Llyn Cau, Cadair Idris
10. GOING OFF-MAP
For weeks, I had studied maps, large-scale and small, but maps are not reality at all—they can be tyrants. I know people who are so immersed in road maps that they never see the countryside they pass through, and others who, having traced a route, are held to it as though held by flanged wheels to rails.
˜ John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
At the beginning of Chapter 1, I wrote about the gulf between the British way of interaction with its landscape, and that of the Americans and the Australians. They have their wild west, their outback, their boondocks, their deserts: places vast and unknowable that demand lengthy pilgrimages and absolute respect. We, on the other hand, have signposted nature trails and the Ramblers, national parks and the National Trust, Sunday outings and Millets waterproofs. Our landscape, like our maps, is tidy, parcelled, thorough. We don’t do wilderness.
Since writing that, I’ve read Robert Macfarlane’s magisterial odyssey The Wild Places, where the disgustingly young and talented author treks around these islands (‘the archipelago’ as he likes to call them) in search of the truly wild. He finds plenty of it, and not always in the obvious places. On every page, Macfarlane is clambering up trees, slipping shamanically into lochs in the dead of winter and rolling out his bivouac bag for a night’s kip on top of a Scottish mountain or in a Cumbrian snowdrift. The lightness of his touch on the landscape is perfectly mirrored in the light, luminous prose with which he tells us of his travels. As I read, I couldn’t quite decide whether to love him or loathe him (the dust-jacket photo persuaded me towards the former).
I’ve travelled many of the same roads and tracks as Robert Macfarlane, criss-crossed the archipelago dozens of times for scores of reasons. Yet his instinctive, elemental interaction with the landscape is an ideal that I fall far short of, and the question wouldn’t leave me as I read: Was it because I was just too much of a map addict? Macfarlane discusses maps on many occasions in The Wild Places; he is evidently as dotty about them as any of us, but they are to him mere bit players in his adventures. The splendours of deep nature always come first. I began to marvel at the menageries of wild creatures that seemed to cosy up to Macfarlane at every stage of his odyssey. Hares and hawks—his totem animals—are forever peering around rocks, hopping through heather or soaring overhead and serenading him. Where were they on my many walks, I wondered, a little sorely. I see the odd hare, have had a few intoxicating one-to-ones with wild deer and was once sung to by a red kite (it has a strangely squeaky sound that belies its savage bulk and vicious talons; it reminded me of Julie Burchill), but that’s about it. Then it hit me. A husk of snow-white hares could be doing a conga through the bracken right in front of me, and I probably wouldn’t notice, as chances are I’ll either be hidden behind the map or furiously consulting the internal one, like the screen on the back of an aeroplane seat, that shows my current position. I’m too blinded by the fake representation of the world to see the real thing properly.
Has map addiction skewed my view of the countryside? I’m afraid it probably has. Maps are methodical little worlds, the rough and ragged landscape tidied up into blocks of uniform colour and sweetly functional symbols. They breathe rules and order in an inherently disorderly world. I guiltily recalled the hundreds of walks that I’ve spoiled for myself and others by getting in a complete fluster over the map, because we’ve gone slightly out of our way, or reached an unexpected impasse. The map tells me where the permitted routes are, and if I fall off them, I feel as nervous as a child waiting to be shouted at. My temples throb, sweat begins to drip, flies swarm over me, my coordination goes and the whole supposedly relaxing experience begins to take on a nightmarish tinge—especially for those poor buggers accompanying me. I can’t imagine Robert bloody Macfarlane ever acting like such a prize idiot. He glides through the landscape like a sinewy ghost, while I puff and pant, red-faced, through it, terrified that I might be going the wrong way. Wrong? Is the word even in Macfarlane’s strapping great vocabulary?
The most Macfarlanesque thing I’ve ever done is spend a night, alone with my dog on the summit of Cadair Idris. That took more puffing, panting and throbbing temples than even I thought I was capable of. It was one of those ideas that comes out of nowhere to whisper in your ear, and once the whisper is heard, there is no getting out of it, however much you wriggle. The whisper came a month or two before I was to move into the house in which I still live; my perhaps overdue, and rather precarious, launch on to the property ladder. It felt like a commitment in a way that renting somewhere new never had; I was acting on pure instinct and I desperately wanted it to work.
The house is in a small village that lies immediately south of the massif of Cadair Idris; the mountain commands the valley, dictates our weather, light and mood. It is the guv’nor. As with all mountains, and especially Welsh mountains, there are innumerable legends and lore associated with Cadair, but the most enduring is that if you spend a night on the summit (some versions have specific nights, in others it doesn’t seem to matter), you will either go mad or become a poet. Some versions add death as a third option, and in my head I pictured the odds like a curious board game—three equal wedges of colour making up a circle, and a pointer in the middle to spin and decide my fate. Even with only a third of the circle promising something desirable (although who can slide a cigarette paper between poetry and madness?), the whisper told me very clearly that I needed to go and pay my respects to the guv’nor, overnight, before moving into my new home. Contracts would be exchanged in early November, so, said the whisper, Halloween is your night. Halloween, Samhain, Calan Gaeaf, the night in which the veils between the worlds briefly thin or part and the spirits of the dead travel freely: just the night to spend alone on top of a three-thousand-foot mountain. And—ooh, look—it’ll be a full moon to boot. The whisper became a roar, and try as I might, it wasn’t shifting.
