End of the Road – Gary McQuiggin

So here is the long overdue final instalment of this hitchhiking saga that finished only two weeks ago or so. It felt like such a criminally short amount of time and it still does. When the author Julio Cortazar and his wife Carol Dunlop set off from Paris to Marseilles along the Autoroute they spent 33 days visiting every single rest stop and entered into another world they dubbed ‘Parkingland’ with it’s own symbolism, it’s own architecture and an epic sense of the mysterious and unknown co-existing alongside the banal.

It’s this sense of the mysterious and unknown that gave our journey significance, this sense that is so easily dismissed as having no place in the everyday. What’s so scary about a service station? After all it’s just somewhere to go when you need petrol or overpriced junk food. It takes on another air when the prospect of spending the night drinking costa coffee because no one will pick up hitchhikers at this time of night is in your mind. Let alone the worrying prospect of being a hitchhiker at this time of night, are the people driving at this time of night scarier than the people driving during the day? Do you care to find out?

Anyway I’ll save these digressions for another blog, in the meantime I’ll fill you in with what was the final leg of our journey. We awoke at my dad’s house in Newcastle and after a quick obligatory visit from my grandparents we set off in company of this our first driver of the day. Okay so this wasn’t hitchhiking sure, it wasn’t the first time we’d cut a corner on this trip however given our time restraint we wanted to play it safe with the only shot that I felt we had to get. The ebb and flow that is hitchhiking is not as predictable as the ebb and flow of the tide and this shot depended on a particular movement of the tide we couldn’t miss. My biggest regret about this whole affair has been that time restraint, necessary as it was for the sake of finance, other commitments and the ultimate brevity of the film.

Anyway when we arrived in Northumberland our destination revealed itself on our right. Holy Island, or Lindisfarne as it is also known is a real gem of the Northumbrian coastline. It was the first point of invasion for the Vikings and is twice a day cut off from the mainland by the tide. In times past pilgrims would make their way across the sands to the monastery that rested on Lindisfarne. Or perhaps drunks would make their way to sample the fine Mead that they still produce on the island (only half a bottle left Onny!) These days if you want to get to Holy Island you take the causeway, however you are still restricted to two times a day when the tide is out as the causeway floods along with the sands.

We spent very little time on Lindisfarne itself (a quick excursion to check the progress of the tide) but there was something magical about the way the sun came out from behind the clouds (fucking graduated ND filters hadn’t arrived yet!) and the icy seaweed dissolved beneath the rushing waters along with the road and the feet of both myself and my tripod. I could go on for longer about the causeway but perhaps I should leave something for my film!

We set off with the tide on our heels until we reached our next destination, an isolated but far from lonely little diner just south of the Scottish border. My dad and I had visited it when I was last up North but we decided that fewer people were likely to stop for a Stotty here than stop at the petrol station by the Berwick-Upon-Tweed junction. As appetising as those stotties are!

So we headed back to a Morrisons on the outskirts of Berwick-upon-Tweed, we were quickly moved on from the forecourt by the staff after an amusingly brief conversation with the staff about the dangers of hitchhiking. We stood down the road by the roundabout leaving the Morrisons (not their property!) with the added bonus of access to the drivers leaving the Premier Inn and the McDonalds that shared this little retail estate. We decided that so close to the finishing line a sense of proportion would help us get a lift.

And sure enough soon we were in our final car, an ex RAF man on his way to visit his parents in a town called Inverkeithing just past Edinburgh. He offered to take us to said town where we could catch a train into central Edinburgh. Considering that were we to arrive on the outskirts of Edinburgh it would probably have meant getting public transport of some sort from there anyway we decided to take this offer and cross both the of the Forth bridges just West of Edinburgh. We followed the A1 up past the coastline as

the sun set West, Torness nuclear power station arose to the East. When flying along the route on Google Earth before we had set off, Torness was one of the only landmarks besides the cities we passed through directly (London, Newcastle & Edinburgh) that appeared as a 3d rendering.

It’s interesting the way Google Earth flattens the landscape into these sort of digital folk maps where the only buildings you see are the ones users have added to the map for their own purposes.

Big cities are of course rendered like 3d tourist attractions, but outside of them the landscape is marked by isolated houses amidst flattened towns or old forgotten towers enjoying long absent grandeur as the trees and pylons that hide them are squashed. There is also something to be said about the way digital mapping (google, Satnav) works the same way the motorway does in that it reduces the world. You don’t even need to know the names of the junctions you turn on as everything is renamed ‘The Next Junction’ and ‘The Second Roundabout’.

Anyway it wasn’t long before we arrived in Inverkeithing, a shithole apparently though it seemed nice enough. We hopped onto a train to Edinburgh Waverley station and soon we had reached our destination.

I’m sure you’ll all agree that this is a good enough place to end, my camera battery certainly did. The rest will come out in the edit I guess!