Free Country: A Penniless Adventure the Length of Britain

by George Mahood

  ‘When you put it that way, yeah, we are. It’s too late to leave now though. Isn’t that him getting out of the red Land Rover over there?’

  And there he was. He was wearing, what I can only describe as, denim hot pants. They were the smallest, tightest shorts that I have ever seen. To complement these, he was wearing a white vest (the kind typically worn by rappers and wife-beaters) which was skin tight and tucked into his shorts. As if this sartorial statement was not bold enough, he finished off the outfit with a pair of wellies. We had salvaged clothes from a lost property, the coastguard, old people, cyclists and farmers, yet we still fell short of Michael Eavis’ eclectic mix. But somehow he pulled it off.

  We walked over to him.

  ‘Hi, Michael. My name is Ben and this is my friend George.’

  ‘Hello, lads. Nice to meet you both,’ he replied whilst walking towards the office, seemingly trying to get away from us as quickly as he could.

  ‘We’re cycling to John O’Groats without spending any money and we thought we’d call in, as we were passing,’ continued Ben unfazed.

  ‘Ok, good luck with the trip,’ he replied as he reached the farm door.

  We thought that was it. We’d cycled all that way. We’d covered all those miles. We’d slept in a barn, and endured hunger, thirst, aches and pains. We’d creepily arrived on the doorstep of our hero, like a pair of crazed weirdoes, and all we were going to get in return was a brief ‘Good luck’. I made one last ditched attempt to engage him in conversation before he entered the house and was gone for good.

  ‘So, can you reveal any secrets about who’s going to be headlining the festival next year?’

  ‘Ha ha, nice try,’ he said, pausing at the door. ‘Did you say you were going to John O’Groats? Come with me, I’ve got something to show you.’

  Now, normally when a man says a line like this to you (especially a man wearing a vest, wellies and hotpants) you should scream and run away as quickly as possible. In this case, seeing as it was Michael Eavis, we decided to go with our instincts and follow him.

  He led us back past the office and around into the yard. Leaning up against one of the walls was a huge metal ring, about eight feet in diameter.

  ‘A couple of lads passed through here about 25 years ago,’ he said. ‘They set off from Land’s End, like you two, and had this huge wheel that they planned to push all the way to John O’Groats. I don’t know why, but they thought it would be fun, I guess. Anyway, they came to the festival here and had such a great time that they decided they couldn’t be bothered to go to John O’Groats and they never made it any further.’

  ‘That’s amazing. And this is the wheel that they were pushing?’ asked Ben.

  ‘Yep, it’s been here ever since. It was a lovely looking wheel back then. A type of wagon wheel, I guess. All this middle bit was wooden but it’s rotted away over the years and all that’s left is this metal rim. They phoned me up a few years back and asked if I still had it. I told them the wood had gone, but they could come and pick up the rest if they wanted. I never heard from them again.’

  We were best friends with Michael Eavis by this point. Or, should I say Mikey Boy, as he liked us to call him. After we chatted for a bit longer he told us we could call him The Mickster, and then a while later we got to call him Eavo. By the time we left, we had dispensed with names all together, and had established our own special handshake, that only Ben, Eavo and I understood. We were inseparable.

  After some long farewell hugs and a tearful goodbye we got back on our bikes and left his farm. In doing this we had surpassed the two losers with the big wheel.

  It was 3pm and we had cycled a total of five miles in six hours. 1.2 mph was not particularly impressive progress. We had missed lunch and so pressed on to get to Bath before the end of the day. The A39 skirted around the city of Wells, which they say is a pleasant market town. I’ll have to take ‘their’ word for it, as we didn’t get to see it. The film Hot Fuzz was filmed mostly in Wells. FACT.

  After Wells, there were several long uphill sections that turned our legs to mush. We were feeling the effects of a fry-up being our only source of energy for the day.

  From high up on the hill when we first saw it, Bath looked like any other city. From the ground level, however, it was particularly beautiful.

