"If you know the way broadly, you will see it in all things." - Miyamoto Musashi
I've always been impressed by people who could blow their nose without using a handkerchief.
Whenever I'd tried it myself I looked like I'd lost a guacamole fight with a slime monster. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten to bring a hankie on tour, which necessitated an acute learning curve. I started out having to stop by the roadside to gingerly pinch each nostril shut in turn while bending double to avoid snotting my shoes and trousers. The noises I produced were not unlike a barnyard during the pig rut, punctuated by much wiping and lots of shits and oh, for fuck's sakes. I was wonderfully pathetic.
After a couple of months I was blowing my nose with the poise of a professional footballer. I didn't need to stop pedalling or even pinch, just a casual flick of the head and a silent snort sent a brace of mercurial missiles flashing into the periphery, scattering my DNA across the planet to further complicate the question of where I'm from.
(It's a joke of some lineage among my American friends that I don't adhere to any particular cultural group. I was born in Canada, raised in the UK, with a German father and an English mother. I went to university in Wales, and lived for 20 years in America. This confuses the hell out of your average Yank, who thinks everybody should be easily identifiable for shooting, bombing, stereotyping and/or imprisonment purposes.)
I'd become an expert judge of wind and trajectory, instantaneously triangulating with relative velocity. I could womp rat storm drains like a trainee Jedi, using my philosophical training to quell the urban Dark Side urge to decorate any dole enthusiast loitering too close to the kerb.
If I did need to nip a nostril on a particularly gushy day, I fired the right one under the left nipping arm, followed by the left one over the top after dropping the elbow and rolling the wrist, switching from right to left nostril with a thumb to middle finger move and a slight turn of the head, in a seamless Legolas-like combo that's frankly deserving of at least a video game franchise.
So I was quite pleased with my personal development.
East Linton
"A man on foot, or horseback, or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles." - Edward Abbey
One of the great pleasures of travelling this way is entering a small village completely unaware of its history, and leaving thoroughly entranced. It's these between places motorised transport denies us.
I'd never even heard of East Linton (population 1,800) in East Lothian: a small village with an impressive global legacy. It's home to the modest Preston Mill, dating back to 1599, still in operation, and open to the public, although I didn't go in because of the hefty entrance fee, and my wallet was still weeping in the shower after Bamburgh.
I'd had some fun with ancient mills already, too, but this place was where millwright and engineer Andrew Meikle grew up and worked, and the man was a legitimate lightning bolt. He invented spring sails for windmills in 1772: wooden slats that opened and closed to control the rotation no matter how strong the wind: which revolutionised the milling industry in a time when a mill was by far the most important building in any community. He also invented the threshing machine: since the beginning of agriculture, harvested grain had to be threshed from the stalks and husks by hand, usually with large flails. Meikle's invention automated this extremely labour intensive drudgery. In one perfect swoop, he reduced annual agricultural labour needs by 25%. Y'know, for the entire world.
Obviously, this didn't make him very popular with farm workers, who rioted in 1830 as threshing machine proliferation, along with the Enclosure Acts, began to seriously hamper their livelihoods. (At this time in history, the loss of livelihood usually meant the loss of life, not comfort, like it does today.) The Swing Riots, as they became known, were intended to destroy threshing machines and protect farm workers jobs; the only directly-linked death was one rioter, probably at the hands of a farmer or soldiers. The end results, however, were nine rioters hanged, and 450 sent to Australia. Serves them right, bloody technophobic ingrates.
Meikle's work inspired a young farmer's lad in the village, who would spend all his spare time at the millwright's workshop, fascinated by the wealth of complexity and innovation. John Rennie grew up, and after a spell at the University of Edinburgh, seemingly single-handedly designed and built every bridge, dock, and canal in the UK, (the breakwater at Plymouth Sound, London and Waterloo Bridges, London, East India, and West India Docks, to name but a ridiculously insignificant fraction) and all by the time he died at 60, to be laid to rest with great ceremony in St. Paul's Cathedral in 1821. He only outlived his mentor Meikle by ten years, who died at the venerable age of 92 and is buried in East Linton near his beloved mill.
