If you’re at all a curious person, and you want to see a
slice of life, just go for a walk, even if you’ve trodden those same footsteps
a thousand times before. Take today, for instance. I looked at the outside thermometer and the
temperature was scraping zero but a walk seemed to be preferable to sweeping
tin leaves in the back garden or baking German biscuits from a recipe in the
‘Sunday Telegraph.’
A sort of misty, ethereal cloud was buttoning the sky and
the ground was pig-iron hard. The grass
was decorated with an icing of hoar frost.
The morning was so calm, you could almost feel the silence. The dog and I set our feet (and paws) out of
doors and our fog-breath billowed out into the frigid morning air like a swarm
of white bees. We headed for the churchyard,
and the river, a mile to the south. The river-water
lay still, becalmed. A few desultory leaves floated on the top, like biscuit
crumbs in a saucer of tea. A family of swans swam up to the bank, thinking I
might distribute some largesse to them in the form of stale buns. I had nothing. They swam reluctantly away. The dog, chasing the ball, got a muzzle full
of frost. It looked like she had been
eating ice-cream. Old people were leaving church after the morning
service. The vicar stood at the door
shaking their hands. The old people were
trussed up like Christmas turkeys. I too
was well protected against the bitter cold.
I wore my bobble hat without the bobble.
Dignity, at all times. You need a
woollen hat pulled low to protect your ears which, on a day like this, feel
like they’re as big as Mr Spock’s and lose heat at the same rate as a piece of
burning coal in a freezer. Trouble is, you end up looking like a cross between
a French Resistance worker and Arthur Askey.
We ducked under the the ancient
stone bridge that crosses the river to the south of the town (the dog didn’t
need to duck – she’s tiny). We emerged near the failed restaurant next to Bobby Darrin's ‘mill wheel grinding.’ The restaurant has changed hands five times in ten years and I’ve
never seen anyone eating there. We carried on along the riverside path. A gaggle of mallards swam upstream. I wondered what the proper collective noun
for a group of mallards was - it certainly isn’t ‘a gaggle’. Perhaps it’s a ‘wall of mallards’ because at
one time, almost every home had several china versions flying above the chimney
breast.
I avoided several other
dog-walkers because of the antipathy of my own hound to theirs.
We eventually drifted
away from the riverside path and headed past the sports centre and the squash
club back into town. We passed the spot where
a prosperous engineering works had once been, now a pile of rubble. In a year’s time, it will be filled with
expensive retirement homes.
In the town, on the main street, workmen were busy
with the Christmas lights. A number of
ornate wrought-iron brackets were propped up against selected lamp-posts. A huge hydraulic crane rested in the road, ready
for action. A council workman stood in the crane's bucket, with his hand over the
control panel, ready to lift the whole contraption high into the air.
I noticed that the crane was of German manufacture. Across the road, in
front of a building that used to be a corn exchange, workmen had erected a Douglas Fir Christmas tree
of considerable height and girth. I
shook my head ruefully, because Christmas is still over a month away. All the shops in the town are geared up already; you
can’t move in Tesco’s for boxes of chocolate.
The foremen of the workers stood giving instructions to his team. His strident voice put me in mind of John
Milton’s ‘Pilot of the Galilean lake.’ One of his operatives stamped his feet
and blew on his hands. He then pulled his woollen hat down low over his ears.
I came to the conclusion that I had observed quite a lot in the hour we had been strolling, but an hour was quite
enough in this cold. I set my cap
northwards, wandered up the steep hill and back home.
This month alone, according to a pedometer that I carry about, being
something of an obsessive on this subject, I have walked 160 miles and have observed
things that are in turn mundane, amusing, annoying and thought-provoking.
Walking to me is a refuge, a chance to be an
unseen witness to daily events. To
paraphrase Robert Browning: “I give the fight up: let there be an end, a
privacy, an obscure nook for me. I want
to be forgotten, even by my wife.”