  Pinky and The Falcon reached record speeds as we screeched into the town centre at about 5.30pm, tired and desperate for lunch. I was ravenous, but Ben had other things on his mind.

  ‘There’s a policeman!’ shouted Ben. ‘I’ll go and ask him if they have any bikes at the station.’

  ‘But… uh… wait… can’t we...’

  It was too late. Ben had dropped his bike and was chasing a policeman up the street. After a few minutes of animated nodding and gesticulating he returned.

  ‘That policeman says we could try the station down here. It’s just down this road, turn right, then left, then right and then it’s on the left. He says you can’t miss it. Come on, we might as well go there now and have a look.’

  ‘For new bikes?’ I asked.

  ‘No, to hand ourselves in. Of course for new bikes, you bellend.’

  ‘Can’t we try and get food first? The police station will still be there later, but I might not be if we don’t eat soon.’

  ‘Alright, but we’ll definitely give it a try later, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  We wheeled our bikes up the main street on the lookout for somewhere to get food. We passed a bakery that had closed for the day, but there was a stack of refuse bags piled up outside. Ben and I had talked about dustbin-diving a few days previously, and this was our first potential opportunity.

  Dustbin-diving, or ‘freeganism’ as it is now fashionably known, has gained a new lease of life in recent years. Freegans adopt an anti-consumerist lifestyle and an alternative way of living. They prey on the discarded waste of supermarkets, restaurants, shops and cafés and try to have minimal impact on the economy. Due to a combination of stringent hygiene laws and an increased desire by the consumer for food to be of the highest standard, the stuff that is thrown out is often perfectly edible.

  Ben and I both had a bit of anti-consumerism in us and a keen desire to ‘beat the system’. We started rummaging through the bin bags, one by one. They all seemed to be full of empty cake wrappers.

  We dug deeper.

  ‘Shit, a needle,’ squealed Ben, holding his finger with a look of panic across his face.

  ‘Fuck. Oh shit, you…’ I started, before noticing his big grin. ‘You idiot. That’s not funny.’

  We carried on foraging for a few minutes until Ben found a giant tub of egg mayonnaise. The pot still had its label on, but drizzles of egg were oozing from the sides.

  ‘Hey, George, check this out. What do you think? It’s best before tomorrow.’

  ‘Yeah, cool, it looks… err… great, yeah.’

  ‘You can have it if you want. I’m not a big fan of egg mayonnaise.’

  ‘No, you have it. Finder keepers, losers weepers, and all that.’

  ‘No really. Consider it a gift from me to you.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, but I couldn’t possibly accept.’

  ‘Well I’ll just leave it here where we found it, if you’re not going to eat it.’

  ‘Good plan,’ I said. We were the world’s worst freegans.

  ‘To be fair, though,’ I said, ‘I’m pretty sure real freegans don’t eat egg either. I think the word freegan probably comes from ‘free’ and ‘vegan’.’

  ‘Good point. Shall we try those bags then?’ asked Ben, pointing to another pile outside the back door of a restaurant.

  We were halfway through the first bag when a large, sweaty chef stepped outside his restaurant for a cigarette break.

  ‘Oi! Get the hell out of my bins, you tramps. Go on, clear off,’ he shouted. We scurried off like a couple of diseased rats. It’s a hard life being a freegan.

  ‘Shall we just try asking in
Caffè Nero for some food instead?’ asked Ben.

  ‘Yes, that sounds much more civilised.’

  We asked the lady behind the counter what the company policy was on leftovers, and she told us that any leftovers were bagged up and then put outside the following morning.

  ‘How many sandwiches do you have to chuck out each day?’ asked Ben.

  ‘Very few,’ she said, ‘Maybe three or four packs. We’re pretty good at ordering our stock so there’s not much waste.’

  ‘So if we came back in the morning and went through your bins before the bin men got here, we could have some free packs of sandwiches?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. Or I could just give them to you now. I’m closing in ten minutes anyway.’

