Aren't We All Better When We Move?
It's amazing who you run into on a day out in Devon
Most editions of Lighting the Path deal with an aspect of my family’s 2016 or 2023 journeys to the northern hemisphere; sometimes both. So please make sure to carefully note the dates of each post as you browse in order to better understand how it relates to the others.
21 June 2023 (cont.)
Our video chat with elder son, Tim, and his girlfriend, Vee, earlier today having confirmed for us that they are continuing to have, quite literally, the time of their lives, we continued on happily this afternoon with our exploration of Devon’s southernmost extremities.
During the course of which we were caught pleasantly off-guard by the unexpectedly wide and attractively golden Blackpool Sands. Beaches in the UK don’t often get much positive press amongst foreign travellers - least of all from those, like us, who hail from Down Under, and generally choose to believe we lead the world in this particular category of natural resources. But the fact is BPS would not look at all out of place back home on the north coast of New South Wales.
So long as you weren’t hoping for any surf that is.
Then ensued one of those bizarre coincidences that international travel seems to throw up disproportionately often. So there we are in a council car park adjacent to the Salcombe jetty; Salcombe being a town that occupies a very similar position and role at the mouth of the Kingsbridge Estuary as does Dartmouth upon the River Dart. (There are even ruins at Salcombe – ie Fort Charles, built half a millennium ago during the reign of King Henry VIII – that lie in an almost identical strategic position as does Dartmouth Castle, where we lunched earlier today). Not wanting to risk a fine, or worse, we had paid our money into the machine at the entrance to the car park in order to secure a ticket, thereby permitting us to leave our car unattended whilst we went off to explore Salcombe’s narrow streets, and its intriguing retail precinct, and to gaze upon the adjacent harbour, and nearby beaches. Upon returning to collect our car an hour or two later who should accost us at the self-same ticket machine but our old friend Neil, the manager of our younger son, Ben’s soccer team for half a dozen years or more through the late noughties and early 2010’s - when Ben was a teammate of Neil’s younger son, Nick - as well as Neil’s wife, Mary, who we also know well.
Neil developed a hard-earned reputation during his period as manager of the mighty Ryde Panthers for being the only football official we know of who could deliver a comprehensive (handwritten) match report to his team and its supporters immediately following the conclusion of the game. No mean feat when you think about it. Years later, after Ben had passed away, Neil recounted to us how Ben had greeted him in his usual hearty fashion at the commencement of Nick’s 21st birthday party, indicating he was very much looking forward to hearing Neil’s “match report”, detailing all the key highlights of the evening’s events, before he headed for home in the wee hours following the party’s conclusion.
It turns out Neil and Mary are over here in the UK because Neil will be competing in an international shooting event taking place in Wiltshire later this month. So if the competition is in Wiltshire, what is Neil doing down here in Devon you say? Glad you asked. Maybe, just like the great Sundance Kid, Neil shoots better when he moves. (I apologise to anyone who has not seen Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, another of my absolute favourite films – starring Paul Newman as Butch, and Robert Redford as Sundance – if that reference falls a little flat. But if you haven’t ever seen the film you really, really should. At the very least you should probably check out the Sundance Kid in action so that at least my little joke makes some kind of sense! P.S. If anyone knows of a more entertaining and/or more charismatic duo to be found anywhere in the history of cinema than these two guys, please feel free to message me).
And so back to the Kingston Estate in time for a well-earned home-cooked dinner of fish and salad – very much our go-to slap-up meal these days. By the way, did I mention how narrow the minor roads are in Devon? Well it turns out it’s not just the thoroughfares that are undersized. Many of the villages and hamlets through which we passed today were so small they should seriously consider banning cat-swinging, if they haven’t already. Fun fact: Apparently the difference between a village and a hamlet here in Britain has nothing whatever to do whether you can swing a cat in the main street, but depends rather on whether the particular settlement in question boasts a church (village) or not (hamlet). Which means that in years past when the citizens of a particular settlement were deciding whether or not they wanted to have a church built on their local streets, what they were really deciding was whether they wanted to be, or not to be, a hamlet. An important question indeed.
And just in case any cat-lovers reading this may have felt uncomfortable with the metaphor I used in the previous paragraph, I note the origin of the phrase “not enough room to swing a cat” actually had nothing to do with tabbies and the like. Rather it referred, in days of yore, to whether or not there was room enough available to effectively utilise a cat o’ nine tails; that formidable whip being the weapon of choice for imposing corporal punishment on offenders at that time.
Jokes aside though, almost all of these minor towns are an absolute delight to pass through. And, of course, their presence at such regular intervals, no matter which direction you are travelling in, is a constant reminder of how the history of this small, neat, verdant monarchy contrasts so starkly with that of our own almost incalculably wide and wild brown land.
Vive la difference I say.