Confessions of a Northerner

The North has an image problem. I love meeting new people, because inevitably at some point I'll have to tell them I'm from Huddersfield, at which point people delve into their attic of facial expressions, and dust off the one reserved for the relatives of recent car crash victims. A mix of pity mingled with a thank-chuff-that-didn't-happen-to-me sentiment. 

This is a widely held belief. In a recent comprehensive national survey I undertook myself; when given the choice between waking up to find yourself in Angola, within a five mile radius of Huddersfield, and newly employed as Satan's toilet cleaner, Huddersfield came a resounding third. The weather does little to help, the only reason Huddersfield has hotels is so it can house the large number of fact finding missions for black and white printers, who come here to stare at the clouds and concrete to make sure that their pantone scales contain every conceivable shade of grey.

However, The North has a bigger problem. It is this: it's not actually that bad. Some places, like Brixton, or the West Side of Baltimore (yes - I've just started watching The Wire), have a reputation for being bad-ass, and some people are attracted to it, presumably on the perplexing grounds that they might get killed at any moment (before the angry emails come, I appreciate that it isn't always a choice to live in these places, and that socio-economic circumstances may force you to live in these, or indeed any other places - see how marketing executives are forced by circumstance to live almost exclusively in leafy suburbs). The North however, is rubbish at being rubbish. No longer do we all slave in mills, no more is the beer seasoned with gravel, though admittedly, we can't do much about the weather. It's actually quite a nice place to be, or at the very least, no more grim than anywhere else.

As Exhibit A in what, for lack of a better name, I shall call, The Campaign for The Resurrection of The North, (or perhaps the Aye'Up Lazerus Project?), I present the Canal System. Canals have had a pretty bad press over the years. A failed technology that was never cool, even in it's heydey. Not like steam engines - kids have never grown up wanting to be canal boat pilots, or the woman who makes the sandwiches on a barge. Grown men have been known to cry at the sight of a wooden galleon docking alongside modern cruise ships, but I've never heard anyone say they miss the days of leading the mule along the tow-path as it hauled a barge load of coal from Newcastle to Manchester. Think of canals like Beta-Max. An old technology that has completed the slide into obscurity by being unnoticeable as well as obsolete.

Canals have a reputation for being dirty as well. Not for nothing does the early scenes of The Full Monty see the protagonists standing on top of a car in a canal, and when what passes for a criminal underworld up here had a body to dispose of (autopsy pronounced death by acute latitude syndrome), they put it in the canal. Sleeping with the fishies, if you will, except there were no fishies, them having been killed off by arsenic poisoning.

In a roundabout way here, I'm getting to the point of this entry, I've spent the best part of the last few days cycling along canals, and the one thing that has stuck out to me is that they're actually quite enjoyably places to be. They've been cleaned, invested in, and there's no-one on them that's not there in some sort of leisure capacity, whether it's the tow-path cyclists, the tourists on the boats, or the inhabitants of the barges who actually live there (for who I still can't see the attraction, or where the money would come from). In the last decade or so, councils have actually got their act together, and actually spent some money in places people might appreciate it. That's not to say the region's perfect, you only have to look at the road quality in Sheffield centre to remember it's not one of the poorest regions in Europe for nothing. But by and large, The North is an alright place to be, it's just we're crap at being crap now.

Slow Bus to Where?

I'm a Tourist Board's worst nightmare. They attract me to a locale with hard fought-over advertising money, I show up, fling myself at the local hills, bring my own tent, own foodstuffs and provisions, and camp on some remote hillside without paying a penny for the privilege. I then leave; with the Board getting little to no return on their investment. In short, I'm a backpacker. 

And for the past few days, that's what I've been doing over the Yorkshire Dales, the plan being that I'd climb mountains, wander hidden valleys, and generally forget work and responsibility for a while. 

But the plan didn't quite work, because high on a limestone pavement above Kingsdale (which incidentally, is now a close second to Upper Eskdale in the stakes to be my favourite place in the world), my stove decided the scenery was just too good for it, and stopped working. Half an hour of deconstruction, reconstruction, flushing, and many Bad Words later, I admitted defeat, and resigned myself to a diet of marmalade sandwiches, and the fact that I'd have to go home the next day. 

In the morning, The Weather Gods decided that Mike hadn't quite had enough urine extracted from him, so supplied the most astonishing dawn weather (pale clamminess quickly followed by a gorgeously warm sunrise), and after another half hour of stove based aerobic exercise, I headed for the village of Ingleton in the hope of either someone who could help me with the stove, or transport home.

The former came in the guise of the man who runs the outdoor shop in the village, and even he couldn't persuade the thing to light, the latter was a little more exciting. My initial plan had involved more days walking, and a train home from a completely different village, and with the first one ruled out, and the second possible only via a full day's walk, I was forced to indulge in one of my personal delights - slow rural buses.

One of my heroes, A. Wainright, shared this love with me (for the uninitiated, to his fans, A. Wainright is not just a walking writer, he is the walking writer), both of us appreciating the relaxation possible on them, and the fabulous cross-section of humanity on display. On the bus I boarded, I was the only one not to know everyone else, including the driver, who took us on a tour of not only his family, his pets, and his financial situation, but the surrounding countryside as well. I think Britain must be fairly unique in having an under-resourced, and under-appreciated bus system, that has access to an extensive and exciting road network. Occasionally I get the feeling that bus companies set up some bus routes because the roads they take in might be fun to drive over. My bus, which contained six people, cannot have been profitable. 

By long ways, we arrived in Settle. Which is a town that attracts the young and trendy like a magnet does, but entices in the elderly and bikers (of the motorised and un-motorised variety) faster than an unguarded piece of flapjack. From there, things got less exciting in a direct-bus-to-Skipton kind of way. Pausing only briefly to be fleeced out of 20p by a malfunctioning automatic public toilet, which decided that opening and closing the door was so much fun, it would continue to do it, regardless of whether I wanted privacy or not, and on discovery that there were only two buses a year to Bradford, I gave up and opted for a train home.