Talkative Strangers

          Last week, at the start of our journey, I quoted travel writer William Least Heat-Moon’s reflection, “When you’re travelling, you are what you are, right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.”  I think that’s pretty cool but, after several recent encounters, I learn that not everyone agrees with the sentiment.

          Our journey began in North Wales, where we enjoyed several days of trekking in the covid-unfriendly hills. Despite the perfect, late summer weather, other hikers were thin on the ground. On one six-hour hike, we met just one lone walker, who crossed our path as we sat to eat lunch. He stopped to exchange pleasantries about conditions, starting points, destinations and so on, but lingered longer than is usual. I began to fear he was eying up my salami, but perhaps he just wanted to talk, for we soon learned quite a lot about him. He lived and worked – as a consultant – in Guildford and had a second home in Wales, where he loved to walk. He was recently retired but still did freelance gigs “working from home”. When he eventually left us to our lunch, perhaps disappointed that no salami was forthcoming, we speculated as to why he was on his own. Recently divorced or bereaved? Or otherwise bereft in some way and just wanting an ear?

          Campsites are extra busy this year, so solitude is hard to come by. Unavoidable neighbourliness is the order of the day, fleeting though it inevitably is. Mostly, conversations are brief and centred around weather and itineraries, but there are those who want to tell their story. Like the chap who recently retired (on a generous package, judging by his magnificent motorhome with a pair of electric bikes stowed in its belly). He told me of his long and illustrious career as an engineer in the oil industry while, just a few feet away, my partner was talking loudly to her XR buddies via Zoom. Whether or not the oil man registered this irony, I cannot say – he didn’t ask about us at all – but when he departed the next morning, he gave us a cheery farewell.

          We then made our way to the west coast of Scotland, where three miracles occurred: the weather was fine, the midges were absent and sourdough was on the shelves of the Co-op in Ballachulish. But these were mere bonuses to the real prize – the marvellously restorative powers of the sunsets over the Western Isles and the quiet, star-studded night skies that follow. It was here that Ross McPherson, farmer, campsite operator and accordionist, told me something of his life. He had just come off the phone to the accordion tuner in Inverness, who had returned the instrument with a few dud notes. Having paid £650 for the tuning, Ross felt entitled to complain and, though the tuner was unhappy about it, insisted it be sorted in time for his intended trip to Shetland to see his girlfriend, whom he had met last year at the Shetland music festival. I managed to extricate myself from this story before he showed me a photo of his beloved or offered to demonstrate the duff tuning on his instrument, though I might have been more amenable had a tot of whisky been forthcoming.

          Throughout these and other encounters, I don’t recall being asked anything other than where we had come from and where we were bound. Given some encouragement, I might have enthused about the quayside shellfish shack in Oban, or the enchanting sculpture trail through the woods at Calgary Bay on the Isle of Mull. Otherwise, I would be reticent about revealing any personal history to strangers. Yesterdays on the road really are unwanted. They dull the spirit of adventure.

 

Don't Shoot The Messenger!

          There was quite a fuss last Saturday, when the activist group Extinction Rebellion (or XR, as its devotees call it) blocked a couple of roads, thereby deliberately delaying the delivery of print versions of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers. This temporary disruption certainly registered high on the public-awareness scale: an attack on free speech, railed some; a dangerous diversion of emergency services resources, claimed others;  and a threat to the key planks of national life by “so-called eco-crusaders turned criminals” said the Home Secretary, while threatening to classify XR as an “organised crime group”.

          There is, of course, another view of this: the billionaire proprietor of the newspapers targeted is a bastion of the system that has brought the biosphere to the point of imminent collapse, yet his media give scant publicity to the truth of climate change: our emergency services are far more stretched by having to respond to disasters caused by climate-change than they are by removing citizens from the streets where they – occasionally and peacefully – exercise their right to protest; and there is a case for the Tory party itself to be declared an “organised crime group”, given its raison d’etre, which is to extract value from society for the benefit of its members, regardless of the welfare of the majority of its fellow citizens, its illegal prorogation of parliament last November and its latest outrage, a declaration of intent to break, unilaterally, an internationally binding treaty that it only recently signed.

