From Cairo to the Connemara: A Sojournal

Pt 3 - 10: LITERALLY LITERARY 2   We woke to the sound of rain beginning to patter on the tent. We had just enough time to drag ourselves out of the bags and chuck everything, including the already damp tent, in the bullet before it came pelting down. The summer weather in this part of the country is everything it’s cracked down to be. Not a little bit pissed off we prowled the nearest town, Yeovil, for breakfast. Being eight o’clock on a Sunday, the joint was closed. In desperation we pulled up to a corner pub, the only place with a light on. I let myself in through the guest’s entrance and the landlady appeared out of a side door. I explained our situation and she offered to do us a full English breakfast with all the coffee we could drink. I could have had her children. She seated us in the main room of the pub, where the juke box blared as the boys in the band bumped out after a big Saturday night. She served us generous helpings of bacon, eggs, snags, mushies and baked beans w...

Pt 3 - 9:   LITERALLY LITERARY 1 The Percy Hobbs on the outskirts of Winchester is famous as the very first of many genuine country public houses I visited in a dedicated in-depth study of country pubs all over the UK and Ireland. An actual house thrown open to the public it was small, intimate, friendly and warm with a jolly, rotund ruddy-faced innkeeper, hearty home-cooked fare and a nice line in Murphy’s Irish Stout. We arrived here late on the afternoon of a day which began with a lazy breakfast in Chiswick followed by a leisurely drive down the A31. I have to say I wasn’t too sad to leave the big smoke behind. Chawton, Jane Austen’s family home in Alton, Hampshire, was our first stop on a mostly literary circuit which would take us in a wide arc south, then west and loop us back to London. I liked Chawton straight away for its lack of pretence. Preserved pretty much as it was when the last Austen walked out of the house more than a hundred years ago, there’s a gentle atmosph...

Pt3 - 8:  ENGLAND 19 th July – 29 th August LONDON the FIRST Day 150: Le Shuttle terminal at Calais is a spaceport. We joined the queue of cars under overcast skies at 12:40pm, were directed down the ramp onto the long train, all polished steel and gleaming glass, and at 12:52 descended soundlessly into the Chunnel. Thirty-five minutes later we emerged into bright sunshine at Folkestone and were funnelled smoothly onto the M20 to London. The immediate challenge was to focus on the novelty of driving a left-hand drive vehicle on the left side of the road, but we managed to negotiate the first two hours without mishap. Hungry and needing some Sterling we swerved off the ramp at Ashford, visited a hole in the wall and hit our first English pub. It was both familiar and strange: familiar because the ambience was very similar to a comfy pub back home, only with period décor, strange because for the first time in a long while the menu was in English and so was the conversation....

Pt3 - 7:   BELGIUM 15 th July – 18 th July   The three hundred kilometres to Brugge took exactly three hours. We pulled into the carpark of the Hotel Lodewijk van Male at 1:30 with just over six thousand clicks on the bullet’s odometer. Concentrating on the little details was one way of managing my mental state, of imposing order on my mind. We’d driven almost the whole way in silence. Tess spent much of the time staring out the window at the dreary, built-up landscape with its endless forest of high-tension towers marching off into the distance. I was quietly angry; angry with myself for allowing us to get into such a compromising position in a public place, angry with the punks for jumping us, angry with the people who ignored us afterwards…I had trouble keeping hold of the positives; that we’d escaped serious physical harm, that our valuables were safe, that we’d travelled for one hundred and forty five days through eleven countries from Egypt to Amsterdam without m...