The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [78]
Soaked by now, deafened by the incessant rain and with a freezing wind flaying me, my brain danced with vivid hallucinations. Clearest of them all was a vision of Alfred Wainwright, a man who made Gordon Brown look like Billy Connolly, laughing his scratchy woollen socks off at me. I’d already been fairly rude in print about the cussedly misanthropic Wainwright, and now, here on the path that he created and just below the peak upon which he’d had his ashes scattered, he was exacting a typically well-calibrated revenge. In between panicky hyperventilations that were making my ribcage ache, I blurted out loud an apology to the God of the Lakeland Trail, and begged him for both forgiveness and to let me live, in return for which I would apologise to him in print and promise to keep off both his manor and his legacy in future. He must have listened, for the hallucinations dimmed and into their place swam a plan to gather my stuff and get back, somehow, to the youth hostel I’d passed hours earlier. The forest track was broad, pale and stony, just about traceable in the dark. On the way, I passed gullies, spouts and streams that had been bone dry the previous night, and which were now foaming and roaring with water.
At the youth hostel, I found an open barn, its concrete floor providing little in the way of comfort, but at least its roof worked in keeping the rain off. Hunched on the floor, soaked and freezing, I watched the water splash down off the greenery and drifted into a stiff, uncomfortable doze to its rhythm. Feverish dreams of my own bed skittered across my subconscious, and when I woke up, I knew that I was going home.
The people who worked in the youth hostel thought otherwise. ‘No come on, you just need to relax a bit, and you’ll be on your way in no time,’ I was assured by Susan, an assistant at the hostel, as she cooked breakfast for me and – wouldn’t you know it – the two Iowans that I’d met the previous day in that terrible pub. She was quite magnificent, not flinching at all when she came down into the dayroom to find a wet, bedraggled stranger huddled in a chair, whimpering. ‘Lots of people have a bit of a shock at the beginning of the Coast to Coast,’ she continued. ‘It’s completely normal. You wouldn’t want to give it up so soon, would you?’ YES! Yes, I would. From whichever angle the question was posed, only one answer came booming back.
The taxi driver who took me to Whitehaven train station was even nicer. To him, giving up the CtC after two short days and about 20 miles was nothing to be ashamed of. I wasn’t, but it was very kind of him to reassure me anyway, telling me how he’d once picked up an American lady who’d given the walk up in Sandwith, the first village on the trail and about a mile inland from its beginning at St Bees Head. ‘She said that she hadn’t realised there were going to be hills.’
On the eight-hour train journey home, I had plenty of time to mull over my sharp exit from Britain’s favourite long-distance path. As per usual, this boiled down to the sticky question of exactly what I was going to tell people, which little excuses I would hide behind. There was the lack of accommodation. The apparently poor standards and high prices of the rooms that remained, and of the food and drink on offer. The zombiefied mass march across the country, a regiment of rambling beards, outdoor OCD and half-a-bitters. The relentlessly upbeat camaraderie of my fellow trailblazers that had succeeded