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Sunday, June 22, 2003
Weekends don’t come much better than this one.

Saturday, I headed North out of Exeter on my bike at 11am, destination Lynton and Lynmouth. On the North Devon coast, these little villages were hosting a music festival as a fringe to the North Devon Festival, and oddly enough, The Clientele were due to play the Saturday evening stage, so we took a spur of the moment decision to make a weekend of it and booked a hotel for the night. Since the weather was favourable, I decided to ride up, with C following in the car.

Less than five kilometres out of Exeter, however, it was almost all over: riding through Rewe, a bee, wasp, or other large insect whacked me in the mouth. I avoided eating the bugger, but it left what initially felt like a sting on my bottom lip. It hurt like hell. Pulling over at the garage, I squeezed my lip and swore a great deal. I could feel it swelling already, and looked in a car’s wing mirror to gauge the seriousness of the situation. Sure enough, there was a crack in the lip, and as I squeezed, blood crept out. I didn’t know if it was a sting or not, but if it was I knew that squeezing it quickly might get rid of the poison. I squeezed until no more blood came out. It still felt sore as hell, so I shrugged resignedly and started peddling slowly back towards Exeter. It was then I realised I didn’t have a door key and would have had to wait several hours for C to come back from the gym anyway, so what was the point? I also considered what the great old riders of Le Tour (about whom I have been reading avidly in the past week) would do. Would Faber have abandoned because a bee hit his lip? Hinault (who could strike a pose as cool as Cagney – I can just imagine him saying ‘wise guy, huh?’ to those impudent enough to launch an attack) once broke his nose in a fall into Pau but went onto ride another week, defending his maillot jaune into Paris, so I imagine a simple wasp on the lip would have been brushed off with a typical Gallic shrug of indifference. Even modern day icons, like Tyler Hamilton, who rode most of the Giro last year with a broken shoulder, which meant he had to ride all the mountains unable to get out of the saddle and who had to have dental work on eleven of his teeth as a result of his clenched jaw; what would Tyler have made of a bug splitting his lip?! So I told myself not to be such a loser, and I turned around once more. What anyone living in Rewe must have thought, seeing me ride up and down the village main street I don’t know.

My lip continued to smart for a few kilometres, but by the time I was leaving Tiverton and heading along the upper reaches of the Exe valley, I’d pretty much forgotten about it. By this point also the sun was starting to burn through the clouds, and the outlook was altogether more pleasant. As I rode through Cove, past the turn-offs for Bampton (deceptively pretty village, brimful of in-bred nutters) I realised it was more than ten years since I had ridden here. How time flies. It still felt oddly familiar, and I realised how much I must have ridden around that countryside when I first moved to Devon and (inadvisably) lived in Tiverton (not even particularly pretty market town, and even more full of in-bred nutters).

From Dulverton, where you’ve just passed from Devon into Somerset, the road starts to climb up to the top of Exmoor. I’d ridden the climb only once before, ten years previously, and remembered it as being quite steep and long. Maybe I’m a lot fitter than I was then, or maybe my memory was playing tricks on me, but it felt a lot easier this time around. I felt like I had good legs, and rode smoothly up through the woods and then out around a couple of switchbacks, the moor suddenly spread out before me; a wild expanse stretching for miles in every direction. Over Winsford Hill the road starts undulating, but I hardly noticed, probably largely due to the tailwind whipping over the moor from the south east, and possibly also to the effects of the Energy Bar I ate at Dulverton. Past ponies, sheep and cows that couldn’t decide which side of the road they wanted to be on; speeding over the Dry Bridge (now a couple of kilometres back into Devon again) and thinking of the town called Drybridge in Ayrshire that we used to cycle through when I was so much younger; over cattle grids and even more desolate moorland that put me in mind of the wilds around the nick o’balloch, only prettier of course because this is Devon after all. Rolling along, I felt fantastic with the sun and the wind at my back, the north coast only a few kilometres away.