I’d climbed Cadair before, so decided to minimise the potential map fluster by going up the same route, from Minffordd, below the mountain’s southern flank. It’s a glorious ascent, which bounds up rough stone steps for the first seven hundred feet, through an oak forest tucked into the banks of a peaty river that hurtles down the mountain in great gallops and falls. This brings you to the icy corrie lake of Llyn Cau beneath the eponymous cadair, the chair. Flustering badly, I’d left it too late leaving home, and the light was already fading by the time I reached the lake, with more than a thousand feet still to go. I’d passed the last of that day’s walkers returning to their cars a while back. There was nobody left on the mountain, except me. I was overwhelmed by the realisation, looked around in vain for any token of human life and felt such a profound stab of loneliness that I struggled for breath. A sugary cup of tea from my thermos brought me back, but not that far. I lunged for my mobile phone, entertaining skittish thoughts that I could ring my pagan guru, with whom I’d talked about the plan, and draw warm words of balm and absolution from her. ‘You don’t have to go on, Mike. You’ve done very well,’ was what I wanted to hear her saying. No chance. No signal. Without the amnesty I needed, I had to go on, and wearily began to climb the path up the side of the great chair.
Once you reach the top of the chair, it’s a climactic spot and a brilliant view, but the mountain has a nasty sting in its tail still to come. From there to the summit, Pen-y-gadair, you have to descend a couple of hundred feet, painfully aware that what goes down will have to go up again, before the final six-hundred-foot ascent. On this section, there’s no real path, for the top of Cadair Idris is a mass of loose boulders scattered in all directions, through which you must gingerly pick your own way. From the top of the chair I looked west to the sea and the thinning line of orange glow still left in the aftermath of sunset. Stars were glittering in the gaps between the clouds. I felt absolutely terrified of the last haul to come, scrambling up those unforgiving boulders in pitch darkness and a growing wind. The poor dog clung to my feet, as nervous and wretched as I was.
It was horrible. As we limped higher, the thought that I was stuck here for at least the next fourteen hours of darkness clamped my heart and sent spasms of panic through me. Finally, we hauled ourselves over the last few boulders to the summit. The full moon hung low to the east, casting silver shadows down the Mawddach estuary. A few pin-pricks of orange light—Barmouth and a corner of Dolgellau—only underlined how very far we were from anything comfortable, and how very long that was going to remain the case. Tears prickled my eyes, and not entirely due to the westerly wind whipping across the barren peak. And then my guts gave way.
I’d hoped that I could contain any need for a bowel evacuation until getting down off the mountain the next morning, but this three-second warning told me otherwise. Trousers ripped down, I squatted over a moonlit hollow in the ground and the world exploded out of my innards. At exactly the same moment, a stream of burning vomit rose up into my throat and shot like alien ectoplasm across the rocks in front of me. More followed, at both ends; much, much more. I clung to the rocks at my side and prayed that I wouldn’t fall over, for it felt as if I’d never get up again if I did. For the first time, I began to ponder the possibility that the pointer on my own particular board game might land on anything other than a golden lifetime of poetry.
After a minute or so of violent, simultaneous expulsion, I was wrung out and empty, cold and shaking. But a peace descended on me that I hadn’t experienced all day. I was purged, of what I didn’t know, but I felt light, giddy and strangely calm. I sprang up, trying to avoid treading in anything nasty, and looked at my surroundings anew as they shone in the moonlight. How different a landscape looks at night. The shadows are so much deeper, your perspective alters completely, sounds become magnified, distances shrunk and views distorted. I was suddenly awestruck to be there, and charged around with the dog, clapping and whooping in joy. The noise whipped away into the black.
