what a weekend. no, seriously, what an epic fucking weekend. to think it nearly ended before it began, but i'll get to that. SpeedFox and i have had this planned for a while now - ever since we realised when it was going down. it started, as many of these ideas do, in a pub.
"Hey, have you heard of the Gloucester Cheese Rolling?"
hell yeah i have!
"You want to go?"
do i have a penchant for wearing too much black???
it's got to be one of the silliest things you've ever heard of. bloke throws a wheel of Double Gloucester down a hill with a 1:2 gradient and a mob of yahoos chase it. first one to the bottom gets the cheese. comparative silliness includes the Running of the Bulls and the Tomatina Festival, with similar injury ratios. colour me keen as mustard.
of course, there were a couple of setbacks. for starters, by the time we worked out when it was happening Fox was seconds away from hitting the "Confirm" button on a weekender in Belgium. louise was originally going to come along but managed to get herself uninvited, then with days remaining before we were set to head off the prices for hire-cars doubled overnight. we thought all was lost - our plans for the weekend really required having our own independent transport - until i came up with a bright idea which saved the day. see, it was only the hire prices in LONDON which had doubled...
our final plan was elegant in its simplicity: catch the first train out of Paddington to Bristol at 7AM on Saturday morning, pick up the car at 9 and head for Cardiff for breakfast. wander around Wales until we were sick of the idea and head for Coleford, a sleepy little farming village in the Forest of Dean (where SpeedFox was born and where we'd scored lodgings with his aunt and uncle). we get ourselves an early night and be up at 2:30AM to be in the car by 3 and on the road to Salisbury so that we can get to Stonehenge by 5:30. breakfast in Bath, then fire on to explore the Forest and the Wye Valley in the afternoon. have a well-deserved sleep-in on Sunday night, then off to Gloucester to attack a hill with a couple of other maniacs, thousands of spectators and global news coverage and generally try not to die before making a break for London and ditch the hire car at the Hertz down the road from my place in Kennington. what could possibly go wrong?
in the end: nothing. nothing whatsoever. well, almost.
getting up at 5AM sucks. when we met at Paddington we'd had about 7 hours sleep between us. itchy eyeballs aside, it was a pleasant train ride made easier by sugar-free energy drinks. we found the Hertz with the help of a map Fox had printed off the day before and were out of town quicker than you can say "which way to Cardiff?", which is a pleasant little town. we got in a little over an hour later, grabbed a bite to eat and spend the rest of our time there wandering around Cardiff Castle. amusingly, it was Fox who suggested that i make a scene and get my poi out in the courtyard of the old keep and of course i couldn't resist. it's well-worth a visit, even just for the quiet time of sitting around the grass being pleasantly surrounded by history (and tourists, let's not forget the tourists).
having had our fill of Wales we decided it was time to head for Coleford. Fox's aunt and uncle were sitting in the sun out the front when we got there so we joined them for a nice cup of tea and a chat before we went off to explore Simmonds Yat in the Valley. it took us a couple of wrong turns to find what we were looking for, but when we did the views were spectacular, and we eyed off a pub that we pledged to hit at the next opportunity. meanwhile, we were nearly late back at Coleford for tea kindly supplied by Fox's family, then we capped off the evening with a quiet pint at The Miner where he remembers his folk having a going-away party back when he was 6 and they were moving away to Oz.
getting up with less than 4 hours of sleep hurt. Fox lived his dream and took the wheel down to Salisbury so that i could play DJ and navigator (our little Kia had both USB and audio input so my PSD brought the noise). driving around england in the long pre-dawn was a great way to get around quickly, with sod-all anyone else on the roads. getting off the Motorway had us dodging deer and rabbits, and at one point the road was lined with bunnies all sitting and looking away from the road at regularly spaced intervals - our very own honor-guard, Watership Down style.
we finally hit Stonehenge at 5:15AM, just in time to see the sun crest the horizon. there were a pile of shivering people who'd come for their Stone Circle Access, and after a micro-briefing (don't damage the stones, no food, drink or smoking. now go have fun) we were let loose and spent an hour wandering around taking photos and with Fox as a willing cameraman i even managed to get a video of me flinging my poi around while he walked around me in a semicircle to get in as much of the scenery as he could.
