First walk with young Murphy and ancient Lilli; so many ways it could have gone terribly wrong… but didn’t.
He’s ready to go in this picture, he can see the ‘harness that promises good things’ in my hands and is wondering why am I taking pictures AGAIN!.. instead of getting on with it…
“C’mon, already”
Our walk took us in a big(ish) loop around the Sherborne Estate and it was an easy to follow and varied route. Only 2.5 miles, but just enough for either dog, each one at opposite ends of their walking life.
There is something so enjoyable about walking with a dog… maybe it’s their enthusiasm, their absolute joy in random running up and down… I don’t know, but it almost gives more of a purpose to the walk, just in case you need one and ‘walking’ per se it’s not enough.
I think it also helps in making you look around more and not get too lost in your thoughts that you stop noticing all the beauty you’re surrounded by. They’re grounding.
… and then they crash when you get back home allowing you to do the same!
(Perhaps not on the floor…)
As a treat here is a lovely poem about a dog called Luke (by Mary Oliver)
LUKE
I had a dog who loved flowers. Briskly she went through the fields,
yet paused for the honeysuckle or the rose, her dark head
and her wet nose touching the face of every one
with its petals of silk, with its fragrance rising
into the air where the bees, their bodies heavy with pollen,
hovered— and easily she adored every blossom,
not in the serious, careful way that we choose this blossom or that blossom—
the way we praise or don’t praise— the way we love or don’t love— but the way
we long to be— that happy in the heaven of earth— that wild, that loving.
There’s a new little girl in our square, which is lovely and it made me think how your own children are all grown up and hairy now and how cute they were when in their little onesies, gurgling away in their prams… their chubby feet and fluffy hair…. Time has a funny way to make you forget the insane tiredness, the constant sour milk smell on your clothes, the constant nappy changing… which is just as well or humanity would have gone extinct eons ago.
Her name is Isabella Rose, which is so lovely it’s almost too much and it definitively deserved a gentle, pink quilt, don’t you think?
(Also, incidentally, why do I keep using fabric from the stash and the stash never diminishes? and no I haven’t bought any fabric either. So weird)
^^52/2023^^ walking
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July 28, 2023
The Sunday walk is becoming quite the routine around here; it’s usually just the husband and I but one lives in hope that one of the offspring might feel ‘generous’ and grace us with their presence sooner or later. Of course it hasn’t happened yet, and to be frank, living with grown up(ish) teenagers is like running a guest house with added laundry facilities. My only consolation is karma… if it exists they will have children just like them and then we’ll talk! (how I will laugh inside…)
Anyway, this week’s talk had a touch of literature and history to spice it up: the walk began in the village of Adlestrop, near Stow on the Wold; the poet Edward Thomas wrote a beautiful poem after his train stopped at its station on a hot summer’s day:
Yes. I remember Adlestrop— The name, because one afternoon Of heat the express-train drew up there Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat. No one left and no one came On the bare platform. What I saw Was Adlestrop—only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass, And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry, No whit less still and lonely fair Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang Close by, and round him, mistier, Farther and farther, all the birds Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
… through field…
… under big skies and big spaces…
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Here the husband was trying to decide if to eat the peas looking things in the field. He did. Whatever they were, they weren’t poisonous…
We then arrived at Chastleton House, a gorgeous National Trust property, well worth a visit, when it re-opens. A lot of history and full of the original furnitures and objects.
Last time we were here the local Scout group were serving delicious home made cakes in the church grounds.
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We also passed an Iron Age circular barrow (not much to photograph, but interesting) dated between 400 and 800 BC.
And then we were back to Adlestrop, which is a gorgeous village by the way… shame the post-office/shop was closed, could have done with an ice cream…
And then back home for Sunday roast…
^^51/2023^^ The old ways (Robert MacFarlane)
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July 27, 2023
Day 126.
The gyms are opening. Don’t feel confident it’s the right thing to do… new cases are still going up so I’m staying put. With a crazy dog and my books (and a pile or ironing… but we don’t talk about such matters here), and a weekly walk with the husband exploring the local countryside.
And talking of books and walking: The Old Ways is a wonderful book.
