May 2017 – orbific weblog

The Pennine Way Day 4

1 – Day 4 of the Pennine Way started with one of the most difficult bits of hiking I’ve done. The forecast had predicted rain, and I’d hoped that we would be lucky and the storms would pass us by. No such luck. We set out in wet-weather gear, heading into town with Emma and Charlie. After separating, Dave and I followed the path along the canal. Soon after, it took a steep turn uphill.

2 – If Dave had suggested jacking it in at that point, I would have gladly done so. I’ve never been so close to giving up on a walk. Looking at the book last night, I learned that this was one of the most difficult ascents of the entire walk.

3 – As the saying goes, there is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing. We were lucky this was on our last day, as it was a good lesson. I’m going to invest in some better rain gear than my poncho. I’m also going to have a change of clothes waiting at the car for all future walks. Despite the rain, the day was better than pretty much any day that I’ve spent in an office.

4 – One of the interesting things about a trail like this is that you hear about the people ahead of you. We knew there was an Australian woman ahead of us and we finally met her on the final day. We decided to walk together, which was an interesting change of pace (and conversation). The Pennine Way was the first of a series of adventures around the world that Carolyn had planned.

5 – It turned out on this walk that Dave is incredibly good at recognising different types of birds. He also knows a lot about farming. I learned that it isn’t possible for sheep to deliver triplets without human intervention – without help, the third always suffocates. The sheep were full of bedraggled lambs, which Dave told were about a day old. Our group was silenced by the sight of a dead one in the grass.

6 – I need to do a whole post on walking and Lord of the Rings. Tolkein’s classic is basically a book about hiking with a load of battle scenes thrown in. I think this is something the movies got wrong, not paying enough attention to the walking. Our walk had its Tolkeinesque moments, with Hebden Bridge providing our hearty Rivendell-style welcome. And, tramping along the damp moorland paths, it was easy to recall the grim tramping of the second book.

7 – We crossed the moors towards Top Withens, a ruined famouse that is said to be the inspiration for Wuthering Heights – despite looking nothing like the house in the book, and there being no evidence for a link. A slightly sniffy sign protests its own presence, saying it is only there because of tourist demand. I was more than ready to take shelter behind the ruined walls. Fortunately Dave looked round the side and found a dry indoor shelter. I’ve been in posh hotels that felt less welcoming and luxurious than this hut with its dirt floor. It was so good to be somewhere dry for a bit.

8 – We said farewell to Carolyn at Ponden and then walked on to Stanbury. A succession of buses and trains took us back to Edale where we’d started the walk. The first quarter of the Pennine Way was complete. We’re going to continue in September.

This Way: Brighton, Lewes, Rottingdean

Some time back, a friend of mine produced a map of footpaths between Brighton and Lewes. I followed one of the two routes on my birthday last year. I’d not got around to doing the other, but needed a route to walk as practise for the Ridgeway (I’m walking with someone who has not done a long day’s hike). So, on Sunday, I walked to Lewes and back.

The route goes along Brighton seafront to Rottingdean before turning North and passing through the abandoned village of Balsdean. A path through a field of crops eventually leads to Kingston and Lewes. On the way back the route followed the Juggs Road for much of the way, re-entering Brighton near Woodvale Cemetary.

It was a good walk. I exhausted myself and got sunburned, but it was so nice to get out for the day.The whole route turned out to be about 50,000 steps, which my fitbit claimed was about 22 miles. It’s probably nearer 18 miles and we did it quite quickly, not stopping for long breaks. We stopped for lunch in Lewes where we overheard a conversation at the cafe about the kitchen clock being slow. Apparently this always happens, because the works get gummed up with grease.

I’d somehow not walked Juggs Road before. This was the old route used to carry fish from Brighton to Lewes by donkey. It featured an impressively steep hill that nearly got the better of me on such a hot day. According to the Internet, a jugg is a name for Brighton fishermen, or a basket for carrying fish. The Revd WD Parish’s sussex dictionary suggests that Jug(g) is a generic nickname for Brighton people.

Once summer calms down a little, I am heading to Bath to try out the second This Way map.

The Perfect Vindaloo?

Wanting to make the perfect vindaloo might seem like a strange ambition.

It originates from my lack of confidence about food. I’ve eaten almost every day of my life, but I still somehow feel like I’m getting it wrong. I don’t know how I made it through university, as I struggled to make those first few dishes and resorted to things in tins. Somehow I’ve kept myself alive, but I’ve never felt good at feeding myself – despite doing it for many years.

