Northern Line To Shropshire

Here is a selection of pieces from Gary's book Northern Line to Shropshire, the musings of a lifelong Londoner leaving the city to live in the country.

The Barber's

I had my first haircut this morning as a Salopian. And there's nothing wrong with my new barber shop. It's airy and clean and modern-looking; it's open long hours, is reasonably priced, and the friendly staff cut what's left of my hair perfectly well. But it definitely lacks the exoticism of my old London barber shop, a place of many tongues.

Which isn't to say my old shop was perfectly multicultural. In fact, there was a barber's either side of the road by the train station and, put simply, one was black and one was white. One of the shops was edgy and cool, a place where you could get a hundred shapes shaved into your head whilst listening to dubstep. The other was a steamy fug-hole of a place where you could get any combination of buzz-cuts from one to four, or a 'short, back and sides', my personal style of choice these last forty years, which is about as long as the shop's radio dial has been stuck on Radio 2.

Four barbers' chairs were squeezed into the latter. The end ones were the domain of an Italian and a Greek who had co-run the place, since forever. The middle chairs were for a never-ending parade of itinerant guest-barbers, Londoners usually, but also Croatian, Swiss and, in one quite radical departure, a fierce but strangely sexy woman from Poland.

The owners, both in their sixties, were like an old married couple. They'd bicker constantly, and moan about each other to their customers, just loud enough for the other to hear. I always imagine them tucked up in bed together in their jim jams, like Morecambe and Wise, watching football on an old portable telly, arguing over whose turn it is to jiggle with the antenna.

'Fish In A Box'

Being in a landlocked county, there's an absence of fishmongers. No matter how long the Birmingham Angling Club hang around the banks of the Severn of a wet Sunday morning, it's fair to say we aren't swimming in fish. Trawlers do not make harbour at Hampton Loade, nor fishing smacks pull up at the quay at Newport. Grubby-faced urchins do not dive into the Shropshire Union Canal and emerge laden with squid and scallops.

But we do have 'Fish In A Box'. Which is a company sourcing good quality fresh fish and delivering it to your door, in our case monthly, in a polystyrene ice-box. It's not cheap, but it is exciting. We don't know what we're going to receive each month. And as we look inside the box, and pull out a fistful of sardines and some fillets of sea bass, we're suddenly part of an island race once again.

Boilerman

I'm waiting for the repairman to come and fix our cooker. I dread these moments, and wish Anne was here. She knows loads about boilers and cookers and similar. I can't even use our new tin-opener.

I remember when our boiler broke down in Tooting. Anne answered the door to the repairman and he said: “Oh, hallo darling, I'm here for the boiler. Now do you know where it is love, I'd guess under the stairs, shall we take a look...?”

Anne went off to work and a while later I took the bloke a cup of tea and asked him how he was getting on. He paused, sucked his teeth and said “Well, what you got 'ere is the twin condensing 2000 xgt with twin flange bifurcating cam shafts. It's a nice bit of kit but they do have problems with the thermonuclear coupling.” Not wanting to seem out of my depth I thought I'd best make an informed comment so I said: “Um, would you like any biscuits?”

Playing Tennis

I keep meaning to wander down to the local tennis club and see about joining. I don't though, and know I won't. It's a club thing. I have a set of stereotypes in my head when thinking about tennis and golf clubs and, besides, I just don't do clubs. Which is a shame, and somewhat self-defeating, given that I love playing tennis.

Indeed I represented my college. True, that was because half the team didn't turn up one day and a friend and I just happened to be knocking up on the courts. Still, we played the local public school, where we bamboozled them with our cunning tactic of standing on the baseline sending up lob after lob; not to mention calling all their shots out, and making up the score as we went along. So disorientated were our opponents that we ended up winning more matches than anyone else, and retired from competition there and then so that we could always maintain that we quit at the top.

By the by, I was back in London this weekend and the highlight of my brief sojourn was an impromptu, but surprisingly boisterous, game of tennis in East Sheen Park. Lack of fitness, ill-fitting training shoes, rustiness, an inability to serve, and a backhand somewhat akin to Anne throwing a cricket ball, all couldn't disguise the fact that there's a really very mediocre tennis player half-digested inside me barking out orders that my body can't follow.

