It seems almost impossible to believe, but the shopping centre was even worse designed than the town around it. Indeed, it must be a source of mirth wherever shoppingmall designers gather. It was absolutely enormous more than a million square feet and it contained every chain store that there has ever been or will ever be. But it was dark and determinedly unlovely and built along two straight, featureless parallel avenues that must run for half a mile. Unless in my delirium I overlooked them, and I think not, there was no foodx:ourt, no central gathering place, nowhere much to sit, no design feature to encourage you to warm to this place to even the most fractional degree. It was like being in the world's largest bus station. The toilets were few and hard to find, and in consequence were as crowded with users as if it were halftime at a football match. I had always thought of the Metro Centre at Gateshead as my worst nightmare made whole, but it is a place of infinite charm and endless delight compared with the mall at Milton Keynes.
I had a cup of coffee in the grubbiest McDonald's I ever hope to visit and, clearing a space among the accumulated litter left by earlier users of my table, sat with my railway timetable and accompanying route map and felt a stab of despair at the discovery that the options before me were to go back to London or onward to Rugby, Coventry or Birmingham. I had no desire to do any of these. It seemed like days rather than mere hours since I had dropped off my hire car in Oxford and set off for the station with the simpleminded plan of travelling from Oxford to Cambridge by way of a lunchtime break at Milton Keynes.
Time was leaking away. I had, in some remote, halfforgotten life, sat at a kitchen table in a house in the Yorkshire Dales and worked out that I could comfortably cover the whole country in six or, at the outside, seven weeks. And that included airy plans to go practically everywhere to the Channel Islands, Lundy, Shetland, Fair Isle, virtually all the cities. I had read John Hillaby's Journey Through Britain and he had walked from Land's End to John O'Groats in eight weeks. Surely with the assistance of a fleet modern public transport system I could see most of Britain in six or seven weeks. But now here I was, having used up nearly half my allotted time, and I hadn't even penetrated as far as the Midlands.
So, in a dim frame of mind, I gathered up my things, walked to the station and caught a train back to London where, in effect, I would have to start all over again. I couldn't think where to go, so I did what I often do. As the train marched through the rolling, autumnbare farmlands of Buckinghamshire, I spread out a mapand lost myself in the names. This is, to me, one of the deep and abiding pleasures of life in Britain.
I wonder if other people notice how much comparative pleasure there is in drinking in a pub called The Eagle and Child or Lamb and Flag rather than, say, Joe's Bar. Personally, I find endless satisfaction in it. I love to listen to the football results and the lulling rollcall of team names Sheffield Wednesday, West Bromwich Albion, Partick Thistle, Queen of the South; what glory there is in those names and I find strange comfort in the exotic and mystifying litany of the shipping forecasts. I have no idea what they mean ' Viking rising five, backing four; Dogger blowing strong, steady as she goes; Minches gale force twelve, jeez Louise' but they exert a powerful soothing effect on me. I genuinely believe that one of the reasons Britain is such a steady and gracious place is the calming influence of the football results and shipping forecasts.
There is almost no area of British life that isn't touched with a kind of genius for names. Just look at the names of the prisons. You could sit me down with a limitless supply of blank paper and a pen and command me to come up with a more cherishably ridiculous name for a prison and in a lifetime I couldn't improve on Wormwood Scrubs or Strangeways. Even the common names of wildflowers stitchwort, lady's bedstraw, blue fleabane, feverfew have an inescapable enchantment about them.