The descent down from the moor to Lynmouth has a couple of switchbacks and despite taking it slowly I still caught the car ahead. I swept past on the straight, and sped on down the East Lyn valley, wondering at the cliffs, thinking how much it looked like the Alps and that maybe the ‘Little Switzerland’ epithet the area has awarded itself is a least a little apt. Finally I peddled into Lynmouth, riding slowly through Saturday afternoon crowds eating ice-creams and bags of chips. The ice-creams looked tempting, and I considered buying one before remembering how much dairy produce, and cream in particular, disagrees with me, so decided that doing without was by far the better option. So perched on the sea wall I phoned my parents and checked my bike computer: ninety kilometres, riding for just under three and a half hours, average speed of 26 kilometres an hour. I thought, hey, that’s not bad until I realised how fast ‘real’ bikies would go, and then marveled once again at the huge gap between those giants of the road and us mere mortals.

After a half hour or so of sitting by the harbour wall, a text message arrived from C saying ‘simonsbath’; meaning she was about 16 kilometres away. I sent a text back to say I’d meet her at the hotel, and rode back up towards Lynton. I knew the road up the cliff from Lynmouth was steep, but nothing had prepared me for how difficult it really was. I was in the granny ring almost right away as I struggled to defy the 25% gradient, the front wheel jumping off the tarmac with each peddle stroke. Getting out of the saddle to keep the wheel in place made my legs burn horribly, and I regretted the time spent cooling down in the sun of the harbourside. Thankfully, I endeavoured to pull out a foot on an upstroke (it’s up for grabs as to whether it was a sub-consciously deliberate accident), and inevitably ground to a halt. Of course it’s impossible to restart on such a harsh gradient: you’d have to effectively peddle one-legged for several revolutions whilst you struggle to get your second foot attached to the peddle, and so I surrendered all remaining dignity and started walking. I swear I walked faster than I’d previously been riding, so what the heck. And didn’t those old Tour giants walk up a lot of the mountain passes anyway? (Of course here I am conveniently forgetting that the mountain passes then were dust/mud tracks and that they had only a fixed gear bike that I would probably struggle to ride on the flat, but heh…)

Riding down the narrow North Walk in Lynton, I finally met C at the entrance to the private driveway that leads down to the Hewitt’s Hotel. Originally built in the latter half of the 19th Century by old Mr Hewitt as a summer house for his second wife (his 19 year old cousin – maybe they were from Tiverton), the house is now a hotel that frankly I wouldn’t have booked if the other (significantly cheaper) places hadn’t all been fully booked. In hindsight I guess this was fate smiling on us, because the Hewitt hotel was glorious (okay, so maybe at 150 notes for the night it bloody well ought to have been!). Our room was huge, with a wonderful view from a large bay window out over the bay, the lights of distant Welsh towns later seen softly twinkling in the evening light.

A stroll around the two villages (linked, thankfully, by the marvellous water-powered Cliff Railway – although sadly no bicycles allowed) and we spotted the stage for the evening’s entertainment. C asked if all the bands were made up of midgets.

It all looked very quaint; a tiny stage plonked down at the end of the narrow street, whilst further up a couple of large barbeque pits heated up outside a butchers shop. With dark clouds pushing in from the moor we sought refuge in a pub. It was by far the best vantage point from which to experience the first two acts on the bill, both of whose names have been erased from my memory, displaced by thoughts of the marvellous vegetarian ravioli in spinach sauce that served as our dinner (actually a second dinner – I needed a bag of chips earlier to stave off the hunger pangs). So a dinner of carbs and lager. Or carbs and water for me, but that doesn’t sound so good.

Our pub vantage point (don’t remember the pub name, but on it’s wall it had listed a variety of things which made it a ‘real’ pub, one of which was, memorably, ‘pink curtains’) was terrific. We were sat right by the door, gazing out at the queues at the chip shot opposite and the stream of people to-ing and fro-ing down towards the stage and, having witnessed the dreadful despair of the mournful Eastern-European violins of the second act, back again.

The violins finally silenced, the young MC took the stage and announced that the next band would be (and here he struggled somewhat with his bit of paper) the Clientele (he said Clee whereas I say Cli, but whatever). At this we darted out of the pub and wandered towards the stage. I felt like a right dork setting up my tripod and video camera, but what the heck. I don’t get to see the Clientele often, and certainly the opportunity of capturing them in such surreal circumstances was worth looking like a berk for.

