Canalised
Sunday lunch, organic carrion, five others present, as far as I know all of them have good hearing. I say: ‘I’m going to cycle from Liverpool, along the ship canal to Manchester tomorrow.’ No one acknowledges this, so I say it again: ‘I’m going to. . &c.’ It is as if they can’t hear me at all, the conversation has passed on — to types of corkscrew, child development, Marx’s facial hair (Groucho, not Karl) — leaving me bobbing in its wake. I’m not so foolish as to be unable to comprehend why this should be: my remark is the analogue of the journey it describes. These metropolitan media types might go to Liverpool for an art biennale, or to Manchester for a party conference, but the idea that these two, proximate cities can be journeyed between, purely for the sake of it, is way off the edge of their flat and papery world.
Then there are those other, fatal words: ‘cycling’ and ‘ship’ and ‘canal’; all guaranteed to make even active minds shut right down. Had I casually let fall that I was going on a rainforest safari with the Ituri pygmies of the Congo, or even, sotto voce, that I was considering two weeks of colonic irrigation in Chiang Mai, they would all have been agog.
So, the following morning, I found myself standing on Runcorn Station having detrained, and the 7.13 to Lime Street was pulling away, and many many thousands of obsolete stair rods had been pressed back into service so that they could rain down on me. Yet, no matter how inauspicious a start, I still felt liberated. Once more I’d pulled it off, and loosed the so-called ‘lines of desire’ with which urban planners lash us to workplace, retail outlet and real estate.
I assembled the foldaway bike and pedalled away into the maelstrom that howled about the steel girders of the bridge across the swirling, turbid Mersey. I’d abandoned the idea of the full push from the ’pool. I had limited time, and I’m not an amphibian. Nevertheless, I soon felt like one, pumping up the towpath of the St Helens Canal, my waterproofs as slick as sealskin. The aim of following the ship canal all the way had also been dropped, when the map confirmed what common sense — never my strongest suit — should have told me; namely, that ships don’t get towed along paths. Instead, I would follow the Trans Pennine Trail, replete with graffiti-obscured info-boards and shuttered ranger stations.
On I slithered, through a watery world carved by the tail of the Mersey as it lashed in its flood plain. Past the fat-bellied deities of the Runcorn Power Station cooling towers, where I could hear metal being tortured behind closed doors, while steam clouds of preternatural brightness plumped above the reed beds. I may wax lyrical — but then why shouldn’t I? When I joined the ship canal itself, at Warrington, I felt my wheel fitting into a groove scoured out over centuries by the most historically significant motive forces Eurasia has ever known.
The ship canaclass="underline" a pre-rail, eotechnic form of transport, force-fed by coal and steel. Manchester: the manufactory of the world for a hundred years. Liverpooclass="underline" its port — and the line of the canal — extended in space across the Atlantic to America, like a water spout from a chthonic past shooting into the post-industrial future. And it was, of course, deserted, except for a man walking a Scotty dog under a golfing brolly, his feet crackling on empty White Lightning bottles, while a hubcap gleamed on the eroding bank.
At a massive set of locks, lowered over by a red-brick building bearing the optimistic legend ‘New World Gas Cookers’, I left the ship canal and followed the route of a dismantled railway across country to Altrincham. The rain cleared and from the embankment I could see jets hurled up by Manchester Airport to spear the cloud cover. I joined the Cheshire Ring Canal for a few miles, before, at Sale, sodden and chapped, deciding to chuck the proverbial towel in. I folded up the bike and boarded a tramcar, which ran up on an elevated section through the outskirts of the conurbation, before, at Old Trafford, suddenly dipping down to the ground and merging with the road traffic.
It was a fitting end to such a journey: the seeming-train transforming into a bus. I had traversed mighty canals that were now weedy backwaters, and the muddy sloughs of defunct iron roads. This part of the world was not a landscape at all, but a palimpsest, worked over again and again by the busy hands of humankind. At dinner that night, in a Thai restaurant, I announced to my five Mancunian companions — none of whom, so far as I know, were hard of hearing — ‘I cycled from Runcorn to Sale today.’ And this remark went blissfully unacknowledged.
Middle Earth
Forgive me if I’ve written this before, but as a man — or a woman, or an hermaphrodite for that matter — grows older, his/her ability to recall things, thankfully, gets hazy. Besides, this was one of the formative experiences of my life, so why not come at it from another angle?
When I worked as a corporate publisher in the 1980s I went to pitch my services to Weetabix, who had their factory in Kettering in the East Midlands. It was the usual tedious drive up into the heart of England, my suit jacket dangling from a hook behind my ear, my face frozen in that dreadful rictus which is engendered by loud in-car entertainment, nicotine, Nescafé and gnawing frustration. When I got to the outskirts of the town I pulled up, and, stepping out of my regulation Ford Sierra, I was assailed by a great wave of wheatiness that engulfed me, stoppering up my mouth and nostrils with the essence of an thousand thousand breakfasts.
Blimey! I thought (these were innocent days, the whole culture existed before the watershed), what can it be like to grow up in this cerealville? As a child, you must believe that this intense, foody atmosphere is natural, then, when at last you reach your maturity, and travel to some other burgh — say Redditch — be altogether perplexed by its absence.
Ever since I’ve thought of the Midlands as a region dominated by these mono-product towns: Birmingham for cars, Nottingham for shoes, Bourneville for chocolate, Stafford for pottery. The waist of Olde Englande is cinched by a belt studded with these buckles, and to travel around it is to find yourself in the tarmac aisles of some grossly elongated cash-and-carry. Not that you’ll be carrying many cars away from Birmingham nowadays; indeed, so far has the second city shed its status as the Detroit of England that the centre is now almost entirely pedestrianised. Pedestrianised and elevated: the other evening (the first balmy one of summer), I walked all the way from the trendy restaurant area around the canal at Brindley Place, to my hotel by St Philip’s Cathedral, without even setting foot at ground level. Doubtless out at Longbridge the rust never sleeps, while tumbleweeds blow across Spaghetti Junction.
The following morning I left for Lichfield, and sat in the jolting, sunlit carriage assailed by an inane in-train television channel. Who would’ve thought that the future would be so technologically scrambled? Yes, we anticipated such things in the 1970s, but we thought they’d come together with jet packs, meals-in-a-pill and eternal life. Instead we get stainless-steel automated toilets, embedded in the same old shitty railway platforms.
Such meditations were fit meat for Lichfield, where the pollution-corroded fangs of the perfect bijou Gothic cathedral gnawed at the sky and gnashed on the winding, Tudor-fronted streets. Lichfield being a carpet town, there was its most famous son, Samuel Johnson, looking gloomy, dropsical and depressed, while apparently sitting atop a pile of cheap rugs. On the plinth of the statue which was surrounded on all sides by the carpet market was this epigram of the Great Cham: ‘Every man has a lurking wish to appear considerable in his own land.’