Some food is genuinely like sorcery. When I read about places like Fäviken or the Fat Duck, I’m in awe of what they do with food. But even some simple dishes feel like they are out of my league. I can’t bake at all – even packets of pre-prepared pizza dough fail to solidify for me. And, for many years, curry felt like it was beyond my competence. It’s become my favourite food as I’ve grown older, but it always felt like a mystery, the blending of mundane ingredients into something magical.

Food shouldn’t feel like that much of an achievement. Cooking is one of those skills – like keeping a budget, driving or having a haircut – that most adults just seem able to do. Yet I’d never felt competent. And elsewhere, my life seemed to drag in so many other ways, as I lurched between hangovers, between jobs that never seemed to go anywhere. I never seemed to focus on anything (god knows, I’ve been distracted from this blog often enough). I’d imagined my life as something that would have felt bigger by now. This inability to cook seemed emblematic of all my other failures. Food still felt like magic, and by now I should have been good at that. I’m not as bad a cook as I used to be; but I’m also not as good as I could be (or should be, considering how often I invite people to eat at my flat). The horror at the first meals I cooked remains, just like the shame I feel as all the stupid things that I have done.

There’s an old saying that the way you do anything is the way you do everything. Most people interpret this as being about maintaining focus and attention in even the smallest act, seeing that as carrying through to the more important things. There’s another way to interpret it at the same time – that if we can do one thing perfectly, what we learn will influence all of the other things that we do.

So why not get good at making a curry? Get to the point where I can make an amazing vindaloo. Sure, it won’t change my life, but it’s a journey that can take me some interesting places. It’s not as if I am trying to meet 100 people with my name, or carry a domestic appliance round a small country. The things one learns about curry connect to other things: it’s about food & people & travel & life. But it’s also just a simple dish of curry.

Aleister Crowley described magick as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will”. Which, loosely, also defines the act of cooking. It’s a form of alchemy, taking raw ingredients and transforming them into a dish. If you can do one bit of magick, well, you can do others. It’s getting one thing right, and knowing I can do that. And even if I don’t make a vindaloo that can change my world, I’ll still be able to make a pretty impressive curry.

The Pennine Way – Day 3 (Standedge to the Calder Valley)

1 – Day 3 of the Pennine Way took us from Standedge to the Calder Valley and Hebden Bridge. The walk started comfortably, with lots of gentle moorland and some great views, although less epic than on the previous two days. This was also a more urban section of the walk, withseveral roads to cross and Rochdale in the distance for a large chunk.

2 – At some point on our third night on the trail, we had travelled for as long as the fastest person had completed the route. Apparently, the record for the entire Pennine Way is a shocking 2 days 17 hours.

3 – The cairns were one of my favourite features of the route. With the stone paths, navigation along the Pennine Way is less ambiguous than it once was. The cairns are now mostly ornamental, but they seem incredibly exotic to me, as if from another time or place.

4 – We stopped for a snack just after the M62. As we put on our backpacks again,the rain began. We didn’t think it would be too bad but it soon soaked us to the skin. This was a foretaste of what was to come on day 4 – and a lesson to change into rain gear more quickly.

5 – We passed the Aigin Stone, a marker from an old coaching route. It also lay on the end of a Roman Road. I don’t know enough about these sort of things to tell if this would have been the original stones that legionnaires would have paced, but it still felt stirring to follow ancient footsteps.

6 – We paused for tea at the White House Pub, which stands beside the A58. It was a lovely, friendly pub and we wished we’d planned for lunch there. Maybe next time I pass.

7 – One of the most famous recent walks of the Pennine Way was by the poet, Simon Armitage. Apparently one of his poems is etched into the stone beside the path, shortly after the White House. We missed it completely.

8 – One of the best thing about walking the Way is meeting other travellers. Of those who aren’t doing the route, many have done it in the past, and will reminisce about it. We met a couple of women who’d walked the way then on to Holy Island, and encountered only 10 minutes of wine. They enthused about the Cheviots, as did a man we met on the third day. Years later, he was still blown away by a view of “Hills forever”.

9 – Off in the distance we caught sight of Stoodley Pike, where we were due to meet Emma and Justin. It felt exciting to be nearing our end. Stoodley Pike is a 37 meter tall monument, originally erected to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon. This caused a Father Dougal-style confusion with perspective, being both very large and far away. We thought we were much closer than we were.

10 – We had barely sat down at the monument when we were joined by Emma, Justin and Charlie the dog. They escorted us into the valley and I couldn’t help but feel like a hobbit being led down into Rivendell. It was good to have a night staying with friends in the middle of a long journey.

11 – I’ve been using the Trailblazer map series, which has a clear and detailed description of the route. And, as promised, a short distance from Hebden Bridge we found the Land Rover in the field.

