Land’s End

Temple Meads Station in Bristol is a building that was built at the dawn of the railway age. Like everything else it has had to adapt. As the technology has advanced so has the station. Yet that which could remain has done so with the result that the old and the new are become the now. Getting aboard the train to Penzance on an April day in 2008 was, Dear Friends, a beginning. It was the start of some months away from the routine of work and regularity. It was the start of a walk along the coastal trail towards Land’s End then round the corner and up the coast back towards Bristol and beyond.  Land’s End is land that juts, an iconic peninsula on the edge of the English Channel, the last piece of the English mainland that points west into the Atlantic and looks back east into the stretch of water that the French call ‘La Manche’, the sleeve.  Many have set off from Land’s End have started on trips to walk, cycle, drive from this point to that furthest other in the north of Scotland, John O’Groats.  Our daughter ran it virtually during Covid. Looking at her certificate on the wall behind my computer desk I see it measures 874 miles.  Apparently one eccentric once swam it using the gimmick of a large towable water tank which one of his mates was pulling behind a lorry.  Many charities have teamed up to do the journey and raise money for a laudable cause.

                   I reached Penzance and decided that I would begin my walking tour with a Cornish pasty and chips. It says much for multicultural Britain that one can now munch on a curried pasty. Indeed when I worked in London it was true to say that on a Friday night I could eat a better curry in Southall than I ever ate in India. I ate seated on a park bench on the sea front, keeping my lunch close because I had read so much about predatory, fearless seagulls.  Finding the entrance to the path, I rummaged my way behind back gardens until I found myself on a lonely promontory looking out to sea. I pitched my tent and watched in the evening as the Scillonian ferry arrived in port from its journey back from the Scilly Isles, western habited islands which are more into the Atlantic than anything on Mainland England.

             The days were windy but warm as I trundled along the trail westwards, stumbling into coves where villages nestled where sometimes there was little more than a boat ramp. One place had and has an outdoor theatre on a sea viewed promontory.  It is wrong to say that I was looking forward to seeing Land’s End because I knew what to expect. It is true to say that I was looking forward to turning the corner there and heading north. It was misty and dreich as I approached the final 30 minutes or so.  I stood by the signpost which indicated distances to various parts of the globe and looked down on the turbulent seas angrily attacking the rocky escarpment beneath. I looked at the sorry looking tea shop and wandered up the road past the garish, trashy tourist ‘attractions’. What ‘Doctor Who’ has to do with a place of nature I will never know.  Humankind has come along to something iconic and made it ironic. I could not escape rapidly enough from a place of wonderful natural forces which some greedy tourist board has done its best to destroy. Such were my thoughts as I walked through the gloomy car park as a drizzle started up. As I neared the end of the tarmac and was about to enter the trail again, I was hailed by a middle aged man who was seated outside his car brewing up a pot of tea on his stove.

       “Wanna  cuppa tea, mate.”

I hesitated.

     “Sure. Why not? Thank you.”

    The small talk that accompanied our introductions subsided into a silence which was relaxed and easy.

“Can I offer you a ride somewhere?”

I looked at the weather that was getting worse, saw that there would be little in the way of a view that day and said,

“Yes please.”

He was happy to take me where I wanted to go so I suggested St. Ives and off we went. Narrow roads and hedgerows are the roads of the Cornish countryside. We wound our way slowly towards the village. On the way he told me that he was taking this holiday as a sort of pilgrimage. His wife had recently died and he was reliving places and sights that they had visited on their honeymoon some years previously. He talked and reminisced, sometimes laughed as he shared a memory, other times welled up when a moment or an old scene snuck up on him.  He had loved his wife and loved her still.  I am naïve and frequently don’t understand how to behave. But on this day, during this time I did ‘get it’. I was to listen and speak only when the conversation stalled. I was to laugh when I should, ask questions when I should. I was to be the shoulder for a stranger, the barman leaning on the bar hearing tales of woe and joy, problems and solutions and then moving away to serve the next customer.  We knew that we would never see each other again. He was obviously not the type to seek help from a therapist or a psychiatrist or any such professional, he was too proud for that. But a complete stranger fit the bill. He dropped me in the town. I could have offered him gas money, taken the opportunity to offer to pay him back with a pint and a bite, but I sensed that he would not accept. More than that I think that he would have felt insulted. Favours had been given and taken between us that day, my ear for his ride. I sensed that I had more than payed him back for the cuppa tea. Indeed I think I had accompanied him on a journey that was more his than mine.  Sometimes we have to step back from our garrulous tendencies, our habits of trying to upstage a story with a matching one of our own. Sometimes we need to set aside our egos, our solipsism of self, and just be there and just say nothing. I don’t do that easily but am proud to say that on that day, on that journey I did. Something good did come out of the depressing manmade mess of Land’s End.

“If you don’t grieve for the dead, how can you love the living?” John Le Carre

                             Thanks for reading.