(Quick note about lifespans here: the incredibly high historical infant mortality rate skewed the average lifespan statistic heavily downward. After countless thousands of hours reading history, archaeology and anthropology texts, mountains of studies and acres of research reviews, I discovered that, back when muck was a condiment, if folks made it out of infancy they often lived well into their seventies and occasionally beyond. Even in pre-agricultural societies (including the ones still around today) the average adult age at death was around 54. And this was in a very sharp and pointy world before sterilisation, safety rails, and interfering cunts with clipboards. So the idea we were teetering by the time we were 30 is rather naive.)
Hailes Castle
I ascended a valleyside on a very pleasant single lane road, paralleling the River Tyne (yep, there are two, this Scottish one's a little more modest) and rode along the tops. The sun came out to brighten the world and made me chuckle at the audacity of the views. There really is nowhere on Earth quite as fetching as the British Isles on a sunny day. It's in a class all its own, like cycling into the lid of a giant shortbread tin.
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I came upon Hailes Castle; a proper castle: in ruins and with little evidence of Victorian tampering. There was no entrance fee, gift shop, or indeed another soul in sight, just a big ruin in the middle of nowhere and little ol' me. Now we're talking. I spent an hour wandering around, imagination clicking into overdrive, empathising with the sheer effort involved in the building of such a thing, and the battles fought over it. I had a whale of a time.
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Haddington
Haddington (population 9,000), the next town along, is one of those places that just stays with you. Drenched in the morning sun it's an absolute beauty. The bike path came in over the 17th century Nungate Bridge, surrounded by the parkland of the medieval St. Mary's Collegiate Church. I stopped for several minutes in the middle of the bridge just for a bask.
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The longest church in Scotland is really of cathedral scale, which belies Haddington's current size. In the middle ages, however, Haddington was the fourth largest town in Scotland, and has seen some serious history, being burned down numerous times by Scottish and English armies alike.
I found the excellent library and spent the afternoon working, then left by way of the riverside bridleway, narrowly avoiding smacking the crap out of two older teenagers as I turned to follow the river. I can't even remember what they said, but their aggressive tone forced my ego to skid to a stop.
They had a couple of girls in tow, so they tried playing hard men and both postured up. I wordlessly ditched my backpack and was actually walking towards them removing my helmet before reality gripped, and they fled. I think the cold grin did them in.
Not sure what I would've done had I decided to chase them down with my re-emerging cardio. Something crippling that doesn't leave a mark, probably. They treated me to offensive gestures as they backpedalled, so I returned the favour, dipping into my exponentionally more appalling construction lexicon. They had no answer, so I considered it a moral if hollow victory as I climbed back on the bike.
Am I going to do this every time someone takes the piss? I decided right there and then not to. From now on I'll just give them a wave and a smile, or uncurl a middle finger. Peace, young padawan. No need to break someone's legs for being a smart mouth. You were similarly objectionable once.
Soothed by this newfound life structure, I stopped at a Co-op and bought a tin of Heinz Baked Beans with Hot Dogs for dinner because I hadn't had them since I was a kid and why the hell not. I also picked up a bottle of white wine and a half priced tin of Devon custard, a steal at 47p, and I like custard so much I'm quite happy to eat it like a big yogurt.
As darkness drew near I happened upon a little picnic spot by the track, slightly elevated above a small car park and screened from the trail by trees. I got my tent up and thoroughly enjoyed the beans and hot dogs with some bread and butter, which got me very nostalgic about my time in the boy scouts. I watched the movie Super 8 as I ate to compliment the experience.