There’s a tiny stone bothy on Cadair’s summit, to shelter its many bedraggled visitors, and I was keen to get in there, light a few candles, have some food and a whisky and try to sleep a while. By now, the wind was bellowing and the silver-tinged clouds storming by just overhead. Occasional downpours crashed out of nowhere, swirling around in all directions so that it even rained upwards. Never has a stone hut looked so cosy. In The Wild Places, Robert Macfarlane stumbles across a walkers’ bothy in the far north-west of Scotland, an area that makes Cadair Idris look as remote as Widnes. It is deep winter, a storm is raging outside, and the bothy contains candles and a stacked pile of dried peat next to a well-used fireplace. Macfarlane lights the fire, and settles down to read the notes about the place that have been left on the mantelpiece. The storm continues to howl and rattle outside. So far, so lovely. And then, just as the thin winter light starts to die out for the night, what does he do? He decides to forsake a dreamy doze by a peat fire for the joys of slogging back two miles to the beach, wading through a swollen, freezing river, with the storm still blowing, in gathering darkness. And all because he fancied sleeping in a sand dune. I was destined never to be Robert Macfarlane, and if clinging too closely to the maps and their rules had stopped that, then that was fine by me. He is quite, quite brilliant at what he does, but thank God he does it so that the rest of us don’t have to. I bet he’s never simultaneously puked and shat in sheer terror on top of a mountain. And if he has, I hope his congregation of totem animals made it out of the way in time.
So, the question remains, can you be too much of a map addict? I’d say so. Getting lost occasionally is essential for the soul, but us addicts are not very good at it. To us, being lost is synonymous with failure, not adventure. Being unable to give a precise grid reference for our location at any point in time makes us prone to panic, with all of the unpleasant side effects—not least to those around us—that that suggests. It’s only in recent years that I’ve begun to go anywhere without a map. Occasionally, I forget to take one and then experience that hot spasm of horror when I remember, the kind that normal people only feel on realising that they’ve lost their wallet. Sometimes, I force myself not to take a map with me on a walk or a journey, an experience that can be anything from liberating to terrifying.
When I moved to where I now live seven years ago, I tried to wean myself off taking the Explorer map out on every single local walk, figuring that it would sometimes be better just to walk with no real sense of where or why, to create a mental map of my milltir sgwar (square mile) that wasn’t just a replica of the Ordnance Survey version. It worked: having spent decades combing Wales, England, Ireland and Scotland like a hyperactive toddler, an armful of maps careering me up hills, through woods, into remote country churches and along lanes deserted except for a few wheel-snapping sheepdogs, suddenly I wanted to stop and dig down instead, to find roots where there had only previously been the tiniest of tendrils. Instead of the big views and guide-book sights, it was time to get intimate with individual rocks, trees, ferns, pools, mosses, streams: to be intoxicated by the anticipation of where the snowdrops, bluebells, wild garlic, hedgerow raspberries, whinberries and mushrooms would soon be sprouting; to trek to favourite swimming pools in the river at the end of a summer’s day; to half dread, half thrill at the day in mid November when the sun disappears behind the mountain, ushering in a three-month break of log fires and early nights. None of this needed a map; in fact, it actively needed not to be accompanied by frantic map-checking. Of course, on the occasions when I did spend a happy few hours, or even a full day, roaming the hills, rivers and forests of my neighbourhood without a map, almost the first thing I’d do on coming home was gallop to the map shelves in my den and painstakingly retrace my tracks across the contours.
While I can now just about comb my local patch without the map, the idea of doing it in an area I don’t know very well remains terrifying. I’ve managed it occasionally, and always feel clammily proud of the achievement, but it doesn’t feel right; indeed, it feels as if I am denying myself one of the main joys of walking in the first place, namely to compare the route on the map with the reality around me. I like to stop at the high points, check the map and see the names of the peaks, lakes and villages spread out below. And as for the idea of a map-free road journey, that was blown out of the water by a recent trip down to Cardiff, when an accident had closed the main road, and I was forced, without so much as a garage road atlas for company, into a bewildering knot of Breconshire lanes that took over an hour to extricate myself from, not helped by the fact that years of over-reliance on maps have dulled any innate sense of direction.
The psychology of collecting has spawned much recent study. Some focuses on the passion involved, some the harmless enjoyment, but rather more chooses to tar avid collectors with obsessive, compulsive, even neurotic and fetishistic tendencies, of making up for empty childhoods and fighting off existential meaningless. Such analyses pinpoint the thrill of the hunt as the driving motivation in collecting anything, and talk of the rapid falling-off of pleasure once the rare collectible has finally been snared.
This was very much the conclusion of Werner Muensterberger, German psychoanalyst and ethnographer, author of Collecting: An Unruly Passion. He compares obsessive collecting with gambling addiction, and states that it is just as destructive to one’s health, finances, personal relationships, work, responsibilities and sense of self as extreme gambling, or any other more louche addiction. In The Island of Lost Maps, a highly entertaining examination of the strange career of American map thief Gilbert Bland, author Miles Harvey goes to visit Muensterberger to probe him on the psychology of the cartomaniac. The veteran psychoanalyst declares that map addicts he has encountered all tended to have fragmented childhoods in some way; that either their parents had split up, they’d moved house a great deal, or both. Harvey talks to another psychologist, Harriette Kaley, and she agrees: ‘For each of us, our early life seems like the distant past, and in that sense it’s like an ancient land—far off, foreign, and unknown. It occurred to me that it’s not unlike the way fairy tales begin: “Once upon a time in a faraway place.” And I think there must be something in map collecting that taps into that. In some sense, old maps reach back into a part of life that you can’t quite grasp, and give you a sense of where you’ve come from. They give you a feeling of being rooted.’