Maybe no-one had had enough to drink, but nobody was within fifteen feet of the front of the stage. It was weird. Kids held balloons and rode down the hill on an odd red machine that was part bicycle part scooter; dogs roamed, scavenging scraps from the meat off the butcher’s barbeque pits; white headed old ladies sat in window seats, looking bemusedly out on the proceedings; teenage girls led each other by the hand, back and forth along the street whilst teenage boys looked sour and tried to pretend they were ignoring them. Extended families darted in and out houses. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. It was less like a music festival and more like a street party.

The Clientele sounded magnificent. The wind blustered through the microphones and endeavoured to spoil their episodes of quiet splendour, but it didn’t matter. On record they sound uniformly restrained; producing perfectly executed mildly psychedelic vignettes of suburban life: French films (blurred), or American indie-films, if you want to put a Sportique slant on proceedings (see ‘arthouse cinema’ from the terrif ‘Communique no. 9’ album on Matinee/ WIAIWYA), but live they are altogether a more dynamic prospect, inserting episodes of gyrating beatnoise into their suburban pop daydreams. They even have the poise to insert a slab of Hellfire Sermons into the mix of ‘Jimmy’, although if you want to be more obvious (and oblivious) you’d say Television and that bit in ‘Marquee Moon’ where it goes, kind of, dah dah dah, dah dah dah, and oh, YOU know: It’s when the guitars sound like police sirens getting ever closer, when Verlaine and Lloyd start to leave the planet for the outer reaches of the stratosphere. THAT bit.

They played a mix of the old and the new, all of which sounded divine. Particularly poignant was the title track of their forthcoming ‘The Violet Hour’ album (out on Pointy in a month or so), with the sun gone in a while ago and the wind whipping around my bare legs, and Alasdair singing about how “this summer has been and gone and I became cold”. Well, maybe you had to be there.

I’m glad I was there. Glad I caught them do their storming cover of the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band’s ‘Tracey Had A Hard Day Sunday’, wondering who else in the audience knew the source, and hating myself for such a music-journalist’s thought. Glad to have heard them close with ‘as night is falling’, which was spellbinding despite Alasdair’s assertion that neither James nor Mark could remember how to play it.

And then it was over. They climbed off the stage and the tipsy teenaged MC insisted we ‘give it up for the Clee-entele’. We most assuredly did, before it was back to festival business as usual: the raffle and some old chap playing the blues. I’m sure he was very good, if you like that sort of thing. Personally I was starting to feel the effects of the day’s exertions, and so we fled back to the safety of the Hewitts, leaving Lynton’s inhabitants to their blues, barbeques and rolling down the hill on big red bicycle/scooter contraptions.

So then today, Sunday, and up at seven. I can’t seem to sleep late these days, which is just as well, because if I did I’d have missed watching the sun break through the morning haze and the clouds building from the sea, stretching out and up before my eyes. Together C and I wandered alone through the hotel gardens, laid out on terraces down the cliff; stood by the peculiar thatched chapel in the grounds, flanked by a giant chess set cemented to the path; filmed the clouds growing out at sea through the jade canopy of trees; sat and breakfasted on a sun dappled balcony, a tame robin sitting on the edge of the table nipping at toast crumbs; rested in armchairs looking out on the cliffs from our room, just sitting and talking idly about Melbourne and remembering that line in ‘Lee Remick’ about being quite plain. Oh, and Gregory Peck. What the heck.

They don’t write them like they used to.

So with ‘Lee Remick’ then stuck in my head we walked out by the Valley of Rocks. In the distance a building on top of the cliffs, maybe an abandoned castle (of my soul), so then the Go-Betweens replaced by the Gothic Archies, and a few minutes later another stab from ‘The New Despair’ as a tiny goat leapt across the scree above us. I thought, what a sad life, leaping from song title to song title.

We headed back to Exeter.

The drive back made Exmoor seem hillier than I had felt it when I was cycling the day before, but maybe I was just saying that to make myself feel better. Certainly the descent through the woods into Dulverton looked more challenging than it had been riding up, and I started to feel smug about yesterday. It was at this point that I reminded myself if I was that bloody good I’d be riding back today instead of sitting in the car with my bike slung in the back…

So now it’s Sunday afternoon, back in the attic in Exeter, writing this on my old (actually only a couple or three years) PC laptop, missing my Mac. The skies are darkening, and there are rain spots on the window pane. Thunder just rumbled around the eaves. It’s time to stop writing and post…