LEJOG Day 42: Congleton to Macclesfield

Weather: Sunny to start, then overcast with chilly southerly

Distance covered today: 22.0km (13.8mi)

Last night's B&B: The Lamb Inn (£35)

Cumulative distance: 814.3km (506.0mi)/ % Complete: 46.3%

GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 42 (click!)

The calm before the storm? Today was undoubtedly the easiest day of my journey so far.  Most of the way lay along the Macclesfield Canal, attractive and quiet, and above all, flat!  The path underfoot was also very comfortable. There has obviously been the odd shower in these parts, so the going is excellent; slightly springy but not muddy – simply perfect for walking. There were few fellow walkers on the towpath, but I did meet a number of oncoming narrowboats, their crews inevitably very friendly, though somewhat preoccupied with the business of negotiating a staircase of 12 locks all in a row at Bosley Locks.  Such was the comfort of my progress that I achieved the fastest overall daily speed of the journey so far. I’m fairly certain that given the difficulty of the terrain ahead, this record will not be bettered, nor indeed will I try to do so.

Unusually, the day started off with me in decisive mode. Late last night, I finally draped three full OS maps all over the double bed in my B&B, and recognised what had been beginning to concern me for the last few days. My intention had originally been to make my way to the start of the Pennine Way at Edale, but this seemed unnecessary as I was already just about at that latitude. I cancelled the Edale booking and booked an alternative with the intention of joining the Pennine Way slightly further north, but I hadn’t addressed the effect of this on the previous legs. Seeing it all laid out in front of me showed that I would actually be travelling south-east again and I’ve had enough of that!  I cancelled two B&Bs, booked a new one plus an extra rest day (tomorrow!). For once, it all worked out smoothly and I was able to set out much happier that the route now makes more sense.

Meanwhile, I have also almost concluded negotiations with Sherpavan, who will ferry my overnight baggage over all the stages of the Pennine Way, with the exception of the first six. I will now not be doing the first stage, and Veronica will again be visiting me for my rest day before the second stage and will help me with that, so I will only have to carry the full load for four out of the nineteen stages of the Pennine Way!  What is more, I have also concluded a similar arrangement for both the West Highland Way and the Great Glen Way!  I am hugely relieved about this development. I know just how big a difference it will make on the steep slopes from my experience on Offa’s Dyke. I was beginning to worry that the strain on my limbs would result in injury serious enough to jeopardise the journey, not to mention the safety issues at the time and the possibility of permanent damage to knees or hips.

I remember learning during my training programme for LEJOG that the Titsey family motto was “Flectes, non Franges ” (“Bend but do not break!”).  At the time, I decided that this would be precisely the right motto for my LEJOG (See post of Tuesday 22nd March 2011). I also recall my mother saying that there is no problem so big that throwing a bit of money at it won’t help!  It seems to me that this development is a fine application of my mother’s Irish logic.

These happy developments meant that I was feeling fairly carefree as I set out this morning. Mistake! I turned right when I should have turned left and only discovered the problem when my gadget told me I was heading 180 degrees in the wrong direction! Much later, I was talking to Veronica on the phone when I missed the exit from the canal path with a similar result! Still, the walk was so pleasant today that a couple of extra kilometres didn’t make any difference to my mood!

As I marched along the canal, I got to thinking about my comment yesterday that I can’t remember at all the thought experiments of my school days. I’m sure they are down there in my subconscious, but they are clearly buried deep down. For some reason, it made me think of my experience in bringing a computer and its memory back to life some years ago. At the time, I was commuting to The Hague on a weekly basis and living in a flat while there. I decided I needed a home computer for use in The Hague and to this end I would cannibalise our very first home PC which still had useful bits and pieces of hardware, including the hard drive with our earliest computer files and memories. I bought a new operating system, motherboard, processor and a new chassis amongst other bits and pieces, but I did it all on the cheap. I then spent some very entertaining hours in those lonely evenings in The Hague putting it all together and solving the myriad problems that kept springing up.

Helped perhaps by the odd whiskey, the new PC became a person to me! It was a sort of Frankenstein's monster, sleeping quietly on my work-bench, but soon to awake. On the day I was finally ready to fire it up, nothing happened. I tried all sorts of approaches, but all I got was warning beeps from the BIOS, a bit like the emergency alarm on a life-support system in the A&E ward. Serious brain surgery was called for!  I took ever more drastic action, until finally I thought that I had inadvertently formatted the hard drive (wiped it clean), a bit like performing a full frontal lobotomy on my somnolent monster. I remember exhausting every possibility over a period of a week or so, until only a single option remained.

My monster stirred!  There was still nothing on the screen (its eyes), nor would it respond to the mouse (its limbs), and there was no sound from the speakers (its mouth), but I could hear that the BIOS was alive and searching for the operating system (brain function). I tweaked it some more and suddenly I was overwhelmed with joy as it opened its eyes and fired its brain (the operating system loaded)! The mouse started operating (it was no longer paralysed!) It still had no memory (it couldn’t access the old files on the hard drive), but a few tweaks later and the installation of a few programmes (a rudimentary education, perhaps?) and suddenly its memory was restored. The installation of appropriate drivers (advanced physiotherapy?) meant that all the ancillary functions (including speech) were restored! My monster came back to life and kept me company those long, lonely years in The Hague. Even as I write this, it is languishing inactive in the garage at home, and Veronica just can’t understand my reluctance to commit it to the dump! That would be murder!

To be fair, I have never found anybody the slightest bit interested in the story of me as Frankenstein, so if your eyes have glazed over, you are in excellent company! I suspect though that trying to resurrect those dormant memories from my schoolboy subconscious will be even more difficult than bringing my monster back to life.  In a way, it doesn’t really matter. Those thoughts were once a part of me; they made me who I am and presumably influenced my further development.

So in a weird way, all this is really anyway their product!

There was something quite traditional about Congleton. The old bandstand looks down on a rugby field in the public park. Certainly not Surrey!

There was also this rather forlorn and overweight lion. Presumably he is a post-Empire lion.

Then there was this hugely incongruous paddle steamer hidden in the bushes on a non-navigable little river! Apparently it was an ex-trawler that had been bought by a local business man when about to be scrapped during the cod wars. He intended it to become a restaurant, but the venture was not a success and eventually the boat burned out. It is now derelict!

The Macclesfield Canal with a hill in the background called "The Cloud"

The glorious towpath along the canal

Activity at a lock

The Fool's Nook? Of course I had to have a bite there! It turned out that it was once owned by the last jester in England, Samuel "Maggoty" Johnson. It served the Irish navvies who built the Macclesfield Canal

Fishing on the banks of the canal. I greeted them both, but the second fisherman failed to respond at all. Probably hates walkers!

A flock of Canada Geese on a break!

A wonderful winding path that takes horses and walkers to join the towpath on the other side of the canal. The care and attention to detail are just a joy.

Canal-side living in Macclesfield

A mother with a brood of eleven ducklings!  Can they all be hers?