Reading this startled me. Yes, my parents had split up when I was four years old, we had moved around a fair bit, largely due to the tectonic plates of family life shifting so massively in those early years, but could all this really be connected with my love of maps? I decided not, absolutely not; after all, Miles Harvey had been writing about a man addicted to pilfering antique maps from some of the great North American map libraries. I quite like antique maps, but I’m much more excited by comparatively modern ones, those that are far more topographically accurate. Being fond of Ordnance Survey maps hardly put me in the same category, surely. I re-read the interview with Muensterberger, where he talked of the collecting addiction (neurosis, fetish) and how, even in the most sober and upright of souls, it can lead to a skewed sense of right and wrong, as well as danger, meaning that theft can be so easily justified in the addicted brain. My mind floated back to those sessions in the far upstairs corner of the Midland Educational Bookshop in Worcester, when I’d go in, a teenager driven, to steal four or five OS maps at a time. It hadn’t felt like stealing, though; I deserved those maps, they were rightfully mine. The techno thump of my heartbeat, the terror and the thrill, the sweat, the almost erotic charge of the heist, the flood of subsequent relief on a successful outcome all came roaring back to me. Who was I kidding? I was a textbook case.
The antique-map proviso doesn’t wash either. In fact, it’s far easier to see that someone is hankering back to a past that’s only just out of reach, before the ruptures of family life tore the sanctuary apart, by obsessing over maps from their childhood, than it is to see the same drive in lusting after maps that are centuries old. I look at an OS map of 1960s Worcestershire, the kind you could find in a car-boot sale for fifty pence, and it can almost make me cry, so poignant and innocent does it look. I admire a 1610 John Speed original of my home county, which could go for a four-figure sum at auction, and nothing much stirs, save for a quiet admiration of the mellow valleys and tiny towns. I’d have the OS sheet every time.
I thought of my unswerving Desert Island Disc choices: the two gazetteers of Britain from the time I was born, and my overwhelmingly sentimental attachment to them, and the country they portray. I recalled a conversation with OS map dealer David Archer, who told me that by far the most avidly collected of all the series that he sells is the one-inch Seventh Series, the last of what had been the OS’s flagship collection since its inception in the eighteenth century, and the one that was finally wiped out in 1974 by metrication. Not only were his sales reflecting a nostalgia for the final hurrah of the Imperial OS, they were boosted by the simple fact that most map collectors are blokes in their fifties and sixties, and that those were the first maps they fell in love with as boys. David told me that there is a 5-10-year delay in his business, that when any new map series emerges, the cartophilic collectors shun and slag them off for the first few years, before eventually taking to them only when they become sufficiently long in the tooth to have gained a certain dust-covered antiquity. I remembered my favourite map museum, in the Romanian capital Bucharest, a bequest to the nation of his personal collection by former prime minister Adrian Nastase. Knowing nothing about him when I went there, I imagined him to be a warm, cultured man with a philanthropic bent. I soon discovered that his career had gone from Ceausescu lickspittle (when he authored a book called Human Rights—A Retrogade Concept) to a thin veneer of democracy that had covered allegations of electoral fraud, corruption and nepotism, all garnished with an addiction to boar-hunting that, in January 2005, saw him shoot and kill twentythree on one trip. Staying in Bucharest, Ceausescu’s love of cartography is evident in the stylised maps of his monster palace scribed on its floor tiles. Quite honestly, we’re nuts.
Nastase’s collection points to another danger area for the map addict: the cold certainty that the map market, particularly in antiques, has gone the same way as vintage cars, period properties and art, namely rife with brash one-upmanship from people who are only collecting as either an investment or a status symbol. The antique-map market has been helped in that regard by the fact that it is zero-rated for VAT, so provides an even more attractive proposition for the greedy and acquisitive. These nouveau mappies are hated by real enthusiasts, who have watched prices soar out of their range as a whole load of parvenus, who wouldn’t know their Ogilby from their Oxfordshire, have brazened their way into the auction rooms and specialist dealerships. Nuts, and raging snobs to boot: it’s a winning combination.
Nearly twenty years of writing guide books has left me thoroughly disabused as to their value. As a writer, you love to imagine that your words are carefully weighed by readers of impeccable discernment, and that if they have a bone to pick, it will be a fine piece of constructive criticism from which everyone will emerge smiling. Writing guide books, stuck in a rigid formula, soon rids you of that fanciful notion. The vast majority of their readers couldn’t give a toss who has written the words that are steering them mechanically around their holiday destination. They’ll never write to say if they enjoyed the book, but they sure as hell will put pen to paper (or digit to keyboard) to moan like stuck pigs if the meal you mentioned wasn’t on the menu any longer, if the hotel was more expensive than you’d said, if the museum wasn’t actually open on a Monday or the if pub you’d loved had overcharged them twenty pence for two halves of Double Dragon shandy. Someone once wrote me a letter of complaint about a farmhouse B&B I’d heartily recommended in the Rough Guide to Wales, because they were served a fried egg with a hard yolk for their breakfast, and what was I going to do about it?
