Take a Hike

Chapter 1 - Mr James Tandy

As promised, today I begin the serialisation of a novel that I wrote in the Summer of 2006. It’s original title was frankly ridiculous and is something I look back on and cringe about. So I’ve changed it to Take a Hike, which will become clear as we progress from chapter to chapter.

There is a certain naivety to the novel, it was written 18 years ago for crying out loud, and I hadn’t formulated my literary style as such. There is a wealth of humour in the story though and a great deal of the bizarre. Basically, I was trying to find my feet as a writer, which, I’m happy to say, I now have.

The idea for this novel originally came from a very strange looking farmhouse that I saw on a trip to the Derbyshire Peak District. It was of a gothic design and there was something rather un-nerving and foreboding about the place. It made quite an impact on me to the point where I began to imagine the kind of people who might have lived there over the years or, indeed, who lived there at that time.

From that little germ of a thought I came up with the characters and the story you are about to embark upon.

I sincerely hope you will enjoy it.

So ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Take a Hike.

Take a Hike - Chapter 1: Mr James Tandy

A springtime trip to the Norwegian fjords was James Tandy’s last foreign holiday. It had seemed like a good idea at first, a short mini-cruise with a couple of old pals to that part of the Scandinavian coast and back. It had only lasted for four days and took in some spectacularly breath-taking scenery, however, for the majority of the time on board his stomach had continuously flipped like a pancake as he suffered terribly from a rampant bout of mal-de-mer and had, thus, rejoiced greatly upon returning to dock in Hull whereupon he actually dropped to his knees and kissed the concrete in gratitude.

There was nothing else to blame for it other than his own weak digestive system as the weather had been fine and the North Sea exceptionally calm. But he didn’t take to the ocean well and was not a natural sailor. As a result he had spent a good deal of the trip in his cabin with his head hanging over the lavatory pan, beseeching the good Lord and all the Heavenly host to make it stop.

He was clearly a landlubber and that excursion had convinced him that he should always remain one for the rest of his days.

Tandy also had a morbid fear of flying that stretched back to as far as he could remember and had been significantly heightened due to a particularly terrifying period of air turbulence on the way back from the Munich Beer Festival of 1990. This, when added to his lack of sea legs, rather restricted his travelling options to foreign parts come holiday season.

He’d had to fly at times, of course, as his second wife always insisted on having two weeks in a Mediterranean resort every year. Tandy had always reluctantly agreed, and had clambered fearfully aboard many a dodgy looking 737 with a light sheen of perspiration on his forehead and his pulse rate throbbing like a strobe light only to sit and clasp the arm rests of his seat as if the whole world depended on it. The fact that he flew to those resorts at all was even more remarkable really given his inability to achieve a tan, as blazing hot sunshine was another thing that disagreed with him. In the Med he usually remained either in the shade of a palm umbrella or covered up at all times, smothered in the highest factor sun block he could get his trembling hands on, which rather defeated the whole point of visiting places like Spain, Turkey and the Greek Islands in the middle of August.

Another problem Tandy had was that he would invariably have terrible, explosive diarrhoea at some point during the holiday. It seemed to make no difference which part of the world he found himself in because as sure as eggs were eggs he would be reaching for the ‘Diocalm’ by day three of the holiday.

His stomach showed absolutely no partiality or bias; all Mediterranean countries received the same response from it. It mattered not to his digestive system whether it was Corfu, Capri or the Costa del Sol, they may as well have all been one and the same.

The worst episode had been in a small, somewhat untidy, resort in Halkidiki where he discovered to his abject horror that the local plumbing was woefully inadequate and that lavatory paper was to be disposed of in the bathroom bin rather than being flushed away with everything else. He still shuddered at the memory of that one.

Perhaps all that had been part of his reasoning behind the cruise. With the termination of the marriage he was a free agent and no longer had to suffer soaring temperatures, a sunburnt and subsequently peeling nose, the trots and the constant worry that the plane was going to plummet out of the sky and plunge into the Alps or Pyrenees, killing everyone on board.

