FISH SUPPER BLUES

Day 6  Saturday 13 September 2014

In which we come across bargains, see the other side and have trouble with a fish-and-chip van

Early in the morning, the little black spaniel and I walked a couple of miles along rutted farmers’ tracks leading to nowhere, opening heavy gates and watching sheep scatter at our approach.  Strung up on one of these gates was a length of twine with the corpses of dozens of dead moles tied to it.  They were so decomposed that you could only tell they were moles by their huge digging feet.  I am unclear as to what damage moles do to sheep grazing pasture, but I am forming the view that farmers are a species best avoided.

I brought my e-book with me to the site, and have been dipping into the exploits of a Swede named Tomas Ericsson, who took a year to perform a dotty cycle-ride from Norway to Portugal via Finland and Germany and wrote a book about it. He refers to ‘campings’ rather than ‘camp-sites’ so that he sounds like Elke Sommer in ‘Carry On Camping.’  It is the simplicity of his writing and the minute detail of his itinerary that are most interesting.  He tells us how many euros it costs to camp, the names of the roads and paths upon which he has to cycle, how many spokes he had to replace on his back wheel, the problems he had with his gears, the price of meals, the fact that only three Finns smiled at him on his journey round that desolate country, his misery with horse flies, sweat, rain and mosquitoes, and the fact he found the French intolerable.  Not for Tomas the deep metaphysical musings of a Colin Thubron or the waspish observations of a Paul Theroux. 
We drove to Bishop Auckland.  It has a very interesting name.  It turned out to be a very uninteresting place.  It reeked of poverty and decay, with peeling shop-fronts and filthy paving-stones.  Many of the shops were closed. Litter lay everywhere. My wife said: “I’m tired.  I cannot walk any further.  I must rest.”   She sat on a bench overlooking a Poundland shop and William Hill’s. I walked the dog down past the Masonic Hall where there was a neat row of Victorian terraced houses – stone-built at the front, brick-built at the rear.  I hadn’t seen that before.  I returned.  An elderly couple stopped me. “Is that a cocker spaniel?’ the old man asked. “Yes,” I replied. “Our son had one just the same, didn’t he, Elsie?” “Yes, that’s right, Jack,” responded Elsie.
“Lovely animals.  Almost human. One of the family,” Jack said.
“As Jack says, Billy had one,” said Elsie. Jack butted in. “The dog had a lump on its jaw. The lump kept growing, Billy took it to the vet’s. ‘That’s cancer,’ the vet said. ‘It’s much too far gone to operate.’  He put the dog to sleep there and then. As soon as the needle went in, the dog died. It was just two years old.  We were there to see it, weren’t we, Elsie?”  Elsie’s eyes were brimming with tears.  She nodded. “Billy was ever so upset,” said Jack, “Vowed he’d never get another one.”
“But he did,” said Elsie. “A lovely Golden Retriever.  He took it to the river one day and it hit its head on a rock.  It died of a brain haemorrhage.” 
Jack then went on to tell me that their own mongrel dog had been run over by a gas fitter’s van.  I felt a profound melancholy creep over me as I listened to them, and I vowed to say ‘No’ the next time someone asked me whether the little black dog was a cocker spaniel.  “No,” I’ll say, “It’s a baby Alpaca.”
I discovered a second-hand bookshop in one of the seediest streets that could be found outside of Addis Ababa.  It contained so many books, from floor to ceiling, that you couldn’t make your way to the shelves without the proprietor moving them aside for you.  There was a transport section and I could see buried treasure halfway along it – an original D Bradford Barton.  This one, ‘Diesels In The Eastern Region” was in mint condition, about the only book of his 10,000 that was.  “How much?” I asked the proprietor.  He looked at the flyleaf. “It wasn’t very expensive when it was new.  Shall we say a fiver?”  I gave it him without demur.  A good copy is worth three times that. “Why so many books?”  I asked him.  He puffed reflectively on his cigarette. “I’m a market trader,” he said. “Northallerton of a Thursday and Newcastle Quayside of a Sunday.  I need to keep large stocks.”
In the evening, I allowed myself to stand in a queue for 55 minutes for a serving of fish and chips from a van which arrives on the site on Wednesdays and Saturdays.  I was obliged to listen to inane chatter from some particularly smug and tedious campers, whilst a portly, sweating fish-frier tried to cope with demand for thirty people, most ordering five fish suppers, four mushy peas, three curry sauces, two portions of scampi and, as far as the length of time the frier took to serve us, a partridge in a pear tree. It was light when I joined the queue at five past seven, pitch-dark when I left it at eight ‘o’ clock.  I have to say the fish and chips were delicious.