Motorcycle diaries

Ten miles from home, I was nearly killed. I could see Leeds in the distance. I was overtaking a lorry when a Volvo pulled out from my left as if I didn’t even exist. I braked hard, but a micro second before my life would have flashed before my eyes, the driver saw me and swerved back behind the lorry. I rode the last part of my journey in the slow lane just trying to stop shaking.

I was at the end of a “gap week”. I had managed to negotiate a whole week to myself (with my beloved Yamaha Virago 535) while my husband looked after our son. My intention was to relive childhood memories of a family holiday to Cornwall; and having recently read Tracy Chevalier’s novel Remarkable Creatures about fossil collector Mary Anning, I hoped to walk in her footsteps from Lyme Regis to Charmouth, down in Dorset.

But first I had to face the motorway slog: M1, M42, M5. When you are in a car, you are cosseted; radio on, or a CD, chatting to your passengers, or singing along. It’s easy to forget you are tearing along hard Tarmac inches from other boxes of metal on wheels. On a motorbike, there is nothing to do but concentrate.

I headed towards Stroud, passed through picture postcard villages and thought of my father at Old Sodbury. After a brief mingle with the hippies at Glastonbury, it was off to Exford, deep in the heart of the Exmoor National Forest.

Exford youth hostel did not open until 5pm, so I found a pub and got stuck into the scrumpy. Exford is quintessentially English – it has two pubs, a tea room, and a post office/village store – all nestled round a village green. I found pub company with Frenchman Arnaud, backpacking around the South West in order to improve his English. We spent a very pleasant evening with me practising my French, and him conversing in English. I even managed to teach him “quintessentially”. By the time we left the quintessential pub some hours later, the quintessential village had gone from being flooded in sunshine to being ... well, flooded. The next morning the skies were dark and ominous. The journey across Exmoor would have been stunning in better weather.

On to Blackmoor Gate, past Barnstaple and Bideford, and Bude. More rain. Finally I arrived in Tintagel. Heavy with baggage and sodden with hours of heavy rain, it took every last ounce of concentration to manoeuvre my bike down a twisty track to the hostel hanging on to the edge of a cliff by its very foundations. There was no sign of life. I knocked. I ran the doorbell. I tried not to cry. As it turned out, I was in luck. Wardens Des and Shirley had been just about to go out, but took pity on me. Three miles up the road was Boscastle, devastated in 2004 by floods. The tourist information centre, itself victim of the torrential storms, shows an excellent film of the event. Visitors stand open mouthed as they watch cars and trees being swept up and smashed into buildings.

One of my favourite haunts back in 1978 had been the Museum of Witchcraft. One exhibit in particular had stuck in my memory – that of a shape of a human being. “The shape would have been cut out of material,” the curator had informed us at the time. “It was the person’s shadow, and it was always trying to get back to its owner. Sometimes when we open up the museum in the morning, it had moved from one cabinet to another.” On my return to the museum, I relayed this to the woman at the pay desk. She listened with interest, then laughed: “It’s not here anymore! It disappeared, no-one knows where it is!”

Back on the road again, St Ives was where being on a motorbike was indeed a big advantage – finding a car parking space at the seafront is as likely as finding a cafe selling a cream tea for less than £5. On a motorbike – no problem. And the money I would have had to spend on parking was put to much better use on a cream tea. The Penzance youth hostel was more like a four-star hotel, with strangers in my room. My luxury bunk had its own reading light, electricity socket and storage box underneath.

On to Land’s End. What would it be like to stand at the furthest point of England; to drink in the silent view and contemplate those who had made the journey to the peninsula from John O’Groats? In the event, I couldn’t get near the famous signpost unless I paid £9.95 for the privilege of having my picture taken by an official photographer. Along with the theme park, gift shop, Cornish pasty restaurant and various other tat, it felt more like being in Blackpool. I decided not to stay for the twice-weekly fireworks.

At Fowey, one of the many picturesque fishing villages which dot the southern coast of Cornwall, I enjoyed a small glass of Ratter cider and heard about some rioting or something. I got chatting to Tony and Nat, who filled me in with what had been happening, while I had been riding oblivious to the mayhem. We put the world to rights over our drinks then like the proverbial ships which pass in the night, went our separate ways.

I arrived in Lyme Regis in the middle of the town’s carnival and regatta; the torchlight procession which had been cancelled from the previous Sunday took place that evening and I enjoyed a magical experience watching the throngs of holidaymakers and locals carrying blazing torches from the top of the hill along the seafront and on to the famous Cobb.

I set off to walk in the footsteps of one of my heroines, Mary Anning. Mary (1799-1847) was a fossil collector at a time when her gender and social standing were looked down on by local people and the scientific community. Her discoveries included the first ichthyosaur skeleton, which she and her brother Joseph found when she was just 12 years old. It was humbling to walk as a free woman along the route she would have taken; and I wondered how on earth she must have coped in those huge skirts.

An hour or so later, I had pockets full of belemnites, portions of ammonites and – to my utter joy – a tiny crinoid. I felt like Mary Anning must have felt when she discovered that ichthyosaur. Well, nearly.

GETTING THERE

* Youth Hostel Association: www.yha.org.uk

* As an individual, I paid around £20 a night for accommodation in shared dormitories. I rode about 1,000 miles which cost me about £90 in petrol.