  This sounded like a much better idea. She scoured the chiller cabinet looking for sandwiches that had reached their best before date, and returned with three packs of sandwiches and a fancy looking salad. See, we were freegans after all. Albeit polite and sophisticated freegans. I don’t mean to imply that freegans are impolite and unsophisticated, I just meant that… oh, never mind.

  We sat on a bench outside Caffè Nero and ate our sandwiches.

  ‘God, I’m starving. We’ve only cycled about 20 miles today. How come we’re so hungry?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s all that mental energy we’ve been using up,’ said Ben.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Did you know that our brains use up a third of our energy?’

  ‘Really? That would explain why you don’t eat much.’

  ‘Very funny, you idiot.’

  ‘So…’ I pondered, ‘does that mean that you could go to the library for exercise?’

  ‘Well, no, it’s not going to give you big muscles.’

  ‘No, but you could burn calories just by reading books and learning stuff?’

  ‘Yes. I suppose so.’

  ‘We could start a new diet craze. Forget Atkins or Dukan, the Ben and George Diet sounds way better.’

  We sat for a while debating this until we remembered that we didn’t have anywhere to stay.

  We got chatting to three students (two female and one male) back on the main street. It took us a while to explain what our challenge was, as they had no idea where either Land’s End or John O’Groats were. Pah, the youth of today! We told them we were looking for someone who would let us sleep on their floor.

  ‘We can help!’ exclaimed the blonde.

  ‘Yeah, you can sleep on our floor,’ added the brunette.

  ‘Really? That’s great. Thanks. Where do you live?’ asked Ben.

  ‘Bristol.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But you could get the train there with us, and then you would be a bit closer to Scotland when you set off tomorrow,’ added the guy.

  ‘It’s very tempting. But that would be cheating, I’m afraid. We’ve got to cycle all the way and we wouldn’t be able to pay for the train fare. Thanks very much for the offer though.’

  It’s not often that two gorgeous girls stop you in the street and then beg you to go and stay at their house. But such was our dedication to the challenge that we waved them goodbye and set out to find somewhere to stay.

  ‘Let’s go to the pub,’ said Ben, after we had been wandering the streets for another hour.

  ‘You read my mind,’ I said.

  We parked our bikes just inside the doorway of a pub so that we could keep an eye on them. It didn’t take long for us to register that it was a gay pub. I know it’s not politically correct to stereotype gays and lesbians, but the clientele looked like, well, stereotypical gays and lesbians.

  The barman, a young rosy-cheeked boy, listened to our story while he held his head with his hands.

  ‘Are you ok?’ I asked, after we had explained our challenge and that we were hoping for a free beer.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, sorry. I’m just feeling like shit from last night. Bit of a wild one, if you know what I mean,’ he said with a grin as he coyly looked over to a group of guys in the corner who all raised their glasses at him. ‘I only got up about ten minutes ago and I feel like absolute crap. Yeah, I can definitely sort you both out with a beer, though.’

  ‘How long have you been going?’ shouted one of the guys in the corner who had obviously overheard us telling our story to the barman.

  ‘Six days,’ I said.

  ‘And how many miles have you done?’

  ‘About 200.’

  ‘And you reckon you’re going to complete it in three weeks?’ he laughed.

  ‘Yeah. We’ll do it.’

  ‘No you won’t, mate. You’re fucked. You’ve only done 200 miles and you’ve got 15 days left. Mathematics says you’re fucked.’

  ‘We’ll make it. We’re a bit behind schedule but we’ll catch up,’ said Ben.

  ‘It’s not possible, mate. Mathematics says you are fucked.’

  One of the women joined in.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing drinking in a pub, when you should be cycling? He’s right y’know. You’re fucking fucked.’

  The whole group erupted into fits of laughter.

  Of all the countless people that we met during our 1000-mile journey, these were the only people who ever doubted we would complete the trip. They continued to mock us in a tongue-in-cheek way, and we gave as good as we got. Their comments echoed through our minds for the rest of the trip and we felt even more determined to prove them wrong. I sent Adam – the most vocal of the bunch, and the obvious ringleader – an email after the trip to revel in our glory. I didn’t get a response.