He’d always fancied a cruise and, as an intelligent man, knew full well that the cooler Scandinavian climate would be far more suited to his delicate skin than the Mediterranean. In addition to this the thought of the boat sinking didn’t bother him as he was an excellent swimmer and there were plenty of lifeboats on the craft for all seeing as concern for passenger wellbeing had greatly improved since the days of the Titanic. Sadly he hadn’t taken the problem of seasickness into consideration and the trip had been a nightmarish travesty.

But now, at the age of forty-five and with two broken marriages behind him, he realised that, as the good book says, ‘a fool’s eyes wander to the ends of the earth’, and decided that there was plenty for him to see, do and explore in his own native United Kingdom.

Indeed he had only set foot across the Scottish border once in his whole life, on a business trip to Edinburgh, and his Welsh excursions had been limited to one rain-sodden childhood holiday in Rhyl with his family and a boozy trip to Cardiff to watch a Five Nations rugby match in his late teenage years with his mates. As for Ireland he had yet to go anywhere near the place and since getting there meant either a flight or a ferry trip, no matter how short, he would leave the Emerald Isle for the time being and focus on the mainland of Britain.

Besides which, two failed marriages were enough, there would not be a third, and he could now travel the length and breadth of the country at his own leisure.

Money was not a problem to Tandy, as the last divorce had been as painless as humanly possible. There were no children involved and everything had been split equally down the middle. They had sold their three-bed terraced house in Philsey for a very good price and he had moved to a nice, new two-bedroom apartment in Ingleby that overlooked the Leeds-Liverpool canal. He earned a pretty good income as a freelance website designer, drove a sensible car and had not a care in the world.

From time to time he bumped into Tina, his ex-wife, and there was no friction or animosity between them. Quite the opposite in fact, they got on better apart than they ever did when they were married. The divorce had been of mutual agreement, as they just no longer seemed to have time for each other anymore.

Tina was a hotel manager, a damned good one, and spent a lot of her time at work. Tandy, being freelance, spent a lot of his time with his face in front of a computer monitor. With the passing of time sexual intercourse had become as rare as rocking horse manure and it just seemed to the pair of them that they would be better off living totally separate lives, which they proceeded, quite amicably, to do.

And so, after the Norwegian fiasco, Tandy had decided that from now on he was going to keep his feet safely on terra firma.

The following year he had visited Snowdonia for a week, on his own, staying in a nice bed and breakfast run by a very friendly family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Low lying cloud, a thick mist and several attempts by the proprietors of the guesthouse at converting him had somewhat tarnished the first few days but the fog had lifted by the Tuesday and Tandy had pulled on a pair of trainers, attached his bum bag (containing his wallet, a small bottle of water and two Mars bars) around his waist and climbed to the summit of Mount Snowden.

It was the most physically exhausting thing he had ever attempted in his life. He had no personal fitness regime as such to see him in good stead for it and his heels were badly blistered from the climb. But it had ignited something within him. Standing at the top of the highest mountain in Wales and surveying the glorious view from up there he realised that he had, at last, found his ideal leisure pursuit – walking.

The last few days of the holiday were spent rambling around some of the lower slopes around the area and Tandy thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it despite his tender heels and several further attempts at getting him to join the J. W’s.

Since then, his weekends had been taken up with exploring the Yorkshire Moors and Dales, which were virtually on his doorstep and yet, for reasons he didn’t have an answer for, he’d always taken them for granted or with a pinch of salt. He’d lived in Philsey for twelve years, since meeting Tina, and until then he had never once taken the opportunity to explore the beautiful scenery that lay all around and within a stone’s throw of that town.

