The other Sunday morning I took myself off down to Instow a
place I haven’t been to in some time living as I do these days over the other
side of the delta at Ashford Strand but lately, I have been spending a lot of
time up top in Sticklepath as
mother has been off her legs with spondyitus and I've been taken up with attending
to her needs, basically going down to the Co-op buying reams of no 8 scratchcards, Buckfast
Tonic Wine, she won’t have Sanatogen, and Lambert and Butlers. Feels like I’ve
gone back to being a kid going down to Cox’s stores except these days she
doesn’t let me keep the change. I stayed up there the previous evening and spent some time with the Old Boy looking for parts for the Datsun Sunny on the internet as I really must get
it going again. Unfortunately not much luck with Datsun parts but we did end up with a quick and easy recipe for making mead. Next morning I decided to take advantage of the fine weather and dazzled
by the sun which has made a more than welcome return, after several tempestuous Winter months of Atlantic storms, to our cold and damp and grey and miserable
Western skies. Spring seems to have sprung with a vengeance and it must be
infectious as half of town seemed to have decamped down to the beach for the
day, the 21a Atlantic Wave bus was packed full and everyone seemed very jolly, youngsters and small families and old ones all out on a beano.
I took a stroll along the beach and standing at the waters
edge looking out over the confluence of the mighty Taw and Torridge rivers and I cleared
out the ventricles in the clean crisp air by doing a few of the breathing
exercises I have been recommended by Dr Dos Santos up at the NDI to ease the
Farmer’s Lung. From this side of the water you get a totally different aspect, geographically
speaking, of the great course, it seems less like a delta or an estuary and more like a gentle mouth
out to the sea. However, in the distance, the white horses galloping over the bar, throwing spume into
the sunlight and creating a spectral mist soon minded me that looks can be
deceiving when it comes to wild water and the ocean. Looking over at Crow Point
I could clearly see the devastation wreaked by the storms as a great gap has
appeared between the dunes marooning one of them in the bay, making it look
like a cartoon desert island all you'd need to do was stick a potted palm on it
and you’d have the full effect. Now there's an idea. In the summer you could stick someone in
pirate garb complete with parrot and treasure chest on it, I don't think it'll be necessary for him to have a peg-leg, then you see at high tide visitors could go out on
a boat trip out to take a look at the unfortunate castaway. The Robinson Crusoe Experience. Not so
daft as it sounds since Daniel Defoe and Stevenson both used this stretch of water, the Bristol Channel as a source n their adventures. Infact, from my reading of Treasure Island I've deduced that Long John Silver must have set himself off from The Hispaniola at some point between Hartland Point and Watchet. Also the location of the Admiral Benbow is on this coast somewhere between here and Bristol.
After mulling over this unique proposition while walking
down to the cricket club I turned round and went back the other way over the
dunes which again were showing the effects of the storms, in places tangled, knotty heaps of driftwood was piled high like
an ancient form of defence against invasion. I made note of this bounty as I got the sense ttha he Old boy
was chomping at the bit, raring to get down here and chop up a few bits for the
wood burner. Down on the beach there were dogs of all shapes and sizes and
breeds hurling themselves about and tearing around in circles fetching balls
and sticks and
Up on The Front a queue was snaking away from a
Hockings Ice Cream van, if snakes had five tails that is! I’d seen a notice that
it was the van’s first day out for the season and after a
long winter it's always a fine sight to behold, the Hocking’s fleet out on the road. I spied Mr Selkirk
Metalbostos in the queue but
fortunately he was with his wife and he barely acknowledges you when they are out
and about together. He gave me a sheepish look and a shrug to indicate that he
was at pains to go and get his wife a Dairy Cream Ice ’99 which is just as well
as it meant I avoided a monotonic Black Counry monologue on industrial relations in North Devon
in the 1970,s the fact that he was
at Kenny Hibbert’s, him of Wolverhampton Wanderers fame, wedding and his views on the current set up
down at Town which as we all know changes by the week.. He’s a lovely bloke,
I’ve got a lot of time for him, he doesn't just half go on a bleddy bit.
I walked on down to John’s as I was fast developing a
craving for one of their steak pasties and after elbowing my way through the
gaggle of weekenders gawping down at his delicatessen offerings and honking and
braying over their shoulders at each other the price of Cornish yarg cheese the n stuff with the stinging nettles in it, I was able to make a quick escape. Pasty in hand and crossed over the
road and sat on the wall and ate it. It wasn’t really up to much, which was a huge
disappointment as in the past they were one of my favourites, So, I was not only left
with a deep sense of regret but also a claggy, greasy palate. There was only
one way to remedy that: a nice cold pint of scrumpy with an orange in it that
they serve down at The Quay and I was glad to see that, despite recent renovations
and a name change it’s now called The Bar a clever pun which I eventually got
after a few minutes they still serve. After standing at the bar for an eternity and
exchanging sneers with the usual blow in bar fixture bores I took my pint outside
and sat down next to a fat, hairless and brazenly semi-nude copper toned man,
basking in the sun, a Buddha in speedos as that was all he was wearing who like
me was enjoying pint of apple and
orange. He turned and raised his glass and low and behold I recognised him,
bleddy hell it was none other than Rowley Barton. I hadn’t seen him for years.
