The Bamburgh Conspiracy
My friends and I have a game, a form of which I'm sure everyone else plays too, called Look at this Cunt.
(We're not targeting women, of course, quite the reverse. Working class men from the British Isles and its derivatives (Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, etc, but strangely not the closest one, North America) typically use the word 'cunt' to describe other men, quite often with friendly affection, or at the very least, minimal malice. North American men seem to have forgotten this masculine ethic at some point, and get quite temperamental when so labelled. I think it's got something to do with all the hugging and constantly talking about each other's 'feelings', whatever those are.)
The Look at this Cunt game doesn't involve the actual presentation of female genitalia for inspection, of course; it's more about pointing out an atypical passerby: perhaps if he's wearing an unusual item of clothing, or staggering along in an advanced stage of inebriation. Maybe he has a nervous tick, or a limp. My current favourite is the Justin Bieber haircut, which to me looks like a toddler's licked a Walnut Whip and dropped it at the barber's.
So I figured, over this first week or two of the bike tour, my lifetime cunter/cuntee aggregate had swung heavily into the negative. This kind of imbalance is, obviously, not very zen at all. I needed to redress the cosmic equilibrium somehow, so I decided the best course of action would be to find people even stranger than me to have a good bloody gawp at.
I considered attending soccer matches for a while, because you've got to be pretty weird to enjoy that shit when there's perfectly legitimate sports like rugby and mixed martial arts available instead. Any 'sport' that requires its participants to avoid physical contact isn't real competition, let's be brutally honest here, it's calisthenics. Sport was conceived to supersede war, not knitting. And as for the fan segregation, well, that's definitely worth watching, if only for the immensely entertaining 'HOLD ME BACK, LADS!' dynamic.
But football games cost money to attend. Which brings us neatly to libraries.
Libraries positively brim with weirdos. I've never been the coolest guy in the building, but if the reading rooms in every town I'd visited so far were any indication, I'm Elvis fucking Presley. Children and pensioners are exempt from the comparison, of course, but the middle ground is filled with characters you wouldn't trust with either.
Libraries also have the dual advantage of being somewhere you can plug in to charge up and log on. There's vast discrepancies between local governments' attitudes towards these two things, however. Some bend over backwards to accommodate their library visitors' needs, while others hoard their electricity and internet access like they're their own private precious. These grasping, shrivelled, Gollum-like authorities put their employees in a very uncomfortable position when someone like me comes along, who isn't above questioning such reticence. After all, charging even my full suite of electronics and backup batteries works out at around a penny. I'd happily bung them the money to cover it. Even 2p. Often these employees would lie to me rather than simply explain their county council employers were so inarguably, stunningly, frustratingly stupid. I had one say the wiring in the building was so old plugging my laptop in would blow the lot. I don't know if I was more miffed by not being able to charge up or that I look so dumb I might buy such absolute horseshit.
I figured out through trial and error that my interaction with the person behind the library counter goes a long way to determine their subsequent helpfulness. If I was monosyllabic while I joined up for the day, there was often a poorly disguised suspicion of vagrancy. However, if I chattily revealed I was a writer, it was like The King himself had swaggered in wearing the cape outfit and a cocked eyebrow, sporting an expectant semi.
There'll be more on this later.
Seahouses
I left Dunstanburgh campsite at 3pm after writing 5,000 words of inane corporate drivel for a client who requires that sort of thing, and rode a meandering ten miles to Seahouses, a small holiday resort on the expansive Northumbrian coast. I passed a touring French couple coming the other way who'd been in the British Isles for three months, zigzagging north through Ireland and Scotland, now heading south through England.
I felt a real kinship with them, even though we only chatted for a few minutes. Not because of the cycling, but because of the travel. It's the shared pace of it, I think, and the attitude of going wherever and doing whatever you want. Proper freedom.
I bumped into another cyclist on the outskirts, a local heading to the shops, who joined me for the ride through the town, and advised me of the things to see and places to go. I stopped to use an ATM and nose around a bit, then hit the beachside road to Bamburgh with the idea of finding somewhere among the dunes to camp. 'No Camping' signs galvanized my determination, but I couldn't find anywhere appropriately accessible and secluded. I eventually gave up, puckering a bit as darkness began to descend with a few drops of rain, and decided to high tail it through Bamburgh and see if I could find somewhere suitable further inland.
It was dark by the time I did, and the rain was steadying. By the light of my headlamp I pushed down an overgrown farm track and found a flat bit as it cornered into a ploughed field. I quickly threw up the tent and got under cover, but fell prey to the beginnings of the deluge.