The North Downs Way Part 2

From back in February, walking on the North Downs way. We continued from Box Hill, along bitter, windy hilltops and across muddy ground. I managed to fall over in the mud. We found a memorial for a tragic plane accident, two wingtips as markers for where the plane came down.

The route had perhaps a little too much motorway, running alongside the M25. I’ve since passed the junctions we walked in my car, and enjoyed thinking back to the walk. Despite somewhat grim weather, there were few other places I’d have wanted to be than on that walk.

Pennine Way – Day 2

1 – Day two of the Pennine Way began with a 300 meter climb spread out over two miles in an incredible valley before following Crowden Great Brook towards Black Hill.

2 – The day’s walk was just eleven miles, but the many climbs on top of the previous day’s strain meant it took quite a toll. I thought I was used to hiking, but this wore me out.

3 – We were very lucky with the weather. It was drizzly and windy, but not too unpleasant. Some of the paths ran very close to the edge of tall drops – in windier weather I could imagine this being quite dangerous. But a quick google turns up few reports of people who’ve been hurt on this trail.

4 – Having done several national trails now, one of the things that fascinates me is that each path has its own language. Or maybe its own voice. The South Downs Way could probably be followed without a map, since there are so many way markers and other walkers. The Limestone Way was incredibly difficult to follow, with the markers disappearing completely once I entered Staffordshire. The Pennine way is an interesting mix of obvious paths and places that rely on the map. When you reach a paved section in the middle of wilderness, it feels like the return of an old friend. Sometimes the path seems tiny, only the barest thread to lead you forward.

5 – On this stage, Emley Moor Mast became visible in the distance. A huge concrete structure, its twice the height of Brighton’s i360.

6 – Just before two we reached the A635 where we found Snoopy’s Snack Van. We ordered cups of tea and sat on plastic chairs out of the wind, chatting with a couple of other hikers. I tried one of the egg sandwiches, but the cooking facilities weren’t veggie friendly. I couldn’t finish the food, but the tea tasted amazing.

7 – One of my favourite things about the Pennine Way is the communication. I’d read about this in Emily’s account of the Coast-to-Coast path. It doesn’t happen so much on the South Downs Way, since the density of walkers is less and people are less chatty. On the Pennine Way people were more up for a chat. That day, a man was walking the route from Edale to Hebden Bridge in a single day, having set off at 4am. Somewhere in the distance was a woman who’d come from Melbourne Australia to walk the trail. I guess some of the people in our wake would have been told about us.

8 – We found a frame looking out on a view, which reminded me of Claude Glasses, used as a means of viewing landscapes in the 18th century. The idea was you looked through them and found a perfect image, like a painting. The Framing the Landscape project is by Ashley Jackson.

9 – On this stage and the following day, we passed a series of reservoirs. Near the snack wagon had stood a couple of gateposts, all that remained of the Isle of Skye hotel. It was demolished when the reservoirs were made, because it was thought it would pollute the water supply.

10 – The Carriage House was a great place to stay – comfortable and relaxed. And it had a bath! We ate an early supper then went to our rooms and fell asleep. The Pennine Way had worn us out.

The Naming of Curry Houses

I’ve always enjoyed The Raj Pavilion in Brighton. It’s your regular British-Indian restaurant and a curry-loving friend lived close by. I was recently hiking with this same friend in Kent, and we found ourselves at a different restaurant called the Raj Pavilion. While both restaurants included the many of the same dishes on the menu, they had few other connections – including the recipes used for the dishes.

One of the fascinating things about British curry houses (which is also true of Chinese food) is that nobody has ever established a large chain. In fact, the largest curry restaurant in the UK is Wetherspoons, whose Wednesday Curry Club serves more Indian meals than any other organisation. Despite this, there are many similarities between different restaurants. After the second world war, many people worked for the Bahadur brothers and were then encouraged to open their own restaurants. This led to places serving the same dishes across the UK. Another things that recurs are the names.

The first curry restaurant in the UK was the Hindoostanee Coffee House, opened by Sake Dean Mahomed in 1810. In the early 20th century restaurants such as Salut e Hind and The Shafi were opened. Veeraswamy, the oldest surviving Indian restaurant, was opened in 1926 and given the owner’s family name – Edward Palmer had an Indian Princess for a grandmother. Bir Bahadur opened the Kohinoor in London. A series of other Bahadur restaurants followed, including Taj Mahals in Brighton, Northampton and Oxford, and Kohinoors in Cambridge and Manchester.