Upon returning from Snowdonia he had gone, the following Saturday, to the charming town of Kipston on the edge of the Dales where he bought a proper pair of expensive hiking boots, a good sized but lightweight rucksack, a hiking pole, a compass and all manner of other equipment that seemed necessary for him to get the most out of his new found interest. He had no idea how to use a compass at that point but he was determined to learn. Since then, he added to that equipment on a regular basis and could be seen most weekends yomping across some patch of heath or moorland in that part of the country.

He joined a walking club and despite finding several of the members a trifle staid, he gleaned what he could from their expertise and experience. He learnt how to read ordinance survey maps and how to travel light. He bought a small survival handbook that the club recommended and listened intently to lectures on what to do if you found yourself stranded for the night or low on supplies. He learnt the countryside code and adhered to it at all times and in a very short while he became a proficient and knowledgeable rambler. No more were the days of climbing Welsh mountains with two chocolate bars and a small bottle of water. He was prepared for anything and everything and come rain or shine he would be out walking whenever possible. His fitness improved, he lost weight and he felt generally happier with himself and life in general.

Being a rambling singleton suited him. When one spends most of their working hours cloistered in a back-bedroom office staring into a screen, typing HTML, manipulating images and writing JavaScript the great outdoors can come as a blessed and much needed relief. Hill walking opened his senses to things that he had never known before. The smell of heather and bracken and the musty odour of damp earth, that merged beautifully with the pleasing petrichor scent of rain. His eyes feasted on panoramic scenery that had been virtually on his back doorstep and yet had gone unnoticed until then and a multitude of dells, nooks, rivers and waterfalls had been revealed to him and he had taken them in with the gleeful exuberance of a small child. Until then he hadn’t realised how green the world was in places. He tasted a whole host of differing local beers and produce. He enjoyed the feel of rock and moorland under his feet and it’s coarseness on his hands as he scrambled up Pen-y-Ghent and the other Yorkshire peaks. He heard the screech of birds of prey as they soared on currents of air, listened intently to the piping call of the peewit and watched hares sparing in the spring. Even the hardy sheep of that area and those who tended them became objects of interest. All this was as new and as exciting to him as if he were the first man to discover a new continent.

As for the singleness, Tandy was definitely sure on that one. There would never be another Mrs Tandy, a meaningful relationship with someone was not off the cards but as for tying the knot; he was through with all that. Besides which, he liked being single and having to be responsible for no one but himself. In addition, marriage hadn’t been exactly a joyride, especially the first time round.

The first Mrs Tandy had been trouble from the word go. Her name was a problem for a start; being Mandy. She just couldn’t get her head round the idea of being known as Mrs Mandy Tandy and had wanted her own surname to be the marital one. Tandy had stood resolutely against this because her surname was James and he didn’t like the idea of going around being called Mr James James. In the end his own dogged persistence had won and so she became the unfortunate bearer of the name Mandy Tandy, which she deeply resented from the off.

            It didn’t really help either that at the office where she worked as a typist she was already referred to under the epithet Randy Mandy. Now she was Randy Mandy Tandy. And it stuck in her craw like a fish bone.

But there was more, much more, to their marital problems than this. To begin with they married rather young, both being just twenty years old at the time. Physical attraction was not a point of concern because Tandy was an ordinary, non-descript looking sort of chap whereas Mandy was a tall, slim, pert-breasted, long legged beauty of a girl who had striking facial features and wore the big piled-up hair and revealing clothing that were favoured in the latter part of the 1980’s.

Unfortunately she had the habit of showing those lovely legs and charming bust off in outfits that would give any self-respecting clergyman a seizure and any self-respecting schoolboy a wet dream. This in turn led to Mandy collecting a host of male admirers at the office and one gentleman in particular.

Tandy had suspected something was amiss for a while and was not entirely shocked when he came home one lunchtime to find his wife and her supervisor rolling around stark naked in their marital bed making so much noise that they hadn’t even heard him come through the front door.