Bamburgh
I packed up at first light and realized I could see the iconic castle from my campsite. Not too shabby.
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I headed back into Bamburgh to find somewhere to work, preferably with a good mobile data signal. I found one, surprisingly enough, on a bench atop a sand dune overlooking the castle, and badged as one of the ten top lunch spots in the UK. It even had a little plaque. I dare say no one in the UK that day worked from a grander office.
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I spent a few hours proofreading and polished the work from the last couple of days and sent it in, then whiled away the rest of the day looking around the village. I visited the church and the Grace Darling museum, did a little food shopping, then headed up to the castle to check on what time it opened the next day so I needn't limit my exploration. I discovered it was a tenner to get in. A fucking tenner?!
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Outraged, I stormed back down into the village for the Castle Inn and spent twenty quid on beer to calm myself down. My more liquid perspective determined this may be the only time I ever visit Bamburgh, and this is a castle I've been fascinated by my entire life. I decided to have dinner in the pub, too, and ordered a ten quid burger. (Is everything a tenner around here?) What should have been a pricey gourmet extravaganza turned out to be a commercial patty and oven chips, though the salad was acceptable. For a tenner, it should come with a back rub and a fucking blow job.
Feeling exploited and a little annoyed at myself for falling for a tourist trap trick, I concluded I should go to the castle tomorrow morning, and left the pub to camp in the same place as the previous night, falling asleep to the final episode of Battlestar Galactica.
The Bamburgh Conspiracy
First thing the next day I went to refill my water bottles from the sink in the public toilets, only to notice a sign I hadn't noticed the day before:
I'd thought the two litres I drank yesterday tasted a little off, but figured it was my imagination. My stomach plopped, just once, in agreement. Better get this castle seen before the squits kick in, I reasoned. I took a precautionary dump and dashed off on a whirlwind tour.
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I managed to cruise all the major sights before sloppily machine-gunning a commode in the castle toilets for an hour. While so engaged, I fired up the GPS, plotted an optimal route, and during the first brief armistice in the bombardment, made a break for the nearest pub that wasn't the tenner-for-a-TV-dinner Castle Inn.
The Victoria Hotel is the other proper pub in the village; there is a third, The Mizen Head, but it's more of a fancy restaurant. I ordered a pot of tea and a reasonably priced egg salad sandwich, broke out the laptop, and made the first of a good dozen visits to the lavatory over the next five hours. To cut down the frequency and avoid bloodying my arsehole with repeated wiping, I held the gravy at bay as long as possible. I'd relent when my bowels began to cramp and groan like an old wooden ship. The bonus effect of these longer intervals was the population of the pub would turn over, so no one saw me make multiple trips except the bar staff, and they weren't really paying attention. I'm not sure why this concerned me.
I'm fairly sure the tap water in the public toilets had been messed with. Why would it not be connected to the mains when the building is bang in the middle of the village? It's likely the sign was placed there to encourage bottled water trade with local merchants, and the tap water smelled like disinfectant, which suggests an easy way to taint a water supply is by tossing a urinal soap cake into the water tank.
I'm not being cheap by avoiding bottled water, but when you average 4-5 litres on a regular day, never mind a hot or hard one, the cost becomes prohibitive, and you require regularly spaced shops. Thus my water filter. It will process chemically affected water, but I need to know to use it in the first place, and the counterintuitive sign placement had caught me out. You'll notice it's far above the eyeline, probably to prevent kids tearing it down.
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Still, there was a sign, so it was ultimately my own fault.
Unconnected to my rectal regret, I was disappointed by the castle. Not that it isn't a fantastic structure: the problem is people still live there. Residents upgrade interiors over time, so the current decor bares little aspect of the original, and it's the original I'm interested in. In a lot of ways, I'd prefer a ruin, because my imagination can more readily fill in the blanks.
I want to experience how the medieval warlord lived, not the Victorian or Edwardian, though those periods can be similarly fascinating, y'know, if you're a stiff-necked ponce obsessed with restriction. The final straw was the exit through the recreated torture scene in the unconvincing dungeon that led into the (admittedly nicely-stocked) gift shop. (I think it may be a sign of advancing age that I stopped to browse the treacle fudge despite my digestive urgency.)
However, it taught me a valuable and shrewd lesson: don't pay to go in castles unless they're ruined.
