Wood Carving, Quaker Meeting House, Settle.
In Settle marketplace, in Yorkshire, I stood my bicycle next to two tourers with razor-thin saddles then pushed open the door of a nearby café. Inside, two women in cycling gear sat over a pot of tea and I was about to give the conventional cyclists’ nod when I realised they were not going to make eye contact. I couldn’t pursue the inevitable chain of speculation that this prompted because after a good morning’s pedalling something far more important was on my mind and that was cheese and onion pie. Installed at a table, I discovered though that all the menu offered was quiche. Now cheese and onion quiche is not cheese and onion pie – obviously. This perhaps northern aperçu was redundant however, as it turned out that the quiche was off anyway. This was not going well but in a flash of inspiration I asked if there was any chance of an off-menu cheese and onion pie and she said yes, she could get one from their baker’s next door. I ordered that and a bottle of dandelion and burdock and sat back triumphantly. Another waitress put a mysterious slip of paper on my table. It had neither my order, nor the price on it, just a single number.
As I waited I thought about the Quaker Meeting House I had just visited. It was one of the oldest in the country - plain, austere almost, and had that quality you sometimes get in religious buildings once you have closed the door behind you: it is as though time has been suspended and space unframed. It’s not the design that does that but what informs the design. What makes it, makes it, so to speak.
The waitress brought my order and I saw to my disappointment that it was a pasty, not a pie. Not only is a quiche not a pie – a pasty is not a pie, either. Only a pie is a pie: does this have to be spelt out? Inside this pasty was some sort of processed mash of cheese and onion and possibly potato. Disappointing. The chips were dry, too, and I mean dry in a suspicious kind of way. An air fryer kind of way. I needed every drop of the dandelion and burdock to get it all down. As an act of self-discipline nonetheless, I left two of the chips.
The cycling ladies were preparing to go, keeping their backs firmly towards me. They were wearing shorts with gel padding – presumably to counter uncomfortable saddles. It is an odd solution to an unnecessary problem, I thought peevishly. Why not just fit a comfortable saddle in the first place?
I paid up and left, riding up a steep incline out of town that eventually beat me so I got off and pushed. Once the gradient had flattened out I started to rattle a bit unsteadily along a rough bridleway. The headbearing was loose, I knew, and I could really feel it here. The bicycle had had to be taken apart recently to straighten a dented downtube and it hadn’t been put back together properly. I’d adjusted it several times but it wouldn’t nip up as it should have. It wasn’t serious for the moment so I put it out of my mind. Magnificent views stretched away over the surrounding hills.
Church Door, All Hallows, Rathmell, Yorkshire.
A horse-drawn caravan stood off the path and as I passed its dog darted at me, snarling and feinting. I was just considering my options in a frantic sort of a way when a figure appeared from the caravan and shouted roughly at the dog which skulked away. Heaven knows what the sheep watching from the other side of a stone wall thought of all this: probably - rather me than them. To my left three horses had ignored the whole fracas.
I then followed a long bumpy descent into a town with a famous outdoor shop whose marketing trumpets the joys of adventure, challenges and self-discovery. It had started to pour with rain so I decided to pop in for a browse and, frankly, some shelter. But it was one minute to closing time as I tried the locked door and the staff kept their eyes firmly averted.
It took me several minutes to cross the main road and then I pulled on my rain cape, put my head down and pedalled off into the deluge. Ten minutes later I came across a huge bowser blocking the road. It was making an emergency delivery of water. In a rainstorm.
Wall Detail, Quaker Meeting House, Settle.
I took all three photos on this rather damp cycle trip with a Hasselblad 500 CM on FP4+ @ 200