When, in 2008, a media row erupted after erstwhile Lonely Planet author Thomas Kohnstamm revealed that he had made up whole accounts in his contributions to various South American guides, most of us who had ever seen our work published in a guide book breathed a small sigh of relief that the secret was finally out, and that it wasn’t us that had got nobbled in the process (although secretly, we were ragingly jealous of just how much coverage he’d levered out of his confession). Even if the author of your guide book is the most scrupulous fact-checker, who trots obediently around every recommended B&B and bounces up and down on each and every one of their bedsprings, the text will still be riddled with inaccuracies, supposition and personal prejudice. If you’ve got a week to cover twenty towns, fourteen castles, eighty-three hotels, eighteen campsites, ninety eateries plus an assortment of museums, views, beaches, country parks, bus stations, walks, internet cafés, bookshops, craft shops, tourist railways and bars, then somewhere is going to get a bum deal: perhaps the place where it was raining when you arrived or which was closed for essential maintenance, where someone was less than enthusiastic to see you or where you stepped in some dog shit and then hit your head on the way in. By the time you’re repeating the process on your sixth or eighth week, it’s all starting to blur.
Writing guide books for a living was most definitely an extension of my map addiction. The dogmatic certainties of a map are writ large in the ethos of a guide book, especially the breed (Lonely Planet, the Rough Guides, Footprint, Bradt and so on) that like to think they cover every aspect of your trip: they get you there, get you around, find you places to stay, eat and get drunk, tell you what to order and how to pronounce it (though you’ll still just jab at the menu and say everything slowly in English), steer you clear of places that they’ve decided to write off, give you just enough history and cultural context to look smug in a museum and unerringly point you towards all the places where you’ll meet people just like you. Plus maps. What’s not to love?
Plenty is the answer. Guide books are tyrannous in the wrong hands, and by the wrong hands, I mean any that cling to them like a shipwreck survivor to a raft. Sit in any café or bar in some tourist hotspot and just watch your fellow imbibers poring joylessly over their guide books, always looking for the next hit as decreed by the gods of LP or RG. The guide is yet another screen, a buffer between you and place you’re supposed to be experiencing. I was sick of them.
So it was that when my boyfriend and I recently InterRailed from Paris to Montenegro and thence into Albania and Corfu, snaking our way through northern and then Eastern Europe, I wanted to do it without a guide book. At first, it felt like diving without oxygen: what brilliant places were passing us by, spectacular sights, fabulous hostels and warm bars full of cheery fellow travellers and clinking glasses? Gradually, though, we learned to trust our instincts instead. It’s not difficult. Place full equals probably good, place empty save for a surly waiter or two, probably not so. We shopped around, asked local people for personal recommendations, which were invariably informed and bang up to date, rather than three years old and written by a misanthropic shag monster on his gap year (or worse—and far more likely in those guides founded in an upsurge of youthful 1980s rebellion, but which have become the very establishment they set out to scorch—by a misanthropic middle-aged grump, bitterly past it as a shag monster, and who’s more likely to be found slumped in his hotel in front of CNN than checking out the coolest bars in town, which, in any case, give him a headache and a vague dose of existential angst these days).
The guide-book-free trip was a liberation. Not only was my rucksack unencumbered with a weighty paper brick, neither was my head. Seeing fellow travellers clambering aboard the train clutching their Lonely Planet as if it were a set of rosary beads had me chuckling into my chest with glee. Every new place was a blank canvas, rather than a paint-by-numbers portrait of venues that had had to make little effort since being so heartily recommended in every guide book for the past few years, decades in some cases. We even ended up in towns and cities that barely scraped a mention in the guides, and they were some of the best of all.
Almost true. I did cave in as the InterRailing part of our trip came to a close in Montenegro. We were planning on spending at least a week there, get a car and get off the beaten track a little. I was also keen to read up on the history and politics of Europe’s newest independent nation-state (unless you count Kosovo, which I’m not sure that I do yet), so I hunted around a couple of the very fine bookshops of Belgrade for an English-language guide to Montenegro. There was a grand choice of one, the Bradt guide, so I bought it. Of course, there are upsides to guide books, and this one reminded me of that. If there’s a strong authorial voice, and it’s a voice that you largely agree with, it is like travelling with a knowledgeable and enthusiastic friend. The Bradt Guide to Montenegro didn’t quite fall into that category, but we did come to love its author, a motherly character who’d spent twenty-five years travelling the world as a diplomat’s wife, before settling back into life in London where, according to her biography, ‘she turned her hand to journalism, writing in a freelance capacity for magazines about travel and food’. Her utterances on this little country perfectly accorded with such a background, filtered as they were through a very British, slightly colonial sensibility where everything could be sorted out with a decent stiff gin. She did help lead us to a few lovely spots, but far more than that, she gave us a many a good belly laugh.
