fooled. The Swanage Pier Trust may look like charming, arthritic volunteers but they are in fact hardcore. In 1993 they took ownership of the pier, which had been in disrepair for 27 years, and promptly raised the £1m needed to renovate the elaborate split-level structure, even bringing the paddle ferries back to the bay.
* * *
Swanage knows its place in history: Punch and Judy, taking the waters, Leslie Ash having a Kodak moment, shipwrecks. Danny snogs the mannequins in the museum and touches things I'm not sure you should touch. He pokes a model frogman and reads the frogman's Beezer comic. He spends too long on the 'what the butler saw', turning the handle one battered print after another. I have a go, too. It feels like we've now got to the roots of the summer. I am most intrigued to see a young Keith Richards strobe past along with the topless exotic dancers.
It's fitting, as this is by far the most Carry On pier we've seen – deliberately playing up how it would feature on a famous McGill postcard, luxuriating in the history of a Two Ronnies film (fittingly enough, the 1982 TV Special By the Sea).
SWANAGE
Opened: 1896
Length at start: 643 ft (196 m)
Length now: 643 ft (196 m)
Burn baby burn? No, but breached in 1939 as a war precaution and damaged during strong weather in 2013.
An earlier pier existed nearby, which was used to load locally quarried stone onto waiting boats. The current version has a museum stuffed full of 'saucy' Donald McGill postcards and 'What the Butler Saw' machines. The pier has over 100,000 visitors a year, which in 1982 included both of the Two Ronnies.
The pier is pleasant, with much white ironwork around its edges. Brass plates underfoot contain messages, sometimes personal, sometimes quirky and amusing. Occasionally someone has put flowers between the slats next to the plaques. Anglers dot the edges, only discernible from the men just standing there by the equipment they scarcely touch.
A paddle steamer boards and leaves while we are on the pier, much to our amusement. Swanage is the first split-level pier that we have seen and we are dwelling longer than usual because the atmosphere has a jolliness to it that we haven't really experienced yet on the trip.
* * *
Further up the pier a fisherman's mobile rings. There's blood smeared across a memorial bench, cast sparklingly in light reflected off the white cliffs. The boards, the lumpy iron railings, the hand-painted signs for boats to catch, all seem lit for and shot in an old grade of film – bright reds and slightly off-whites dominate.
* * *
'What are you doing?' I straighten up and turn to face Midge with as much nonchalance as I can force.
'Nothing.' I scrunch up my face and shake my head to illustrate how much nothing it is I am doing.
'Yes you are, you're stuffing something between the boards. I saw you at the last pier as well. What is it?' Midge presses with a smile on his face.
I've always had the impression that Midge's continued friendship with me has always come from his certain knowledge that, however odd or different he is from the general populace, it comforts him to know there's always someone weirder.
'It's salt.' It was bound to come out sooner or later. 'I'm trying to make a protective salt ring around the country. It's a magick thing.' Midge walks over and looks down.
'And you can do that with sachets of salt from KFC?'
'It's symbolic.'
'It's bollocks,' he says with a laugh.
* * *
We ask a passing tweed cap to take our photo, faces through the holes, as a young family with fat wife and all.
* * *
Looking around Swanage town we are overwhelmed with the food choices. I suggest the Wimpy we walk past. Wimpy was the English burger bar that existed in this country before McDonald's. I honestly thought they had all closed and can't think of a better metaphor for a dying English culture than eating in a now nearly defunct chain hamburger shop.
'I'm not eating in a fucking Wimpy,' Midge says flatly. Granted, he hasn't eaten much in the last three days and is probably looking forward to an actual meal.
'Come on, it's perfect, look,' I say, gesturing to the menu of food that all looks terrible.
'Definitely not, no.' Midge storms away.
Jon shrugs, his apathy for food balancing almost neatly with his love of obscure British brands.
Wimpy made it from America to England 20 years before McDonald's and quickly spread to India, Japan, Ireland, New Zealand and South Africa. It was the only game in town as far as chain restaurants or American-style dining was concerned. From my youth I remember a mascot that consisted of a hamburger dressed as a Beefeater (and I half remember a Spectrum computer game starring the squat tower warden). Even back then Wimpy had been erroneously marginalised as an English knock-off of McDonald's glamorous authenticity. Since then, you still see them around the country, cowering in service stations like beaten dogs or looking confused on some backwater high street, sticking out like a pensioner wearing their slippers to the post office. The most English thing about Wimpy is not the table service that they seem to have a childlike stubbornness in keeping, but their tenacity to stick around, refusing to believe in defeat because of their once brief but almost worldwide dominance.
