XIII | Beaches, Spotty dogs, & Brain damage

26/08/23 

It was the beginning of July 2022 where my life in North Devon began. What was meant to be a 10-day stay turned into a two month one, before I ended up going back in October to live there. I had been looking on the workaway.info website before I even arrived in England, looking for work/voluntary work to kill some time and explore while I was waiting for my UK passport to arrive. Long story short, I didn’t have enough time to apply for my UK passport between booking the trip and leaving the country. Word of advice, sort all that shit out before you book a trip to bounce from one side of the world to the other. Anyway, there was this advertisement that I was really interested in where this couple were looking for people to help with general labour around their property for a week or two. The location was in Lynton, North Devon - right on the south-west coast of England. I really liked the look of the location, and the advertiser was only wanting four hours worth of work a day for four days a week, which is far less than any other advertisement I saw on the site. Ideal!

So after staying with my cousin for my first month of my time in England, I was finally set to head to North Devon. With my backpack, ruck-sack, and massive suitcase - it was go-time. One train ride from Basingstoke to Exeter, another train from Exeter to Barnstaple, and one bus ride from Barnstaple to Barbrook. Roughly five and a half hours of traveling. I remember being anxious as hell because I wasn’t used to using buses and trains yet. Which was a little bit weird after being perfectly capable of flying 30 hours across the world and being relaxed as anything about it.

On arrival I was welcomed by Angie and her partner Andrew, as well as their two very nervous dalmatians - Dulcie and Daisy. There was also another workawayer called Sam.

Sam was quite an interesting chap. He lived in Bristol where he was finishing up his neurodiversity degree. I didn’t know what the fuck that was, but he had great fun explaining it to me - it’s something he was very passionate about. Angie wanted to bring in two workawayers around similar ages thinking it would be cool if we got on well, but Sam and I could not have been more different from each other. “I don’t think you’re cut from the same cloth somehow” is what Angie said to me within the first day of my stay there. We got along fine, but we were indeed very different from one another. I remember most mornings I’d wake up, leave the caravan and he would greet me with a “Morning gorgeous!”. Now, I can generally tell when someone is taking the piss or not - but I had no idea with Sam. He wasn't the type to take the mick or crack jokes. I genuinely could not tell if he was being funny, or if he actually wanted a piece of this kiwi ass. He’s a decent enough geezer though, haven’t seen or spoken to him since then but I hope he’s doing well.

After I arrived, Andrew drove Sam and I to the Queens Hotel pub for a drink and to watch Andrew do his weekly group line-dancing. I was sceptical about this at first - didn’t sound like something I would be into watching, but I actually really enjoyed watching it. There’s a group of middle-aged and elderly people that go outside that pub every week to perform, where they all dance and attempt to raise money for charity. I went a few times since then to watch Andrew while I’d have a beer, there’s something wholesome about it. After our beer, Sam and I went for a walk and got a glimpse of the Valley of the Rocks hillside pathway. We only got to the beginning of the path before we had to turn around and I thought it was stunning already. I knew I was definitely coming back here the next day for a proper. Valley of the Rocks quickly became one of my most favourite places in the world, in fact - so did Lynton.

The following day I must have walked about 14km around the area from where I was staying. I remember starting off down in Lynmouth and moseying around there before doing the Watersmeet river bush walk. So basically, in this area you have Lynton and Lynmouth. They are small towns right on the coast, there’s Lynton up on the top behind the cliffside, then there’s Lynmouth down at the bottom where the shore is. There’s actually a cliffside railway connected between the two, where you can see some bloody good scenes. Well - apparently anyway, I always opted to walk that prick of a hill instead because I was too tight-ass to pay 6 pounds. Maybe one day I’ll do it. So I started my day by walking around Lynmouth, then proceeded to walk along the Watersmeet river. I was told to go and have a coffee at the teahouse that’s about 2-3kms deep into the bush, so I was on the hunt for this. For memory I think I ended up having a beer and an English pasty. A pasty is kind of like an English version of a New Zealand pie, but honestly - while they’re nice, I’d much rather a Patrisha's pie back in Wellington. After this, I walked back to Lynmouth, then up the hill to Lynton where I then went to see Valley of the Rocks properly. Like I said, Valley of the Rocks is one of my favourite places. Especially in the Winter when there’s no one around. I used to walk and run through this place many times. It’s basically this cliffside walk full of hills, rocks (ironically) and there’s so much greenery and sea to look at. Not to mention there’s always a tonne of goats roaming about which is quite cool. My favourite thing to do was climb the highest point of one of the rocky hills and just sit there and gaze at the sea, where you could faintly see Swansea, Wales in the distance.

I remember being absolutely shagged when I got back to the house at around 8pm. All I wanted to do was go to bed and sleep, which was weird because I don’t really get tired from walking distances like that. I thought bugger it, may as well get the rest if I need it. I went to sleep, only to wake myself up at about 2am. I was freezing, fucking freezing. It was the middle of summer, the room was hot. So that got my head scratching. One minute I was freezing, then the next I was sweating my ass off. This is weird, I thought. This feels like a virus or something. Then I remembered I sat in front of this bloke on the train who was sick as a dog, coughing and sniffing his ass off. I was pretty grossed out about it and wanted to move, but the train was packed and I had loads of luggage so I couldn't do much about it. There’s been a few times over the past couple of years where I thought I had Covid, when I actually didn’t. But this time I just knew I had Covid. I tested at 2am, both black lines had shown up straight away. Oh shit, I thought. I’m staying with a family I’ve just met and I’ve brought bloody Covid in to their house. Bare in mind, this is back then the whole Covid era hadn’t quite died off yet. These guys were in their mid to late 60’s too, so who knows how it’d affect them if they caught it - thankfully they didn’t. They were really good about it, they just put me in the caravan where Sam was originally staying in and I just isolated in there for about a week. I had great fun sitting out in the sun while watching Sam sweat his ass off working in the sun and bitching about how hot it was. Sam was only there for about a week or so, and somehow I ended up staying for over two months.

