July 26, 2015
Wick, Scotland: A life of contentment
GEOFF SERVED us tea, inquiring politely if we wanted sugar, then settled into his deckchair. He keeps it outside his tea stand beside the harbour at John o'Groats. Like the Londoner selling tatties in his pub, he escaped as far as he could from the southern rat race.
We sipped tea and listened to his tale of contentment as the weak Scottish sun grew warmer. There was no hurry to get to Wick. We couldn't get a train from there that afternoon anyway.
"I was a commercial director of a company in Manchester," he said. "The head office was in Milton Keynes, which was fine except that they insisted on holding meetings on Fridays. Which meant that every Friday evening I was driving back to Manchester on the M6.
"Then one day, the managing director called me in and said they were giving my job to the guy below me, whom I'd trained. So the day came when I said to my wife: 'Why don't we go and live in the north of Scotland?'"
They looked around for something to do. By chance a friend found the tea stand.
"It'd been up for sale for a while and nobody in the area would take it on. So we did the calculations and we reckoned that it could pay, and so we sold our house and moved."
He speaks gently in a kind, understanding voice. He took the original stand, "a wheeled trailer like you see parked by the roadside", and built a more permanent hut next door.
And why move here? He waves at the sun on the sea as it twinkles its way to Orkney, at the island ferry still and patient in the harbour.
"You know, every morning I listen to the radio. I listen to all the reports of traffic jams everywhere and I really enjoy it. I get held up driving here some days but it's only because there are sheep in the road."
He sees a steady flow of cyclists. They pose alongside his stall at the white signpost that lists the distance back to Land's End.
"They don't often come down here, though. A few do but the rest are all energy bars and water. They never deign to eat anything fatty."
He works all summer and closes in October. Then he packs a rucksack and goes off to India, Australia or anywhere else he and his wife fancy. He's a picture of contentment, selling teas, cooking sausages, frying eggs, passing the time with those, like him, who have time to chat.
We set off up the slope from the coast from the campground. I imagine how it must feel to ride the other way on a record attempt, to see the sign for John o'Groats and know the misery is over. You could freewheel to the finish from there. The record for cycling from Land's End fell to less than two days right back in the 1960s.
A man called Dick Poole did it. The name of his club, Middlesex Road Club, was embroidered across the front of his tracksuit top. The zip ran down the middle and he liked to joke that, when he undid it, one side of the top said SEX CLUB.
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It was Karen who spotted the powdery stone busts by the road.
"I think they were put up by and for people who were important, or had a lot of money," a laughing woman out for a walk with her husband and her dog told us. "They're memorials to the Boer War."
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By then we'd walked down a grassy path to the cliff above an abandoned harbour, where a lone and crumbling house must once have been the harbourmaster's. There were even bigger memorials down there, religious in appearance, with recesses in which, optimistically in the northern wind, people imagined lighted candles. There was no explanation.
Laughing Woman had followed the same route as Geoff the Tea Man. She and her husband had lived in Brighton and moved to the other tip of Britain via a pause in Cumbria.
She spots a butterfly.
"That's a brave soul at this latitude," she says. "We don't get many of those up here."
It wasn't a lone traveller. A quarter of an hour later a speckled white butterfly landed on my shoe as I pedalled and clung there for several moments, puzzled and increasingly dizzy.
The countryside grew flatter and less interesting the further south we rode. And the road grew busier. The old, round-shouldered houses puckering up against the wind gave way to ordinary, all-of-a-type modern houses with three-piece suites and door chimes. And then we rode into Wick, a solid but uninteresting town not yet reached by the coloured-paint industry.
Karen has found us an apartment overlooking a furious river. On the far bank is what the town boasts is the shortest street in Britain. In reality, the bit of road that passes the narrow end of Mackay's hotel has been given a name. And that's as exciting as it gets.
We're going to meet Vikki and Russell, the walkers, tomorrow. They, like us, are taking the train to Edinburgh and they've got a room at the hotel.
Look for more than a moment at the side of the building and you see, in fading capitals, the words "Temperance Hotel".
Today's ride: 31 km (19 miles)
Total: 2,670 km (1,658 miles)
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