* * *
We head into town, make a circuit of the eateries, and choose to eat dry fish and chips. Due to some complicated system we manage to confuse the waitress enough for her to bring cans of cider we haven't ordered. We obviously look like the cider-before-lunchtime types. We eat quietly, drinking ginger beer, aware perhaps that we've snagged the best table in the restaurant. There are regulars, old guys and gals on permanent vacation, or those who quickly gain a routine while on holiday, who want the table. It's the one with the sea view. We have our heads down, writing. The table is fairly silent. I exchange a few Internet messages and think of the people I'm missing. Of people back in Birmingham essentially. Heinz sauces will do that to me. I squeeze some red out over my chips and feel guilty.
Nothing is as English as Heinz ketchup in the sauce game, except perhaps HP. The HP bottle really is iconic – the round-cornered square, the unusual colour and the name that has nothing to do with the taste. It's from a time before modern marketing, much like large parts of Swanage.
I went to school within smelling distance of the HP factory in Birmingham. On a day when the wind blew from Aston Cross towards the park, you could feel the tang of molasses in your nostrils. I used to swear I could tell whether it
was original, fruity or curry flavour production that day. The illuminated HP sign shone like the chip-shop equivalent of the bat signal, except this one shone across the M6 as opposed to the rooftops of Gotham City; it meant you were home. We won't see it when we complete our trip, as it's been taken away. The factory closed and production moved to a cheaper facility in Holland, despite Heinz saying that they'd do no such thing when they took over the local company that had been making HP sauce for decades. The demolished site is now being rebuilt as a modern factory, with the usual mixed-use plans for a hotel alongside. Like many a modern building, it seemed to go up too quickly to have a lasting impact; construction without toil seems so temporary. The HP sign is in the storage warehouse of the local museum, the brand's association with a place now historical and intangible.
* * *
'Jon, have you noticed we're getting stared at?' I say loudly, hoping the other patrons get the hint.
'It's probably the jacket,' says Jon, once again referring to the thin bin-liner bomber jacket he's wearing. Despite its complete lack of practical value he hasn't taken it off since we left Birmingham. 'It was designed by Paul Weller for Liam Gallagher's fashion label, thus making it the most mod piece of clothing ever created.'
'Both Paul Weller and Liam Gallagher are fucking pricks, though, Jon. You're wearing a prick's coat.'
Jon looks hurt briefly then shrugs. Midge shoots me a look and I'm suddenly aware of the numerous pairs of eyes on me from the other people in the chippy, mostly elderly with either raised bushy eyebrows or jowl-wobbling heads. I try to look sorry but then shrug as well.
* * *
I haven't bought Heinz products since that day; there's no orchestrated campaign, I just feel uneasy. Little choices that we can all make, little remembrances of things past. Forget the fossils in the museum opposite, forget King Arthur, forget the 'Ralph Coates museum' that I can't believe exists but am sure I saw a sign for. The reminders of history are all around us. And reminders of the present too. There's a piece of Banksy graffiti near where we get back into the piermobile. The sauce signal is calling us onward.
* * *
Bournemouth is so good they named it once, but you probably have to repeat it a couple of times if they haven't got a hearing aid in. Driving into it, the place looks like a very modern student town with a one-way system that is conspiring with our satnav to give Midge an aneurysm. Bournemouth has had a reputation as a retirement resort and home of the invalid since the 1840s when a physician, Augustus Bozzi Granville, included it in a book called The Spas of England. Granville is also credited as the first person to perform a medical autopsy on an Egyptian mummy.
Despite its reputation, Bournemouth has always been forward-thinking. It was one of the first towns to have a telephone: reportedly the telephone number was '3'. It was also the first local authority to introduce CCTV (in 1985, one year after Orwell's prediction) supposedly to stop small crime and vandalism. However, considering that most of the council's income still comes from parking fines (the local clamping vans have an almost supernatural alacrity), it's not a big leap to suggest a connection. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, when we find a car park we are almost immediately approached by a lady wanting to give us her car parking ticket, which still has an hour or two left on it. It seems a very English thing to do, appealing to the pagan, anti-establishment streak we've had passed down since the Saxons. Punk (the political attitude, not the fashion trend) could only really have taken root in Britain, tapping into our genetic memory of centuries spent under the rule of some invading force.
