Discouraged, I repaired to a nearby restaurant, a place where my wife and I used to have crab salads and fancy ourselves genteel. Things had changed here, too. The menu had plunged downmarket to the scampi, chips and peas level, and the food was heartily mediocre. But the truly memorable thing was the service. I have never seen such resplendent ineptitude in a restaurant. The place was packed, and it soon became evident that not one party was happy. Almost every dish that appeared from the kitchen had something on it that hadn't been ordered or lacked something that had.Some people sat foodless for ages while others at their table were presented all their courses more or less at once. I ordered a prawn cocktail, waited thirty minutes for it and then discovered that several of the prawns were still frozen. I sent it back and never saw it again. Forty minutes later a waitress appeared with a plate of plaice, chips and peas and couldn't find a taker so I had it, although I'd ordered haddock. When I finished, I calculated my bill from the menu, left the right money, minus a small reckoning for the frozen prawns, and departed.
Then I went back to my hotel, a place of deep and depressing cheerlessness, with nylon sheets and cold radiators, went to bed and read by the light of a 7watt bulb and made a small, heartfelt vow never to return to Lulworth so long as I might live.
In the morning I awoke to find rain falling over the hills in great blown sheets. I breakfasted, settled the bill and spent a protracted period struggling into waterproofs in the front hallway. It's a funny thing. I dress myself most days without incident, but give me a pair of waterproof trousers to put on and it's as if I've never stood unaided. I spent twenty minutes crashing into walls and furniture, falling into pot plants and, in one particularly notable outburst, hopping on one leg for some fifteen feet before wrapping my neck around a newel post.
When at last I was fully kitted out, I caught a glimpse of myself in a fulllength wall mirror and realized I looked uncannily like a large blue condom. Thus attired and accompanied with each step by an irritating rustle of nylon, I picked up my rucksack and walkingstick and took to the hills. I proceeded up Hambury Tout, past Durdle Door and the steepsided valley engagingly called Scratchy Bottom, and on up a steep, muddy, zigzagging path to a lonely, fogshrouded eminence called Swyre Head. The weather was appalling and the rain maddening.
Indulge me for a moment, if you will. Drum on the top of your head with the fingers of both hands and see how long it takes before either it gets seriously on your nerves or everyone in the vicinity is staring at you. In either case, you will find that you are happy to stop it. Now imagine those drumming fingers are raindrops endlessly beating on your hood and that there's nothing you can do about it, and moreover that your glasses are two circles of steamy uselessness, that you are slipping around on a rainslickened path a single misstep from a long fall to a rocky beach a fall that would reduce you to little more than a smear on a piece of rock, like jam on bread. I imagined the headline ' American writer dies in fall; was leaving country anyway' and plodded on, squinting Magoolike, with feelings of foreboding.
It is twelve miles from Lulworth to Weymouth. In Kingdom by the Sea, Paul Theroux gives the impression that you can walk it in an easy lope and still have time for a cream tea and to slag off the locals, but I trust he had better weather than I. It took me most of the day. The walking beyond Swyre Head was mostly along mercifully flat, if lofty, cliffs high above a cadaverous grey sea, but the footing was treacherous and the going slow. At Ringstead Bay the hills abruptly ended in a final steep descent to the beach. I rode an ooze of flowing mud down the hill to the bay, pausing only long enough to belly into boulders and carry out a few tree resiliency tests. At the bottom I pulled out my map and, making calipers of my fingers, worked out that I had only covered about five miles. It had taken most of the morning. Frowning at my lack of progress, I shoved the map into a pocket and moodily trudged on.
The rest of the day was a dreary, wet tramp along low hills above a pounding surf. The rain eased off and turned into an insidious drizzle that special English kind of drizzle that hangs in the air and saps the spirit. About one o'clock Weymouth materialized from the mists, far off across a long curve of bay, and I gave a small cry of joy. But its seeming nearness was a cruel deception. It took me almost two hours to reach the town's outskirts, and another hour to walk along the front to the centre, by which time I was tired and limping. I got a room in a small hotel and spent a long time lying on the bed, booted and still condomed, before I could summon the strength to change into something less obviously mirthmaking, have a light wash and hit the town.
I liked Weymouth a good deal more than I'd expected to. It has two claims to fame. In 1348 it was the place where the Black Death was introduced into England and in 1789 it became the world's first seaside resort when that tedious lunatic George III started a fashion for seabathing there. Today the town tries to maintain an air of Georgian elegance and generally nearly succeeds, though like most seaside resorts it had about it a whiff of terminal decline, at least as far as tourism goes. The Gloucester Hotel, where George and his retinue stayed (it was a private house then), had recently closed and now Weymouth didn't have a single decent large hotel, a sad omission in an old seaside town. But I'm happy to report thatit does have many good pubs and one outstanding restaurant, Perry's, all of them in the harbourfront district, a tartedup neighbourhood with fishing smacks bobbing on the water and a jaunty nautical air that makes you half expect to see Popeye and Bluto come loping round the corner. Perry's was crowded and cheerful and a joy to the spirits after Lulworth. I had local mussels from Poole after three days of hard walking it came as a shock to realize that Poole was still local and a highly creditable sea bass, and afterwards retired to the kind of dark and lowceilinged pub where you feel as if you ought to be wearing a bulky Aran sweater and a captain's cap. I enjoyed myself very much and drank so much my feet stopped aching.
To the west of Weymouth stands the fiftymilelong arc of Lyme Bay. Since the landscape just west of Weymouth is not particularly, or even fractionally, memorable, I took a taxi to Abbotsbury, and began my walk midway along Chesil Beach. I don't know what Chesil Beach is like towards the Weymouth end, but along this stretch it consisted of great drifts of small, kidneyshaped pebbles worn to a uniform smoothness by eons of wave action. They are nearly impossible to walk on since you sink to your ankletops with each step. The coast path is on firmer ground immediately behind the beach, but leaves you unable to see over the stony dunes. Instead, you just hear the sea, crashing into the shore on the other side and sending endless successions of pebbles clattering along the water's edge. It was the most boring walk I've ever had. My blisters soon began to throb. I can stand most kinds of pain, even watching Jeremy Beadle, but I do find blisters particularly disagreeable. By the time I reached West Bay, early in the afternoon, I was ready for a good sitdown and something to eat.