When strangers in the night come bearing cake: Turning 35 in Edinburgh
A lingering memory from my End to End By Friday escapade in 1997, buried deep in the internet here . You know when you’ve been on the road a long time. You have a birthday. And then another. And another. Each time you’re surrounded by strange faces singing that universal happy birthday anthem, with the same tuneless clash when they hit that same high point in the song. But with strange words. "Cumpleaños a ti..." in Spanish. And so on. You know also when you’ve been going for a long time when you have a birthday and nobody at all sings for you. You’re staring at the road, or at the sky, or at your reflection in a coffee in a place where you’ve sheltered from weather you’d swear you’d never be caught dead in at home. Two months into my meander from the bottom of Britain to the top on a small folding bicycle, I rolled up to a phone box in Edinburgh. It was getting dark. I scanned my WWW list for promising comrades under ‘Scotland’. WWW is a travel friendship organisation of wo...