I think I timed this whole vacation just about right. Friday morning, for the first time, going for a walk sounded like a chore. I spent a while looking through the Sussex sections of my walking guides to try to get some inspiration, and decided instead to take a walk I had devised myself – following the riverside path along the Arun nearly to the sea, then walking along the seacoast to Bognor Regis. I reasoned that this couldn’t be too difficult, since it had to be more or less flat, both from common sense and from looking at the contours on the map. I was also curious to see Bognor Regis, because it was where Jeeves went on his holidays away from Bertie – for the shrimping Bertie would always say, and damned if I didn’t see numbers of people with dip nets on long handles pulling something wriggly out of the water, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
I did successfully finish off Wildfell Hall on Thursday night, so I grabbed up my three Brontes in one as well as my guidebook and map for Dartmoor to carry down to the used book shop in town for a little change of reading matter. I had crossed Dartmoor off my list because it’s all over hills (of which I had had plenty) and bog (of which I had had more than plenty). I got a few pounds credit for the Dartmoor stuff. They wouldn’t take the Brontes because of their condition. Well, they had spent a long time in my pack after being dead for a while, so I couldn’t blame the book shop folks. At any rate, I spent my credit and a few pounds out of my pocket on a range of the silliest, thinnest looking space opera I could find, one of which I read in the course of yesterday. It was called SPACEHAWKS and had lots of exclamation marks. It’s a real tonic after all the high literature.
They had some “Anything in this bin 2 pounds” bins out front, so I tipped the Brontes into one of them on the way out.
The stroll back up to the inn worked the stiffness out of my left leg that had really been making me reluctant to walk. I have implied this, but not said it explicitly. Here in Arundel, when I write about walking up to the inn, I mean that literally. Arundel is built on a steep slope, and my inn is at the street on the top. These guys probably keep a certain number of guests here for dinner just because the thought of walking back up here after eating somewhere down the hill wears them out.
I was back to fairly enthusiastic as I headed out and down to pick up the riverside path. It was a beautiful morning, but of course with a lingering threat of rain. The walk along the river was easy in every way. I saw hardly anyone beyond a few dog walkers for most of the morning.
I did discover something very funny about the cathedral right next door. From close to, it doesn’t look extremely large. The buildings surrounding it are mostly two or three stories tall, and crowd it in. The wall around the park runs just across the street from it. You really can’t get far enough away from it in the town to see it properly. As a result, in violation of everything you’re ever heard about perspective, when you get about a mile from it and can see it whole it looks much bigger. I mean, it looks huge. It looks bigger than the castle, even though the castle is both bigger and closer to you. It suddenly looks as though Arundel is a cathedral with a few buildings crowded up to it rather than a town with a cathedral in it. I think some of the buildings down the hill from it are a similar color stone as well, so they sort of get tangled up with it. Anyway, it’s the first time I ever experienced that effect, and it was almost magical.
The walk along the beach was also fairly easy, although much of it was loose packed gravel, which shifts under the foot even more than sand. My calves got a good work out. Bognor Regis turned out to be a pleasant enough town. I was pretty tired when I got there, because there hadn’t been many good opportunities to rest along the way. I did plop down on the sea wall pillowed on my rolled up raincoat reading SPACEHAWKS for a while, but I was near a major access to the . . . you know it’s so hard to keep calling it a beach . . . from a parking lot, so there were lots of families marshalling on and off the strand with all the attendant crying and screaming and threatening. In the end, it wasn’t as restful as it might have been. I got back up and walked on to Bognor.
Once there, I bought a portion (OK, a bucket, but it was a little bucket) of fries and hired a deck chair to sit on the gravel and stare out at the sea and read more of my novel. The seacoast makes the British do odd things. For one thing, it makes them go in the water when the air is 68 degrees with a 15 mph wind blowing and a lovely bunch of stones to walk across coming and going, but that’s just the beginning. I will confine myself to the most extreme case which was a portly father and son standing about 40 feet apart and hurling stones at one another as a form of entertainment. Golf ball sized stones. Fist sized stones. They didn’t always miss. Father tried to break off the game, I think, by walking over to stand near Mom, but that didn’t stop things. It just meant she had to be ready to spring away at any moment. Much hilarity ensued.
After a while, the chill started to get to me. I poked around town looking for anything more interesting, but since I was too tall for the kiddy rides and didn’t care to feed a bunch of pounds into slot machines, I soon exhausted the amusements on offer. There was a cinema showing the new Harry Potter, but it had just started a half hour before. I found the train station and bought a ticket back to Arundel.
I got back to my room and turned on the TV. The best thing I could find was a game show in which a bunch of sports trivia cranks were shown photos and film clips and had to answer questions about them. I actually watched about 20 minutes of this while trying to gather the energy to take a shower.
I had a nice Indian dinner – all the way at the bottom of the hill, so you know I really wanted it. The air had cleared remarkably. If the world were run properly, there would have been emergency opening hours at the castle so I could go to the top of the keep for the views. I really think I might have seen to London.
OK, time for a few words about right now. I’m in the beer garden of the inn on Saturday night. The lounge bar is crammed with people singing bits of various show tunes. The bad news is they haven’t yet struck on a song they know more than two lines of, so they start and stop a lot. On the plus side, they are sometimes all trying to sing the same song, not invariably mind you, but often. There was just a bit of an interruption because someone’s chair fell to bits. They just had a try at “In other words” but they literally only knew the “Fly me to the moon and . . .” and had to trail off right away. On the other hand, they seem to know more of “I’m forever blowing bubbles” than I ever heard before.
Any more about last night? I don’t think so. I had a quick pint back at the inn while a bunch of people on the wide screen TV talked about a horserace scheduled for today then went up to my room and finished SPACEHAWKS.
Garmin Facts: 12 miles, 3:50, 4.1 mph plus 1 mile around Arundel.
Oh, but I forgot to put in when it happened, a few nights ago, I was reading myself to sleep and started hearing an odd clicking noise I couldn’t place. I’m staying in a really old building that makes a number of odd noises, but eventually I figured out it was someone throwing pebbles at my window. I pulled on a robe and poked my head out to find it was a couple of my fellow guests who were locked out because someone had failed to leave a key in the back door where I’d been told there always was one. They were profusely apologetic, but it really wasn’t their fault. I only include this story because it’s the sort of thing I don’t think of as happening in real life, but there it was.
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