My eye was also taken off the ball when I was serving from the end where you could see the yummy mummies doing combat training. They of course were being similarly distracted by my top-spin lacking lobs, and sheer athletic magnetism.

'Coast'

I feel the coast of this island in my bones. I really mean that. Whenever I reach the edge of our land I become all elemental and in looking outwards to sea find a physical sense of belonging inside me. When I'm at the coast I swear I can almost feel a pull back through history. Which is about as hippyish as I get without magic mushrooms and 'The Battle of Evermore' on constant replay.

So, being landlocked on the great prairies of the West-Mids, whenever there's a programme on television about the coast, I like to settle down with a glass of something in my hand and a hanky on my head. I don't pay much attention to the presenters or the content, just look at the scenery and imagine the spray on my face and the sand underfoot.

Cows

When I was a young lad my mate Cod's Head Clark could gob across Clapham Junction railway station, from one platform to the other. I can still see those grollies arching their way across the tracks. In fact I'd have to say to this day it remains the greatest achievement of any of my friends.

I was thinking of this scarcely credible fact today, and it proved the breakthrough in a piece of detective work concerning cows. And their poo. There's a field where I walk, with an electric fence dividing the field of cows from a narrow strip of path. But the path itself is full of cow-pats, despite there being no reason for the cows ever to be driven along that way.

After much musing, I have come to the only plausible conclusion. I believe that, late at night, when there's no-one around, and when they're at their most bored, the cows line up with their arses against the fence and see who can shit the furthest.

One Man and His Dog

I grew up with a boxer dog, and Anne with a labrador, but as a married couple we had solidly been cat people. However, our new backs onto fields and lanes approximating dog nirvana and so it came to pass that the other day Anne came home with a three month old rescue puppy called Bobby.

Which meant obedience classes. For Bobby was completely uncontrollable. And so, last Monday evening, we entered a local village hall. Bobby immediately broke from my grasp and started lurching up and down the hall over and over; careering off the end-walls like a drunken joyrider, back legs wheel-spinning furiously, and then he was off again. Anne took the opportunity to make friends with those around her. I longed for a cat.

And then something happened. The dog trainer took control of Bobby. I don't mean grabbed his lead, I mean took control. Hypnotised him or something. In under two minutes she had him walking to heel; lying down; staying; rolling over; double flic flac, triple salco and dismount. Bobby's was in a blissful state. His pupils were fully dilated. He looked at her in awe. He was in love. Their conversation went something like this:

Trainer: “Bobby. Sit. Down. Roll over. Obey me. I am God.”

Bobby: “Woo hoo, at last. Someone speaks my language. You have no idea what it's been like for me, living with these incoherent cross-breeds. They speak in riddles and nonsense. It's been a nightmare. Completely beneath me. Would you like to see me do my wheelbarrow impression, and maybe have my babies?”

Trainer: “Right, Gary. Your turn.”

Me: “Bobby. Bualum ep oiii asipiorie dadcked po kaht [pp{pl nhnwmnhmmnhhn”

Trainer/Bobby: “What an idiot.”

TFM

Which I think stands for Telford Farm and Machinery. Which is a shop in a barn in the middle of nowhere. Which is the place to go to wander around pretending you're a farmer, gawping at the amazing choice and low prices, and generally getting in the way of people who actually are farmers. Here's what we've just purchased on our latest trip, as we gear up our new house on the edge of town:

A waterproof coat with zipped in fleece.

Two rat traps

A bucket of rat poison

A felling axe

Bamboo poles

A knife - a big manly one with a retractable blade which I cut myself on when I flicked it open. I don't think anyone noticed. 

Growing Mushrooms

My sister-in-law bought me a mushroom-growing kit for Christmas. It's as close as I've come to growing vegetables since we moved here, and I found a nice warm home for them in a quiet corner, and set to tending for them. Not that much seemed to happen.

However, yesterday afternoon I went to spray my little box of compost and up had popped a small perfectly-formed button mushroom. Which was quite the most exciting thing that has happened to me this week. Or year even.

