“Watching the view from a car from the overpass,
And we’re driving down that ancient road,
Shining like diamonds in the night,
Oh diamonds in the night,
All along the ancient highway.”(‘The Ancient Highway’ – Van Morrison, singer/song writer)
Alone and Vulnerable in Amsterdam
Creating a travel writing website – At the start of Spring 1987, I casually made a decision which shaped a lot of what I did over the next couple of decades or so. I decided to journey abroad solo for the first time, destination Amsterdam.
Looking back on this trip now, my recollections are quite splintered. But there are a couple of things about this period that I am very clear about.
Firstly, it was a particularly bleak time to journey across the Low Countries. A couple of hour’s drive away from Amsterdam, a few days earlier, the Dover bound Herald of Free Enterprise had sailed out of Zeebrugge harbour, without closing the bow doors first. It rapidly capsized. The loss of life was huge.
Secondly, a couple of nights into my jaunt, I was tracing my way back from Amsterdam’s central Dam Square to my hotel. I cut my way down the meandering Kalverstraat. A couple of minutes into my walk it started to feel very eerie. It was a long deserted pedestrianised shopping street, with hardly any exits. I felt very uncomfortable and contemplated retracing my steps back to the main square. But it was too late. A few strides behind me appeared a tall man, whistling quite nonchalantly. As he pulled level, he pulled out a gun and held it to my head. I turned all my pockets out and managed to raise fifteen-pounds for him. He couldn’t believe I was on my night out (well actually, I was on my way back from it) with such a pitiful amount about my person. He patted me down to look for any hidden loot and then, thankfully, scarpered.
Back home, I related the story to Roy, down my local pub. He was no stranger to Amsterdam and maintained that it really was quite safe, if one kept one’s wits about oneself. Anyway, he quipped, it was probably a water pistol that was pushed against my temple. The next time I saw him was a few months later. He had in the meantime been back to Amsterdam and had got mugged on the steps of his hotel by some hoodlum with a very large blade. Roy didn’t joke about water pistols after that.
Two years later, I was back again on Kalverstraat, as the shops were closing. I walked with a real sense of urgency, having no desire to be the last man standing along this enclosed, snake-like stretch of the city.
Getting it down on paper
Amsterdam had been my first journey into the unknown alone – book your transport and go. Worry about the rest when you get there – day or night. The fact that I had been lucky to make it back didn’t put me off making this my default position for the many explorations that followed.
Over the subsequent decade, I covered a fair few destinations, went through a lot of shoe leather as I pounded the beat, came back with a host of anecdotes, but never committed my memories to paper. Now a big chunk of it is lost forever and the rest are scattered fragments in my mind.
It was only at the end of this lost decade, shortly after returning home from any adventure, that I started with due diligence to meticulously commit my travel memoirs to paper. I frequently turned them into novella length pieces of nonfiction. Friends, colleagues, and family loved them – at least that’s what they told me. ‘Too good to stay in your top drawer’, was a common response, although I wasn’t sure. One colleague even offered to go into partnership – I would do all the creative writing and she would sort out and manage the website bit. It didn’t seem to me like a particularly good deal at the time.
Dormant under the bed
And then my muse dried up, or more precisely my lone-travel days came to a halt. No more spending my days in endless pursuit of back alleys that might yield an alternative story. Rather, safety, comfort and knowing what we were letting ourselves in for each day rightly became the forces that shaped our adventures. My writings lay dormant under the bed. Some of them drafts, with the final version missing, some the finished article. Other pieces, criminally, forever lost. A few stories, I had in a pre-social media time, somehow managed to store in the ether.
And there they stayed for many years. I was a rebel without a cause.
Reinvention Through Lockdown
Then arrived the trauma that was Covid Lockdown. To escape the perils of home-schooling and in search of a location where it was possible to sit and socially distance, I made the bench that is immediately in the shadow of the ruins of Old Saint Chad’s church in Shrewsbury my own. It was a relatively isolated spot, away from the town centre’s inner core. I came to expect my adopted bench to be empty, when I showed up each day at 1 pm with my book, coffee and packed lunch, and was likely to suffer from palpitations if it wasn’t. It was a kind of therapy, away from the little terrors back home. Lockdown, it suddenly felt, wasn’t that bad after all.
And there I met Scott for the first time. He had started to make a regular habit of pinching my seat. We bumped into each other on a regular basis – sat at opposite ends of the bench, chewing the fat about parenting, lockdown, books and cricket. After a few months of this, he one day wheedled out of me that I was once upon a time a fairly prolific, unpublished, writer. He was chomping at the bit and demanded to see a sample, and then another, followed by lots more. I think he quite liked them. He was apoplectic about my intransigence in ‘getting them out there’. Set up a website he said and get on with it.
I procrastinated for a few more weeks, just turning up each day and lounging on that bench, but still taunting Scott with extracts of my writing. But then I really grasped the nettle. What kick-started this was the day that Scott told me that I really shouldn’t be continuously lounging around on that bench like, “Some friggin’ fully fledged retiree.” To be fair, I don’t think he realised at the time that actually, I was a friggin’ fully fledged retiree – Well that got my back up – I don’t like being insulted about my age. Rather, he added that I needed to fuck off home that instant and start web designing and writing some more, as a matter of urgency. Not one to mince words, our Scott. Well of course he was right, although quite possibly he just wanted to keep me away from Old Saint Chad’s, so there was less competition for that seat.
I got my mo-jo working and settled on a domain name – it was top of my short list, and out of these was the only one that was available (It is also the name of one of my favourite Van Morrison songs, but hey-ho!)
Birth of theancienthighway.com
I was taken in by all the books and websites that waxed lyrical about how easy website design is these days with the gift that is WordPress software. And so I started out, all kind of confident, but that didn’t last. It has been damned hard trying to conquer a mountain of glitches. It feels though, that I am finally on top of the key essentials. Possibly, as a result, the heavy mop of brown hair that I took to Amsterdam, has now been replaced by something that is more greyish, with flecks of brown. However, my children assure me that it is completely white. This is rich, coming from them, because deep down, I know that it isn’t near death in Amsterdam, other similar scrapes, or theancienthighway.com website wobbles that have aged me – it is their unruliness – bloody kids.
Damian Rainford
Back Home to http://theancienthighway.com
Further information
http://www.visitshrewsbury.com
(Header image: Pixels Free Photos)
