The Road to Little Dribbling (15 page)

So there you have it. Criminal convictions, government hygiene ratings, and other secondhand information have no place on a hotel and restaurant ratings website. As I write, TripAdvisor gives the Crown Manor House Hotel high recommendations for both quality and cleanliness, and there is no indication that it has ever in the recent past been otherwise.

Let’s pause for just a moment to incorporate a little context here. Think of the worst place you have ever eaten. In my case, it was a late-night kebab house in London, where meat of indeterminate origin permanently rotated on a heated spit. I am sure the meat was years old. I passed this kebab house regularly for years and the amount of meat on the spit never seemed to shrink or change. Yet one night when I was a little drunk (I know, hard to believe) and hungry, I went in and paid money for a grubby fellow in a slaughterhouse shirt to carve some slices off the slab and put them in a kind of pita-bread first baseman’s glove, and I greedily devoured it. Grease ran down my chin. For weeks afterward my beard smelled like thousand-year-old mutton. Even now the thought of it makes me retch a little. I am sure you have eaten in places just as bad yourself. Well, here’s the thing. Those terrible restaurants we have eaten in have probably never been fined £16,000, with £4,000 costs, for being disgustingly squalid. In your whole life, you may never have experienced a place so bad that it got a zero rating and had its kitchen shut down twice.

But then again you may just have been reading TripAdvisor recommendations. That’s all I’m saying.

Chapter 8

Beside the Seaside

E
NGLAND IS A COMPLICATED
place. It has five different kinds of counties, all with different histories, purposes, and boundaries. First, there are historic counties—the ones that go way back in history—like Surrey, Dorset, and Hampshire. Most of these are still there, but some have been chopped into smaller pieces or even summarily dismissed and exist today only as partial relics or fond memories. Huntingdonshire was absorbed into Cambridgeshire forty years ago, but people still tell you that they live there. Middlesex hasn’t been a county since 1965, but there is still a Middlesex County Cricket Club and a Middlesex University.

Then there are administrative counties, which exist principally to provide working boundaries for county councils. Administrative counties tend to pop in and out of existence like soap bubbles. Humberside was created in 1974, but disbanded in 1996. Rutland, conversely, was banished in 1974 and resuscitated in 1996.

The third kind of county are postal counties, whose boundaries may be different again. The outline of Cheshire, for instance, on the postal map is quite different from that of Cheshire on a historic map and different again from its administrative shape.

After postal counties come ceremonial counties, each of which has a Lord Lieutenant (or Official Twit), to preside over royal visits and other grand occasions requiring someone with a sword and a jacket with epaulettes, but otherwise ceremonial counties, like the Lord Lieutenants who serve them, have no known purpose.

Finally there is Cornwall, which isn’t a county at all but a duchy—a distinction that the Cornish are very sensitive about. (You could say that it is a touchy duchy.)

And that is just English counties. Welsh and Scottish counties are separately confusing. The result of all of this, not surprisingly, is occasional confusion. When I worked on the Business News section of
The Times
in London we frequently had conversations at the copy editors’ table that started with a question like:

“Where’s Hull?”

“Up north,” someone would answer confidently.

“No, I mean what county is it in?”

“Oh. Dunno.”

“I think it’s in East Yorkshire,” someone else would say.

“I don’t think there is an East Yorkshire,” a fourth person would say.

“Really?”

“Don’t think so. Well, maybe. Not sure actually.”

“It doesn’t matter,” yet another person would interject, “because Hull isn’t in East Yorkshire even if there is an East Yorkshire, which there isn’t. Hull is in Lincolnshire.”

“Actually, I think it’s in Humberside. Or possibly Cleveland,” a fifth or sixth person would add.

“Cleveland is a city in the United States,” someone else would volunteer confidently.

“There’s a Cleveland up north now, too.”

“Really? When did that happen?”

“No idea. Not sure if it’s a county or just an administrative unit.”

