On a sunny afternoon in June 1969 I arrived outside the Theatre Royal in Bury St Edmunds, I tried the front foyer doors which were locked so I went down the alley at the side of the building, through some tall doors, into a workshop and through onto the stage. A man was there by himself tying a backcloth onto a flying bar.
“Who are you?” he said.
“I’m the new ASM” I said.
“Well you better tie that on there then” he
said and I did.
Almost exactly forty-five years later to
the day I tottered out of the First Night of Terry Gilliam’s production of ‘Benvenuto
Cellini’ at English National Opera and
thought “That’s it. I don’t want to do this anymore” No reflection on the
production which had been excellent and, on the whole fun to do, with a cast of
more than a hundred on stage and 9m high inflatable of the bottom half of a
naked man (well statue actually), but it seemed to me to be a good show to go
out on.
All of which is fine but I still need to
work, I need to earn a living. In financial terms I have, in general, been a
grasshopper rather than an ant. There is no massive pension pot to retire on nor
a second home in Florida. So what to do? Many of you may know that I have been
flogging old postcards and ephemera on ebay for some years so my wife and I
have decided that I should try and expand this into a full time occupation. So as
well as continuing to sell on ebay we get up astonishingly early one day a weekend,
load up the car and drive off to a postcard/stamp/collector’s fair and we enjoy
it. It’s good fun. We have to go to auctions to buy new stock, I am one of the leathery old gits that you see in the background of 'Flog-It' or 'Cash in the Attic'. Can we make enough to survive? Well when a Chinese politician was once asked “Was the French Revolution a good
thing?” he replied “It’s too soon to tell”.
What about cycling? I have come up with a
few schemes. Favourite is ‘Basingstoke to St Petersburg’. I have done some calculations
and reckon it’s an 18 day ride from Calais to Gdansk and another 20/21 to St
Petersburg. Almost identical to my Danube trip. Unfortunately I can’t afford to
be away that long, I need to be manning my postcard stall at Haywards Heath/Canterbury/Bath/ Birmingham
at the weekends. For a while I toyed with the idea of a “Nowheresville Tour”
which involved an entirely random cycle ride around England the only condition
being that I should stay every night in a place that I have never heard of. The
randomness was attractive but I am extremely well travelled and I would end up
cycling in ever decreasing circles round rural Lincolnshire. Finally the
bookshelves in the downstairs loo which house the travel section of my library
came to my aid. I picked up an old favourite, Paul Theroux’s “The Kingdom by the
Sea”, written in 1982 the year of the Falklands War. Theroux, an American, had
lived in London for eleven years but had rarely ventured far beyond the M25 (not
surprising since it wasn’t built until 1986) and certainly never to
Lincolnshire. He decided to circumnavigate the UK in a clockwise direction
using coastal railways where possible and walking where not. Coincidentally
another travel writer Jonathan Raban chose to sail round the UK, though in an
anti-clockwise direction at the same time and wrote about his journey in a book
called “Coasting”. This also used to be on the shelves in the downstairs loo
but seems not to have survived one of my periodic culls. I do remember that the
two travel writing titans did have an awkward meeting somewhere along the way.
So a ride round the Coastline of England
and Wales with a possible excursion along Hadrian’s Wall. What are the rules?
Rules! What rules? Why do there have to be rules? Because without rules we will
all go to Hell in a handcart. I will try and ride as close to the sea as seems
sensibly possible but not along the high tide mark nor along the coastal path which
is a nightmare of steps, stiles, gates and mud. Tarmac only. Due to my postcard dealing commitments the
journey will have to be done in fits and starts, two days here, three days
there but somehow it will be done.
