‘What a deep pile of. .’ I muttered to myself, as I wandered off to find some cheese in a nice olde cheese shop. But there was none to be had anywhere. I consulted an ancient crone of the diocese, who informed me: ‘You’ll have to go to Iceland.’ And that, in a non-recyclable plastic shell, is the very rub of modern Middle England: you always have to go to Iceland.
At the cathedral a genial beadle told me: ‘We’ve a lot of children in today, but I’m sure they won’t bother you and nor,’ his eyes hardened into paedophilia-seeking devices, ‘will you bother them.’ Frankly, I would’ve been hard put to bother them, because there were hundreds of the little blighters. Whole choirs of little seats had been lain out in the nave, the transept, the chapels, and upon them lessons were taking place. What a joy it was to see this magnificent building fully tenanted, instead of vacuous with the absence of God.
I plodded on out of Lichfield as the day heated up. On and on along the canal heading north. On and on past fields of alien, oily rape. On and on, with only my overheated brain for company. Towards late afternoon I crossed over Watling Street and reached the outskirts of Burton-on-Trent, only to be assailed by a great wave of maltiness, a farinaceous swell that engulfed me, stoppering up my mouth and nostrils with the essence of an thousand thousand pints of lager. The great steel vats of the Coors brewery scintillated in the sunshine. ‘What must it be like,’ I mused, ‘to grow up in this beerville, waiting your entire childhood for chucking-out time?’
Kate Moss or Moss?
Shown here are a group of peasant women Ralph caught on camera during his recent sojourn in the rural fastness of Puglia. According to a local ethnographer (who Ralph managed to corner in a bar, then strong-arm until he divulged), the ancient crones are worshipping a totemic carving of Rianare, the God of Cheap Plane Flights. Their belief is that if a suitable offering is presented to Rianare (a garland festooned with polished olive stones is usually enough), he will bless the donor with a £27.49 return flight to Stansted; or Luton, or Gatwick — and possibly even the East Midlands Airport. Anywhere, in fact, so long as it isn’t Heathrow, the passenger wasn’t born in a leap year, and their hold baggage doesn’t contain more socks than pants. (Pants surcharge is £4,578.23 per pair.)
I myself am a recent convert to the cult of Rianare, having flown to Cork at the weekend on a low-cost airline. In Ireland the God is known as ‘Ryanair’ (Rían-àr in the original Gaelic), and his devotees, despite the anathema pronounced on them by the Cardinal Primate of All Ireland, are quite as numerous and fanatical as those in southern Italy. Personally, I didn’t know what to expect when I started on this new, spiritual path. I had been warned that in return for a seat Ryanair demanded exorbitant mortification on the part of his suppliants. There would be a twenty-mile walk from the departure lounge to the gate. Indeed, very likely there would be no gate at all, simply a gash in the aluminium skin of the terminal building, through which passengers would be bodily hurled on to the concrete apron.
Once on the plane — already battered and bruised — I would find no seats, as such, only straps from which to hang. When turbulence came, us dangling punters would collide with each other like ball-bearings in a Newton’s cradle, setting in motion the most inappropriate collisions, and even spontaneous acts of congress. No wonder, I thought, the Cardinal Primate takes such a dim view. Moreover, there would be no strap allocation, for on cheap flights it’s every man, woman and even child for themselves. In the event things weren’t that bad at all. There were seats, and, as none of these were secured, instead of finding myself sandwiched beside one of my own, needy offspring I instead plumped down and discovered that my thigh was melded against that of Kate Moss, the internationally renowned model and demi-mondaine.
Surprised? I didn’t even know she was Irish. It transpired that Moisty — as she is familiarly dubbed — flies back and forth to West Cork with disarming frequency. As she vouchsafed to me, the flights are now so cheap that it’s more cost effective for her to hire a babysitter in Bantry and have them flown over for the evening, than to engage one on Primrose Hill. I spoke to a couple of other parents of young children on the flight, and they said the same thing: Ryanair brought families closer together; now Nan could sit, chewing a quid of tobacco, and singing ‘The Croppy Boy’ in the corner of their Danish Modern kitchen in Clifton, for the price of a loaf of soda bread. Mind you, that isn’t for the price of a loaf of soda bread actually on a Ryanair plane; that costs £27,609.43 (€40,653.29).
Who are we environmentalist Cassandras to deny these simple folk their consanguinity admixed with aviation fuel? What perverse ideology would dare to tear grandchild from grandmother, stag night from Cork bar? So what if the improved familial relations of today are ruining it all for succeeding generations? At least those future generations will have had well-adjusted parents. And anyway, the airspace of today is not the airspace of yesteryear. That was a moneyed preserve, accessible only to the super-rich, who in a very important sense owned it. Now the sky belongs to all, and is like unto an illimitable, blue moorland, across which the masses have the inalienable right to roam.
Frankly, this is all just as well, because once you actually arrive in Ireland you will find yourself subject to a most astonishing reversaclass="underline" you may have been able to fly hundreds of miles with utter abandon, but at ground level the Emerald Isle sets up fierce resistance to the idea of anyone daring to stray off the beaten track. Since 1995 something called the ‘Owners Liability Act’ has been in force. This makes property owners legally obliged to compensate walkers for any accidents that happen to them on their land — even if these occur on public rights of way. Needless to say, this has made Irish landowners — never that keen on unconstrained roaming in the gloaming — positively Stalinesque, exiling ramblers from their land with brutal alacrity. Only in the burgeoning cult of Rían-àr can the people find succour.
Where’s Papa?
I suppose, if we were honest, by the time we reached Papa Westray both Antony and I were already just a little bit weirded out. It had been a beautiful day, and we’d cycled up the length of the larger Orcadian island of Westray, stopping only to boil up cockles on a perfect white sand beach and visit an archaeological site at the Knowe of Skea. Here affable archaeologists (mind you, have you ever met one who wasn’t affable?) gave of their time to tell us about the dig. It was an Iron Age sacred site of some kind, the corpses of 127 people bound and interred in the walls of a series of buildings used for metalworking. ‘Basically,’ our guide told us, ‘these people were metal-bashing while granny rotted in the wainscoting.’
There was no one besides us on the ferry across to Papay, as it’s locally known. Antony chatted with our genial Charon, while I observed the bank of sea mist, which, having remained offshore throughout the day, was now oozing in. At Moclett Pier a lady was waiting in her car. She wore a blue tunic and took receipt of a prescription from the ferryman. ‘Do you want a lift up to Beltane House?’ she asked, but we declined. Fiona was, it transpired, our hostess, as well as the district nurse. ‘And will chicken be all right for supper, because he’s got it on?’ Chicken, we conceded, would be fine.
We traversed a dwarfish golf course with only one hole and crossed by the shore of the Loch of St Tredwell. This was the uttermost end of Orkney, with nothing due north of it save for Fair Isle, where men are men and jumpers are nervous. Papay is a diminutive island, four miles long and barely a mile wide in places, but it supports a big history. St Tredwell, the remains of whose chapel stand beside the loch, was one of the ‘holy virgins’ who accompanied St Boniface on his mission to convert the Picts. Apparently, when some venal fellow saw fit to compliment the nascent saint on her fine eyes, she responded by tearing them out and sending them to him stuck on a bodkin. How’s that for anti-vanity!