Days 16–20: The Loudest Voices

When I finished my last blog, I wrote:

“For a few hours, I thought maybe it was.

Then the next morning happened…”

Unfortunately, it couldn’t have gone much worse.

I woke up genuinely excited about Sidmouth. The Folk Festival had arrived, the streets were full of music and it felt like exactly the sort of place I needed.

I rode into town, found a spot outside a row of shops and had barely stopped the bike before five shop owners were outside telling me I couldn’t be there.

I hadn’t been there fifteen seconds.

Not fifteen minutes.

Fifteen seconds.

What followed escalated far more quickly than it ever should have.

I wish I could say I handled every second of it perfectly. I didn’t.

After the previous few days, I was already emotionally worn down, and being confronted by five people almost immediately pushed me past my limit. There are parts of my reaction I would handle differently now.

That is mine to own. The way I was approached is theirs.

The facts themselves are actually very simple. I was legally entitled to busk where I had stopped.

I tried to find a compromise. I offered to put my bucket away completely and play only to raise awareness for the PianoMission. I wanted the shop owners to understand that I wasn’t interested in taking a single pound that they believed might otherwise have been spent in their businesses.

When that didn’t help, I offered the jewelry shop owner £500 to cover any loss she genuinely believed my presence might cause her business that day.

She looked at me and said, “I don’t think you look wealthy enough to afford that.”

Yorkie was on the phone with me, as she almost always is, and she heard every word. I don’t think either of us expected that sentence.

The police were called and, if I’m honest, I think the shop owners believed they already knew how that conversation was going to end. They laughed while they waited, convinced that once the officers arrived, I would simply be made to leave.

What they didn’t know was that I had started filming from the moment I left the van that morning. The entire interaction, from the second I arrived, had been recorded.

When the officers arrived, they didn’t rush to a conclusion or assume that because several shop owners were saying one thing, they must automatically be right. They listened to me. They took the time to watch the footage from the moment I arrived and saw for themselves how quickly the situation had unfolded. They listened to my side with exactly the same attention they gave everyone else’s, and once they understood what had happened, they made it clear that I was perfectly entitled to remain where I was and that the shop owners needed to leave me alone.

What stayed with me wasn’t simply that they agreed I could continue playing. It was the way they treated me while they worked it out.

For one of the first times in nine years of sitting behind a piano on Britain’s streets, I didn’t feel like “the busker” standing opposite a group of established businesses whose voices automatically carried more weight. I felt like an equal. I felt like another member of the public whose account deserved to be heard and whose rights mattered just as much as anybody else’s.

I’ve met some wonderful police officers during my years of busking. York immediately comes to mind, as does Bury St Edmunds. But every interaction I’ve had with Devon & Cornwall Police during this journey has left me with the same impression. They see the person before they see the label. They listen before they decide.

Whoever is responsible for training the officers I’ve encountered in Devon & Cornwall should be incredibly proud of them. I don’t think those officers have any idea what they gave me that morning. They didn’t just resolve an argument. They reminded me what it feels like to be treated as a whole human being.

I stayed and played for about an hour before packing everything away and leaving. The police had made it clear that I was entitled to remain where I was, but by then I simply didn’t want to. Too much had already been said, and I wasn’t enjoying being there anymore.

Unfortunately, leaving the high street didn’t leave the negativity behind. Once I posted about what had happened, the conversation simply moved online. Some people were incredibly supportive. Others suggested we were exaggerating, some accused us of lying, and still others seemed determined to find a reason why I must somehow have been responsible for the way I had been treated.

Normally, you let those things roll past. That day, neither of us did particularly well at that.

Yorkie and I have poured nearly two years, an enormous amount of money and more hours than either of us could count into making this journey possible. More importantly, we have both made decisions that have permanently changed our lives because we believe so strongly in what we are trying to build. For a while that afternoon, the negativity became so loud that we genuinely talked about whether continuing to put ourselves through it was worth it.

We nearly allowed a handful of negative voices to define the entire experience.

They weren’t the majority. They were simply the loudest.

It took us a little while to remember that.

Neither Yorkie nor I is very good at quitting. We’ll stop, reassess, change the plan, solve the problem and occasionally swear quite a lot while doing it, but ultimately we keep going. Once the emotion settled, that was where we ended up again. The mission had not changed. Our belief in it had not changed. We had simply allowed people who were never going to understand what we were doing to take up far too much space in it.

So we changed that.

We are not going to spend this journey arguing our way around Britain. Constructive criticism and genuine disagreement are part of putting your life in public, and neither of us has a problem with that. But people who arrive only to insult, provoke or repeatedly drag the conversation somewhere negative will be shown the door quickly.

That isn’t because we need everyone to agree with us. It’s because every minute spent fighting with someone determined to misunderstand us is a minute taken away from the people, the music and the mission we came here for.

And perhaps the most important thing we learned that week was how misleading the loudest voices can be.

Because Sidmouth wasn’t finished with us yet.

It was about to show us just how many good people had been there all along.

— James

Day 18
Exmouth to Sidmouth
Miles travelled: 10.5
Average speed: 11.4 mph
Elevation gain: 935 ft
Elevation loss: 945 ft
Locations busked: 1 — Exmouth

Journey Total
Total miles travelled: 217.1
Total locations busked: 10