Except Anne had put it in there for a laugh...

Being a Regular

(As opposed to being regular, which thankfully I've always been able to take for granted). And I'm not talking about the local pub here - it would just be nice for the woman in the newsagents to remember me. I used to be served by Pam who was lovely, but she's gone to Weymouth and the replacement has served me at last 30 times now, and each time she treats me as though it's the first time we've met.

Obviously, when you are a swirling vortex of lynx-like sexuality this comes as something of a shock. But, my smouldering good looks aside, you'd think she'd remember my dog, he knocks down the Pringles stand most days, if he hasn't knocked over a young schoolgirl first. Plus, I take the Guardian. The urbanites amongst you should know that the only paper sold in rural areas is the Daily Mail. The Guardian is hidden away behind Fisting and Orgasm.

I not only remember most of my regulars from when I worked in a pub in Forest Hill in 1984, but can actually remember their drinks, and the cost:
"Large vodka tonic, ice and slice" (£1.52) - grey haired bloke in dirty raincoat we called 'Mac'.
"Half of Courage Best, not in a straight glass, I don't drink out of effing jam jars" (44p) - Ronnie - or maybe Reggie - who owned the amusement palaces in half of South London. And so on.

With every extra stone I seem to be becoming more invisible. Early on I treated this as a relief. It gets wearing having women throw themselves at your feet in the street. But now I appear to be The Man Who Wasn't There....

Foraging

We've just spent an interesting couple of days joining Neville and C on a foraging holiday in Dorset. This included getting down and dirty with dead ducks, partridge and squirrel, a giant trug of mushrooms and the world's most unleavened loaf.

We also went out with a bloke who knew his time and tides. He showed us how to bait razor clams with salt, how to trawl for shrimp, where to find rock samphire, marsh samphire and sea beet, not forgetting how to scrape green slime off rocks so that you can make your very own deep fried chinese seaweed.

He also took us urban foraging, which wasn't as I'd imagined loitering out the back of Pret a Manger, but was picking things from the hedgerows you've just seen a dog pee on. Wild rocket, mustard, and a cornucopia I've long since forgotten but which all tasted decidedly of leaf.

Masterchef – The Wild Garlic

I have suffered Masterchef for decades, it being Anne's favourite programme. I've never been totally convinced as to the prowess of the winners but having just eaten at the Dorset restaurant of last year's winner I have to admit that the champion can actually cook.

The chef came and over to our table afterwards looking for feedback and immediately, and wisely, dismissed Neville and myself as drunken fools. Highlight of the evening though was this exchange:
Chef: "And what did you think of the main course?"
Anne: "I had the rabbit risotto, and I'll be honest it was, umm, what's the word, pedestrian."
Chef: "Oh, really? The Telegraph gave it 9 out of 10 last week".

Striking up Conversations with Strangers

In her excellent book 'Watching the English', Kate Fox suggests two places where men can innocently start a conversation with women. The first is when queuing for drinks at a bar, and the second when looking at horses parading at a racecourse.

I'm betting Kate isn't a dog owner, because dog walking is a much more obvious situation, and even I am able to chat to complete strangers when out with Bobby who ignores all such etiquette and just gets stuck in (much like Fresher's Week at college).

Striking up conversations with strangers isn't something I've ever done before. Seriously. Well, once on the last tube home I did connect telepathically with a young Glaswegian trainee pensions actuary in such a familiar way that she could only have been my love in a parallel universe, but who left me at Clapham South in this one, and led me to ponder for years on the existence of 'soul circles', at least until I finally managed to transfer my affections onto a slightly slutty dress-shop mannequin, who is pleasingly soulless, if slightly aloof. Headless also.

Anyhow, I was walking the dog the other day and fell into step with the owner of a black labrador, and found that she was from the local village. Wondering whether she knew Anne I asked if she went to the village WI. For the next mile she regaled me with her disregard for the people of the village in general, and its WI in particular. It was a pleasing tirade, and I laughed out loud several times, whilst encouraging her to tell me more. Twenty minutes in, she stopped, took a breath, looked at me and said: “Oh, your wife's a member isn't she?”.