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I got my head down early, but was woken at 11 pm by the sound of souped up ricers congregating in the parking lot below. I'd forgotten it was Saturday night. I've never been one to complain about the noise of partying; lord knows an hypocrisy on that scale could fracture the firmament and annihilate the entire physical plane of existence. But they couldn't see me from where they were, so I lay awake and eavesdropped on what conversation I could filter from the dental equipment-like whine of their tiny motors. (If you're going to buy a car, kids, buy a goddamn CAR, for the love of all that's combustion powered.) They talked about diminutive pistons and micro gears and wee exhausts, some of the most boring shit I'd ever had the misfortune of overhearing. After a couple of surreal hours I was longing to open up a vein, but would've settled for a cloak of invisibility and a sack of root vegetables. Or even better, a Molotov Cocktail.
I'd just started contemplating the empty wine bottle, an oily bike chain rag and a half-litre of methylated spirits when they wisely buggered off. Finally alone, I slipped into sleep and woke to a dew-drenched morning. I packed up and quickly fixed an overnight flat, then hit the trail into Edinburgh, possibly my favourite city in Europe.
Edinburgh
It was spitting rain as I rolled around the base of Arthur's Seat into my familiar Scottish stomping grounds. I'd been up to Edinburgh maybe eight or nine times in my early years before I moved to America, so I passed a few pubs I remembered falling out of, streets I'd streaked down, and parkland I'd pissed and passed out in. The nostalgia washed over me in rich golden waves. It's curious we have such affection for chaos. Or maybe it's just me.
Edinburgh is my favourite because it's probably the finest city to get drunk in on the planet: the civic buildings are magnificent, the Edwardian and Georgian architecture a real joy to meander through, and the pubs were built by men who knew precisely what they were doing: evenly spaced, and individually unique. No chain pub nonsense here, where one interior looks much like another. At least, not in my experience: I didn't actually go in any pubs, but made a beeline for the MacDonald library, the only one open on a Sunday (as far as I could determine with a spotty data connection). Riding through the crowded Sunday lunchtime streets reminded me of London. Edinburgh has changed. And there were hipsters everywhere, which I'd thought was a purely American thing.
(What's a hipster? A hipster is a youth clothing and behavioural trend, given to retro fashions and, as far as I can tell, the overt dismissal of anything approaching a work ethic. You're not going to find a hipster down a coal mine, for example, or pouring concrete, or tiling a roof. They seem to work and congregate in coffee and sandwich shops, claiming to be artisans and artists, apparently a product of affluence and the internet. Also, your average hipster tends to vehemently deny being one, like homosexuals in the fifties.)
The particular hipster working the reception in the MacDonald Library, South African if I can place an accent, looked at me as if I was stuck to the sole of his hemp loafer. I announced my wish to join for the day so I could use their WiFi. "Why not go to a coffee shop?" he volunteered contrarily.
I didn't reply "Because it's none of your fucking business, shithead. Punch the card and pipe down before I drag you out of here by that ridiculous steampunk moustache and smash it through your head on the kerb outside," because that would be alarming for the poor lad and I'd be straying from my new philosophy of peace. I'm sure he was simply attempting a little human interaction, he just wasn't very good at it. He worked in a library, after all, and he was a hipster.
The reason I didn't go to coffee shops much is because it's prohibitively expensive. I'll do so if there's no other option, but when a coffee costs as much as a day's food, it's difficult to justify the expense. Similarly with pubs, though a pint can last a good while longer than a coffee, even though I'd developed a taste for cold coffee while living in warmer climates.
The library shut at five. I made a run for the outskirts to find a place to camp, trying to beat both the rain and the dark and failing miserably on both counts, getting lost several times on the way. I cheered my predicament considerably with a visit to a Morrisons, where I bought bean sprouts, shallots and some soy sauce for a stir fry with Thai noodles and prawn crackers. Finally around seven I found a flat bit of grass and pitched, but the topsoil was at best an inch thick so I had to get inventive with the guy ropes and weight distribution inside, thank Christ I bought a free standing tent.