  The table of doubters bought us pint after pint. It felt like we were being groomed, had it not been for the fact that none of them offered us a bed for the night. There we were, two attractive, naïve, homeless, drunken men in a gay pub and we still couldn’t find a bed for the night. We stumbled out of that pub at about 10.30pm and into another.

  This one was full of underage Goths mingling in close-knit groups. We needed to work quickly because closing time was approaching and we still had nowhere to stay. Five pints of beer had given us extra confidence so we took it in turns to approach the various cliques.

  ‘Alright, guys. We’re not mental or anything, so don’t be afraid. I don’t suppose any of you have a floor that we can sleep on tonight?’ asked Ben.

  Blank stares.

  ‘We’re cycling to Scotland without any money and we need somewhere to stay tonight,’ I added.

  There was still no sense of recognition whatsoever from any of the faces. They all looked completely stoned out of their brains, and trying to comprehend anything that we said was far too taxing. We had exactly the same response from each of the different groups. The barman gave us half a pint of lager between the two of us, and we retreated to a table to decide on our next strategy.

  ‘Did you say you were looking for somewhere to stay?’ asked a husky voice over our shoulder.

  ‘Yeah. We’ve got nowhere to stay tonight. Have you got any ideas?’ I asked.

  The voice came from a young man dressed in army combats and a black Guinness t-shirt. He had floppy blonde hair and a goatee beard that was so goat-like that I was surprised when words came out of his mouth, rather than a bleat.

  ‘You might be able to stay at my place. I’ll have to give my housemates a quick call, but I reckon they’ll be cool with it.’

  ‘That would be brilliant. Thank you. What’s your name?’

  ‘Max. Sorry, I’ve lost my voice,’ he whispered, pointing to his throat. ‘I’ll just go and give them a call and I’ll be back in a minute.’

  Max returned a few minutes later.

  ‘Yeah, they were cool with that,’ he whispered, ‘but they asked me to check that you’re legitimate and not some sort of clever con people. I know it sounds stupid, but have you got any ID or anything?’

  ‘No. We haven’t got anything at all, I’m afraid. We set off from Land’s End with nothing but a pair of boxer-shorts and everything we’ve got we have blagged from peopl
e along the way,’ I said, trying to reassure him.

  ‘Errr, cool, that sounds wicked, man. You really just started in just boxer shorts? Respect. Yeah, man, you both seem genuine, but my housemates did want me to check. There are some dodgy people about.’

  ‘We completely understand. I’m sorry we haven’t got any ID or anything. But I can promise you that we are 100% genuine. We wouldn’t be asking random people unless we were really desperate,’ said Ben.

  ‘That’s cool. You can stay at mine. I haven’t got anything worth nicking anyway, so if you are con men then you’ll be pretty gutted. I’ll just go and finish my beer and I’ll give you a shout when I’m leaving.’

  By this point, Max’s voice had almost completely disappeared, so the prospect of him giving us a shout was unlikely. We had left it late, but by 11.15pm we had eventually found ourselves somewhere to sleep.

  We walked with Max back to his house, which was 20 minutes from Bath town centre. He spoke – well, whispered – to us about the course that he was studying at university, his dream to direct music videos and the fact that he had only lived in England for two years. His dad had worked for the military and Max had spent his childhood at various bases around the world. In the two years he had lived in Bath, he had already developed a strong South West accent.

  Max was having relationship issues. Sarah, a girl we had met briefly in the pub, had been in floods of tears. She and Max were supposed to be an item, but then had got very distressed because she had seen a girl that she liked snogging another girl. It was a very complicated situation that Max failed to explain properly, but he had basically realised that his girlfriend preferred girls to him. Ben and I, being ‘men of the world’, gave him the best advice we could, and he seemed genuinely touched to have received guidance from us older, more experienced guys. Although, I have to confess that my experience with lesbian love triangles is unfortunately non-existent.