Travelling without a guide book is one thing; travelling without a map—well, that’s just a step too far. That’s diving without oxygen, legs strapped together and blindfold. But I did my best to rein myself in. If I go for a night in, say, Snowdonia, all of an hour away, I’ll generally take the entire oeuvre of OS maps that cover every inch of the way between here and there, and in both medium and large scale. That’s despite having lived in this area for nearly a decade and knowing my way around pretty well. For a European journey that eventually took in sixteen countries in nearly six weeks, it was patently impossible to cover all bases, especially when everything had to be carried on my back, so I had to content myself with the legendary Thomas Cook Rail Map of Europe (consulted almost hourly), augmented by detailed maps that I picked up along the way of places where we were spending a bit of time and wanted to mooch around. It was just about enough even for my extreme needs.
There’s no guide book that could have prepared me for the shock of coming home. We’d only been able to get a flight that bundled us into Gatwick at sometime after midnight, so that it took four times as long, at four times the cost, to travel the last two hundred and fifty miles as it had done the previous twelve hundred. Trying to get across Britain on public transport in the dead of night is a dispiriting experience, especially when it conspires to dump you, hollow-eyed and sleepless, in the middle of the Birmingham morning rush hour.
The rot had already begun to set in when we disembarked from the boat that had brought us over from Sarande to Corfu. Albania and Greece are just ten miles apart at this point: it must have been agony for the Albanians, under the despotic regime of Enver Hoxha, to be within touching distance of a world that was physically, culturally and economically fenced off. Still is, to a large extent: travel is chronically difficult and prohibitively expensive on an Albanian passport, private boats remain banned and the hatred towards Albanians in neighbouring countries—and beyond—is staggering. For us, though, it was easy. Just a quick hop across the bay and, after a month of the rawness and brawn of Eastern Europe, suddenly finding ourselves somewhere that was so comfortably padded and primed to our Anglo-American sensibilities. Stopping just long enough to buy that day’s copy of The Times, we ran straight into a bar for mojitos and club sandwiches to celebrate, but it was a curiously bittersweet celebration. For the first time in weeks, we could hear all around us accents from Glasgow, Manchester and London. After a month of listening to voices brimful of spark and enthusiasm, eager to chew over world politics or history, to swap cultural insights and ribald jokes, the British voices grated. They were whining and moaning, threatening and complaining, shouting drunkenly from bars or boorishly from the windows of speeding hire cars and mopeds. So were the ones in the newspaper. It felt like we’d been listening to adults for weeks, and now suddenly we’d been dropped into a vat of whinging toddlers in the big pool of coloured balls at the Ikea crèche.
Trekking across Britain on public transport two days later, the sensation only deepened. Having travelled through so many other European countries, the level of public infantilisation here was truly shocking, and the causes so horribly obvious. Nagging announcements and nagging signs everywhere: one in Birmingham New Street was even addressed to ‘Parents or Guardians of Children with Balloons’, warning them not to let said balloons drift up into the station ceiling, alongside the usual finger-wagging riot of no eating, drinking, smoking, music, access, littering, loitering, ball games, suspicious packages, funny looks, swearing at staff, touching this or that, using mobile phones, wearing bike helmets, leaving baggage unattended, running, jumping, dive-bombing or heavy petting. Barely a minute went by, both on the platforms and the trains, without a robotic tannoy announcement, often telling us nothing more than to remember to listen to the announcements. Everyone looked hypnotised. It was the only way to cope with the white noise.
Despite the ever-present backdrop of whining and hectoring, Britain looked quite wonderful that night. A coach from Gatwick landed us in Oxford at 3.00 a.m. First train anywhere useful was the 6.30 to Birmingham, so we searched for a hedge in which to stash our backpacks before wandering into the city. Thankfully, we remembered just in time that we were back in Britain, thus needing a hedge out of sight of a CCTV camera, lest we return to find our bags detonated in a controlled explosion, half of Oxford closed off and the Sky Newscopter hovering overhead. It was May, the birds chirruped excitedly at the prospect of sunrise, students in dicky bows and ball gowns reeled out of various clubs or lay shouting and prone on the pavement (‘Facking hell, Toby, I’m s00000 faaaacking pissed’). We slid past our leaders of tomorrow entirely unnoticed, as did the watchful few black and brown faces making their way back from working in late-night burger bars or on their way to clean offices and streets. Everyone was having their own bespoke nocturnal experience of the dreaming spires.
