Intro One

The End of the Road

This is a story of a journey, a walk that took place between two doors.

Before I start telling the story of this walk, I first wanted to give a little bit of background to how it is this adventure came about… a good starting point I think would be for me to climb back into the truck.

It is 2008, Christmas is just a handful of days away; I am sat behind the wheel of an articulated lorry as part of a convoy heading south out of Scotland. In the cab the Today program on BBC Radio 4 was again talking about the on-going recession, the conversation turned to the disappearance of Woolworths from the high street and the many jobs that would be lost as a result, mine and the rest of the guys in this fleet of red Lorries were among that number. The Woolworths’ trucks were leaving Scotland, for the very last time; we were taking them down to the main Woolworths’ depot in Rochdale.  

The convoy arrived in Rochdale close to midday, trailers were parked up and the trucks added to an already long row of redundant trucks. I switched the engine off and sort out the paperwork. I sit in the cab a little longer than necessary, I had done a lot of miles in this truck (tomorrow I’m out of a job; the minibus waiting to take the drivers back up to Scotland can wait). Taking one last look around the cab checking for any personal stuff that I had forgotten to take out the day before; the cab was empty all but for a photo of my two girls, I unclipped it from the sun visor, placed it in my top pocket, climbed out of the cab and closed the door.

It is said ‘when one door closes another door opens’, there is little said about the distance between these two doors or what it is that lies between them.

Christmas came and went; the little ones were back at school. The years of driving trucks had taken me the full length of mainland Britain; from the south coast of England, into Wales and to the very top of mainland Scotland. I had been too or driven through many of the towns and cities in-between, and yet I had never come across this place called Redundancy before…a strange place; it is both a little bleak and at the same time full of doors waiting to be pushed open.

The sensible choice would be to find another driving job. It was work that I knew well plus the bills still needed to be paid and for a while this is what I did. I was driving fresh salmon from Scotland down to Heathrow; the salmon went straight on to a plane and was flown to the breakfast tables of Saudi Arabia. I was also taking fish to Grimsby; this was pretty much my grandads’ home town; he had worked in the fishing industry at a time when Grimsby had one of the biggest fishing fleets in the world. I am not sure what he would have made of fish coming into Grimsby by truck and not trawler…

Although I was back behind the wheel of a truck it no longer felt I was going anywhere. It did not feel right driving out of redundancy on the same road I had driven in on. I decided to take another route out of this place… I would use my shoulder to force open a different door… the idea… if I could… was to go back to school for a few years.

And it turned out I could…it would be a little over four months before I stepped through the doors of Oatridge College and into a classroom, to study ‘Countryside Management’, the landscapes, fauna and flora of these islands has for a long time intrigued me. I didn’t really know if taking three years out, to study the countryside around me would change my line of work. This college thing in truth was more about confronting the world of academia; it had been close to thirty years since I had left school, I remember, certainly in the last two to three years of school struggling and falling behind in pretty much every subject, as a result I left school without taking any exams, maybe it was time to put that right. College I knew would be a huge challenge (and if I’m honest I wasn’t sure I would be up to such a challenge)… but as I said the beginning of that adventure was four months away and that gave me the time to take on a much more sensible challenge an idea that had been in my head for a number of years and that was to walk the length of Britain from the top of Scotland to the south coast of England via Ireland and Wales.

Redundancy had given me the chance to take a step back. I think maybe I should not have been, but I was tired of what was making the headlines on the radio, TV, and the newspapers. Tired of squabbling politicians, of what seemed like a never-ending conflict in the Middle East and the on-going obsession with celebrities. It felt like a good time to take a long walk.

I wanted this adventure (if that’s the right word) to be more than about the highest mountain, the longest river, the quickest time, the shortest route, the…… whatever. I wanted to take time out and revisit the questions we all ask ourselves at some point or other. What is it that really matters in life? I believe the overwhelming majority of people are in essence good and that they long for a better world, if that is true, how is it we live in a world where horrible things happen? We all have a built-in desire to better ourselves and yet we still do things we know we shouldn’t and don’t do the things we know we should… how does that all make sense.

It’s not always easy to talk about faith in this world… faith or what it is we believe In, is personal… and I understand that… I also think sometimes the religions of this world can be a stumbling block for some… how many times (not every time... but many times) when something terrible happens, a religious leader of one faith or another will stand up and tell us that these events are beyond what we can understand… and that God works in mysterious ways… that doesn’t work for me… and I doubt very much it works for the father on the TV screen holding his dead child after a stray bomb has just hit a school… for me faith needs to be real or not at all…

…If I drop a pencil it will fall to the ground… it does not matter if I belong to one religion or another or none at all, nor does it matter when in history I was born or the culture that I grew up in, I can be black or white, boy or girl… it doesn’t matter… the pencil when dropped will fall. Truth is truth, it is also universal… is not a genuine smile, the need to hold out a hand to help another, the love of the world around us, the laughter of a friend or the bond between parent and child… are these things not also as real or as true as a falling pencil… Yeah I’m ready for this walk.

I figured this adventure would need a little bit of planning especially if I wanted to entwine the physical aspect of this walk with faith. The kettle seemed a good place to start, ten minutes later I was sat at the table with a map of Britain laid out in front of me and a mug of tea in hand.

Where to start, I had an idea of a route but not much more, what I did know is for me to get to Ireland I would need to catch a ferry from a place called Troon (a small town on the south west coast of Scotland) and the ferry from Ireland back in to mainland Britain (Wales) would leave from Dublin.

To work out how long this walk would take, I used my thumbs. My thumbprint from one side to the other when pressed against the map covered a distance of about twenty miles. The next step was to walk thumb over thumb along an idea of a route. Forty thumbs later I was in the middle of the English Channel. To walk a thumbprint a day would be a good pace. Not only this, forty days (and forty nights) would tie up well with the idea of faith.

The real idea of how best to bring faith into this adventure came to me halfway through my second mug of tea. I would do this walk without taking any money, nor would I accept any donation of money during the walk. This in a very real way took the walk out of my hands (legs) and placed it into the hands of the people of these islands. The success of this adventure no longer depended on whether I was physically capable, but in my belief in the generosity and heart of people I had never met.

To add a further twist to the faith aspect of this adventure I would finish the walk in the church I was baptised in, on the south coast of England. A church I have not been in again since that day, with my dad being in the military the family never stayed in one place long.

This is the story of that journey… a walk that took place in-between two doors… the door of a truck and the door of a classroom. A story of empty pockets, a belief and a thousand thank-yous… and the backdrop to the story… a beautiful rickety old island.