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The next morning
Whenever I'd tried it myself I looked like I'd lost a guacamole fight with a slime monster. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten to bring a hankie on tour, which necessitated an acute learning curve. I started out having to stop by the roadside to gingerly pinch each nostril shut in turn while bending double to avoid snotting my shoes and trousers. The noises I produced were not unlike a barnyard during the pig rut, punctuated by much wiping and lots of shits and oh, for fuck's sakes. I was wonderfully pathetic.
After a couple of months I was blowing my nose with the poise of a professional footballer. I didn't need to stop pedalling or even pinch, just a casual flick of the head and a silent snort sent a brace of mercurial missiles flashing into the periphery, scattering my DNA across the planet to further complicate the question of where I'm from.
(It's a joke of some lineage among my American friends that I don't adhere to any particular cultural group. I was born in Canada, raised in the UK, with a German father and an English mother. I went to university in Wales, and lived for 20 years in America. This confuses the hell out of your average Yank, who thinks everybody should be easily identifiable for shooting, bombing, stereotyping and/or imprisonment purposes.)
I'd become an expert judge of wind and trajectory, instantaneously triangulating with relative velocity. I could womp rat storm drains like a trainee Jedi, using my philosophical training to quell the urban Dark Side urge to decorate any dole enthusiast loitering too close to the kerb.
If I did need to nip a nostril on a particularly gushy day, I fired the right one under the left nipping arm, followed by the left one over the top after dropping the elbow and rolling the wrist, switching from right to left nostril with a thumb to middle finger move and a slight turn of the head, in a seamless Legolas-like combo that's frankly deserving of at least a video game franchise.
So I was quite pleased with my personal development.
East Linton
"A man on foot, or horseback, or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles." - Edward Abbey
One of the great pleasures of travelling this way is entering a small village completely unaware of its history, and leaving thoroughly entranced. It's these between places motorised transport denies us.
I'd never even heard of East Linton (population 1,800) in East Lothian: a small village with an impressive global legacy. It's home to the modest Preston Mill, dating back to 1599, still in operation, and open to the public, although I didn't go in because of the hefty entrance fee, and my wallet was still weeping in the shower after Bamburgh.
I'd had some fun with ancient mills already, too, but this place was where millwright and engineer Andrew Meikle grew up and worked, and the man was a legitimate lightning bolt. He invented spring sails for windmills in 1772: wooden slats that opened and closed to control the rotation no matter how strong the wind: which revolutionised the milling industry in a time when a mill was by far the most important building in any community. He also invented the threshing machine: since the beginning of agriculture, harvested grain had to be threshed from the stalks and husks by hand, usually with large flails. Meikle's invention automated this extremely labour intensive drudgery. In one perfect swoop, he reduced annual agricultural labour needs by 25%. Y'know, for the entire world.
Obviously, this didn't make him very popular with farm workers, who rioted in 1830 as threshing machine proliferation, along with the Enclosure Acts, began to seriously hamper their livelihoods. (At this time in history, the loss of livelihood usually meant the loss of life, not comfort, like it does today.) The Swing Riots, as they became known, were intended to destroy threshing machines and protect farm workers jobs; the only directly-linked death was one rioter, probably at the hands of a farmer or soldiers. The end results, however, were nine rioters hanged, and 450 sent to Australia. Serves them right, bloody technophobic ingrates.
Meikle's work inspired a young farmer's lad in the village, who would spend all his spare time at the millwright's workshop, fascinated by the wealth of complexity and innovation. John Rennie grew up, and after a spell at the University of Edinburgh, seemingly single-handedly designed and built every bridge, dock, and canal in the UK, (the breakwater at Plymouth Sound, London and Waterloo Bridges, London, East India, and West India Docks, to name but a ridiculously insignificant fraction) and all by the time he died at 60, to be laid to rest with great ceremony in St. Paul's Cathedral in 1821. He only outlived his mentor Meikle by ten years, who died at the venerable age of 92 and is buried in East Linton near his beloved mill.
