“We could have gone back to Dartmoor again. Plenty to see there. By now we’d have had breakfast in Morrisons at Tavistock and headed up onto the moors for the first shoot.”
A couple of hours later….
“We could have turned off right here and headed over the bridge for the Brecon Beacons. It’s brilliant there. Fantastic for waterfalls. Just look at the M49! Empty in comparison to this lunacy. We could be in Abergavenny in under an hour, stocking up on Haribo and Welsh beer in Aldi. There’s a very good chippy there. Generous portions too.”
Later still…..
“And there’s the New Forest. A bit of a trek but we’d probably be there by now if we'd turned off the motorway after Exeter. Great heathland shots and plenty of woodland (well obviously) opportunities too. And you’ve got the ponies - they make for wonderful subjects in the golden hour when the light touches their manes. Silver birches everywhere. I love a silver birch - wish we had some in Cornwall. I know a good Indian takeaway at Ashurst. Lovely naan bread.”
I hoped Lee was taking this personally. It was his idea to head north of Birmingham for our latest adventure, and to make things worse, for reasons that remained unclear we were travelling on a Friday. Back in the nineties, when I was married to a Lancastrian, we would routinely make the journey from Falmouth to Preston in six and a half hours, with two toddlers on board, always driving some dodgy old jalopy that was only just about roadworthy. And after three days in Preston with the in-laws I would be crawling up the curtains, wondering whether we could sneak off to the Lake District or the Trough of Bowland for a few hours - or preferably until it was time to go back home.
Thirty years on, with a car that does what it’s expected to without complaint, and no squabbling urchins to drive me to distraction, the shorter distance to Buxton was turning into an ordeal. By now we’d trudged through the A30 roadworks from Chivvy to Carland at walking pace, crawled across the Bristol area at the speed of an arthritic snail, and parked the car on the M5 in a queue that commenced just before Droitwich and finished on the other side of Birmingham. And all the way, the road was close to saturation point with moving traffic. Or traffic at a standstill. Purgatory on wheels. Honestly, if in a moment of blind optimism you ever dared to hope for our future as a species, try sitting in a traffic jam on the M5 on a Friday afternoon, surrounded by articulated lorries belching blue clouds into the stratosphere. And then remind yourself you’re just a small speck on the map in a tiny country at the edge of one of five carbon fuelled continents. Imagine what it must be like in Los Angeles, Mexico City, Jakarta and a thousand other mega-cities. Enjoy it while you can.
Finally we popped out of the tailbacks along the final miles of the M5 like a cork from a bottle of flat Lambrini, to join the northbound masses as Lee peered wistfully through the rear windows at his old home, looking to see if he could spot the football ground at Walsall. Meanwhile Bossy Barbara (otherwise known as the satnav on Dave’s phone) was adding further to this driver’s woes. “She says come off at the next junction,” he told me. I wasn’t convinced. “But the map clearly showed that we should leave the M6 at Stoke and that’s still nearly twenty miles away,” I complained. Now Lee chimed in with his version of events, which unhappily agreed with Dave’s. We bade the motorway farewell - a motorway that was now moving along nicely in the prescribed manner I might add - instead taking the route that Barbara had decided would take us to Buxton in record time. A record slow, it seemed.
For a while we chased along a happy A34, a dual carriageway with little to hinder our progress. This was more encouraging. Perhaps Barbara was right after all. But then she decided it was too easy, sending us instead along a labyrinthine trail of narrow roads through nodding villages, most of which took us to junctions where we needed to turn right into what was rapidly becoming the rush hour chaos. We still hadn’t seen a sign for Buxton, and as the hours dragged, I wondered whether we were going to arrive on the east coast at Grimsby or Hull instead. All the while, relations with Barbara remained distinctly frosty as I questioned every command she issued. Why were we driving up this narrow lane, more than thirty miles short of our destination? I wanted to go straight to Buxton, not conduct a whistle stop tour of every farm in North Staffordshire along the way.
Nine hours into our journey, we arrived at Leek, just a few miles short of our target, and after a local commuter reluctantly allowed me into the flow of traffic at yet another tedious right turn, it seemed the ordeal was close to its end. Pulling along the straight upward slope towards Buxton, we saw an imposing stegosaurus on the hills - Ramshaw Rocks huge, brutal and towering down over us as smiles returned to tired faces. Maybe it would be worth it after all - and maybe Lee would be forgiven for dragging us all this way. We found Aldi, bought supplies - including beer and confectionery (bloke shopping - dictionary definition: the result of three unattended middle aged men going to a supermarket unsupervised), and made haste to the cottage we’d rented for the next five nights. We’d left Cornwall at nine in the morning - by now it was almost seven in the evening. If you live close enough to a major European airport, you could probably have made it to New York and had your postcard halfway back across the Atlantic before we arrived in Buxton.
Less than an hour later, we were here, where I’d arranged to meet Shelly, who’d put in a special request to do traffic trails at Mam Tor. Introductions made, we headed up the short but steep slope and gazed out across the Edale Valley to Kinder Scout. In the opposite direction sat the beautiful village of Castleton, the top of the escarpment above Winnat’s Pass and the unmistakable cement works with its tall factory chimney at Hope. And there was the classic view along the ridge towards Back Tor and its lone tree. A rush of recognition. Suddenly some of the places in the book and the YouTube videos were real - living and breathing parts of the big green canvas that rolled serenely towards us, as if unfurled from somewhere beyond the horizon. This was a place where adventures to remember would surely happen. Although Shelly had forgotten her coat, and despite being loaned a thick jumper by Dave, had to leave early before we got down to business with the traffic trails.
As a gentle yellow sun cast its soft glow across the land, I decided to absolve Lee of all blame for dragging us this far. Well at least until the journey back to Cornwall a week later at the beginning of the bank holiday weekend that is. Probably best if we don’t talk about that. I’ve already made him sign a legally binding agreement in the presence of a team of solicitors that says we’re going to the Brecon Beacons on a Tuesday next time.
