One of the difficulties in having free time on your hands is to use that time profitably. I was thinking about that as I sat in the passenger seat of my car, alongside the monument that looks across the valley to the ancient hill that is Traprain Law. It was nine a.m. on a murky June Friday. A slab of battleship grey cloud hung overhead like a giant spacecraft waiting to land. The cloud was so low that the fields on the horizon were completely obscured.
I drank hot coffee from a black thermos flask. It tasted like molasses. I balanced the cup on a cassette case containing a tape of 'Cliff Richard's 40 Golden Greats'. I thought that was appropriate. I ought to have been engaged in some useful labour, but here I was, sitting in the car, looking out over the land instead.
Two cyclists lurched up the hill towards me. I could hear them puffing and panting. They sounded like steam locomotives having trouble pulling away on slippery rails. "Serves you right," I thought to myself. I'm not a lover of men in aquamarine lycra and silly caps.
The hedgerows were festooned with hawthorn blossom and lined with the pink of ragged robin and the musty white of cow parsley. The patchwork quilt of fields was green or brown, except for the odd yellow slash that meant oilseed rape. Swallows swooped and tumbled around the hedges, flying unerringly and joyfully at great speed. A couple of willow warblers alighted on the ground nearby and looked thoughtfully out onto the fields below.
I mentioned that I was parked next to a monument. I have no idea why it is at that precise location, or, indeed, what it is meant to represent. It's an obelisk, standing perhaps twelve feet tall, in sandstone, but blotched with lichen and age. Down the years, people have carved their initials on the stones. I tried to imagine what some of them might have been doing up there in that lonely and isolated spot and I came to the conclusion that they were doing what people have been doing to public buildings for centuries - carrying out acts of vandalism on them.
A huge lorry roared up the hill and nearly took off my nearside wing-mirror. I could see the driver quite clearly. He was a wizened little man with a monkey's face and a shock of untidy white hair. "What the devil are you doing out here?" I yelled after him, but he had hurtled by in a cloud of dust and stone chippings.
I got the binoculars out of the boot and tried to focus on the landscape. I bought them from a charity shop in Mablethorpe. I had never managed to make them work properly, even though I had whirled the centre wheel and twiddled individual lens adjusters till I was blue in the face. Their spell in the boot had done them no favours, and they still didn't work. By the time I had screwed up my eyes in all directions to try and focus on a white-fronted farm cottage half a mile away, I was as boss-eyed as Laurel and Hardy's James Finlayson.
I climbed out of the car to see whether that made any difference but found that the wind, the drizzle and the cold were not conducive to any form of outdoor activity, so I chucked the binoculars back in the boot and made a mental note to get some decent ones at some time in the future, perhaps from a charity shop somewhere posher than Mablethorpe.
I started the car, turned on the radio, and the weather man was saying the rest of the month was going to be like this. I will really have to think very hard and come up with some useful work to do, because I can't be doing this class of thing every day I'm unemployed. I'll get myself talked about.
I drank hot coffee from a black thermos flask. It tasted like molasses. I balanced the cup on a cassette case containing a tape of 'Cliff Richard's 40 Golden Greats'. I thought that was appropriate. I ought to have been engaged in some useful labour, but here I was, sitting in the car, looking out over the land instead.
Two cyclists lurched up the hill towards me. I could hear them puffing and panting. They sounded like steam locomotives having trouble pulling away on slippery rails. "Serves you right," I thought to myself. I'm not a lover of men in aquamarine lycra and silly caps.
The hedgerows were festooned with hawthorn blossom and lined with the pink of ragged robin and the musty white of cow parsley. The patchwork quilt of fields was green or brown, except for the odd yellow slash that meant oilseed rape. Swallows swooped and tumbled around the hedges, flying unerringly and joyfully at great speed. A couple of willow warblers alighted on the ground nearby and looked thoughtfully out onto the fields below.
I mentioned that I was parked next to a monument. I have no idea why it is at that precise location, or, indeed, what it is meant to represent. It's an obelisk, standing perhaps twelve feet tall, in sandstone, but blotched with lichen and age. Down the years, people have carved their initials on the stones. I tried to imagine what some of them might have been doing up there in that lonely and isolated spot and I came to the conclusion that they were doing what people have been doing to public buildings for centuries - carrying out acts of vandalism on them.
A huge lorry roared up the hill and nearly took off my nearside wing-mirror. I could see the driver quite clearly. He was a wizened little man with a monkey's face and a shock of untidy white hair. "What the devil are you doing out here?" I yelled after him, but he had hurtled by in a cloud of dust and stone chippings.
I got the binoculars out of the boot and tried to focus on the landscape. I bought them from a charity shop in Mablethorpe. I had never managed to make them work properly, even though I had whirled the centre wheel and twiddled individual lens adjusters till I was blue in the face. Their spell in the boot had done them no favours, and they still didn't work. By the time I had screwed up my eyes in all directions to try and focus on a white-fronted farm cottage half a mile away, I was as boss-eyed as Laurel and Hardy's James Finlayson.
I climbed out of the car to see whether that made any difference but found that the wind, the drizzle and the cold were not conducive to any form of outdoor activity, so I chucked the binoculars back in the boot and made a mental note to get some decent ones at some time in the future, perhaps from a charity shop somewhere posher than Mablethorpe.
I started the car, turned on the radio, and the weather man was saying the rest of the month was going to be like this. I will really have to think very hard and come up with some useful work to do, because I can't be doing this class of thing every day I'm unemployed. I'll get myself talked about.