(Quick note about lifespans here: the incredibly high historical infant mortality rate skewed the average lifespan statistic heavily downward. After countless thousands of hours reading history, archaeology and anthropology texts, mountains of studies and acres of research reviews, I discovered that, back when muck was a condiment, if folks made it out of infancy they often lived well into their seventies and occasionally beyond. Even in pre-agricultural societies (including the ones still around today) the average adult age at death was around 54. And this was in a very sharp and pointy world before sterilisation, safety rails, and interfering cunts with clipboards. So the idea we were teetering by the time we were 30 is rather naive.)
Hailes Castle
I ascended a valleyside on a very pleasant single lane road, paralleling the River Tyne (yep, there are two, this Scottish one's a little more modest) and rode along the tops. The sun came out to brighten the world and made me chuckle at the audacity of the views. There really is nowhere on Earth quite as fetching as the British Isles on a sunny day. It's in a class all its own, like cycling into the lid of a giant shortbread tin.
I came upon Hailes Castle; a proper castle: in ruins and with little evidence of Victorian tampering. There was no entrance fee, gift shop, or indeed another soul in sight, just a big ruin in the middle of nowhere and little ol' me. Now we're talking. I spent an hour wandering around, imagination clicking into overdrive, empathising with the sheer effort involved in the building of such a thing, and the battles fought over it. I had a whale of a time.
Haddington
Haddington (population 9,000), the next town along, is one of those places that just stays with you. Drenched in the morning sun it's an absolute beauty. The bike path came in over the 17th century Nungate Bridge, surrounded by the parkland of the medieval St. Mary's Collegiate Church. I stopped for several minutes in the middle of the bridge just for a bask.
The longest church in Scotland is really of cathedral scale, which belies Haddington's current size. In the middle ages, however, Haddington was the fourth largest town in Scotland, and has seen some serious history, being burned down numerous times by Scottish and English armies alike.
I found the excellent library and spent the afternoon working, then left by way of the riverside bridleway, narrowly avoiding smacking the crap out of two older teenagers as I turned to follow the river. I can't even remember what they said, but their aggressive tone forced my ego to skid to a stop.
They had a couple of girls in tow, so they tried playing hard men and both postured up. I wordlessly ditched my backpack and was actually walking towards them removing my helmet before reality gripped, and they fled. I think the cold grin did them in.
Not sure what I would've done had I decided to chase them down with my re-emerging cardio. Something crippling that doesn't leave a mark, probably. They treated me to offensive gestures as they backpedalled, so I returned the favour, dipping into my exponentionally more appalling construction lexicon. They had no answer, so I considered it a moral if hollow victory as I climbed back on the bike.
Am I going to do this every time someone takes the piss? I decided right there and then not to. From now on I'll just give them a wave and a smile, or uncurl a middle finger. Peace, young padawan. No need to break someone's legs for being a smart mouth. You were similarly objectionable once.
Soothed by this newfound life structure, I stopped at a Co-op and bought a tin of Heinz Baked Beans with Hot Dogs for dinner because I hadn't had them since I was a kid and why the hell not. I also picked up a bottle of white wine and a half priced tin of Devon custard, a steal at 47p, and I like custard so much I'm quite happy to eat it like a big yogurt.
As darkness drew near I happened upon a little picnic spot by the track, slightly elevated above a small car park and screened from the trail by trees. I got my tent up and thoroughly enjoyed the beans and hot dogs with some bread and butter, which got me very nostalgic about my time in the boy scouts. I watched the movie Super 8 as I ate to compliment the experience.