It was a precaution against the latest invasion threat that Bournemouth Pier, along with most others on the southern coast, was part-demolished in 1940. But piers are nothing if not survivors and the German threat wasn't able to finish what storms, erosion and an infestation of Teredo worm had started during the previous 84 years. Bournemouth Pier reopened in 1946 and has been given two major refurbishments since, the latest costing £1.7m in 1979.
BOURNEMOUTH
Opened: 1861 (Architect: George Rennie, then Eugenius Birch for the 1880 iron version)
Length at start: 1,000 ft (305 m)
Length now: 750 ft (229 m)
Burn baby burn? No, but wormrot, bad weather, and antiinvasion breaching by the Royal Engineers in 1940 have all damaged it at some point or other.
A much smaller jetty existed for five years before the George Rennie pier replaced it in 1861. A 1949 British Pathé film shows girls playing the 'new sport' of sea cricket (essentially cricket in the sea) with spectators watching from the pier. Continuing as a home for odd sports, it now has a zip wire, 'PierZip', connecting the pier head with the beach – reportedly the first in the world.
Bournemouth Pier also costs 60p to step onto, but this will be a brisk walk rather than a stroll through the arcade and across a seriously sturdy structure. Blue panelling acts as a windbreak, with benches and cut-throughs. Midge walks on ahead, as is becoming the norm on each pier. He's consciously giving us space to do the things he says he doesn't understand. He is, as I know and have seen, perfectly capable of doing anything we're doing, but he has decided that we're 'the artists' and he is the hired help. He's not only practical, but thinks deeply about life and how people get through it. He's also not immune to what he refers to as 'that psychogeography stuff', liking Will Self every bit as much as I do and happy to spend time in the mindspace where place and emotion collide. I think he's enjoying the trip, but we've yet to really fall into 'comfortability'. I'm not yet able to be comically nasty to him. With Danny, I can be, but we're taking a break from each other here – we are separated by the windbreak and swap over as we walk towards the theatre that blocks any view ahead to the sea. When we do walk around the theatre to the end of the pier it's a little featureless, a glass-fronted terrace for dull meals and a perfunctory coin-operated carousel. We could be anywhere.
Bournemouth seems to have been regenerated at just the wrong time: the late eighties and early nineties, a decade of mirrored glass and the sort of modernism that flirts with post- without ever being sure what the artistic movement was about. It leads to tubes of no use, metal coated in plastic, bright-but-dull red and blue. The pier and its plaza are cut off from the pavilion and gardens by a raised ring road, and the only building that you can really see on shore is a glass lump.
We watch the surfers. There's wind, but not enough for them to get much of a ride. Cue conversation about surfing: Danny will mention having a go in Australia and the film Point Break; Midge will admire the determination and hippyish outlook on life amongst surfers. The closest I'll get to surfing is various hair products. Still, it's a colourful and decidedly rooted activity. They can only surf with the correct conditions, right equipment and experience. They will be back; this is a commitment.
What looks from a distance like it might perhaps be another local bit of colour – a charming local craft market – turns out to be stalls of the sort of tat to be found at car boot sales up and down the country. Danny buys a leather wrist-bangle; it's too rough to be called a bracelet and it's not shiny.
* * *
'We should find a coffee shop or something,' says Jon, checking his phone for local Wi-fihotspots.
'By "something" do you mean "a pub"?'
'I know your 3.30 thing, but we could find a pub, yeah,' says Jon a little defensively.
'There's a holiday clause in that particular rule anyway; we could find a pub, I suppose.'
'We've got a ferry to catch later,' says Midge, 'shouldn't we just push on?' He knows that his isn't really a deciding vote and he is too tired to put up that much of a fight.
'Anyway, I've got a couple of phone calls to make. It'd be good to be in one spot to make them,' I say, deciding it.
* * *
I'm starting to feel a little cut off from the world outside the Clio, and the blandness of the surroundings isn't helping. My usual connection is the web, but the lack of electricity and the patchy phone signal mean
that we haven't really been able to use it. I really fancy sitting in an airy, independent coffee shop, able to linger with my laptop, but searching the town reveals nothing quickly so we head into a pub, The Brasshouse.
It's cavernous and dark, and the air is thick with chain-food grease and fun music. It's a place for people to wait for coaches, surrounded by luggage, after the hotels chuck them out but before the holiday is officially over. The place is full of tired, irritable bonhomie and everything has the furry texture I associate with impatience. There's no one here who doesn't wish it was yesterday or tomorrow. It's the long, dark pub lunch of the soul. With chips and peas.