To Tandy’s credit he took the whole thing very well. A lot of men would have flew into a violent rage and attacked the other man with the nearest heavy, blunt object. Tandy merely shrugged his shoulders, went down stairs and made himself a coffee and a ham and mustard sandwich. When Mandy’s lover had apologetically left the house, with his clothing in a state of dishevelment with one shoe on and the other in his hand, Tandy announced to his wife that he had suspected for some time that she had been having an affair and knew that the marriage was doomed and destined for the rocks but was just a little bit miffed that she’d actually done the deed in their bed and asked her if she would be so good as to change the sheets before he went to bed and would she mind moving out tout suite.

Six months later they were divorced.

With the wonderful gift that is hindsight Tandy would not have even entered into the marriage in the first place. He had fallen for Mandy on purely outward appearances and hadn’t considered the fact that she wasn’t exactly the brightest button in the box or that neither of them had even the remotest thing in common.

Tandy was a quiet, bookish person whose idea of a relaxing weekend was going to watch Slede City Football Club play at home every other Saturday, going for a few jars at his local with his pals and having a damn good lie in with the Sunday papers the following day.

Mandy, on the other hand, loved the nightclubs and was usually in one with her equally narrow-minded and screechy girl friends until two or three in the morning most Friday nights. She would then go up to Slede for a day’s shopping with the aforementioned friends on Saturdays before visiting another nightclub that night and sleeping off the effects until mid-afternoon on Sunday, often having been violently sick in the back of a taxi or over the garden wall onto their neighbour’s rockery on the way home.

Tandy liked quiz shows, the news and wildlife documentaries on the television. Mandy was thoroughly absorbed in all the soap operas leading to a separate set being bought and put in the bedroom so that even on most midweek evenings they would be apart.

Lovemaking occurred once a week, regular as clockwork, on Wednesday nights. It was never understood why that night of the week was designated for that purpose; it just seemed to be. It was done as cleanly and as quickly as possible with little or no foreplay and never any pillow talk afterwards. It wasn’t that he found her any less physically desirable than when they first met, it was more to do with the intellectual void between them and the fact that he’d once caught her examining her nails during intercourse.

Tandy just got fed up with making love to someone who could spend hours on the phone talking about make up or who could tell you the names of the entire cast of Home and Away but couldn’t tell you what the capital city of The United Sates was or name three of Shakespeare’s plays.

There were a myriad of other differences of course. They could never agree on décor or food or finance or any other household matter and Tandy felt that the office supervisor had actually done them both a favour by committing adultery with his wife because it was the catalyst for the divorce that they had both been wanting for a while. The marriage had lasted a total of three years, nine months, one week and four days, including the six months it took for the decree absolute to come through.

His second wife, Tina, was different, however. She didn’t have Mandy’s stunning looks or model figure, but she was infinitely more intelligent and had far more in common with Tandy. Tina was five foot six, compared to Mandy’s Five eleven – six one in stiletto’s, she had thick, wavy red hair that she always kept in a tidy bob. She had a small, pleasant, slightly freckled face, which was unfortunately marred by a little white scar on her left cheek from a dog bite she had suffered as a child due to her brother teasing the poor animal. But she was attractive and bonny.

But, most importantly, Tina possessed in profusion something that Mandy lacked in bucket loads – a sense of humour. Tina liked to laugh, loudly, and she did so often and, unlike Mandy, didn’t need to be loaded with vodka and coke to see the funny side of things. She liked many of the same television programmes that Tandy watched and she encouraged him in his intellectual pursuits, including setting up his own web design and desktop publishing business.

They had met at a hotel in Slede. Tandy had been sent to Slede by the company he worked for at the time for some technical expo when computers were still considered avant-garde and the name Microsoft was yet to be a household name on everyone’s lips. Tina had just become assistant manager of the hotel Tandy was staying in and he had got to chat to her on the front desk one evening when things were quiet. He asked her when she had a night off. She told him. He asked her out. She agreed.  The long and the short of it is they hit it off straight away, had a lovely evening, finished up in bed and the rest, as they say, is history.