you don't usually get to go INTO the circle at Stonehenge. if you rock up during the day you go through a tunnel under the road and are greeted with a discrete fence that prevents you from getting more within around 20 metres of the circle. book in advance, pay a little more and arrive before or after the regular session is closed and you get to go play. why the fuck else do you think we were there at ridiculous-o'clock in the morning?
when we got to Bath it was a ghost-town. the only people who seemed to be up and about were us and a few haunted-looking backpackers who were obviously on their way somewhere else. what was awesome was the chance to drive around the hilly streets exploring the place and getting to walk the streets without interferencne. we couldn't find a feed tho and by 9:30 we'd been there for nearly 2 hours and were getting hungry. we didn't find food until nearly 11, and had gone to Bristol via Avonmouth. we were originally heading for Weston-Super-Mare because it was a) on the coast, b) on the map and c) had a cool name, but every time we spied a sign for it we wound up lost and decided that the gods did not smile on WSM and we should try elsewhere. i finally got my Big Breakfast tho (which was... reasonably large), so at least i didn't go without.
by 1PM we were back in the Forest and buggered. we'd had a full day and covered 200 miles before breakfast on fuck-all sleep and we'd had it. alarms were set and we got 3 hours of sleep (each!) and were up in time to get back to Simonds Yat and hit The Royal for well-deserved beers in the sun.
i have a concept i've been working on for a while now: the Crystaline Perfect Moment: a quantum second in time that stretches out long enough for you to absorb everything about it and ingrain the entirety of the sensorium like a 3D photograph with the smell and taste and the warmth of the sun against your skin, the sound of the birds fucking around in the background and the view of whatever you're looking at. sitting at a park bench in front of The Royal with a view of the Wye Valley with a half-finished pint of cold Kronenboug, the tree-sperm floting in the air with a good friend sitting across the table... this was one of those moments. "how's the serenity?" SpeedFox quotes from The Castle. we must have say there for 2 hours, until the sun finally dropped behind the ridge across the river and we headed into town for some food and a few more beers to round off a fantastic day.
we hit Gloucester about an hour before the first race the next day. it's a tradition shrouded in history, but for once i'm not really interested too much in the background. take 100m of 1:2 gradient hill and throw yourself down it. thousands come to watch or participate, crowding the sides of the hill or the flatish plain below. we didn't manage to get in a race in the end, but once it was all over anyone who still wanted to go down hopped the fence, lined up and went down as a horde. i was a little worried about my knees, knowing that one foot wrong and i'd twist or jar something and it'd be all over red rover so i prioritised sliding on my arse to trying to stay upright. take three steps, slide, get some footing for another couple of steps, slide again and roll, slide, run, slide and roll until you hit the bare-10m of runoff before the bales of hay. the rugby team jumped out of my way - i was rolling sideways as i hit the bottom and somehow manged to get on my feet with enough time to hit the hay head-on, face to face with a woman who seemed part of the official team.
G'DAY!
"Are you alright?"
i'm AWESOME! that was FUCKING INCREDIBLE!!!!
she must get a lot of that.
we'd waited in line for hours, drinking a couple of tinnies of Dutch Courage and making friends with a couple of kids behind us in the queue. they'd come down from Canterbury and camped on the hill the night before. it'd taken them 3 hours to walk from the middle of Gloucester so we insisted on taking them into town. it wasn't far out of our way and there were 5 seats in the car so why not?
we fly down the road to Ross-on-Wye and pull into the car park of the restaurant right behind Fox's aunt and uncle. we were in a hurry, but it helped that the A road was windy and begged to be taken at speed. we were still muddy and filthy so he dived into the toilets to get changed and i headed down into the town to do the same, making use of the public convenience to clean off the caked-on mud and change into something clean then crossing over into the park on the River Wye to have a makeshift picnic and read my book on a park-bench.
come 11PM and i was dropping him off at his place in Hammersmith then heading for basecamp. i'd got a message from louise on Saturday night when i turned my phone back on saying that she'd found the perfect place to move into and was shifting on Sunday, so once i'd dumped the car back at Hertz i walked into a half-empty room and all the peace and quiet i could want. how's the serenity? today included the now-regular ritual of going over the photos and uploading them to the web and preparing for the hate-mail from people screaming "YOU BASTARD!"
but seriously, what a great fucking weekend.
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