(We're not targeting women, of course, quite the reverse. Working class men from the British Isles and its derivatives (Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, etc, but strangely not the closest one, North America) typically use the word 'cunt' to describe other men, quite often with friendly affection, or at the very least, minimal malice. North American men seem to have forgotten this masculine ethic at some point, and get quite temperamental when so labelled. I think it's got something to do with all the hugging and constantly talking about each other's 'feelings', whatever those are.)
The Look at this Cunt game doesn't involve the actual presentation of female genitalia for inspection, of course; it's more about pointing out an atypical passerby: perhaps if he's wearing an unusual item of clothing, or staggering along in an advanced stage of inebriation. Maybe he has a nervous tick, or a limp. My current favourite is the Justin Bieber haircut, which to me looks like a toddler's licked a Walnut Whip and dropped it at the barber's.
Now, imagine, if you will, a man cycling through a British city centre towing a single wheeled trailer, dressed in clothing so loud it diverts shipping, topped by a helmet not unlike the bell end of a penis. This image opens Look at this Cunt season with finger food, fireworks and a free DVD.
So I figured, over this first week or two of the bike tour, my lifetime cunter/cuntee aggregate had swung heavily into the negative. This kind of imbalance is, obviously, not very zen at all. I needed to redress the cosmic equilibrium somehow, so I decided the best course of action would be to find people even stranger than me to have a good bloody gawp at.
I considered attending soccer matches for a while, because you've got to be pretty weird to enjoy that shit when there's perfectly legitimate sports like rugby and mixed martial arts available instead. Any 'sport' that requires its participants to avoid physical contact isn't real competition, let's be brutally honest here, it's calisthenics. Sport was conceived to supersede war, not knitting. And as for the fan segregation, well, that's definitely worth watching, if only for the immensely entertaining 'HOLD ME BACK, LADS!' dynamic.
But football games cost money to attend. Which brings us neatly to libraries.
Libraries positively brim with weirdos. I've never been the coolest guy in the building, but if the reading rooms in every town I'd visited so far were any indication, I'm Elvis fucking Presley. Children and pensioners are exempt from the comparison, of course, but the middle ground is filled with characters you wouldn't trust with either.
Libraries also have the dual advantage of being somewhere you can plug in to charge up and log on. There's vast discrepancies between local governments' attitudes towards these two things, however. Some bend over backwards to accommodate their library visitors' needs, while others hoard their electricity and internet access like they're their own private precious. These grasping, shrivelled, Gollum-like authorities put their employees in a very uncomfortable position when someone like me comes along, who isn't above questioning such reticence. After all, charging even my full suite of electronics and backup batteries works out at around a penny. I'd happily bung them the money to cover it. Even 2p. Often these employees would lie to me rather than simply explain their county council employers were so inarguably, stunningly, frustratingly stupid. I had one say the wiring in the building was so old plugging my laptop in would blow the lot. I don't know if I was more miffed by not being able to charge up or that I look so dumb I might buy such absolute horseshit.
I figured out through trial and error that my interaction with the person behind the library counter goes a long way to determine their subsequent helpfulness. If I was monosyllabic while I joined up for the day, there was often a poorly disguised suspicion of vagrancy. However, if I chattily revealed I was a writer, it was like The King himself had swaggered in wearing the cape outfit and a cocked eyebrow, sporting an expectant semi.
There'll be more on this later.
Seahouses
I left Dunstanburgh campsite at 3pm after writing 5,000 words of inane corporate drivel for a client who requires that sort of thing, and rode a meandering ten miles to Seahouses, a small holiday resort on the expansive Northumbrian coast. I passed a touring French couple coming the other way who'd been in the British Isles for three months, zigzagging north through Ireland and Scotland, now heading south through England.
I felt a real kinship with them, even though we only chatted for a few minutes. Not because of the cycling, but because of the travel. It's the shared pace of it, I think, and the attitude of going wherever and doing whatever you want. Proper freedom.
I bumped into another cyclist on the outskirts, a local heading to the shops, who joined me for the ride through the town, and advised me of the things to see and places to go. I stopped to use an ATM and nose around a bit, then hit the beachside road to Bamburgh with the idea of finding somewhere among the dunes to camp. 'No Camping' signs galvanized my determination, but I couldn't find anywhere appropriately accessible and secluded. I eventually gave up, puckering a bit as darkness began to descend with a few drops of rain, and decided to high tail it through Bamburgh and see if I could find somewhere suitable further inland.
It was dark by the time I did, and the rain was steadying. By the light of my headlamp I pushed down an overgrown farm track and found a flat bit as it cornered into a ploughed field. I quickly threw up the tent and got under cover, but fell prey to the beginnings of the deluge.