Through Carfax, the sky was brightening into dawn over Broad Street, touching the immortal gables and chimneys of Balliol and Trinity. I ambled over to a large tourist map of the city centre and drank in its ancient shapes and names, a silent roll-call of the famous and the infamous who had padded these streets before us. It was so English, a familiar map of a familiar place, and my heart ached with gratitude that this hotch-potch of history and hysteria was my country, this was where I called home, and that it looked so wonderful. My boyfriend, who’d spent his only year of living outside Wales lodging in Oxford a decade earlier, gave me a whirlwind tour of hand-picked sights, interspersing them with half-remembered parties, favourite coffee shops or pubs and old friends. By now, most of the carousing students had either copped off or passed out; there was barely anyone else around. To stroll about the honeyed streets and cloak-and-dagger alleys of Oxford at sunrise on a fine May morning, before the tourniquet of traffic chokes it to near death, is the purest of ecstasies. We had the Radcliffe Camera to ourselves, walked undisturbed down the middle of the High Street, St Giles’ and St Aldate’s and could see not one punter to please in Magpie, née Gropecunt, Lane.
We ambled back towards the station through the bright, silent streets of Jericho, and then along the misty banks of the Oxford Canal. Herons eyed us warily as we passed the dozens of houseboats decorated with flowers and mail boxes, bicycles and coal scuttles. Of course, all this is threatened by developers, but I couldn’t bear to think about that just then. It was too magical to contemplate anything other than that moment in time, the lazy splash of a few early birds, the barges slumbering in their vapours and the bright new leaves on the willows, ashes and oaks leaning towards the water.
A couple of hours later, we surfaced again like moles in the middle of Birmingham. Yes, we’d been nagged and grumped at to get there, and yes, there was a distinctly haunted look to the thousands of people pouring in and out of New Street station, but it still looked amazing to my bloodshot eyes. The pavements crackled with an efficient energy that blazed all those people, cars, buses, trains and goods every day through this seething mass of all kinds of everyone. My biggest fear about being a map addict is that it’s a one-way ticket to becoming the worst kind of Little Englander, for too many of my fellows seem to have gone that way. To them, the Birmingham rush hour must be a vision of hell itself, the million shades of skin, the hollow-eyed waifs, the punks, poofs and junkies, the leisure wear, the jewellery, the noise, the sheer bloody chaos, the youthful arrogance of it all. But I loved it, and miss it terribly. There was a surge of something in those pavements that I hadn’t felt for months. It was the surge, the spark of diversity, our defining feature and single biggest asset as a country—and the one that we are most in danger of trying to abandon.
On our trip, it had become increasingly obvious that there were some dreadful levels of racism in the newly splintered Eastern Europe, parts of which are galloping into monocultural paranoia. We barely saw a nonwhite face between leaving Berlin and docking in Corfu, ten countries later. Although I’d far rather deal with naked, naive prejudice than the slippery circumlocution of the Western mainstream, some of the stuff we heard made my eyes water. I’d struck up a conversation with the lady who ran the tourist office in an idyllic Slovakian mountain village. She, like very many people we met, was nostalgic for the Communist times, and mourned the demise of Czechoslovakia, just as people we’d met had mourned the collapse of Yugoslavia and even East Germany. During the Czechoslovakia days, she’d been an eminent scientist and had travelled the world to attend conferences, something that doubtless was a great deal more fulfilling, and lucrative, than dealing with a few uppity German and Polish tourists. I asked her where she’d been. ‘Oh, America, a few times, the Far East, all over Europe, Australia once.’ ‘Never Africa?’ I asked. She wrinkled her nose. ‘No. I never go to Africa. I not like black people.’ I spluttered, but she ploughed on. ‘Black people no good. They smell like WC.’ I tried to picture some poor black German, Italian or Brit pitching up in her tourist office, asking where to stay, and felt faintly sick. The next day, we got the train out of the town in the valley below. On the platform was a plaque, written in Slovakian and English:
On this site stood the railway station
From which, on March 25th, 1942,
The first transport left for the Auschwitz Death camp,
Carrying a thousand Slovak Jewish girls.
To honour generations past,
To remind generations to come.
2002
Standing outside Birmingham New Street station, soaking in the fizz of the rush hour, my eyes were drawn to a wall-mounted city-centre bus map. It looked so soothingly familiar: names and shapes that had played their part in every stage of my life. Then I started to notice that there was also much on it that made me feel like a complete stranger. Since leaving Brum only eight years earlier, whole streets had disappeared or been re-routed, new ones had sprung up. Walkways, bus stops, shopping centres and open spaces were not the ones that I’d known. The new Bull Ring is the major culprit, and I get lost within it every time I go there, unable to stop recalling the landmarks that it has so thoroughly supplanted in the city’s latest wholesale sweep-out of its centre. For that’s Birmingham, a perpetual skyline of cranes and scaffolding, the restless cycle of constant reinvention, of knocking it all down and building it up again: repeat until the end of time. There was one more map, and one more journey, to get us home.
