A White Horse and an Agreed Course
I can’t remember who first suggested a trip to Morocco. Which is not a good way to start writing about something that happened so long ago. I’ll have to go by the law of averages and most likely occurrence. It’s the start of a long hot summer. Simon and I are mooching about in town gazing at the weir and wondering whether to follow others and leap out of a shop window from Pultney Street into the cool water below. Deciding against it we wander through the Abbey square glancing up at the neckless saints climbing Jacobs Ladder - hunched because Cromwell’s soldiers shot their heads off as target practice when waiting for the Battle of Lansdown then the saints were remodelled with new albeit lower heads.
Why we left - sandwich boards and tourists...
Beardy Man Jim, Walking Advert Simon, Shy Al
Unable to move for gaggles of tourists we decide to get out of Bath and plum for a rash ride to the Westbury White Horse a good hour’s cycle away. Half way up the Wellsway and just past our old school we realise it’s going to take a lot longer than an hour but we’re young and fit, the days are long and the only impediments are no food or water and my dad’s ancient proudly steel framed bike. Seriously flagging by Odd Down but we know the worst is over and it’s plain sailing through picturesque Midford and by Hinton Charterhouse we need a drinks stop at the historic old pub. Back in the saddle and past Norton St Philip and then we’re into uncharted territory and riding on instinct. We somehow navigate to within sight of the famous white horse and we speed up to our quarry. Once there we lock up the bikes with the thinnest of cables and hike up the hill.
Glorious day with the heat of the sun now our friend we snooze for a while on the horse’s eye then wake to discuss what the summer will bring. Maybe it was the wonderment of lounging on a massive chalk horse carved into a hill atop which stood an ancient neolithic earthwork fort, or maybe it was something more ethereal brought on by laying on crossing ley lines, but our minds wandered further than English festivals, even southern France which we’d gone to last summer seemed commonplace. Spain. That’s the place. Cheap margaritas, alluring senoritas, guaranteed sol, thousands of lobster red British tourists with money to buy those senoritas those margaritas. Bang back to reality. How much fun are two skint punk rockers gonna have on the Costa del Sol? The ley lines flex again disrupting our electric brain patterns forcing our minds to wander southwards to another civilisation and culture far from the swilling crowds. Whence ancient mariners risked life and limb to trade with our ancestors perhaps on this very hill. Maybe the horse was drawn by those mariners from the south and eastern reaches where horses came from. The thought was in our collective brain - Africa, more specifically that part with delights well documented by the beat poets and easy to reach from Europe. Morocco here we come! Having decided that to hitch to Africa from an island off northern Europe would be a cinch we find the cycling back to Bath easy going especially speeding down into town. We meet up with usual suspects in The Bell in Walcott and their dismissal of our hare brained idea makes us more determined.