Travels in Time : Back to the Future!

I’ve been stuck in a rut for four and a half years and I hadn’t had a proper holiday since 2014.

A few weeks ago, I decided to take a holiday – more of a road trip; camping in The Peak District, The Lake District and the Scottish Borders – the first and last both places I had not visited before. Topping and tailing my visits to those places, as I headed for them and then, later, as I wended my way back home, would be stop-offs at my place of birth in Warwickshire and at one of my favourite places on earth: a small village called Bontddu, near Dolgellau in North Wales.

It was also my intention to go wild swimming in lakes and rivers. I’d recently done so more locally in Monmouthshire and found the experience incredibly revitalising and uplifting; both in the moment and in how it left me feeling afterwards. I had some notion in the back of my mind that this trip might provide the opportunity to refuel my soul and top up my energy levels, but I wasn’t banking on that….I just wanted to get away for a bit and escape all the pressures around me....a holiday, like any other.

My budget was small, but that was okay. The much bigger worry was that my car would not survive the miles it would be required to cover. Suffice to say that not only did it do so, but very economically and with barely a murmur of dissent. It may be old and grizzly and tainted with the moss that grew on it during three years furloughed on my driveway, but I love my car!

On Day 1, leaving at 4am, I easily got to Warwickshire, without any bother on the roads. This lack of traffic problems was the norm throughout my trip, bar an hour’s delay on the M6 in Lancashire on the return leg; the result of a bad accident. I waited patiently, hoping only that no one had been seriously hurt.

I’ve visited the house I was born in and the surrounding area several times since leaving there in 1978, but I hadn’t been back for over twenty years. As luck, or some sort of unseen intervention would have it, as I walked past my childhood home I encountered the present owner, who was renovating and extending the dwelling for his young family. I explained my connection and we talked easily for fifteen to twenty minutes. I also chatted to two teachers at my old infant school; hurriedly repainting the fence ready for the new school year. Both conversations demonstrated that the feel-good community vibe that I always associated with the place from my childhood still existed there forty to fifty years later. It slowly dawned on me, for the first time ever to be honest, that I didn’t mind that I wasn’t now part of that and I realised as I left that I didn’t need to hang onto the past so tightly. People were forging a great life in that place. I had to do the same in my place; now, in 2020. This revelation and the accompanying acceptance that I had to let go of the past as an emotional crutch would be repeated and further endorsed on my return journey.

I ate my packed lunch sitting on a bench beside a beautiful green in a tiny hamlet somewhere in Leicestershire….a place I picked solely because it had an unusual name. A smart, graceful black and white cat approached me, only to be soon urgently called inside by its owner. Her back turned, the cat quickly re-emerged to again seek a share of my victuals. Its owner was grateful I had not fed it, explaining it was suffering acute kidney failure. She then offered me a cup of tea. How lovely was that!? Sitting on the bench, drinking my tea I noticed the exhaust cover was loose under the car. I was fairly sanguine about it and a few miles further on, after I had interrupted his lunch break, a garage mechanic willingly paused to fix that for me… for the price of a pint. I sort of knew then that this trip would be a good one.

My first night’s camping in The Peak District was a success. En route to the second night’s pitch I located the swim site I had earmarked in North Yorkshire and enjoyed half and hour’s ownership of Sparth Reservoir (Go there!) before others joined me in the water. I chatted amiably to them and they wished me well on my journey. My second night’s camping, on a very remote site at the far end of Borrowdale, in the northern Lakes, was less successful. I’ll spare you the gruesome details. Suffice to say I was well and truly rained out and the tent was ruined. I slept in the car overnight and left early, still in good spirits, heading for Hawick in The Scottish Borders. I arrived there about 2pm.

I’d gone there to meet someone with whom I’d been chatting online over the preceding few weeks. I will admit I was in search of romance, but it didn’t pan out that way. We had agreed to camp out in the wild for a couple of nights; an arrangement that more than one of you, when I mentioned it in passing, were amazed to hear of as a first date activity! Well, prepare to be even more amazed. No…romance has not blossomed, as yet, and may well not – but a firm friendship has certainly developed and one I feel sure will be life-long. The rain continuing unabated, camping was not an option. Due to COVID, a B&B my new friend had contacted had refused to take me without an advanced payment, so she offered me accommodation at her place. I was both grateful and amazed. How trusting was that!!? I mean, I know I’m a decent fella…but she’d never met me before.

It worked though: we talked and talked and shared some very traumatic and deeply affecting personal histories, yet it all felt natural and healthy. We also got out and about in my car, visiting several truly beautiful locations, each of us finding unexpected and welcome surprises along the way; the whole three day experience feeling ultimately and immeasurably restorative and life-affirming. In a village called Denholm, (coffee shop closed on Mondays!), standing quietly beside the river and feeling truly at peace with the world I raised my arms and announced that what would make the scene truly complete would be a Kingfisher. Seconds later one appeared; flying right past us, then turning around and doing the same a second time, before disappearing. Don’t tell me that was a coincidence!