We slunk out of the motley hubbub of Birmingham city centre and on to the little train that bumps its way every couple of hours out west to the Welsh coast. I gazed affectionately at the earthy names on the Arriva Trains Wales network map on the carriage’s wall: the fullthroated song of Llwyngwril, Ystrad Mynach, Dyffryn Ardudwy, Llanwrda, each the cause of equal parts terror and haughty condescension (‘It sounds like spitting, and there’s no vowels’) in England. The map’s sleek and straight lines attempted to ape the smooth functionality of Harry Beck’s tube map, but Llandanwg is no Ladbroke Grove. It might work stylistically, but it conjures up all the wrong associations: vitality and velocity, rather than the more glorious truth of single tracks unhurriedly snaking through mountain passes, stone villages, impossibly green fields and above wind-battered beaches.
One of the reasons that I’d wanted to do the trip we were just finishing was to look at these newly independent countries of Eastern Europe through Welsh eyes. Although every fibre of my physical body is rooted in the English Midlands, and that won’t—can’t—ever change, nearly a decade since moving from there, I have found myself thinking more and more as a Welshman. It is a truly special culture, and one that I feel hugely privileged to have been given such access to. The trip was to test whether those commitments to diversity and to Wales—Welshspeaking Wales in particular—were compatible. They are. Cymru Cymraeg, Welsh-speaking Wales, is one of the most unexpectedly diverse and quietly tolerant societies I’ve ever encountered. Not in that bullet-point, tick-box fashion so beloved of New Labour’s New Britain, but in ways that are rooted deep in rock and soul, the ways that matter.
I’ve often been accused of staking a chameleon claim to come from anywhere and everywhere. There’s considerable truth in the charge: I’ve written and broadcast of my sense of home in Birmingham, in the Black Country, in Kidderminster, in wider Worcestershire, in the reviled Hereford and Worcester, in London and throughout Wales. I feel of them all, yet none of them, and I’m sure that part of that comes from my love of maps. My great heroine, Jan Morris, speaks of her taking ownership of a place by writing a book about it. For me, my map collection gives me that same sense of belonging to as many places as I can handle. Of course, a life of such gadfly inconstancy will never root me as deeply as those who can trace their lineage back hundreds of years in one parish and who stay put for their duration; as the product of nomadic families, I’d come to terms with that long ago. I’ll never, for instance, quite get that intense rivalry that pitches village against village, valley against valley, city against city, country against country—the ubiquitous human need to define ourselves by constant comparison, and competition, with our nearest neighbours.
For now, though, my perspective felt ever more Welsh as we clattered through the countryside among growing hills and gloomier crags. The view was right up there with all the train journeys of the previous six weeks, as good as anything the Transylvanian Alps, the Slovakian Tatra mountains or the valleys of the Rhine and Danube had thrown our way. Lambs and calves bobbed around the fields, arthritic hawthorns frothed with blossom, sessile oaks were budding on the banks of rushing streams, beech trees shimmered in a haze of luminous lime green. My nose pressed to the window, I think I was beginning to dribble when my boyfriend snapped me out of my distraction by asking, ‘So, how many countries did we do, then?’ Well, that depends. Could we include Bosnia-Herzegovina, despite seeing only a few miles of it from the train window as we creaked our way from Serbia to Montenegro? Yes, we decided we could. And were we counting England and Wales as separate countries? Oh, yes.
It is perfectly possible to love both England and Wales, Scotland too, and yet, on balance, want to see the end of the British nation-state. Too often, the enthusiasm for separation in any of the countries is presented only in oppositional terms, of provoking a fight with the neighbours where there is no need of one. Our trip had shown that separation is difficult and fraught, but that it can also be hugely rewarding and liberating. It had also shown me that countries with far, far fewer substantive and historic advantages than Wales, England or Scotland were firmly on their own journey, and that the inherent distinctiveness of our three countries was considerably greater than in many places now separated by international borders. Just as people should not be imprisoned unnecessarily, neither should natural nations. And since leaving Gatwick hours earlier, we had most definitely crossed two different nations. I adore them both, will collect maps of them both until the day I drop and will use those maps to explore as many corners of them as I can.
I pledge also to leave the maps behind more often. After eighteen months of travelling, researching and writing this book, I dreamed last night that I was physically stuck in a map. It was a very beautiful map: a large, coloured street plan of Georgian London, full of grand streets named in hard-carved fonts. There was no other life in there except for me, and I thrashed and flailed my way through the empty streets searching for the way out, while simultaneously loving the unique tour that only I was party to. My last memory in the dream was admiring some tiny, hand-painted trees in the middle of Hanover Square, before waking up, slightly smothered under the duvet and gasping for air.
It’s definitely time to go off-map for a while.