Week 11 - FM

I am fed up with it.  And fed up with myself moaning about it.  So I will not even write its name: M. F’ing M.  FM. 

Jan dropped me off where I left off at the Rose & Castle car park in Ansty.  I crossed the road into the first kissing gate which was just a well of FM.  Entering the first field which adjoins the Oxford canal and I find the canal has invaded the field.  I run backwards and forwards trying to find a dryish way through and just have to content myself with splodging through the least wet bit.  Turning off from the canal I try to ascend a 2m slope.  It takes three attempts as there is so much FM I just keep sliding back. There is all manner of FM: the slimy sort that sends your feet sliding sideways, the deep soft sort that your feet sink right into the and sticky sort that makes your shoes double in size and treble in weight.  Approaching Corley I enter a wooded area where the path has been totally lost in a mass of fallen branches and FM.  That’s enough about the FM.

It is a bit warmer this morning than last week, but only just, and there is no sun.  I go for two layers above and two below, but I soon regret it.  With the damp air and without the regular burst of solar energy it feels a lot colder than last week.  So as I finish each map I stuff them up my front as a street-dweller might layer their clothes with newspaper. 

On this misty morning and as a ran through the badlands of Bedworth, turning off a short arm of the Coventry Canal and onto the track bed of the former Newdigate Colliery railway, the atmospheric conditions made it easy to see how this place may have once looked.  Black faced miners guiding emaciated ponies to pull coal trucks down to the canal for loading.  A landscape pock-marked with pits; colliers trudging to work across causeways through the marshy land.  An old coal truck has been left as a reminder of what once went on. 

Through Bed’th my navigation goes a bit awry and I have to ask a passer by whether I am on Tower Street.  Stupidly I had not looked up, for there is a magnificent water tower.  I assume it once had a waterworks around it but all that appears to be demolished now and housing surrounds the tower.

My work includes trying to improve the quality of new housing developments by promoting the use of the Building for Life standard, and in Bedworth I find a terrible example of what we are trying to overcome.  There is a phenomenon called the ‘multiple flush syndrome’; the idea that you have to build sewers big enough to cope with everyone flushing their toilets at the same time.  When this is applied to housing developments it means having roads so over-specified that if the refuse lorry was doing it rounds, a fire engine could break down, the water main could burst and there would still be room for a car to get by.  This housing estate has been built on the assumption that every household would have four cars and they would all leave for work at the same time.  It has roundabouts that would not disgrace a motorway.  I resolve to come back and take some photos to illustrate what not to do.

Along the way there was plenty of the horsey-culture that seems to be one of the main industries on Coventry’s periphery and a couple of fisheries; the odd car or tent dotted about a landscape of small ponds, with an occasional glimpse through the mist of a solitary ghostly angler.

Progress is slow, what with all the FM, but I finally make it to the Bull & Butcher at Corley where Jan has been briefed to pick me up.  I have almost completed my first circumnavigation (love that word) of A Coventry Way.

This week the remainder of map 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 & 17 completed

17k at a pace of 8.15 min/k

So far 17 maps completed: 59k