In her recent article Who Killed the British Curry House, Bee Wilson talked about the changing fashion in curry house names:

You can judge the age of a British curry restaurant from its name. If you see one that is called Taj Mahal, Passage to India or Koh-i-Noor (after the famous Indian diamond), it probably dates back to the first wave of curry houses in the 1960s… The names of 1970s curry houses began to shrug off the colonial past and evoke, instead, a vague sense of eastern exoticism: Lily Tandoori, Aladdin, Sheba – glamorous names to counteract longstanding British prejudices that south Asian food was malodorous and unclean. By the 1980s, however, such orientalism had also begun to seem hackneyed, and new restaurants opening in that decade often named themselves after ingredients, a more subtle form of rebranding: Tamarind, Cumin, or Lasan (Hindi for garlic).

A 2014 survey took place of the most common restaurant names in the UK. The top ten curry house names were:

Saffron (54)
Taj Mahal (48)
Taste of India (48)
Bengal Spice (40)
Spice of India (40)
Little India (30)
Spice of Life (27)
The Raj (26)
Eastern Spice (23)
Bombay Spice (21)

How many of these have you eaten at?

Pennine Way – Day 1

IMG_20170511_102228

1 – The Pennine Way is 268 miles long, running from Edale in Derbyshire to Kirk Yetholm in Scotland. On Friday I set out to walk the first 52 miles with Dave, my brother-in-law.

IMG_20170511_114538

2 – The Pennine Way was Britain’s first national trail, originally suggested in 1935 by the journalist Tom Stephenson. An American wrote into his newspaper column asking if Britain had anything like the Appalachian trail. Stephenson said there wasn’t, but suggested a possible route, and worked to make this official. The path was formally opened in April 1965, thirty years later. The success of the Pennine Way has led to other trails being opened around the country.

3 – Despite managing to live out of a single bag for months when travelling, I made a huge mess of packing for this trip. I sorted my things in Derbyshire, at Dave & Liz’s house, and realised I’d forgotten to pack appropriate trousers. Walking the Pennine Way in suit trousers seemed a poor idea, requiring a late-night drive to Tesco’s to buy better attire.

4 – The route begins at Edale, close to Castleton, the start of the Limestone Trail (which I walked in April). After walking the South Downs, North Downs and Limestone Ways recently, I’d grown complacent. Fortunately I read the Rambling Man guide a few days before and realised I needed to prepare a little better than usual. The maps I bought came in very useful.

5 – We stopped at a cafe to buy hot drinks in Edale before setting out. We considered food – I fancied a breakfast roll. Dave wanted a sandwich from the lunch menu. They would sell us the latter to take away, but only on condition we didn’t eat it on the premises – they were still on the breakfast menu. There were just two other people in the restaurant. I wondered what disaster or misfortune had led to such a strict policy.

(The sandwiches we brought were tasty though, probably the best packed lunch we had on the trail. The bread was unlike any I’d had before, the surface of the roll tearing like paper)

6 – It’s quickly apparent that the Pennine Way is not fucking around. After a gentle rise to warm up, the path reaches Jacob’s Ladder, a long stone stairway. At the top of this we were among the clouds, with little visibility. The path across Kinder Downfall ran beside a long drop. And the descent to the Snake Inn turn-off was hard work, with steep slippy rocks. The Pennine Way is a health-and-safety nightmare. It compensates for this with some of the most incredible views I have ever seen.

7 – Apparently Wainwright hated this path, with its bogs and difficult navigation. With the addition of paving stones, the route across the bogs on the first day has become much easier. These provide both navigation and a trustworthy walking surface. Apparently some people have complained that they make the route too easy. Personally, I was very glad of them.

8 – Day 1 included some interesting places. We passed through Kinder Scout, site of the 1932 mass trespass. Although it was a little way off the path, we passed near to the crashed bomber on Bleaklow that I visited a couple of years back. We also passed through the narrow twisting route of “Devil’s Dike” (sic). All the high points were wreathed in mist, sometimes with very little visibility.

9 – The pace of the Pennine Way is defined by the availability of accomodation. There are long periods without any buildings or shelter. Indeed, we could go hours without seeing anyone. The first stage is 16 miles to reach the Crowden Valley, where we’d booked into Crowden’s only B&B (other options were a short car journey from the trail). For £3 the B&B owner drove us to the Peels Arms where we had a surprisingly good meal

10 – By the time we reached Clough Edge, the weather had turned sunny, and we had a beautiful descent to Crowden. Dave was adopted by a tame lamb, which followed us through the fence. Eventually he had to walk to the wall and climb over, leaving the lamb on the other side, jumping and bleating.

The first day was a hard walk, but I already knew I was going to love this trail.