Polly Harvey asks us to take her back to beautiful England. The car is subdued, there's no place or opportunity to celebrate, just a two-hour schlep back in a vehicle that isn't fit to make scenic stops. I want a drink so badly, but can't as I'll have to drive once Midge has got us back. I'm already worrying about how to start it again if it stops. At the moment it's going at least, going through backwoods A-roads: 'more interesting,' says the driver.
We get onto the M5 eventually and straight away see a sign that tells us there are delays from Junction Seven to Junction Five. I calculate that this will bring us back into Birmingham in time for rush hour. That doesn't happen, as soon afterwards we hit traffic around Worcester. That's a metaphor for returning to civilisation if ever there was one: three lanes of static, with cars slowly drifting across lanes near any junction. Next to us, as I stare blankly out of the window, is a battered white minibus with a work gang in it. They aren't talking either, though I suspect that's through tiredness rather than this hollow feeling I'm consumed by.
I'm not sure what I'm going back to. We've proved it can be done – not that anyone really cared enough to doubt us.
The bit I'm looking forward to is that hour or so before sleep when food doesn't taste right at home, when you want comfort, but everything's just off. A broken-down car sits on the hard shoulder, and the family is now sitting in the sun on the embankment with their golden retriever. I point and we sing a song for the last time.
Eventually we get back, drop Midge off at the house he shares with his dad. He leaves the engine running as we swap seats, shifting equipment and Danny about for the next bit of the drive. We wave Midge off. He's a terrible driver, but a very good man. We love him. Twelve days with barely more than six feet between the three of us, there's a lasting bond created here. With tears and a hug I drop Danny off too – door open, car chugging, keys in the ignition – and I've probably never felt more alone.
Later, I lie alone in bed: too hot to move, sweat droplets forming on my widow's peak and I contemplate what I'm going to do next. I haven't a clue. I'm not sure how this ends.
I often think back to the trip. What was it? I mean it certainly wasn't a holiday, but, even though it was hard at times, it wasn't work either. It was something we needed to do. A pilgrimage. Something our souls wouldn't have forgiven us for if we hadn't done it.
So who or what in our pilgrimage was the God we were trying to get closer to? I once heard a theory that the reason that we evolved the way we did, relatively hairless, with chamber lungs and the ability to float from the moment of our birth, is because we are descendants of the monkeys that met the sea. That branch of the ancestral tree settling near water. Now, I'm sure there are a hundred reasons why this is total horse shit, but it does explain one thing that nothing else does: our deep and utter connection to the sea. It never got old, that excitement of seeing the sea after a short time driving inland. Despite following the coast we still would race to be the first to spot it. And, when we got to the piers, the majority of time was spent just looking out to the horizon.
Piers are nothing if not adaptable. The ones that survive are the ones that can anticipate the needs and whims of the public. Be it in the terrible lowest-common-denominator way of Blackpool or the simplicity of Boscombe. Personally, I think the only reason piers exist is so humans can go out and collect themselves and connect to the deep, unknowable entity that is the sea. Of all the things that they offer, the piers that endure are the ones that are about this connection. Pier fishing, deckchairs, bars and restaurants offer not much more than a chance to sit and commune with something bigger than ourselves.
Like all pilgrims, the clothes we wore were modest and imbued with meaning. We deprived ourselves of food and suffered on the crucifix of our own excesses. And at the end we're changed.
A story isn't just what happens while it's happening. A book of a trip isn't a record of what you did in the time you were living it – it's a record of all the living you did up to that point and maybe even more so the life you lived while writing it. Everything changes.
I'm sitting on a boat on the Adriatic, the sun blazing red low in the sky. Contrails crack the hazy cloud cover like the scorched earth a little way inland. I'm looking over the intensely clear water for the promised dolphins. I'm on honeymoon, with my Guinevere, but I'm scribbling these notes into a notebook identical to the one I had on the trip. Not everything changes.
It's now getting on for two years since we first started planning Pier Review and my view of life is very different. I've moved to the countryside, Danny moved to the coast. Midge remained in Birmingham, which is good for the city as we were worried that, like the ravens at the Tower of London, the kingdom would fall without him. Not everything changes.
So what has changed? I'm not telling you right now, except that the Clio destroyed itself as I sped down the M40 about a year ago.
But England, Wales, Britain, whatever, that does change: it evolves. And bound up in that are the echoes of how we see it. The edges of culture are important, and the edges of the landmass are too. Where we touch something we can't understand, the sea, where we can look out and away, in the spaces where we get space to think – that's where the evolution happens.
Our country, like a story, doesn't exist without its future as well as its past.