          Unfortunately for those such as the Home Secretary (what an innocuous title for an office with the power to advocate Putin-esque repression of dissenters), Rupert Murdoch and those who deny or ignore the catastrophic consequences of climate-change are set to be in a minority. One of XR’s demands is for a people’s assembly to tell the government what it may not want to hear. To its credit, the government has organised one such assembly, focussed on its declared aim of a carbon-neutral Britain by 2050 and it has just issued its report, which will be presented in Parliament (though the government is under no obligation to heed its recommendations.) Given that the assembly purports to represent a cross-section of society, its conclusions may be extrapolated to the whole. And those views are broadly consistent with the measures long advocated by XR.

          Another reason to be cheerful – if you are a reviled eco-crusader-criminal – is that there is more evidence that you are winning the argument. A recent report, commissioned by the Wellcome Trust, suggests that the XR message is getting across. For all their perceived unpopularity amongst the public (thank you, right wing media, for your portrayal of concerned citizens as riffraff), XR protestors have succeeded in raising awareness of the climate crisis – and not in a negative way. Nobody seriously thinks we should continue to destroy our own habitat.

          Having been involved with XR for a couple of years, albeit peripherally as the partner of a more committed activist, I have met and, in some cases, got to know many of its active supporters, young, old and in-between. They are not a criminal gang. They are a mixed bunch of people, different only from their peers in that they feel sufficiently motivated by the human-made crisis we face to press for urgent action. Sure, we can all agree on recycling and green energy, but do we wait until vested interests have had their fill of profit before change is granted to us? Like the Greenpeace movement before them, XR activists are not the problem, they are the messengers issuing a wake-up call to the complacent. In Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, a character called Mike is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he replied. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

Smiley Face

           I was walking down to the barber’s when I paused to cross a junction that used to be busy but is now corona-quiet. There was just me and a lady on a bike waiting dutifully at a red light opposite. She was wearing specs and one of those safety helmets that looks like a Stirling Moss hand-me-down from the 1950s. As I approached her, we made eye contact – there being nothing else happening – and, instead of looking away, she smiled at me. I was unsure how to react. Did we know each other? I searched my memory, swiftly. She was aged about 50, tall, slim and sensibly dressed. Yes, it could be…but no, it wasn’t. I managed an uncertain flicker of a smile by way of a polite return but, as I came alongside her, decided to explain myself, lest she thought I was flirting. I said, “I’m sorry, I thought you were someone I know.” “That’s OK,” she replied, grinning now. “I was smiling because you have a friendly face.” I thanked her for the compliment but was at a loss what else to say. Fortunately, her light turned green and she pushed off, sparing us both any further embarrassment.

          The event was surprising to me, not because it was an apparently spontaneous display of goodwill – they do happen from time to time – but because, having left home in a mood that registered more at the crotchety end of the scale than the euphoric, I assumed that my condition would be reflected on my face. Not so apparently and, cheered by this outcome, I stopped at the Greek deli a few yards further on to buy a slab of spanakopita to take home for a celebratory lunch. The man behind the counter also had a friendly smile for me. But he always does.

          Even the barber smiled when I walked into his shop, but that was possibly because he had been sitting alone, waiting for custom for some time. He informed me, with some delight, that my fee would just about cover the expense he had incurred earlier on his regular visit to the chiropodist. “I’m in the wrong business,” he said, explaining that chiropodists get rich on expensive, fifteen-minute corn treatments. He then asked me the stock barber question. “Have you been away anywhere?” I told him I had not but that I have a trip coming up – hence the haircut. He made no comment. The barber, as I have come to realise, only asks questions as a way of introducing topics upon which he intends to expound. So I, the captive audience, then listened to his account of his recent holiday in Wales. Holidays in Wales can be either wet and windy or dry and sunny: his had been the latter, but the weather was not, for once, the main topic. Prime position went to the zip wire ride that he had been given as a birthday present. I imagined him dangling inelegantly, Boris Johnson-like, over a shallow, tree-studded valley but whoever gave him the token had something else in mind. Yes, there was a gentle practice run but the main event, according to his description, involved his being strapped on to a roller mechanism and launched, head first, down an almost vertical line stretched across a deep, disused quarry. He never did tell me who the donor was, though I suspect it was his son, of whom he sometimes complains.

          The barber, evidently invigorated by his zip wire experience, flashed a self-satisfied smile as he finished off my quiff with a triumphant flick. And so, having left home that morning with no expectation of anything out of the ordinary happening, I walked back feeling like Tintin, clean cut and expectant, a smile hovering on my lips, ready to break out at the slightest provocation.