But nowhere, of course, are the British more gifted than with place names. There are some 30,000 place names in Britain, a good half of them, I would guess, notable or arresting in some way. There are villages without number whose very names summon forth an image of lazy summer afternoons and butterflies darting in meadows: Winterbourne Abbas, Weston Lullingfields, Theddlethorpe All Saints, Little Missenden. There are villages that seem to hide some ancient and possibly dark secret: Husbands Bosworth, Rime Intrinseca, Whiteladies Aston. There are villages that sound like toilet cleansers (Potto, Sanahole, Durno) and villages that sound like skin complaints (Scabcleuch, Whiterashes, Scurlage, Sockburn). In a brief trawl through any gazetteer you can find fertilizers (Hastigrow), shoe deodorizers (Powfoot), breath fresheners (Minto), dog food (Whelpo) and even a Scottish spot remover (Sootywells). You can find villages that have an attitude problem (Seething, Mockbeggar, Wrangle) and villages of strange phenomena (Meathop, Wigtwizzle, Blubberhouses). And there are villages almost without number that are just endearingly inane Prittlewell, Little Rollright, Chew Magna, Titsey, Woodstock Slop, Lickey End, Stragglethorpe, Yonder Bognie, Nether Wallop and the unbeatable ThorntonleBeans.
(Bury me there!) You have only to cast a glance across a map or lose yourself in an index to see that you are in a place of infinite possibility.
Some parts of the country seem to specialize in certain themes. Kent has a peculiar fondness for foodstuffs: Ham, Sandwich. Dorset goes in for characters in a Barbara Cartland noveclass="underline" Bradford Peverell, Compton Valence, Langton Herring, Wootton Fitzpaine. Lincolnshire likes you to think it's a little off its head: Thimbleby Langton, Tumby Woodside, Snarford, Fishtoft Drove, Sots Hole and the truly arresting Spitall in the Street.
It's notable how often these places cluster together. In one compact area south of Cambridge, for instance, you can find Bio Norton, Rickinghall Inferior, Hellions Bumpstead, Ugley and (a personal favourite) Shellow Bowells. I had an impulse to go there now, to sniff out Shellow Bowells, as it were, and find what makes Norton Bio and Rickinghall Inferior. But as I glanced over the map my eye caught a line across the landscape called the Devil's Dyke. I had never heard of it, but it sounded awfully promising. I decided on an impulse to go there.
Thus it was that I found myself late the next morning wandering a back lane outside the Cambridgeshire hamlet of Reach looking for the dike's start. It was a rotten day. A steamroom fog filled the air and visibility was next to nothing. The dike rose up suddenly, almost alarmingly, out of the soupy greyness, and I clambered up to its top. It is a strange and brooding eminence, particularly in thick fog and out of season. Built during the darkest of the Dark Ages some 1,300 years ago, the Devil's Dyke is an earthen embankment that rises up to sixty feet above the surrounding landscape and runs in a straight line for 7Vi miles between Reach and Ditton Green. Disappointingly, noone knows why it is called the Devil's Dyke. The name isn't recorded before the sixteenth century. Standing as it does in the midst of flat fenlands, it has a kind of menacing, palpably ancient air, but also a feeling of monumental folly. It required an immense commitment of labour to construct, but it didn't take a whole lot of military genius to realize that all an invading army had to do was go around it, which is what all of them did, and within no time at all the Devil's Dyke had ceased to have any use at all except to show people in the fen country what it felt like to be sixty feet high.Still, it offers an agreeable, easy stroll along its grassy summit, and on this bleak morning I had it all to myself. Not until I reached the approximate midway point did I begin to see other people, mostly exercising their dogs on the broad sward of Newmarket Heath and looking ghostly in the unearthly fog. The dike runs right through the grounds of Newmarket Racecourse, which I thought rather jolly though I couldn't see a damn thing, and thence on through prosperouslooking horse country. Gradually the fog began to thin and between the skeletal trees I glimpsed a succession of large stud farms, each with a whitefenced paddock, a big house and a sprawl of ornate stable blocks with cupolas and weathervanes that made them look uncannily like a modern Asda or Tesco's. Pleasant as it was to have an easy, flat ramble along such a welldefined route, it was also a trifle dull. I walked for a couple of hours without passing anyone and then abruptly the dike ended in a field outside Ditton Green, and I was left standing there with an unsettling sense of anticlimax. It was only a little after two in the afternoon and I was nowhere near tired. I knew that Ditton had no railway station, but I had presumed I could catch a bus to Cambridge, and indeed I discovered in the local bus shelter that I could if I waited two days. So I trudged four miles to Newmarket down a busy road, had an idle look around there, then caught a train to Cambridge.