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In Morecambe Bay
Back after a couple of days frolics on the canal with Trina to a small pile of mail, including a Summons to the Magistrates Court for unpaid Council Tax. It will "be stopped if the amount shown [£542.47] together with the other sums claimed [£58.00] are paid [...] before the hearing date." It'll be OK. I'm a professional at one thing--living beyond my means.
To Trina's narrowboat on Sunday and the cosy, enveloping feeling as you bend and go sideways through the tiny French doors at the prow and down the two little stairs.
We were up early by our standards, since we were to strike across Morecambe Bay with the Queen's Guide To The Sands, Cedric Robinson, who is seventy-nine and has been leading people across the Bay for forty-nine years on a salary of fifteen [sic] pounds per annun. When he retires they are not making a new appointment, so a post dating from the sixteenth century will be lost, and it will be a brave person indeed who will set out alone, hoping to avoid joining the scores of human and equine corpses that lie below the sands. There is a young pretender who wants to do it commercially but he's had to be rescued twice by the coastguard and Cedric has a low opinion of his abilities.
The event was organised in association with Invisible Flock, a cheery young trio of artists, who provided headphones and an mp3 player for us to listen to a soundtrack. It was bits of interviews with Cedric, bird sounds, distorted bits of the Shipping Forecast--that sort of thing. After a while it became irritating, a muzak to nature's unmatchable music, so I turned it off.
Grey skies and a whipping wind; brief promises of sun were followed by flung rain. Most of us walked in bare feet, receiving a fine pedicure. Shortly before we came to the most treacherous part, crossing the River Kent, Cedric showed us a patch of quicksand, which wobbled malevolently underfoot like a huge jelly. Rolling up our trousers, we waded across the river. Someone gave a little scream as she trod on a fluke, a dab-like fish which lives just below the surface.
The last hour or so was across some stinking marshland, sheep dung and oily black mud everywhere; channels you had to jump across. "I'll be alright here," said Trina, and immediately slid down the bank and into the water. In another patch of squelching mud, her shoe was sucked off her foot. A careless comedy was taking over, as we gave up any pretence of protecting ourselves or our clothes.
Me bird: no post-production in the picture;
just taken at a particularly rainy moment
Trina and I were the last to straggle ashore at Kents Bank. After seven-and-a-half miles, filthy, wet, but exhilerated, we all stole gingerly into a cafe aimed at well-pressed car owners, where Invisible Flock bought us a cup of tea.
Back on the canal, changing out of our clothes turned into something far more enjoyable, making a virtue of the narrowness of a narrowboat. We improvised a studenty lentil stew, pouring off the mould that had formed on the top of the jar of olives, dispatching any harmful bacteria with one bottle of Chablis and another of Tempranillo.
14 comments
Tradin’ my time for the pay I get
Livin on money that I ain’t made yet
The Vogues
Invisible Flock sounds like bad performance art.
This place is the anti-Caribbean. That’s not a criticism. I’d love to see it.
I like that lyric. The older I get the less I worry about demands like that.
I’m the least countrysidey person I know. All hills and fields look the same to me. But Morecambe Bay has this beautiful bleakness–which is why I didn’t want some twenty-five-year old offcomer’s arty babbling in my earhole while I was crossing it.
Looks a great trip. I think I would give the music etc a miss too
What a shame Cedric won’t be replaced … it looks like a labour of love, but one worth doing.
The walk sounded great on it’s own, no need for arty babbling at all. Is offcomer the same as a comerin ? (yorkshire for ‘not originally from the area but lives here’)
Yes, “offcomer” means the same as “comerin".
I did appreciate Invisible Flock’s evident interest in this unique feature of life round here, but the occasionally didactic tone they employed to locals reminded me of a comment whispered to me by someone I used to work with at the University’s theatre after an eminent historian of C20th classical music had given a talk about Steve Reich: “Hmm, nothing there that you couldn’t have got off Wikipedia.”
Thank you for that detailed and extremely harrowing account. It does sound a wee bit dodgy, and I was getting worried that the story might have to finished by Trina.
I can imagine her tear-soaked emotional account of you being sucked down by the voracious Morecambe Bay Quicksand.
Be more careful.
How on earth am I going to be able to keep up with the news on the Real Ale, Real Cider, Real Mind Altering Substances and Real Narrowboat Sex if you kick the bucket.
Think of others before taking such risks, please.
Actually the last time I crossed that bay, I did it in about 10 minutes.
In a Westland Wessex.
PS Fungal Exotoxins may well have permeated that jar. Fungal Exotoxins are unaffected by alcohol.
Keep breathing.
Ooo I’m doing that next Saturday. Lived in L for 14 years on and off, and never done a Bay walk. You should get up to Dunsop Bridge for “Ghost Bird” If you can. Striking bits of art in amongst the bog, and wild landscape.
quicksand is real? cool… growing up on a steady diet of cartoons, i thought i was going to die in quicksand if i dared wander off the beaten path. good to know that it’s navigable, with a competent guide.
this sounds like a fabulous day out - murk, muck and rain and all that!
TSB: I can imagine better ways of being sucked in than into a wet sandy death in the Bay.
Thanks for the tip about the exotoxins (they sound worse than normal toxins). I assume I’m out of the danger zone now.
RB: I heard about the Ghost Bird thing but the “walking in silence” it mentioned on the blurb put me off. You’ll love the Cross Bay Walk.
DF: I think it depends on the type of quicksand. Cedric told us not to all stand at once on the patch he was showing us because given enough weight, it’d give way.
Anyone who knows me IRL knows that silence isn’t something I do in company (OTOH, when I’m writing it’ll be 3 days of not speakingat all, to anyone…), but there were only some bits where silence was requested, and TBH, I was too busy leaping from solid bit of bog to solid bit of bog on the top of the moor, to speak, in the bit where we were asked to be silent. My friends (who were running it) tell me that it finished early today because of the driving rain. Ah, Lancashire!
Yes, she’s… er, sorry, the rain, yes, terrible!
Morecambe gets a bad reputation, which I think it kind of courts these days, having been burned too many times before. If the alternative to being low-key is hosting Crinkly Bottom, I’d prefer to be avoided too.
Iain Sinclair chronicled walking across the sands in Ghost Milk, as a kind of critique of grand projects by paying homage to the cockle-pickers. The significance sounds a bit muddled now, but Sinclair put it much better. I imagine he was led across by Cedric too; what a shame that he won’t be replaced by the Crown.
Speaking of the Crown, good luck with living beyond your means.
I never realised Sinclair had done a book about Morecambe Bay–thanks.
The latest Crinkley Bottom-type financial disaster into which the council has lead us is the closure of the market, at a cost in future rent of several million pounds. In the meantime, we are trying to get Freemans Wood declared a Town Green, to reverse the effects of an earlier administration selling, in the 70s, an area of what everyone assumed was common land to a property trust based in Bermuda.
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