Both my new friend and I are struggling: for different reasons, but for honest and serious reasons and with similar immediate problems – linked both to finances and family. I felt we helped one another a great deal and I was told that, simply through my being a decent, patient and kind man I had helped her a lot. I didn’t really want to leave if I’m honest but, at the same time, I was by then feeling a growing determination to find a way out of my own dilemmas and make my life better – much, much better.

To thank my new friend for her hospitality, I took her out for a curry on my last night. We were the only ones eating in. I haven’t been out to eat for ages and haven’t had an Indian meal in a restaurant in donkey’s years. I chose a dish I’d never had before – a Goan Green Curry, which was truly sublime. Message to self - try new things!

I left Hawick at 6am on 1st September; stopped to swim at a deserted and isolated lake near Bala (I wasn’t quite brave enough to remove all my clothing – next time!),  and got to Dolgellau in North Wales before midday. It was buzzing. I wondered around the town, reminiscing and thinking how much I might like to move there; not so much because of the past, but because it is still, now, such a lovely place to be. I spoke at length to the owner of an independent wine merchants and he confirmed that work was scarce and, as I had already considered: a move there (or anywhere) had to be with work to hand, rather than to look for it on arrival.

I then stopped at The George III Inn, next to the Penmaenpool Toll Bridge (as in the photo above). This is the point at which, as a child, I always knew we had arrived for our holidays and crossing the rickety old bridge, at a cost of 80p, is as much a delight now as it was fifty years ago, at a cost of 2p.

I popped into the George III (Go there too!) and had my first pint this year, sitting by the banks of the Mawddach Estuary and contemplating a swim in that stretch of water the following day. The bar man was fascinated by my wild swimming exploits, but he and another employee (or it might have been the owner) had some bad news about my next destination, the village of Bontddu, halfway down the road to the coastal town of Barmouth.

This was where we had mostly stayed on holidays in my early childhood; in a caravan on a working dairy farm. I knew from my last visit in 2013 that the farm no longer existed, but the land was still owned by the son of the family we had rented the fixed-site caravan from. He had based his business there and, as I discovered when I passed later, had also sold some of the land for property development. I’d felt sad about the farm when I’d been back there in the past, but it wasn’t that that was to affect me this time.

The barman told me that a small hotel, The Halfway House, always the centre of village and the holidaymaker’s life in Bontddu and somewhere I had worked a summer season in 1985, after my first year at Uni, was closed, dilapidated and boarded up. Prophetically, perhaps sensing my unease on hearing this news, he advised I not go there as he thought I was bound to be upset. In addition, his colleague informed me that the Bontddu Hall Hotel, a grand old stone edifice where I had shared a beer in 1985 with the then owner of our holiday farm, had suffered a devastating fire – in which it’s new owner was killed – and was now just a shell, resembling a spooky horror movie set.

I was compelled to go though and I planned to spend the night in the car in Bontddu before my swim and a further walkabout the next day – my birthday. The impact of the site of The Halfway House I cannot describe. It reduced me to tears. A Demolition Order hung from the building and it was quite clearly never going to be restored. I imagine only COVID had spared it this year, perhaps for me to witness. Bontddu Hall had heavy, padlocked gates across its entrance, but I could see the sad, burned out remains beyond the driveway.

I walked down the hill where we, as children, had run to the sweet shop across from the waterfall and the river in which tourists had panned for gold in the 70s. I knew the “shop” had long been a private dwelling and now I saw that this house was for sale. I found myself asking: Could I live here? Instantly the answer was No, and more than that I knew too it was time to go; to go home and get on with repairing my life in the here and now and building a better future for myself.

This was a strange, overwhelming and compelling sensation. I didn’t want the past to support me any longer, at least not as much as it had. I felt I might well return again, especially to Dolgellau or for a beer at The George or a swim in the Mawddach – but those were all positive thoughts for the future, conjured by what I was seeing in the present. They had nothing to do with the past which, as so devastatingly evidenced in Bontddu, I knew I had to let go of.

Many of my happiest times as a child and some of my best memories of my father, who died earlier this year, are in North Wales, but those memories must from now on remain just that. I have been living in, dwelling in the past for too long and, for the last few years, that was largely because it was the only place I could be happy. That has to change. As of now!

On this trip I took my favourite author Paul Theroux with me to read; specifically his “The Happy Isles of Oceania” in which, in the opening paragraph, contemplating his own personal grief at the ending of his marriage, he writes:

“…. a journey can be either your death or your transformation….”

I had smiled ruefully at that on my first day out. I hadn’t been as far or to anywhere as exotic as Mr Theroux, but coming home I knew I had undergone a transformation.

Time to get back to the future!