At first they were content to just live together and Tandy quite happily made the move into her flat that she lived in at the time. The way things were going with the rapid rise of the computer industry and with the arrival of the worldwide web he saw location as being no barrier to his chosen career in the rapidly growing world of I.T. and so they had bought the house in Philsey at a time when prices were laughably low.

They waited a couple of years before deciding to marry. Tandy was a confirmed member of the ‘once bitten, twice shy’ club but knew that Tina, as a person, was in a different class to the shallow and selfish girl to whom he had been previously united.

The marriage itself was a simple one, a registry office do with a bit of a celebration afterwards at the house followed by a honeymoon in Salou. It was on that honeymoon that Tina first became a sun worshipper and came home the colour of polished oak; the only white bits being where the bottom half of her bikini came into contact. Tandy came home as white as he had left and with a badly sore crotch from where his briefs had continuously rubbed against his sweaty skin.

Things were generally fine between them and whilst, like all married couples, they had their arguments from time to time, they were not explosive and were few and far between. Then came Tina’s promotion to manager and she spent more and more time at the hotel with the prospect of a move to one of the larger ones in the chain down south in the near future if she wanted it. It was at the same time that Tandy’s business took off with a bang and work became the dominant factor in both their lives and they eventually drifted so far apart that they reached the decision to separate yet remain the best of friends.

There were several ladies in the walking club that Tandy had joined but none appealed to him in that way. There was just something so off-putting to him about a woman in chunky hiking boots, thick socks, mud-splattered leggings, woolly hat and a waterproof coat.

One lady in particular, a half Polish woman who answered to the name of Saskia, made it transparently clear very early on that she would like to have more than club membership in common with him and always tried to sit next to or near him at meetings. On a hike across Wharfedale one Saturday she had pinched his bottom as he climbed over a stile and gave him a grin that had the expression ‘how about it?’ written all over it. Since then he tried to keep as far away from Saskia as he could at both meetings and hikes. She wasn’t a bad person; she just wasn’t his type.

Besides, Tandy was prepared to wait and he was not a great believer in casual sex and promiscuity. It would happen one day, with a lady that he felt he had something in common with, and until then he was happy with the way his life was going. He liked himself as well. He was of average height being five foot ten, which was an embarrassing factor in his and Mandy’s wedding photos, his dark brown hair had not yet begun to recede or grey and his face still looked relatively youthful to the point where many people would wrongly guess his age and place him as being in his mid-thirties. He had soft brown eyes that were nicely spaced apart above his aquiline nose and he had full, almost feminine lips that were distracted from by the presence of a squarish chin and firm jaw line. The only facial feature that he didn’t like were his eyebrows that were just a tad too thin and wispy.

He’d made some good friends, of both sexes, since moving to Ingleby, his client base was continually expanding and he was popular with both groups of people. Now, he was a free agent in both business and personal life and he was extremely happy with his lot.

Things had become very busy recently and Tandy had forsaken the chance to ramble for several weekends to complete an immense job of setting up a web site for a local school. It was a lucrative contract being a private school rather than a state one, which he tried to avoid as budget restraints in those establishments meant that he would invariably end up doing a lot of work very cheaply. But with the end of the current job in sight his thoughts began to turn towards having a well-earned break.

He had spent dozens of hours working on the contract and he missed the moors and dales with the feeling of the wind on his face and the gratifying burn in his leg muscles as he reached the top of a hill. Within a week the school job would be finished and Tandy Web Design would be closing for a fortnight. He needed a holiday badly, a long walking holiday to blow away the cobwebs and fill his lungs with fresh, clean country air. The club was going on a hike that very weekend and he was fully intent on joining them and picking a few of the members brains as to ideas for where he could go.

To be continued…

Chapter 2 will appear next Friday