MARCH OF TIME

Write, curse it, write!  Five weeks since my illness and back to full fitness.  Bored, restless, listless.  Looking out of the French windows as hail falls, driven by a fierce wind.  Dead leaves in the back garden swirling up and eddying around. They land on the patio, which I swept this morning.  I suppose I should have cleared them up after the great leaf fall, but I left them to offer protection to the slugs and toilet beetles.  Skies as black as coal. 
Good job I’ve already been out with the little dog.  We’ve being going out each morning, driving to somewhere different each day and walking for miles.  In a county like East Lothian, there are not that many different places to go.  On one side there is sea, and plenty of it; on the other, fields, and plenty of those too, interspersed with some hills.  I avoid the hills, because you can’t easily kick a tennis ball up hills, and the dog refuses to go anywhere unless I kick the ball for her to return it to my feet as we walk along.  The arrangement generally works quite well, until I miss my kick and end up almost decapitating the dog, who invariably dives between my feet to retrieve the missed ball.  Once, in order to avoid her when I missed the ball, I did a quick Paso Doble and ended up on my face in a patch of brambles. 
Today’s sojourn was to Hailes Castle, a ruin that sits on the banks of the River Tyne (the less important of the two River Tynes).  There was no-one else around, except a woman in a cottage opposite, who was clad in a Barbour jacket, jeans and wellingtons, and seemed to be preparing some feed for her horses. She gave me an unfriendly look, as if I were about to deface what she took to be her castle. I returned her look, with interest.

The trouble with ruined castles is that they are...ruined.  A plaque says: ‘This was the great hall, where all the social activities of the castle were held.’  What you see is a floor, three walls and a space that might, or might not, have contained a fireplace.  Downstairs was the alehouse, but there was not one part of it that suggested that it was anything to do with brewing beer.  It might just as easily have been the master bedroom.
The dog soon grew bored with reading the plaques, so we struck out along a footpath opposite the castle entrance.  It headed south and uphill.  I had brought a camera, but the whole aspect was so un-photogenic, I didn’t use it.  Acres of flat fields, sprouting grass in regular order, like hair-weaves.  Added to that, the wind howled and screamed in my face, and I could scarcely hold the camera without shaking it and ruining any subsequent photographs, as if I had delirium tremens.
The path was laid with small stones, but these were mainly covered in mud, and the tennis ball soon turned black.  A stream ran alongside the path for part of its route, and of course the dog made a beeline for it, and emerged dripping wet but triumphant.  The path meandered on, like Christopher Marlowe’s ‘heavenly path, with many a curious dint’, and once I had to check my compass to see in which direction I was headed. 
We reached civilisation at last – the main road that leads up to Traprain Law, an ancient hill on top of which it appears that in the Dark Ages people actually chose to live, which shows how daft they were – there were no shops or anything.  Time was marching on and we had little option but to retrace our steps, going downhill, with the wind, on the way back, which made tennis ball-kicking much easier.  I heard a skylark bursting his lungs against the wind and we passed a clump of pretty yellow winter aconite, but that was all there was of any interest. 
We arrived back at the car three hours after we had started out.  I said to the dog: ‘Dog, that was the most pointless three hours it has been possible to spend.  We walked along a path into the wind and walked back along the same path with the wind at our backs. We saw fields, mud, and eventually a hill. It must have been like that at Ypres.  My boots and trouser-cuffs are dirty, and your fur is soaking and matted.’  The dog nodded sagely and wagged its tail.  ‘And to think,’ I said, ‘I once wanted to be a travel writer when I stopped working.’