totnes - arundel - dover

arundel - lydd

lydd - st-antoing

Along The Southern Coast of England
11.06.2008

Leaving Totnes in bright sunshine is not so easy, not only because you will get stopped in the tracks talking to old friends, but also because it feels cosy, comfortable with enjoyable company, the lush environment surrounding it...i could go on like this...
Decision made i'm heading for the south coast route which means squeezing through coast towns, sometimes appealing, sometimes rough as hell.
And the clouds catch up with me, threaten to unleash their load, retreat only to come back with even darker shades of grey.
The night close to the river Arund brings rain, the next morning enough sunshine to hit the road early enough to make it to Romney Marsh and its little jewell called Lydd.
Not a jewell in a strict sense, though, but honest and straight forward ("there is no such thing as a posh pub in Lydd" a young pierced man tells me...)
Pitching the tent on a field for a fiver close to the possibly most horrendous entertainment facility in the area (The Heron) and an MOD site from which stakkato noises of machine guns attributed by the swoosh of tracer bullets can be heard untill midnight. At twelve the war is over only to be resumed at ten in the morning.
Weird strategy, as the tracer lights reveal the position of the launcher, but hey, i'm not an expert. Shingle covers the ground covered by pioneer plants; and masts emerge from a distance in a straight line, from a well lit nuclear power station in a sharp contrast to the sheep grazing on lush green fields.
It is possibly the contrasts that make Lydd interesting, with lots of static caravans in the vicinity, proper working class heroes frequenting the pubs,
some people, if only a few in comparison appear richer than others and they look much smarter, too.
The next morning presents a boy with a fishing tackle and a loaf of bread, throwing back his catch as carp obviously simply tastes a little bit too muddy.
It takes us 45 minutes to disassemble the curled up line, and suddenly i'm off to Folkstone, squeezing through traffic jams in central Dover overtaking a hard core Harley crew on their way back to Holland, asking for a ticket, repairing the bike just after passing the check point (*this* is what a knife's for, not slashing kid's necks but fixing vacuum tubes - Britain has an increasing number of casualties due to knife attacks and subsequently enforced legislation); and soon the white cliffs shrink into the distance, into the misty horizon, and once again i repeat the words in my head in due melancholy: byebye Britain.

status bike: temperamental
status max: melancholic
status weather: temperamental.