The first rule of Bald Headed Walking Club is don’t get lost. The first time the Bald Headed Walking Club went walking we got lost. Do you know why we got lost? Because we followed somebody with a map. Not just any map. This was an Ordnance Survey map. A map so detailed it contains information that you can use to find outside toilets in rows of terraced housing. The map belonged to the man who’d organised the walk and decided that what we really needed to do was go to Todmorden early one morning and climb and climb and climb until we came to Bridestones Moor from where you can see everything including The Dark Side. Except we were going around in circles. We knew we were going around in circles because we passed a house that must have once been a chapel which had floating from its side two shiny pink balloons, one a two and the other a one. You don’t see that many shiny pink balloons on the moors above Todmorden. We were lost but a kindly local took it upon himself to impart local knowledge and pointed us in the right direction. The map was put away and we trudged on and down and down and down until we arrived at the back of a row of terraced houses with an outside toilet and the only way we could get back to the road that would lead us to Todmorden was to jump over somebody’s back garden wall and walk down their garden path. Said somebody was watching the racing on Channel 4 and he didn’t seem to mind. Once we arrived in civilisation we had a coffee and decided that we’d had such a lovely time that we had to do it all over again in a couple of months. Except this time without the map.
The Bald Headed Walking club was three then it was four and yesterday it was five but it was too hot to go walking over the moors seeing as how they were tinder dry and it was heading towards thirty celsius and what with there being no shade on the moors because there’s no trees, and have you ever heard of walking parasols? The idea is that we meet up in Hebden Bridge or Todmorden or Marsden, somewhere with a train station and moors above it because one of the Bald Headed Walking Club – who isn’t actually that bald, but comes from The Dark Side – travels the furthest and doesn’t want to sit on a bus for two hours before he starts tramping up hills and over moors. So its easier you see.
There’s lots of good walking to be had on the moors above Hebden and Todmorden and Marsden and over the last couple of years we’ve familiarised ourselves with a lot of it; Stoodley Pike, Pule Hill, Widdop and Gorple Reservoir, the back streets of Heptonstall and Slack Bottom. The views are magnificent, the legs ache and we talk and talk and talk about music and books and cricket and gigs and what have you been up to and it’s good to see you again and let’s not get lost next time and we usually do get lost but never that lost and if you’re on a side of a hill you can just go down it and eventually you hit the valley bottom and find a road and then you’re not lost though you may have to put up with some traffic noise for a while but you will have been to the top of the moor and made it to the balcony on Stoodley Pike where there’s graffiti going back centuries and pigeons hiding in the narrow, pitch black staircase that scare you to death.
Yesterday we walked along the Rochdale Canal from Todmorden to Sowerby Bridge. The thinking being that there would be shade and places to stop to along the way to eat our sweaty cheese sandwiches and that it would be downhill all the way and that the chances of getting lost must be so small as to be ridiculous. I mean just don’t stray off the path. Keep looking for canal water. We didn’t stray off the path. We met at the train station at ten o’clock and got a coffee from a busy Tod Market that always has rails of oversized Hawaiian shirts for sale outside it. If you’re ever in need of a XXXL bright yellow Hawaiian shirt with palm leaves on it get yourself to Todmorden. I’ve never seen anybody in Todmorden wearing an XXXL bright yellow Hawaiian shirt come to think of it but maybe they only wear them at night?
Thus began the walk in the bright sunshine. Five men of a certain age with ten miles of canal path in front of them.
We encountered many sights along the way and talked of many things. Finding your own walking pace means that you can fall into conversation with whoever among the group is by your side and thus the conversation evolves along the way. If a breakaway group gets too far ahead they seek shelter under a bridge or welcoming oak and say hello to passing cyclists and fellow walkers as they wait for those of a slower gait and we all come back together and say things like were you ever at that Bongoleeros gig at the Fenton where Pig was chucking lumps of concrete about and I’m reading Paul Morley’s book about Yoko Ono which is also a book about the rise of the Avant-garde and is pretty good and yeah I’ve just been made redundant and last night I had too many beers in Leeds but I’ll soon sweat it out. We saw lots of Canada Geese including a dead one that was truly honking, canal barges in bloom and canal barges covered in mould, terraced houses whose gardens extended via stilted decking over the canal and a man in a hammock under a tree reading a book. We passed the house where Keith Emerson used to live which is outside a Mitsubishi Factory, walked gingerly over rickety footbridges, sweated buckets and took our hats off where their was shade and wiped out brows because we were in the midst of the country’s fifth heatwave of the year.
Around noon we arrived in Hebden Bridge and sat under shady trees in the park and ate our sweaty cheese sandwiches [me] croissant sandwiches made by the missus [The Dark Side], hand cultured yoghurt ndjua whip on rye sourdough with seed toppings sliced into fingers, no crustsa [Mirfield Maestro] and the rest in the park and take advantage of the facilities. It was nice to sit in the shade and rest our legs and bemoan the rise of the Hundred.
It seemed that the nearer we got to Hebden the better the condition of the barges. In the more picturesque parts barges are festooned with flowers and all manner of gaiety, ladies sit out on their decks enjoying glasses of wine in the boiling heat but as you make your way out they show signs of not having been moved for decades; small windows covered in grime, faded name plates, peeling paint and rusty bicycles with flat tyres strapped on to their collapsing roofs. Crafty barge owners spread their narrow territory onto dry land with the aid of car tyres, pallets and decking, some have sheds, some become shrines to Timothy Taylors. Outside Sowerby we will pass a boat [not a barge] on its side in the shallow canal, now a home to ducks and insects.
Onward towards Sowerby passing through Mytholmroyd which has a cricket ground the size of a tennis court and is the same shape as a tennis court. This being a Friday there is no match in progress but I’m making a mental note as to if I should come and watch a game here. Many cyclists pass us warning of their arrival with the tinkling of bells, except for in Hebden where we hear the parp of a car horn as pulled from a 1920s shooting brake – parp parp parp – and the clown behind it wondered why nobody was moving. ‘When I sound my horn I expect you to move.’ It wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d have passed us on a cast iron tricycle or penny farthing wearing a leather flying helmet and goggles – but rather sadly he wasn’t.
It’s agreed that we should call in at the Puzzle Hall Inn in Sowerby for a pint and as if in reaction to this news I notice that my hands have begun to feel rather sticky. I look at them and notice that my red and blotchy fingers are the size of plump sausages. ‘Does anybody else have swollen fingers?’ I ask. Four of us do. We are suffering from what I later discover is heat oedema, a swelling of the veins, the body’s attempt to cool itself by increasing the flow of liquids by widening blood vessels. Oh dear. It’s a good job our walk is at an end. Local Knowledge has us overshooting the escape path to the Puzzle Hall Inn and we have to backtrack slightly and clamber down broken stone steps and there we are on tarmac and the Puzzle Hall Inn is closed until four o’clock which is what the Lead Bald Head had predicted but we laugh in the face of adversity because we are the Bald Headed Walking Club and Local Knowledge tells us that there’s another pub not a hundred yards further down the road, and there is, and it sells Timothy Taylors and I make use of the facilities and run lovely, precious cold water over my hands and the swelling starts to come down. First rule of Bald Headed Walking Club; don’t get heat oedema.
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