On the whole I live a fairly sedate existence. I am more like a minor character in a gentle sitcom than the hero of a tough detective show. I couldn’t bend the rules if I tried. In fact I have tried, and I found the whole living-on-the-edge experience so fraught, so unbearably tense and upsetting, that never again will I return a video tape without first rewinding it to the very beginning. My triumphs and tragedies largely reflect this perennial lower-league status: mine is a world of third-prizes and flat tyres, polite romances and wistful reflections whilst queuing at the post office. I prefer it this way. I’m not built for adventure. I’ve got all the wrong shirts and I couldn’t cope with bullet holes in my white walls.
This latest mishap of mine is no exception, but it does make you think about the nature of life, being that one minute you can be idly thinking about whether you’ll have soup or Thai prawns for starter, and the next minute you’re up to your neck in freezing water.
So it happened like this: I was on the train going to Hebden Bridge, a dandy little town in West Yorkshire, when my friend sent a text message to say that she had been delayed and could I possibly occupy myself for a couple of hours?
Well of course! I said. Hebden Bridge is a funky little town; I can hardly think of a more agreeable place to waste a couple of hours, just kicking around bookshops and taking pictures. Why, there’s also a splendid riverside walk – not the kind of arduous mountain trek I am used to, merely one of those seasoned routes through a local beauty spot called Hardcastle Crags.
The name conjures images of daunting cliff walls and the kind of dangerous spiky rocks you wouldn’t even want to sit on to eat your egg and cress sandwiches let alone find waiting for your bottom at the end of a long fall. In fact the Hardcastle Crags walk is nothing like that. It’s what we tough, mountain hikers scornfully refer to as an ‘escalator route.’ That is, a path so ludicrously simple and well-maintained it might just as well move under your feet and gently convey you past the sights. It certainly isn’t the kind of walk that would present any imaginable problem to a veteran of the hills such as me.
So I decided to visit Hardcastle Crags. I allowed it would take me a mere two hours, which included a generous portion of time for snapping photographs and flicking bits of grass from the tips of my shoes – my nice shoes, not my walking boots. I wasn’t going walking remember. This is the kind of walk promoted in Council literature, a family walk, some of it with wheelchair access. I can’t get lost here. Only a fool of the most sterling calibre could manage to get lost here.
I got lost here. An hour after joining the popular trail, an hour after being in an untaxing convoy made up of elderly couples, young families, blind people, certified madmen, hospital patients wheeling drips, unaccompanied toddlers, several circus clowns and a man who was otherwise so stupid he had put his toupee on back to front and couldn’t see where he was going, I was suddenly alone at the top of a steeply wooded hill, gazing down at a trickle of river in the valley and a string of people who were now magically on the opposite bank.
With a sigh, I turned off the track and began to pick my way gingerly down the hill to the river. The hill was steep and slippery, and everywhere lurked the menace of exposed tree roots. I was lucky not to fall and break my neck.
I wasn’t dressed for this, if you recall. I was meeting someone for lunch. I didn’t intend to go hiking let alone cross a river without the assistance of, oh, a bridge say. The current was fast but the river was not too wide, and scattered throughout were large, water worn boulders of the kind easily traversed by giraffes and people on unicycles, but not I of course. I can’t cross a hot bun without falling over. It did no good to remind myself of this. I had a river to get over, simple as that.
So I started to cross, and realised at once what a stupid mistake I was making. I tell a lie. This revelation hit me when I was exactly halfway across the river, one leg stretched out behind me, the other pointing ahead at an impossible angle, the tip of one shoe barely tickling the edge of the next rock in the chain. My arms were positioned on slimy rocks either side of me, though not directly either side of me, so that I looked for all like a man playing twister by himself. Locked into a position like that, trapped in the middle of a fast-flowing river, limbs too stretched to retract, there are exactly two ways to go. You can either be plucked deftly from trouble by a rescue helicopter, or you eventually buckle and fall in the water.
Fuck it, I thought, you hate helicopters, and promptly fell in the river.
To cut a long story short, I never made it to lunch. Too embarrassed, you are thinking. Too wet, someone else is thinking. The answer is none of the above. Despite being wet to the bone, despite bursting energetically out of a thicket and onto the path, terrifying the life out of a young couple in jeans and matching woollen hats, river slime clinging to my face and the flapping tail of a fish sticking out of my coat pocket, there is yet another reason why I never made it to lunch. You see, on the way back to Hebden Bridge, I got lost for a second time.
Some hours after falling in the river I staggered up a steep incline to find myself staring over a featureless crest of rugged hills with a single grey road snaking off into the distance. It was Nowhere, West Yorkshire. I couldn’t even pick out the comforting thread of the Pennine Way, always a welcome sight when you are lost or simply need to engage someone in tedious conversation about hiking gear. I could have been on the moon.
Except there was an estate car parked in a lay-by a short way down the road. A man was in the process of lifting a mountain bike into the back. I decided to run towards him before he loaded the bike and left, which on reflection, given that I was covered in slime and had a live fish about my person, was probably a bad idea. The man looked up sharply at the sound of my wet feet slapping urgently on the rough tarmac, and hurriedly slammed the hatch of his car down, buckling the back wheel of his mountain bike.
“Wait!” I called out, “Don’t go, I’m lost!”
He opened the car door and stood guardedly behind its protection, eyeing me suspiciously.I smiled in a disarming manner, dislodging a pebble and a strand of green algae from the corner of my mouth.
“If I carry on walking down this road, where will I end up?”
“Burnley,” he said.“Burnley?”
I repeated, and then shook my head vigorously, fearing my ears were blocked with river weed.The man nodded slowly. “Burnley.”
“Burnley?” I cried, scaring the man into his car. “Burnley in fucking Lancashire? Are you shitting me?”
I heard the clunk of the central locking being engaged before the man dropped the electric window a couple of inches. “That’s right,” he said. “Do you know you’ve got a fish in your pocket?”
Needless to say I had to text my friend and cancel lunch. I was about two hours from Hebden Bridge by now, which was two hours more than I had intended to pass with my unplanned stroll through the woods. Miraculously my phone was undamaged, as was my camera.
2 L8TE 4 LUNCH, I said in my text. HOW ABOUT A FISH SUPPR?