I got my head down early, but was woken at 11 pm by the sound of souped up ricers congregating in the parking lot below. I'd forgotten it was Saturday night. I've never been one to complain about the noise of partying; lord knows an hypocrisy on that scale could fracture the firmament and annihilate the entire physical plane of existence. But they couldn't see me from where they were, so I lay awake and eavesdropped on what conversation I could filter from the dental equipment-like whine of their tiny motors. (If you're going to buy a car, kids, buy a goddamn CAR, for the love of all that's combustion powered.) They talked about diminutive pistons and micro gears and wee exhausts, some of the most boring shit I'd ever had the misfortune of overhearing. After a couple of surreal hours I was longing to open up a vein, but would've settled for a cloak of invisibility and a sack of root vegetables. Or even better, a Molotov Cocktail.
I'd just started contemplating the empty wine bottle, an oily bike chain rag and a half-litre of methylated spirits when they wisely buggered off. Finally alone, I slipped into sleep and woke to a dew-drenched morning. I packed up and quickly fixed an overnight flat, then hit the trail into Edinburgh, possibly my favourite city in Europe.
Edinburgh
It was spitting rain as I rolled around the base of Arthur's Seat into my familiar Scottish stomping grounds. I'd been up to Edinburgh maybe eight or nine times in my early years before I moved to America, so I passed a few pubs I remembered falling out of, streets I'd streaked down, and parkland I'd pissed and passed out in. The nostalgia washed over me in rich golden waves. It's curious we have such affection for chaos. Or maybe it's just me.
Edinburgh is my favourite because it's probably the finest city to get drunk in on the planet: the civic buildings are magnificent, the Edwardian and Georgian architecture a real joy to meander through, and the pubs were built by men who knew precisely what they were doing: evenly spaced, and individually unique. No chain pub nonsense here, where one interior looks much like another. At least, not in my experience: I didn't actually go in any pubs, but made a beeline for the MacDonald library, the only one open on a Sunday (as far as I could determine with a spotty data connection). Riding through the crowded Sunday lunchtime streets reminded me of London. Edinburgh has changed. And there were hipsters everywhere, which I'd thought was a purely American thing.
(What's a hipster? A hipster is a youth clothing and behavioural trend, given to retro fashions and, as far as I can tell, the overt dismissal of anything approaching a work ethic. You're not going to find a hipster down a coal mine, for example, or pouring concrete, or tiling a roof. They seem to work and congregate in coffee and sandwich shops, claiming to be artisans and artists, apparently a product of affluence and the internet. Also, your average hipster tends to vehemently deny being one, like homosexuals in the fifties.)
The particular hipster working the reception in the MacDonald Library, South African if I can place an accent, looked at me as if I was stuck to the sole of his hemp loafer. I announced my wish to join for the day so I could use their WiFi. "Why not go to a coffee shop?" he volunteered contrarily.
I didn't reply "Because it's none of your fucking business, shithead. Punch the card and pipe down before I drag you out of here by that ridiculous steampunk moustache and smash it through your head on the kerb outside," because that would be alarming for the poor lad and I'd be straying from my new philosophy of peace. I'm sure he was simply attempting a little human interaction, he just wasn't very good at it. He worked in a library, after all, and he was a hipster.
The reason I didn't go to coffee shops much is because it's prohibitively expensive. I'll do so if there's no other option, but when a coffee costs as much as a day's food, it's difficult to justify the expense. Similarly with pubs, though a pint can last a good while longer than a coffee, even though I'd developed a taste for cold coffee while living in warmer climates.
The library shut at five. I made a run for the outskirts to find a place to camp, trying to beat both the rain and the dark and failing miserably on both counts, getting lost several times on the way. I cheered my predicament considerably with a visit to a Morrisons, where I bought bean sprouts, shallots and some soy sauce for a stir fry with Thai noodles and prawn crackers. Finally around seven I found a flat bit of grass and pitched, but the topsoil was at best an inch thick so I had to get inventive with the guy ropes and weight distribution inside, thank Christ I bought a free standing tent.
The next morning
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