Once I came right from Covid, I got back to exploring North Devon and doing jobs for Angie. I had to do things like paint fences, make concrete patios, dig weeds, all those kinds of things. Every Monday I would go and play table tennis with Andrew out in Brendon, which fulfilled my sporting needs. My stay kept extending and extending, Angie always thought of more jobs for me to do. I liked the area and had nothing else planned at that point. I wasn't getting my passport until August at the least so I didn't mind dragging it out. Sometimes I wish I made more of an effort to do more workaways and whatnot over those couple of months, but honestly - in reality I wouldn’t change a thing. It was a very happy period of my life. Lynton is isolated and very beautiful, it’s full of ocean and trees - exactly what I needed for a while. All I did was explore, exercise, and date a little bit. It was great.

I ended up getting pretty close with Angie, Andrew and even Angie’s kids and grandkids. They’re all life-long friends of mine now, I know that much. Angie is a cool lady, definitely the boss of the household. She took great pleasure in finding jobs for me to do, right until my last day there in early June. It’s quite funny, she definitely treated me like a son. I remember when I hit my head the first time back in January, at this point I just started looking after the house for two months while they were in Spain. I wasn’t actually too bad from that knock, but I must have sounded dead on the phone when I told Angie about it or something. She told all the neighbours to check on me constantly to the point where some of them offered to get my groceries, which was definitely unnecessary in the nicest way possible. It was quite funny and touching how concerned she was. Andrew is probably the nicest, most innocent bloke you’d ever meet. He’s very funny in his own unique way as well. A very religious and heavily routine driven man. He’s 70 now, but the way he moves around you’d think he was half that age. Not to mention he has luscious long hair that he’s very proud of. The dogs, or the spotties as we’d all call them, are fucking nutters. I used to say I hate them, but I actually do love them a lot. They are very anxious around just about anything, but they can be very sweet if they know you and you give them some love. I would still never own Dalmatians in a million years though. Vicki, Angie's daughter is a cool girl. I knew her the least out of everyone, but we still got on well. I absolutely love her golden retriever, Mackenzie - who I had the great pleasure of looking after every now and then. That dog would be the ultimate chick magnet for me if there were actually any women under the age of 65 in Lynton. He is a big, beautiful and lovely boy. I got very close with Angie’s son Rory and his wife Christine. Rory and I bonded well over our nerdy interests, and still keep in touch quite often now. Christine is lovely, and has great taste in music. We’d always have a cheeky cigarette or ten after enough drinks. The three of us would get on the piss at least once a month at their place where we’d just chill out in the lounge, play cards and listen to 90’s and 2000’s music. They have two very young kids, both of whom are very different and hilarious. Aksel is 4, and Griffin is 3. Aksel is the type of kid who will likely be academically gifted and be quite on to it as he gets older. Griffin is the type of kid who eats sand, spits out the sand because he doesn’t like it, then proceeds to eat more sand with a big grin on his face. He will likely end up as that munter front-rower in a rugby team where he’d eat dog shit for a laugh or something.

Honestly, they’re all great. I’m looking forward to seeing them all again some time soon.

My workawaying days ended around the middle of September. I booked a trip to France and didn’t know what I’d do beyond that. I did mention to Angie that I was actually interested in living in Devon at some point down the line. I knew I was going to have to find somewhere to settle after traveling a little bit, and at that point Devon was in high contention. I did indeed return to Devon to live, and lived there from late October 2022 until early June 2023. Back living with Angie and Andrew where this time I was paying board and looking for work. Things were looking promising to begin with, but unfortunately my living stint in Devon turned into quite the shit-show. Jobs kept falling through, then concussions had me out of work for six months and because I had hardly worked in the UK prior to this - my sick-benefit payments were pathetic. I joined the Barnstaple Rugby club in November and played about 5 games for their second team. My time with them was quite wishy-washy. The lads were good quality, but I struggled to make strong connections there. I'm mostly at fault for that though, I was my usual quiet, reserved self amongst a group of 40 people and didn’t apply myself very much. It took me a while to start playing well too, and once I began starting regularly - injuries kept interfering. Ultimately, I decided to retire from the sport. 

I absolutely loved Devon. Those first two months as a workawayer were awesome, and I have some great memories from that time. Not everything was bad about my 9 months of living there, but it was certainly a very difficult time for me. Things would start and stop a lot and who knows what could have happened had I not had a concussion for so long. Even beyond that though, something just wasn’t clicking with living in Devon, and I don’t think there was ever going to be a click. I’m not going to go too much into this as I have spoken plenty about my time trying to build my life up in Devon before.

I saw lots of beaches, Woolacombe and Saunton Beaches were probably my favourite. I went on some awesome walks and runs. I experienced my first "white out" of snow, which was amazing. I made good mates. I even got to experience playing some rugby in the UK. Overall, while it's easy to look down on my time living in Devon - there were some awesome things that came from it too. It had it's good chapters, and it had it's bad chapters. But in the end, North Devon was certainly a story that I’ll cherish.