The Great Covid Car Trip
My intentions of being vegetarian came to a halt in an Asian grocery shop in Colne, East Lancashire. It was 11.30am and I was on the hunt for lunch. Now Colne is a strange little town of Victorian arcades, Poundstretchers and Iceland, set on top of a hill. Its terraced houses run in lines as straight as railroad tracks and it looks across to the hills, factory outlets and mosque minarets of Blackburn, Yorkshire and Pendle with a snout of mild indifference. I park on the main shopping drag, in what looks like a parking bay but when a traffic warden walks slowly up the pavement in my direction, I’m not so sure. I tap my steering wheel and look at him, a code, I am sure for ‘Am I ok to park here?’ His response is similarly succinct. Two shakes of the head and a finger pointing to another bay across the road. But he walks on, without talking, as though he doesn’t really care.
I am in Colne to return some Victorian-era costumes to a theatre that kindly lent them to me for a film, several months ago. It takes me fifty minutes to drive from where I live, in west Lancashire, over to here, almost on the border of Yorkshire, but it’s a drive to a different world. I live down in the valley, near Preston, a city of a hundred and forty thousand people with, crucially, a train station linking you quickly to London, Edinburgh or Glasgow and bypassed by a motorway which was one of the first in the country for everyone who wanted to get out of here. We’re not far from the sea if escaping by ship is more your thing: you can fall asleep on a ferry in Liverpool and wake up in Dublin or The Isle Of Man (a friend of mine once drunkenly did so). With the Atlantic ocean licking our skin, the west of Lancashire is a busy place with big arteries running through it, whereas going across to East Lancashire is a bit like taking a trip to the kidneys. It’s smaller, darker and weirdly shaped, and full of interesting and unexpected flavours, like in the Thai grocery shop in Colne.
The shop is dark: perhaps after fourteen months of lockdown, no one can be bothered to turn the lights on. I am the only customer in it but here is a woman behind the counter and in front of her are four or five curries covered with plastic bowls and all of them are meat.
‘Do you have anything vegetarian?’ I ask.
‘You have to order off menu,’ Woman tells me, ‘take fifteen minutes.’
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My wish to inflict no pain on animals meets my impatience and the latter wins. I exit the shop with four pounds worth of spicey, minced chicken, which I am quite sure did not spend its days scrabbling freely for worms in the valleys of Lancashire before it ended up on my polystyrene plate.
I sit in my car and eat the spicy chicken, watching shoppers go in and out of Poundstretchers. I am excited to be somewhere new, twenty five miles from home. My sense of adventure has returned pleasingly to childhood levels, when cooking sausages over a small fire in a den of rhododendron bushes was the highlight of my year. No bungee jumping in New Zealand for me. I should be home already, at my desk, it is a Wednesday and there is a to-do list waiting for me. But screw the to-do-list. I pull up Google Maps on my phone and plan out the most circuitous route I can think of back.
I drive over Pendle, a hill that’s like a five litre tub of ice-cream turned upside down. I have had a can of fizzy mango with my lunch and must stop for a pee. I hop over a fence and crouch down by a dry stone wall, staring at some fresh April nettles and listening to sheep and wind. I drive through small villages where every pub has erected a large white tent on its carpark so that it can serve its customers, according to regulations, outside. But these tents make me think of refugee camps, or Ebola, or conversely, that the Queen might be about to visit every pub in England. And since this is Wednesday and other people are at their desks, in front of their to-do lists, and since it’s only about nine degrees outside, tent or no tent, the structures are largely empty, like research centres where all the scientists have up and left.
We are all part of a science experiment now, and a year on we have imposed routines on ourselves to live in our new structure and systems. Breaking free of this on a Wednesday makes me feel like a renegade: I am Neo, for now incognito and at loose in a bleak, cloud-drenched world.
Only it’s not. The theatre where I dropped the costumes off was a warm hive of activity, of septuagenarians who had been ‘double jabbed’ scraping down stage scaffolding in a workshop or sorting out beads, belts and flannel jerseys in the costume store. A woman in blue overalls walked silently through an auditorium whose five hundred seats were covered in white sheets. ‘She’s doing the gold leaf above the stage,’ my guide told me. I took pictures but said I wouldn’t publish them yet. ‘We’re not supposed to be open,’ she said. No, they are not open to the public, this vast labyrinthine theatre on top of a northern hill, but the bees inside it are still buzzing.
‘We do everything ourselves,’ a gentleman in the workshop told me. It was a warm space with screwdrivers neatly arranged in rows and a radio playing classical music in the background. ‘No one’s ever going to give you anything. I mean ‘The Arts Council’ …there was an art exhibition up the road and they got seventy five thousand pounds and they had a sculpture made out of goat’s manure. Most we’ve ever had is a hundred and fifty pounds. So we just crack on.’
Another man in overalls appeared with a tray of mugs and a packet of oaty biscuits. He said nothing but pointed to the mugs, looked at me. I felt like I had entered into a secret club; the rebels who were working solidly to make sure there would be a world to come back to. I understood why it was best not to speak too much.