These conversations could go on for hours and would generally end up with the person who started it all deciding that he would just put “Hull,” and leave it at that.

The one corner of the country I knew about was Bournemouth and its smaller neighbor Christchurch because I worked in one and lived in the other for two years in the 1970s. Until 1974, Bournemouth and Christchurch were in Hampshire, but in that year English county boundaries were redrawn and Bournemouth and Christchurch were hefted into Dorset. The idea was to take some people out of overpopulated Hampshire and put them into underpopulated Dorset. But news of this change hadn’t filtered through to everyone, so sometimes even into the 1980s a news article in
The Times
would place Bournemouth in Hampshire. Once when this happened I sauntered over to the Home News desk—which is to say the national news desk—and pointed out to the chief copy editor that they had Bournemouth in Hampshire.

“And your point is?” he said.

“Well, Bournemouth’s not in Hampshire,” I elaborated.

“I believe you’ll find it is,” he said, returning to his work.

“No, it’s in Dorset. I worked for two years on the paper in Bournemouth. It was part of the condition of employment to know where we were.”

The Home News editors didn’t have a lot of respect for the Business News editors and I don’t entirely blame them. We looked a little like Vince Vaughn’s team in
Dodgeball
.

“We’ll look into it,” the chief copy editor told me.

“You don’t need to look into it. It is a fact.”

“And I said we’ll look into it.”

I don’t remember my exact words from this distant remove, but I daresay “anus” was in there somewhere.

“Touchy fucker,” the chief said as I walked off.

“He’s an American,” one of his colleagues pointed out gravely.

I looked in the final edition of the paper the next morning and Bournemouth was still in Hampshire. People on the Home News desk were by and large wankers, except for one or two who didn’t rise quite that high.

Anyway, Christchurch is indubitably in Dorset, and, forty minutes after leaving Lyndhurst, so was I.

—

I have an abiding attachment to Christchurch. When my wife and I were newly married and I had my first grown-up job on the
Evening Echo
in Bournemouth, we lived for six months in a rented flat above a fish-and-chip shop in the outlying district of Purewell, then bought a bungalow in the even more outlying hamlet of Burton. It was a sweet white-painted cottage with a pretty garden and a distinctive copper beech on the front lawn, a perfect first home. We bought it from a kindly white-haired couple who had lived there for decades and were most concerned that we should look after the garden, which we solemnly promised to do and lovingly did for the two years we lived there.

I hadn’t seen the house in years and wondered if it would look small now, the way fondly remembered places so often do. In fact, I didn’t recognize it. I drove up and down our old road twice without spotting my own house, and finally parked and got out to have a closer look on foot. The only property I could find with a copper beech didn’t look like ours at all.

I stood out front and checked a slip of paper to make sure I had the house number right. I did, but it was nothing like the house we had lived in and fussed over. The front garden was gone altogether, buried under asphalt. The most decorative objects on it were two garbage bins and a terra-cotta pot with a dead plant in it. A little enclosed glass porch that had served as a mini-greenhouse had been taken away for no visibly good reason. Even more pointlessly, a perky bow window, once the central feature of the house, was gone, too, replaced with a rectangle of aluminiumized double glazing.

Nearly all the other houses on the street had been similarly assaulted by owners looking for more parking and less maintenance. All the lovely gardens, all the well-tended prettiness of my day, were gone. It really doesn’t pay to go back and look again at the things that once delighted you, because it’s unlikely they will delight you now.

I continued on to Christchurch, fearing the worst, but in fact it was quite all right. Most of the good things were still standing and some of the ugly things—notably, a semi-industrial area formerly dominated by a large pale-blue gasometer—had been taken away. The gasometer zone was now occupied by stylish apartments and retirement homes with jaunty, if entirely imaginary, nautical names like The Moorings or Sea View Meadows, which I suppose are more romantic and commercial than Gasometer Way or Goodness Knows What’s Buried Beneath Us Cottages.

