Harry Bucknall is one of life’s greatest optimists. Every glass placed before him is half full or someone has gone to the bar to refresh; every morning he announces a day of sunshine, even if he seems to spend most of the evening in this account of his trip around Britain twisting the inside of his cloudy trousers. In this world full of hatred and bad faith, he offers a remedy.
After pilgrimages to Rome on foot and through the Greek islands, which were praised by experienced travelers such as Jan Morris and Patrick Leigh Fermor, the former official stayed at home for the latter, visiting four countries of the United Kingdom and almost half of its 95 counties, a journey of 6,500 kilometers on 75 trains, 16 buses, 16, a service of four boats, a minibus, a truck and a 1953 Morris Oxford.
It begins with Iona in the spring, where she finds the island closed. He writes: “There was an aversion to not cooking in the hotel. If St Columba had visited Iona at the beginning of the season as Bucknall did, the Picts would not have been converted. Regardless, he gets all the food he needs in beer. For the next nine months he travels on a wave of alcohol, helped by having friends everywhere who will buy him a pint and give him a pillow.
Many are from his military days. A visit to Colchester reunites him with Hugh, an old friend with whom he once pantomimed in the Bosnian officer riots. Hugh was beating a drum, while Bucknall was lowered by a rope like a fairy god, with wings and glittering dust. He says that before he could swing his stick, the center was bombarded with mortars and, as The Times war correspondent reported, “two cinema jobs were cut short by the ravages of war”.
Bucknall is a keen observer, as all travel writers must be, noting things like the warning on the Highlands gate that “entrance to this field is free but a bull may charge”, and the passionate young woman he overheard on the train to Ipswich explaining to a friend that her uncontrollable desire for some lucky guy was because she “keeps the bathroom” clean. He spends mornings cleaning with experimental workers in south Yorkshire and reports that while some protested looking after a single cannabis plant while their neighbors were on holiday, others were openly demanding and handing out weed.
He has a good turn of phrase. Glaswegians, with their penchant for spray tans, “glow even in the water”. He writes of how “sleek, efficient and quiet tractors graze Manchester like hungry sharks” and describes a boat going down the Oxford Canal locks “with all the grace of a Harrods lift”.
He also takes us to some of Britain’s lesser-known treasures, such as a simple wooden cup shaped like a coconut shell that some say (they certainly left teeth marks around the mouth) is the Holy Grail. Bucknall finds this at the top of a flight of stairs in Aberystwyth in a Perspex box of the sort you see filled with foreign papers at airports.
Among these amazing chapters are excerpts from Song of Songs in Dorothy L Sayers, I stand Keats, Betjeman and Kenneth Grahame, accompanied by Bucknall’s charming pencil sketches and small history lessons on the likes of Rob Roy and Venerable Bede. Yeah, it’s a little twee, but don’t we need it?
They are not all treasures. Bucknall cuts when raised. Worcester has come under fire for poor city planning which left the medieval town “lobotomised” to create the dramatic state of Lychgate shopping centre. He suggests that the planners should have put their heads over the pike to allow the dual carriageway of the A44 to pass near the cathedral. A hotel in Stowmarket that looked out of place on the internet has turned into an “old country house”, while Leicester is a major road project. He writes: “It was as if, after excavating one king, the city was hunting for another.”
He also takes us to the diversity of British religion, going to the carlisle cathedral, visiting a synagogue in Bristol and one of the 101 mosques in Bradford, where the imam cheers when Bucknall says he is from Dorset. “Hard country!” he says. “Mayor of Casterbridge!” Everywhere at Bucknall he finds friendship instead of conflict.
He seems never to have gone out of his way to find discord, although he does record the grumbling of some Halifax natives about their Asian neighbours. Overall, Bucknall is keener to paint a more tolerant Britain, from all angles, than some would have you believe. For example, in east London, he finds a refugee who refuses those who urge him to follow sharia. “‘I fled Syria to escape such extremes,'” he said.
It’s a rose-tinted view indeed, but is that worse than jaundiced? Pauline, the 89-year-old writer she meets at Beachy Head, makes you feel better than any visit to social media, which can lead you to the edge of a cliff. He told her: “We may not always get it right and we certainly don’t have all the answers, but how lucky we are to live in such a beautiful place among such diverse people.” I often feel that it is they, or us, who make it beautiful.” This hope echoes his devotional sentiments, culminating in “To Life” written in English, Arabic and Hebrew. It may not be as authentic a British show as it really is, but the Bucknallised version is very interesting.
A Road for All Time: A Tribute to Britain by Harry Bucknall (Constable £25 pp304). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Standard UK P&P on orders over £25. Special pricing is available for Times+ members
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