Whinberries

Old books tell of the Shropshire hills being covered in whinberries, apparently a Salopian word for bilberries. The Reverend Carr, writing in 1865, writes: “To poor people for miles around the 'whinberry picking' is the great event of the year.” The local families would pick bilberries on the Long Mynd and sell them, making as much as £500 between them.

Ida Gandy mentions children “purple-faced after whinberrying”. And she talks about the colours on the hills. “Never had the view seemed so beautiful....all the tumbled hills, rising and falling wave on wave to the horizon, took on an unusual richness and variety of colour. Indigo and peacock gave place to violet and sea-green, and these to palest blue and grey.” Which makes AE Housman's “blue-remembered hills” a more literal line than I had hitherto imagined.

Intolerance

Some Guardian readers are coming to tea,

Famously tolerant of all they see,

Except wheat and dairy, obviously...

The Great Veg Swap

It starts slowly as spring turns into summer. Someone comes to stay and they bring with them a couple of chilli plants and leave with your spare tomato seedlings. Then a head of lettuce finds its way over the fence. A trickle of garlic. A trug of rhubarb. It gathers pace as the greenhouses start gushing tomatoes and cucumbers and by August there's a tide which, taken at the flood, leads onto a fortune of bloody courgettes. Allotments do it, suburban gardens do it, let's do it, let's fall in love. With the great veg swap.

You give me a red cabbage, I give you that courgette I turned my back on for five minutes and is now a marrow. Peas for mange-tout. Seems fair. New potatoes for a cucumber. Keep your hands off our sweetcorn, but do help yourselves to our gooseberries whilst we're away. Apples for pears; damsons for plums. Here, have some cherry tomatoes and runner beans before you go. No really, please, I insist, if I see another flippin' runner bean...

And, if you're lucky, if you can sustain the momentum, keep the wheels turning, as the summer gives way to autumn, there's every chance the rhythms of giving and sharing can continue beyond the harvest. A couple of artichokes for a brace of freshly-caught mackerel; a pheasant, well just because, please, you've been so generous to us; a rabbit in thanks for that firewood. Indeed only this morning a jar of coriander and tomato chutney changed hands for two home-baked blueberry muffins.

There's no price placed; no equivalence sought; no stockpiling, no profiteering. Abundance shared with those who have and those who have not. You've got to like that - an annual outbreak of back-door communalism.

Spring's Dress Rehearsal

As we all know Spring doesn't really begin until the collective roar that greets the start of the Supreme Novices Hurdle that kicks off the Cheltenham Festival in mid-March, but yesterday we had one of those rather uplifting false dawns – the pre-Spring, Spring day.

At the end of the lane, the horse that has spent all winter looking bored and lonely was bucking and kicking and cantered over to say hello. For the first time in a while, the dog walkers were in the mood to linger, happy to feel the warmth on our backs as our dogs danced and wrestled.

In the fields I could almost hear the wheat and rape awakening from their midwinter slumber to yawn and stretch upwards. Similarly, I noticed new leaves on the elder providing some green to the hazel nearby which groan with catkins. And, although the daffodils still doze, in King Charles' Wood the bluebells push their shoots tentatively up through the undergrowth.

There was song everywhere as any number of (unidentified) birds flitted along the hedgerows, clearing their throats. Bobby flushed out a couple of pheasants, now veterans of the winter's slaughter, stumbling home with a bereft shroak. Seven buzzards were up separately, stretching their wings, spiralling way up high, presumably just because they could. Their distinctive keening accompanied me by relay throughout the seven mile walk.

At Hinnington Cottages, a woman was turning the soil in her vegetable beds, whilst an eighth buzzard sat atop a telegraph pole watching. I thought of spending the afternoon in my own garden but settled instead on the win double of the crossword and a snooze in the conservatory, wishing Anne had left me that last slice of apple cake. Bobby slept beside me, legs twitching, re-living his earlier adventures and dreaming of the day the swallows come.

Dedicated Follower of Fashion

Being hunkered down in a small town it's obviously hard to be at the cutting-edge of fashion, and it's to their great credit that the pair of bodacious babes in the boutique manage to keep their standards as high as they do. Not forgetting they're headless dress-shop mannequins.