Last time was with the Hawkwind lot out at Sheepwash where he’d been spray
painting an old bus and they’d got me out there to do a spot of welding. Blimey he’d put on a few pounds and
looks like he’s lost all he’s tousled hair but I recognised that rather
insouciant leer anywhere. Blimey, we spent a lot of time together back in the
day, I grew up with him but Rowley had a gift for drawing and had gone to the
grammar school and then up to the art school in Taunton and then onto London
where he’d fallen in with a fast crowd and ended up designing book jackets and
LP covers for heavy metal bands. He’d also published a few comics. Or graphic
novels as he calls them about a phantom biker gang, piston head Robin Hoods,
who righted the wrongs heaped on stoners, surfers, hippies, babes, rastas,
grafittos wandering troubadours and such like by the forces of law and order.
They were very successful and as it turns out still are as they are now a
computer game and a pilot for a TV series was made which Rowley assured me can
be viewed on Netflix. Rowley told
me he’d been living in the woods
in North Bulgaria as he’d married a Bulgarian woman but she’d chucked him out
after he’d met an Estonian woman on a trip to Tallin so he decided to come home
and he was now living in Yelland. His current girlfriend it transpires had also
left him and gone and set up a house with an old schoolfriend over from the baltic states of in Landkey. That was what Rowley said although I find it
difficult to believe. Anyway us two old boys sat out the front of the Quay with
our scrumpy and soon we just fell into talking as if time had stood still. We
both came to the conclusion that Instow was the North Devon Riviera, the boat hulls shimmering on the water, the
pinging of their pennants in the breeze which when it’s sunny and you squint a
bit can't be too far off the mark. All you need now is a fishing boat to tie up at
the Quay haul up a large tuna and start slicing up big bloody chunks of it and you could be in the vieux
port in Marseille, a smashing spot
as I recall. Rowley reckoned Instow was a real community beach where
you get a real cross section of the true North Devonian constituency.
Over another pint we
agreed that it lacked the pretensions of other beaches in the area a fact made evident from the total absence of VW
Transporter vans along The Front. No one organised a
beach clean at Instow and went on-line or in the Journal to give it the big "I AM" and going on about how they
love the beach and mutually congratulating each other on such a mighty
community effort, uploading their
photo’s to the friends up country to show them what a charmed life they are
leading and how really involved they are and inclusive they feel before all piling
into their vans and causing a monumental tailback in the lanes around Georgeham
and Croyde. I was off on one but Rowley seemed more than happy to indulge me!Oh we had a laugh. Of course it wasn’t long before I was telling him how as kids we would head down here and go cockling and wrack mussels from the rocks but onlyin the months with an r in them. Back then the Taw /Torridge Estuary was reasonably polluted and you had to squelch through stinking oily black mud which had the sickly sheen of a large bluebottle and would suck your wellies off as often as not leaving you stranded, virtually cemented into the quagmire and you wouldn’t want to be doing that on an incoming tide primed as we were by cautionary tales of poor unfortunates who’d come to a sorry end subsumed by the incoming waters. Thinking about it, back then the mortuary must have been crammed full of crab nibbled human remains as we all claimed to know somebody who’d met this fate. Rowley had a laugh when he reminded me of the time that we came down along the railway line from town carrying our forks to dig some bait and to prang some flooks in the shallows as he tells it we got plenty of ragworm but all we pranged on the prongs of our forks was toilet paper and used condoms. I went on to tell him how I thought the people of North Devon probably cause havoc at airports throughout the world due to the amount of heavy metals we must have ingested over the years eating molluscs and shellfish out of the estuary especially after it came to light that Gales Electroplating down at Pottington had just ben pouring their residuals into the river for donkeys years.
Before long we were both regaling a coupe of visitors, up
from Kilkhampton with our youthful escapades and the scrumpy kept coming. At
some point Rowley decided to take his leave and cycle back to Yelland and he
was the cause of much merriment as he waddled over to his bike precariously
mounted it as not to show of his meat and two veg under his budgie smugglers as
one passing lad had called his trunks and wobble along the road before falling
off as he attempted to pull in
between some parked cars to avoid an oncoming Atantic Wave. He picked himself
up turned and waved to one and all before deciding the best course of action
was to walk.
After bidding farewell to he folk at the bar I meandered back along the beach to the
foot of the dunes where I laid down for a knap in front of me two rather thin
and pale odd looking children, moon kids we used to call this type who were building some sort of arcane diabolic structure out of
driftwood.
I dozed off and awoke with a start it was bloody freezing and the sun was setting I looked down at the totem beneath me and was troubled to see what looked like a pigs head had been place on top of it. My mind was playing tricks and I must have been having some sort of waking dream as on closer inspection after I had slid down the dune it turned out to be a punctured plastic football. However, I was still unsetttled as many ears before I had come across a pigs head almost in this very spot that must have been washed down river from the abattoir at Fremington Quay. Cold and out of sorts I hobbled into the Wayfarer for a restorative rum and a jar of cockles before catching the 21A Atlantic Wave all the way back to The Strand and Antiques Roadshow.
