August 21, 2011
Car Boot Sales and Thatcher's Children.
Today was perfect in just about every-way. The weather and the road together with the places. The quiet little road in late afternoon before finding a place to camp. It began on a damp note though with the tent soaked inside by condensation and on the outside by wet sea mist.
The camping-site too was a dampener. The place allot to me was a poorly drained field with a ten minute walk to the services. The owner justifies charging me fifteen pound as she said "It's high season you know." I deduce from the tone of that that car-drivers, backpackers and cyclists are all charged the same flat rate of fifteen pounds. The later two subsidizing the former. I needed to get away less pay for a second night.
I cycled into and through the small town of South Morton where few people were about at the early hour of half past seven on a Sunday morning except that is, a group of club cyclists brightly clad in yellow and red assembled in the square. On the way out of town mist was clearing and dark rain cloud rolled in over the hills. Not more rain today I thought. But the cloud melted over the following hour finally leaving blue sky and radian sunshine.
The road onwards was a quiet B road and the scenery pleasing though there were a few steep hills, hills of twenty per cent gradient, and there was even one which was twenty-five per cent, that's a one in four hill.
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I reached Great Torrington at eleven o'clock and found a shop open where I bough food. The friendly shopkeeper was a Scot and when I remarked you're not from around here he replied "nay, fram op North."
The town was on top of a hill and on the way out before dropping down there was an open grassy common on one side of which was what is called a "Car Boot Sale", people selling things from cars and vans, I didn't see what as I headed over the other side to where there were picnic tables by clumps of trees and a view down over the surrounding hills. A good place to stop and make a cup of tea. I took the tent out and put it up to dry while I waited for the water to boil.
Having eaten a sandwich and drunk tea, Is packing up the now dry tent ready to leave when a man came walking over from the cars and stalls on the other side, reaching the picnic table, he seemed very impressed by my outfit as he looked over the bike and trailer many moments with glee before looking up and speaking. He said that he married a cyclist, thought that she would be the type that wanted to travel as he himself had wanted to travel around the world, but it wasn't to be, she wanted to settle down and have children.
He spoke with great passion about his admiration for people like me cycling with all they need carried on the bike, that He would still love to go around the world but, he'd lumbered himself down with buying property in France before the economic crisis which he cannot sell now. He saw error now in owning more than he needed speaking almost in biblical terms to define the rottenness of the speculative society which led to the crisis in the first place, blaming most of what went wrong on the materialism of the generation that has grown up since Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister saying "We are Thatcher's Children". He was trying to put a perspective on the important things, not the everyman for himself way of the speculator, and recognized in the nomadic cyclist a pure unencumbered lifestyle in which you could be at ease with yourself.
The road dropped almost vertically down from where Is taiking to the man on the common, then climbed almost as steeply up again from the gorge, then for the most of the afternoon done something unusual for this country, it undulated with only the odd moderate climb or descend. I reached another town, Holworthy at two o'clock, where I turned onto a busy coastbound A road with cars driving in close convoys of six or seven, a bit like sheep, each driver mesmerized by the bumper of the car in front and not watching the road otherwise as they swoop past very close one, two, three and more in a line. Then there's the apparent thinking intelligent driver, that doesn't behave like sheep, that you hear slow down behind, remaining behind on the twisty blind bends until an opportunity arises on a straight road where they can see no oncoming traffic and then past giving you lots of space.
I past a Welcome to Cornwall sign and a few miles further at Stratton joined a yet busier road which had a shoulder, though after a mile on this road, NCN 3 cycle route coming from the coast crossed over and led me onwards along quiet country roads for the remainder of the day. Traffic was so infrequent that ten minutes would past without seeing a car. I past through sleepy little hamlets such as Mary de Week, past farmyards and fields of sheep. And needing water as it was a beautiful warm afternoon, I stopped at a church where I filled water bottles at a tap in the graveyard. It was a mile more when passing a plantation of young pine trees that I turned off, pushing the bike around the barrier and cycling a long way along a forest road to a turning place which, although hard packed gravel and stones, made a good enough campsite.
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