My Thirty Fifth Week as a Budding Author

“The duck sucked the muck”

To the vast majority of the British population that phrase would be meaningless nonsense. An ornithologist might conjecture that this is possible were a duck looking for a tasty morsel in a particularly repellant pond. But the Barter siblings would all point directly at their father whilst smirking at his calendar. The reason being that Dad used to catalogue every night that we spent sleeping in a tent in neat print on our kitchen calendar. Being a man of the RAF this had to be done using a three letter acronym. Dad thought long and hard about this and came up with DUC, SUC and MUC.

If you can crack the code before I tell you, you’ll realise just how long ago this was. I’ll give you a clue, “D” stands for Dave, “S” for Sally and “M” for Mark. Now you have to get the “UC”. Give up? It stands for “Under Canvas”. As a result our calendar was covered in DUCs, SUCs and MUCs and on occasion a full house of DUC/SUC/MUC. Being children, we would snigger away at this and chant “The duck sucked the muck” to ourselves. 

My Dad set an impressive benchmark for nights under canvas (CUC in his case). He told me that he’d managed a full year and his Dad had given him a pipe (or something like that) as a reward. Cogs whirred in my mind and I enquired as to whether we had a similar reward scheme. It turned out we did and in my youth I notched up an impressive 730+ DUCs gaining a rucksack as a result. Most of the DUCs were in our back garden which probably still has the two yellow patches in the grass (one was the tent, the other was pure laziness).

This week I increased my DUC count by one during a planned trip to the West Country. Cornwall and Exmoor were on the agenda and most of the roads there were designed for wheelbarrows rather than motorhomes. So, I shoved the tent in the car along with a dusty sleeping back, a gas stove, roll mat and my coffee pot. Then I drove into the depths of Cornwall and rode my bike around it for nearly seventy miles.

I’d forgotten how hard Cornwall is for cyclists. There is not an inch of flat and all inclines go properly up without any fannying around. I reckon I only used three of the ten gears available to me at the back of the bike and the big ring at the front went into a major sulk after being left out for fifty miles. Cornwall also has proper closed roads. None of those mincey little signs with a bit of resurfacing going on. Oh no, Cornwall closes its roads with hulking great boulders and clay.

I arrived back at the car properly knackered (after a steep climb to get to it of course) and drove off in search of a campsite. A few miles up the road I stumbled upon a holiday park and a tent sign. I should have known better, but fatigue drove me forwards to the reception and a living Miss Marple who manned it.

“I’d like to book a pitch for the night please” - I politely enquired

“£14.99” - she replied over her reading glasses

“It’s just a small tent”

“£14.99”

“I don’t need electricity or water on the pitch”

“£14.99”

She drove a hard bargain, I tried every angle to get the price down but she had clearly been programmed to respond with “£14.99” to every plea. I considered asking if she had a daughter just to see what the response would have been, but even I have to draw the line somewhere.

£14.99 poorer I drove to my pitch, or “the side of another steep hill” as she should have described it. I rushed back to reception, but she’d locked up for the day. Her and my £14.99 were off to Asda. I was stuck on the slope.

I made the best I could of the experience, by pitching the tent and driving to Mevagissey where I spent the evening queuing for fish and chips followed by hiding from seagulls and fat tourists. The night in the tent was awful. I awoke curled up at the bottom of it with dead arms and legs. All cycling pain was forgotten replaced with tent induced bruises, hernias and blood filled feet. I ate a sulky breakfast and left, somehow dropping my dictafone in the process. This will cause much puzzlement to whoever finds it when they wonder what on earth the breathless bloke was up to.

“<puff><puff> four point five miles <wheeze>country lane<puff>poorly surfaced, steep<rustle><rustle><sound of not switched off dictafone in pocket>”

I realised I’d lost it nearly forty miles from the campsite and phoned Miss Marple back to see if she’d found it. But she wasn’t taking my calls so I diverted into Launceston to buy a new one for the planned Exmoor ride. What a mission of optimism this proved to be, attempting to purchase a solid state voice recorder in deepest Cornwall.

“Hello, do you sell digital voice recorders?”

“Oi don’t think we do my lover, but I sell e’ a pasty?”

After a fruitless hour in the town centre I left with a pasty and directions to Argos who clearly knew I was coming as they were having a dictafone sale. 

At Exmoor I booked a room in a pub. This came with a bath, telly, flat floor and all of my favourite drinks in a bar below. Tempting as it was to cut loose, I only had the one due to Thursday’s ride looking even harder than the Cornish epic. I was up bright and early for a cooked breakfast then jumped on the bike and headed off into Exmoor which was covered in sun.

It wasn’t only the sun that made an appearance, the hills did as well. Exmoor had clearly heard about Cornwall and got all competitive. The hills were as steep as the Cornish ones, but elongated a tad. Dunkery Beacon was the first objective, it climbs 1,200 feet in 2.4 miles with a mile long section of 17% gradient. I used to like climbing until Dunkery Beacon. Now I’m going to retrain as a time trialist and stick to flat roads that are ten miles long. Dunkery Beacon flogged my legs all the way up and is still flogging them as I type this now. Believe me, I had to give myself a right good talking to before I was able to ride back down and take photos.

Descending down the other side I met a cyclist putting on his gear. “Did you make it?” he enquired. That for me sums up the Beacon, it’s not a case of how long it will take you to climb, it’s whether you will manage to climb it at all. 

The rest of the ride was equally hard, long steep climbs mixed with absolutely no flat bits at all. Even the cows decided to have a go, as evidenced by the picture below. All I was trying to do was take a nice little picture, but the hairy bugger was having none of it. “Not on my manor” he mooed at me in cow language. I attempted to pedal away at speed, but speed morphed into amble due to the hill. I was saved by a particularly succulent piece of heather that distracted him from his intention to munch upon my legs.

I finished the ride exhausted and drove back home to Swindon. Another long week on the road, two more routes bagged and photographed. A return trip is required as I spotted a perfect piece of road to illustrate the Exmoor ride. Unfortunately I spotted it whilst travelling downhill at 30+ mph and it will need a third party to nail the shot properly from above. The plan for next week is to head southeast, let’s hope the weather has an entirely different objective.

Dave

2nd September 2011

WEEK THIRTY SIX >>>>>