Martin and I have one of many meetings at a London mainline railway station. He has so little stuff. And I'm not only saying that because I travel with so much stuff and am insanely jealous. And not because it's a pain – often literally – to carry it all, but because I fear people judge my mental state by the amount and disorder of the one-woman camel-train which is me, and because they'd be absolutely right to do so.
I'm mentioning how little stuff Martin travels with because his arthritis has left him with a great deal of weakness and pain and so he is forced to carry very little, as well as being the kind of chap who likes to wear the same outfit day after day: it's a combination of habit and scumbaggery. For the record, I am simply a scumbag, but he is a creature of habit.
He has a very lightweight rucksack which he uses when he travels internationally, but we have already had a bad time on this tour due to the rate at which I'm inclined to walk and the amount of pain his rucksack gives him. Oh, and then there is his very bad knee (the injury to which ended his preposterously promising dance career at 27) and his bad knee, the one with only the arthritis. He is fond of reminding me, as I forget his plight and stride off into the distance with all the unknowing assurance of one who was last an inpatient when I was untimely ripped from mother, that a kilo carried on the back has the effect of eight on the knee. So, even though he only travels with eight/ten kilos of luggage, this adds up pretty fast. In my defence, I keep telling him we can get cabs if he needs to. But he doesn't want to need to and, for him, succumbing to needing to is another vertiginous splurge down the slippery slope to... more hospitals? Not being able to hold his razor? A wheelchair?
Also, we are already aware that we are both a lot fitter than we were when we started this tour. Neither of us is that interested in the gym or knocking a ball at someone else just for them to knock it back at one - surely ball sports are simply a metaphor for the pointlessness of life? However, shifting logs, mowing the lawn, cleaning the car, walking from B&B to the train station, these exercises make sense to us.
I have been trying to persuade him, though, for some time that if he got a lightweight rucksack which also had a handle and wheels, he might be a lot better off. Jacques would be better off as well – I thought this lightweight rucksack of his was his... but it's not. It belongs to Jacques, who is more than good to Bartelt, and, apparently, sometimes plaintively points out that if Bartelt is travelling with his rucksack then Jacques cannot use it. But, as with the new razor, Bartelt has a resistance to a New Bag. And it's not to spending money. He can do that. I'm inveterately stingy, but Bartelt has an ability to spend money and he'll spend money on someone else as much as spend it on himself. But he is used to the rucksack he has and doesn't want to change. He knows its pockets how to pack it, how to find something it in, and exactly how painful it is. In fact, he's been to a shop and the one he found weight 3kg empty. This put him right off and he doesn't particularly want to talk about it. I, on the other hand, am sure we can find him something.... if we have an opportunity on tour.
We know we are both going to love Oxford. I went, years before, when my friend Dey took me to his college ball for my 21st birthday present. I have many memories of that ball: having a filthy cold, sitting next to someone whose father had written the key text on Don Quixote which I was studying, and the zip on the ball dress my sister had made me as an 18th birthday present, breaking as we got into the cab to go to the ball. But this is Bartelt's first time. As our friend Pip picks us up from the station and we drive past the ancient buildings of the various central colleges and the like, Bartelt looks like a child who has arrived at the zoo for the first time, or maybe a dog who is being shown the sofa he will be allowed to sit on... soon. Which is strange to see as he is sharing the backseat with the enormous Bruce, Pip's dog, who, as we are about to find out, owns parts of Pip's sofa.
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