Bamburgh
I packed up at first light and realized I could see the iconic castle from my campsite. Not too shabby.
I headed back into Bamburgh to find somewhere to work, preferably with a good mobile data signal. I found one, surprisingly enough, on a bench atop a sand dune overlooking the castle, and badged as one of the ten top lunch spots in the UK. It even had a little plaque. I dare say no one in the UK that day worked from a grander office.
I spent a few hours proofreading and polished the work from the last couple of days and sent it in, then whiled away the rest of the day looking around the village. I visited the church and the Grace Darling museum, did a little food shopping, then headed up to the castle to check on what time it opened the next day so I needn't limit my exploration. I discovered it was a tenner to get in. A fucking tenner?!
Grace Darling's grave
Outraged, I stormed back down into the village for the Castle Inn and spent twenty quid on beer to calm myself down. My more liquid perspective determined this may be the only time I ever visit Bamburgh, and this is a castle I've been fascinated by my entire life. I decided to have dinner in the pub, too, and ordered a ten quid burger. (Is everything a tenner around here?) What should have been a pricey gourmet extravaganza turned out to be a commercial patty and oven chips, though the salad was acceptable. For a tenner, it should come with a back rub and a fucking blow job.
Feeling exploited and a little annoyed at myself for falling for a tourist trap trick, I concluded I should go to the castle tomorrow morning, and left the pub to camp in the same place as the previous night, falling asleep to the final episode of Battlestar Galactica.
The Bamburgh Conspiracy
First thing the next day I went to refill my water bottles from the sink in the public toilets, only to notice a sign I hadn't noticed the day before:
NOT TO BE USED AS DRINKING WATER
I'd thought the two litres I drank yesterday tasted a little off, but figured it was my imagination. My stomach plopped, just once, in agreement. Better get this castle seen before the squits kick in, I reasoned. I took a precautionary dump and dashed off on a whirlwind tour.
Awww
Bottle-shaped door to allow access for mounted soldiers.
The King of the North!
I managed to cruise all the major sights before sloppily machine-gunning a commode in the castle toilets for an hour. While so engaged, I fired up the GPS, plotted an optimal route, and during the first brief armistice in the bombardment, made a break for the nearest pub that wasn't the tenner-for-a-TV-dinner Castle Inn.
The Victoria Hotel is the other proper pub in the village; there is a third, The Mizen Head, but it's more of a fancy restaurant. I ordered a pot of tea and a reasonably priced egg salad sandwich, broke out the laptop, and made the first of a good dozen visits to the lavatory over the next five hours. To cut down the frequency and avoid bloodying my arsehole with repeated wiping, I held the gravy at bay as long as possible. I'd relent when my bowels began to cramp and groan like an old wooden ship. The bonus effect of these longer intervals was the population of the pub would turn over, so no one saw me make multiple trips except the bar staff, and they weren't really paying attention. I'm not sure why this concerned me.
I'm fairly sure the tap water in the public toilets had been messed with. Why would it not be connected to the mains when the building is bang in the middle of the village? It's likely the sign was placed there to encourage bottled water trade with local merchants, and the tap water smelled like disinfectant, which suggests an easy way to taint a water supply is by tossing a urinal soap cake into the water tank.
I'm not being cheap by avoiding bottled water, but when you average 4-5 litres on a regular day, never mind a hot or hard one, the cost becomes prohibitive, and you require regularly spaced shops. Thus my water filter. It will process chemically affected water, but I need to know to use it in the first place, and the counterintuitive sign placement had caught me out. You'll notice it's far above the eyeline, probably to prevent kids tearing it down.
Still, there was a sign, so it was ultimately my own fault.
Unconnected to my rectal regret, I was disappointed by the castle. Not that it isn't a fantastic structure: the problem is people still live there. Residents upgrade interiors over time, so the current decor bares little aspect of the original, and it's the original I'm interested in. In a lot of ways, I'd prefer a ruin, because my imagination can more readily fill in the blanks.
I want to experience how the medieval warlord lived, not the Victorian or Edwardian, though those periods can be similarly fascinating, y'know, if you're a stiff-necked ponce obsessed with restriction. The final straw was the exit through the recreated torture scene in the unconvincing dungeon that led into the (admittedly nicely-stocked) gift shop. (I think it may be a sign of advancing age that I stopped to browse the treacle fudge despite my digestive urgency.)
However, it taught me a valuable and shrewd lesson: don't pay to go in castles unless they're ruined.
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