It took over an hour and a half to cover the thirtyeight miles to Barnstaple, where I alighted and headed into town across a long bridge over the swiftflowing River Taw. I wandered around for a half an hour through narrow shopping streets and a large, cheerless covered market thinly arrayed with people selling handicraft items, and felt content that there was no need to linger here. Barnstaple used to be a major rail interchange, with three stations, but now there is just the one with its infrequent pootling services to Exeter, and a bus station overlooking the river. I went into the bus station and found two women sitting in an office beyond an open door, talking together in that quaint 'Oi be drinkin zoider' accent of this part of the world.I asked them about buses to Minehead, about thirty miles to the east along the coast. They looked at me as if I'd asked for connections to Tierra del Fuego.
'Oh, you won't be gittin to Moinhead this toim of year, you won't be,' said one.
'No buses to Moinhead arter firrrrst of Octobaaarrrr,' chimed in the second one.
'What about Lynton and Lynmouth?'
They snorted at my naivety. This was England. This was 1994.
'Porlock?'
Snort.
'Dunster?'
Snort.
The best they could suggest was that I take a bus to Bideford and see if I could catch another bus on from there. They may be runnin the Scarrrrrrlet Loin out of Bideforrrrrd, they may be, oi they may, they may but can't be sartin.'
'Will there be more people like you there?' I wanted to say but didn't. The only other option they could suggest was a bus to Westward Ho! but there didn't seem much point since I couldn't go anywhere else from there and anyway I couldn't face spending the night in an ejaculation, as it were. I thanked them and departed, I stood outside in a froth of uncertainty and tried to think what to do next. All my carefully laid plans were coming unravelled. I retired to the curiously named Royal and Fortescue Hotel, where I ordered a tuna sandwich and a cup of coffee from a mute and charmless waitress, and rooted in my pack for my timetable, where I discovered that I had twentythree minutes to eat my sandwich, drink my coffee, and waddle the mile back to the railway station to catch a train to Exeter, where I could start again.
I swallowed my sandwich nearly whole when it came, gulped two sips of coffee, threw some money on the table and fled for the station, terrified that I would miss the train and have to spend the night in Barnstaple. I just made it. When I got to Exeter, I marched straight up to the TV screens, determined to take the first train to anywhere.
Thus it was that I found myself in the hands of fate and bound for WestonsuperMare.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE WAY I SEE IT, THERE ARE THREE REASONS NEVER TO BE UNHAPPY. First, you were born. This in itself is a remarkable achievement. Did you know that each time your father ejaculated (and frankly he did it quite a lot) he produced roughly 25 million spermatozoa enough to repopulate Britain every two days or so? For you to have been born, not only did you have to be among the few batches of sperm that had even a theoretical chance of prospering in itself quite a long shot but you then had to win a race against 24,999,999 or so other wriggling contenders, all rushing to swim the English Channel of your mother's vagina in order to be the first ashore at the fertile egg of Boulogne, as it were. Being born was easily the most remarkable achievement of your whole life. And think: you could just as easily have been a flatworm.
Second, you are alive. For the tiniest moment in the span of eternity you have the miraculous privilege to exist. For endless eons you were not. Soon you will cease to be once more. That you are able to sit here right now in this one nevertoberepeated moment, reading this book, eating bonbons, dreaming about hot sex with that scrumptious person from accounts, speculatively sniffing your armpits, doing whatever you are doing just existing is really wondrous beyond belief.
Third, you have plenty to eat, you live in a time of peace and 'Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree' will never be number one again.
If you bear these things in mind, you will never be truly unhappy though in fairness I must point out that if you find yourself alonein WestonsuperMare on a rainy Tuesday evening you may come close.
It was only a little after six when I stepped from the Exeter train and ventured into the town, but already the whole of Weston appeared to be indoors beyond drawn curtains.
The streets were empty, dark and full of slanting rain. I walked from the station through a concrete shopping precinct and out on to the front where a black unseen sea made restless whooshing noises. Most of the hotels along the front were dark and empty, and the few that were open didn't look particularly enticing. I walked a mile or so to a cluster of three brightly lit establishments at the far end of the promenade and randomly selected a place called the Birchfield. It was fairly basic, but clean and reasonably priced. You could do worse, and I have.
I gave myself a cursory grooming and wandered back into town in search of dinner and diversion. I had an odd sense that I had been here before, which patently I had not. My only acquaintance with Weston was that John Cleese had once told me (I'm not really dropping names; I was interviewing him for a newspaper article; he is a jolly nice fellow, by the way) that he and his parents lived in a flat in Weston, and that when they moved out Jeffrey Archer and his parents moved in, which I thought was kind of remarkable the idea of these two boys in short trousers saying hello and then one of them going on to greatness. What made Weston feel familiar was, of course, that it was just like everywhere else. It had Boots and Marks & Spencer and Dixons and W.H. Smith and all the rest of it. I realized with a kind of dull ache that there wasn't a single thing here that I hadn't seen a million times already.
I went into a pub called the Britannia Inn, which was unfriendly without being actually hostile, and had a couple of lonely pints, then ate at a Chinese restaurant, not because I craved Chinese but because it was the only place I could find open. I was the only customer. As I quietly scattered rice and sweet and sour sauce across the tablecloth, there were some rumbles of thunder and, a moment later, the heavens opened and I mean opened. I have seldom seen it rain so hard in England. The rain spattered the street like a shower of ballbearings and within minutes the restaurant window was wholly obscured with water, as if someone were running a hose over it. Because I was a long walk from my hotel, I spun out the meal, hoping the weather would ease off, but it didn't, and eventually I had no choice but to step out into the rainy night.
I stood beneath a shop awning next door and wondered what to do. Rain battered madly on the awning and rushed in torrents through the gutters. All along the road it poured over the sides of overstretched gutters and fell to the pavement in an endless clatter. With my eyes closed it sounded like I was in the midst of some vast, insane tapdancing competition. Pulling my jacket above my head, I waded out into the deluge, then sprinted across the street and impulsively took refuge in the first bright, open thing I came to an amusement arcade. Wiping my glasses with a bandanna, I took my bearings. The arcade was a large room full of brightly pulsating machines, some of them playing electronic tunes or making unbidden kerboom noises, but apart from an overseer sitting at a counter with a drooping fag and a magazine, there was noone in the place so it looked eerily as if the machines were playing themselves.
With the exception of penny falls and those crane things that give you three microseconds to try to snatch a stuffed animal and in which the controls don't actually correspond to the movements of the grabber bucket, I don't understand arcade games at all. Generally I can't even figure out where to insert the money or, once inserted, how to make the game start. If by some miracle I manage to surmount these two obstacles, I invariably fail to recognize that the game has come to life and that I am wasting precious seconds feeling in remote coinreturn slots and searching for a button that says 'Start'. Then I have thirty confused seconds of being immersed in some frantic mayhem without having the faintest idea what's going on, while my children shout, 'You've just blown up Princess Leila, you stupid shit!' and then it says 'Game Over'.