The high street at first sight seemed pretty much unchanged. The buildings offered a pleasantly higgledy-piggledy mix of styles, sizes, and materials, yet formed a comfortable and coherent whole in that way that British towns seemed to do effortlessly for centuries and now often can hardly do at all. Though the buildings were the same, the businesses within them were completely changed. It is remarkable, when you think about it, how many types of shops have vanished from British high streets in only a few years: most butchers, greengrocers, fishmongers, ironmongers, repair shops, gas showrooms, electricity board showrooms, most building societies, travel agents, and independent bookshops.

Lots of post offices have gone, too. It’s a sacrilege not to lament their loss, and I am genuinely sorry to see them go, but it has to be said there was scarcely a less pleasurable, more Soviet-style environment in which to pass half an hour than in a British post office queue. They were bureaucracy gone mad. At their peak you could (genuinely) conduct any of 231 types of transactions in a British post office—renew your TV license, collect pensions and family allowances, pay car tax, withdraw or deposit money in a savings account, buy savings bonds, mail parcels. All that was required of you was that you be white-haired, hard of hearing, and able to spend up to an hour hunting through a tiny coin purse for a 20p piece.

Despite all the changes in retail patterns, Christchurch’s high street seemed to be thriving. The old Regent Cinema, which in my day was a dowdy bingo parlor, had been refurbished in an enlightened joint undertaking between the borough council and a nonprofit charity set up to run it. Now it offers a busy program of new and old movies, amateur and professional theatrical productions, talks and satellite broadcasts from places like the Royal Opera House and Royal Shakespeare Company, and a whole lot more. I was impressed. The restaurants in Christchurch are clearly better than they used to be, the pubs are cleaner, the supermarkets more exotically stocked. Christchurch was my new model community.

I had a look around Christchurch Priory—the biggest parish church in England, I believe, and very fine it is, too—then walked out past the flat where my wife and I once lived (the fish-and-chip shop was still there, I was pleased to see), then on a little-used path around the marshy harbor to the neighboring village of Mudeford, with long, dreamy views across the water to the stately gray hulk of the priory, and I thought that when England is lovely there isn’t any place I would rather be.

—

I had lunch at a nice waterside café in Mudeford, then returned to the car and drove on the five miles or so to Bournemouth. When I did
Notes from a Small Island,
I stayed at the Pavilion Hotel in Bournemouth. It was a pleasant, old-fashioned place and I thought I would stay there again, but it turns out that the Pavilion was torn down in 2005. It took me some time to work this out, because when I googled “Pavilion Hotel, Bournemouth,” I got responses from seventeen hotel-booking companies all faithfully promising to get me a room at the Pavilion Hotel at a very attractive rate. The first one turned out to be for the Pavilion Hotel in Avalon, California.

As usual I am left staggered by the Internet. How can anything be so useful and stupid at the same time? Does somebody somewhere in the Google universe really think that I am looking for any hotel in the world called the Pavilion and that one in California will do me as well as one in Bournemouth? I know these things are managed by an algorithm, but somebody still has to give it parameters. But then, I suppose, that is the thing about the Internet. It is just an accumulation of digital information, with no brains and no feelings—just like an IT person, in fact.

The bottom line is that seventeen companies promised that if I opened their pages they would book me into a hotel that in fact no longer exists. TripAdvisor’s search entry indicated that the Pavilion Hotel in Bournemouth had a rating of 4.7 out of 5. “Book Pavilion Hotel and Save on Pavilion Hotel!” it shouted in strangulated English, so I clicked on its page out of curiosity and of course it turns out that when you reach the right page on TripAdvisor there is no Pavilion there because
there is no Pavilion there
. This is the thing that just drives me mad about the Internet, which is that the commercial parts of it operate on the assumption that there is no particular necessity for any part of it to be accurate, truthful, or reliable. When did that become all right?