 |
| notes & pictures - story 1 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
Hunstanton is a quiet Victorian resort
and is the only town in East Anglia that faces west. Riding
down the main street, you are greeted by chip shops and
a tattoo parlour. Geographically misplaced, the 'Tamworth
Tearooms' stand alongside the village green next to other
small shops selling or dealing with sundry matters.
It is a tidy town and you soon begin to suspect the excitement
of living here is connected to that. Like clean bikes,
people like tidy places. It suggests safe yet hardworking.
Clean streets are predictable streets, and the knowledge
that they will be swept clean on some regular basis allows
for a feeling of order. In places like Hunstanton, one
week might be a tad tidier than previously, prompting
locals to harrumph. A letter would be sent to the editor
of the local paper and the headline 'Litter Bin Kicked
Over By Vandals' would make that weeks edition, along
with conclusions about the curse of disaffected youth
screaming wheelies on their mopeds.
Victorian England would have been equally hysterical.
Successive generations bemoan the demise of the 'good
old days'. Perhaps to ease the paranoia of city life,
the idea of holidaying with time away from the workplace
did not begin to be taken seriously before the end of
the 19th century, and after the railway arrived here in
1862, this resort began to grow.
Along with the temporary exodus of people from Kings Lynn
and Norwich, the local landowners were the Le Strange
family who were largely responsible for the town's development.
Not so long ago notices on the beach still proclaimed
the rights of the family to all the mussels and oysters
on the foreshore, and anything that was thrown up onto
the beach during a storm was theirs to keep. As hereditary
Lord High Admirals of The Wash, the Le Stranges could
also claim possession over anything in the sea as far
as a man could ride his horse at low tide, and then throw
his spear. There are lots of perks, living in Hunstanton.
Much has been written about the 2009 R1. We are aware
of the Moto GP derived cross-plane crank-shaft, it's sophisticated
fuelling and smart electronic control are instantly evident
when you twist the throttle. Around the lanes on the coast
of Norfolk between villages coated with the poshness of
a Chelsea-by-the-Sea, the bike feels faster and gruntier
than the one on which I went around the world. It was
hard to truly road test such a bike on the lanes that
separate Britain from the sea. Every narrow bend steers
a car coming the opposite way. This isn't a slow journey
about riding a bike fast, it's a quick adventure about
riding a fast bike slowly.
Out of town, the cliffs at Lighthouse Lane are layer-caked
with red chalk sandwiched between its white equivalent
and a type of brown sandstone called carr stone. On the
tops, the remains of St Edmund's Chapel, built after Edmund
landed here in AD 850, lie next to the white lighthouse.
In the old part of town, red roofed fishing cottages stand
next to the church with Hunstanton Hall dating back to
Tudor times only to impress on me why it is that this
might be interesting, and almost too soon into the journey,
I have an overwhelming feeling that the coast of Britain
is a land where time forgot.
Down the road at Wells-next-the-Sea the occasional car
rumbles down a narrow street only to disappear out of
sight. It is a pretty evening with a chill wind but the
light has the luminescence of innocence. It is easy to
take photographs of things of colour; a red telephone
box against a blue sky, the juxtaposition of green hawthorn
and brown, a shop painted yellow and blue. This reminds
me of an important objective of such a gentle voyage,
which is to be re-acquainted with the concept of Englishness
whilst in England and whether this can be judged by the
only two attributes I might know anything about; character
and landscape. Scottishness and Welshness will be different
along with the third ingredient in this layered coastal
cake, which is indubitably, the bike.
Perhaps amplified by the quietness of this laid back part
of the country, the grunt of the engine rips wildly across
manicured little villages like a bad boy on the pull.
On the long bumpy straights, the sound has naughty written
all over its face, cascading loudly when it takes a corner.
This bike doesn't talk, it shouts. The cross-plane crank
takes away the fly-wheel effect of the flattening top
dead centre and although there is less torque, the immediate
pick-up on revs counteracts a feeling I'd intuitively
known for years.
Landscape is the easier of the two other attributes. A
view is the totality of visible objects - roads, trees,
fields, houses, lakes and churches - not just the land.
Historically it had been supposed that landscapes shape
human perception, that the power of the earth was greater
than the heavens in determining human destiny. As I sit
by my bike beside salt marshes listening to the wind tease
flying wires on the mainsails of small yachts, I feel
the traveller sneak up on me.
Close by, Burnham Market has the made up mannerisms of
a Chelsea-on-Sea. It is a place mesmorised by such a sense
of self worth, it gives off a feeling of separateness.
Nearby, The Lord Nelson pub serves beer through a hatch
as if it were grog on board HMS Victory. Before Nelson
went to battle, he came from here. As a child, this was
the place where he first grew up. The sixth of eleven
children, he was educated until the age of twelve at nearby
North Walsham. That night I am to be the guest of Mrs
Plum. She once owned the rectory in which Nelson was born
but it has long since been destroyed. Nina Plum is a plum
farmer and every one of her plums are hand-picked, and
when she harvests, she takes baskets of plums to market.
Certain plums are picked ahead of others, and knowing
that the ripening process of different types of plums
are not always the same, picking can be staggered, so
in between her plum-picking, she can plan how and when
she will ride her motorcycle. Mrs Plum, along with her
friend Clive once motorcycled around the world, and recently
returned from their adventures in the Americas, and without
telling anyone, and when the plums are picked, think nothing
of doing it again.
In Anglo-Saxon literature and story telling, the principle
of emotion and subsequent development of some conflict
of character is less visible. If the 4th and 5th centuries
were year zero for English literature, the use of complex
elaboration and intrigues summerise one aspect of the
English personality perfectly. It is said that the English
movement was for decoration rather than architecture -
analogous to how nice looking English bikes used to sit
in a pool of oil in the shadow of Japanese-ness. This
is form over functionality and unlike engineering, eloquent
prose is more concerned with making patterns from fragments
of knowledge without needing to make sense. This is how
I see journeys; elegant and sometimes without sense. It
is the ice-cream-obviousness of what's easy to see that
I don't get. Motorcycling around the coast of Britain
could easily be described in the context of a 'Kiss-Me-Quick'
culture, of red telephone boxes and chip shops, shingle
beaches by the seashore and cafes. There are bikers by
the dozen and mums pushing children in their prams. I
hear seagulls bark over the din of crashing waves yet
acknowledgement of a journey has to be more than the sum
total of stereotype. Historical authors such as Ackroyd
are experts when speaking of the English imagination.
They talk about purity of function undermined by elaboration
of form - all fur and no knickers. and is something which
avoids 'depth of feeling or profundity of argument
in favour of artifice and rhetorical display'.
Bike built in Japan. Journey made in Britain. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