Still, I try to keep up with the fast-moving trends as best I can from afar, only choosing clothes from my wardrobe that could well have come back into fashion again and I rather think I cut quite a dash as I stroll through town, a dandy amongst peasants. Of course sometimes my attire will be beyond the curve of their imagining. Indeed only this morning I was walking in my “I've got the the Edge” t-shirt, black track-suit bottoms and brown brogues. A girl, probably seven, holding her granny's hand, walked past me. As she came alongside she said very loudly: “Oh, that's not a good look”.

Agricultural Shows

Yesterday we sampled the Newport Show just down the road from us. What's not to like? There's all the normal farmyard livestock - cows, sheep, pigs, and alpacas; beer tents and foodie stalls; the usual display-teams on their summer schlep round tory England; traction engines, vintage cars and buses, and the local brass band playing to the lines of women queuing for the toilets. It was, in fact, exactly what people used to do for entertainment before music festivals were invented.

This one worked out even better, as a friend at the heart of club middle England took us into sundry private marquees and plied us with Pimms and hog-roasts. It was a bit like being backstage with the band. All I had to do was pretend to be the largest grain importer in Herefordshire, which seemed easy enough. That said, I've no idea what I'm going to do with the 200 tonnes I purchased off a drunk farmer from Market Drayton.

Fort Apache, Shifnal

When we lived in Tooting there wasn't any crime. Well, apart from the murders, the pub shootings, the IRA cell that blew itself up and the sundry daily muggings and dodgy dealings of South London life. What I mean is, the whole time we lived there I was neither the victim of crime, nor witness to any.

Whereas I was yesterday, on the festering crime-ridden streets of my Shropshire town. I was sat at my desk when a car careered round the corner into the lane and drove straight into a tree on our driveway. A kid jumped out and started running, hotly pursued on foot by an older guy who was simultaneously phoning the police on his mobile.

I went out to inspect the damage and found another lad hiding in the copse opposite. I leapt in panther-like, disarmed him, put him in an arm-lock, wrestled him to the ground and shouted out “book him Danno”. Well, I would have, but you know I did my back in when I did that grouting. Instead I watched as he made his escape over the road into the fields beyond.

Soon, three flashing police vehicles arrived and I pointed out our perpetrator about to enter the housing estate over the way. The police immediately became the all-action heroes we need them to be, screeching off to form a pincer movement, and calling out chopper support. Our brave boys in blue, clearing scum off the streets. Or, more accurately, they did nothing, no chasing, just standing around chatting for an hour or so, until a pick-up truck arrived to remove the stolen car.

It was quite the most exciting thing to happen to me in weeks, so god knows how exhilarating it must have been for the joy-riders themselves. I may take it up as a hobby. Doesn't seem much chance of being caught.

Kestrels

Much as I like buzzards I do see them every day and they don't do much to entertain me. Kestrels are a rarer sight and are much more likely to put on a show, by which I mean how they hover in the wind with their wings adjusting and their head stock still, prior to the dive in for the kill. The Stiperstones is a good place to enjoy them, I've seen one each time I've been there, either up on the hills or hunting in the fields down below the car park.

And about once a year we have one on the telephone wires across Lamb-chop field right by us, or atop the dead tree nearby. This seems a perfect spot for hunting voles and suchlike, just above a brook and the margins between the fields, and once the kestrel discovers it, we'll see him or her every day for a few weeks, then just as suddenly they'll disappear.

What have you done today...

In the film Fargo a police chief called Marge is wading knee-deep through malfeasance, trying to catch the sort of psycho who will later stuff his accomplice in a wood chipper.

In one scene she meets up with her husband, Norm, and asks what he's doing today. He says he's off to try to see a bird that he wants to paint. It's a moment that shows their lives in stark counterpoint and it does make him seem a bit, well, slow.

I was thinking of this because Anne has just come home and told me tales of working on the mean streets of inner Birmingham, and when she finished she asked me what I'd done today, and I said: “I saw a kestrel.”

At the end of the film, Marge and Norm are in bed and looking at his artwork that has just been chosen to be used on a postage stamp. I await similar redemption.