I first heard of Robert Macfarlane when, a few months ago we watched the movie ‘Mountains‘ (more a documentary/love story of mountains), stunning words and photography and Willem Dafoe is the voiceover, what’s not to like? Anyway, if you love mountains like me check it out, it’s such a lyrical ode to the mountains that it’ll make you want to pack your boots and go. (Blasted Covid19… Mr M and I were going to spend the long weekend of my birthday on the Dolomites – the best mountains in world, don’t even try to argue with me on this one -.. but obviously it wasn’t possible).
I’m digressing, I knew I wanted to read more of his words and given it was a little painful to read about mountains when unable to go, I chose his 2012 book The Old Ways because it’s all about walking mostly in England, and THAT we can most certainly do (and have been doing).
The book it’s all about paths, what they mean, how they’ve been made. It’s about the connection between walking/the land and people.
Paths are the habits of a landscape. They are acts of consensual making. It’s hard to create a footpath on your own…Paths connect. This is their first duty and their chief reason for being. They relate places in a literal sense, and by extension they relate people
I love how it references the poet Edward Thomas as his inspiration because that it exactly how I re-discovered walking, through Thomas’s writing and poems after studying his work last year at College and discovering that he lived around here for a while (near Robert Frost, another one of my favourite poets). Thomas walked everywhere, he walked to get out of himself and his depression but also to find himself, he wrote beautifully about nature and what it meant for him. I love how Macfarlane writes that paths not only connect places to each other, but people too, and the past to the present.
I find it fascinating and must have underlined hundreds of quotes (and checked the dictionary hundreds of time… and there’s me thinking I’ve mastered the English language… ahem)..
“We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places — retreated to most often when we are most remote from them — are among the most important landscapes we possess.”
I am always intrigued by how people perceived the sense of the place they inhabit, why some people ‘feel at home’, and more and more by how people interact with the place they live in. I’ve discovered so much about my town, and my area since being unable travel to far away places, since I’ve been forced to slow down. Walking has done that so if you do like the slow, one step at a time, experience you would like this book.
I’ve also realised how utterly ignorant I am about trees and flowers and birds and clouds… you name it… (I’m like ‘oh what a nice… pink flower! what a big tree… sigh…) .. and I bought myself a couple of books on trees and wild flowers!
Thought, like memory, inhabits external things as much as the inner regions of the human brain. When the physical correspondents of thought disappear, then thought, or its possibility, is also lost. When woods and trees are destroyed — incidentally, deliberately — imagination and memory go with them. W.H. Auden knew this. ‘A culture,’ he wrote warningly in 1953, ‘is no better than its woods.
This year I’ve turned 50. It’s a bit of a weird one… on one side… well let’s face it… it makes no difference to the traffic of everyday life. Maybe I’m not as supple, yes I have grey hair… but I’m still me and I don’t get why so much fuss should be made by everybody else about it. It’s not that I made it to this out of effort and volition… it kind of just happened!
Whatever, let’s talk books. Two years – yes TWO YEARS – ago I had started this thing about reading 48 books in a year, each from a different year, from 1970 onward. I tried to read books I had already whenever possible and had attacked the challenge with gusto.. but then it all went to pot and I got totally sidetracked. For two years. College… the more you read books the more you read about books and the more books you buy… and on and on. Not good.
Now I think it’s time to bring the whole challenge back, don’t you? Let’s tie it to the number 50 because it has a better ring… 50 books from 50 years!
This is where I currently stand:
2023 A thousands Moons (Sebastian Barry)
2023 Domonicanah (Angie Cruz)
2018 The mermaid and Mrs Hancock
2017 – Magari domain resto (Lorenzo Maroni)
2016 – Upstream (Mary Oliver)
2015 -Reasons to stay alive (Matt Haig)
2014 – Annihilation (Jeff VanderMeer)
2013 – Careless people (Sarah Churchwell)
2012 – Wonder (RJ Palacia)
2011 – The Paris Wife (Paula McLain)
2010 – Visit from the Goon Squad
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2008 – The White Tiger (Aravind Adiga)
2007 The Road (Cormac McCarthy)
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More walking. Different landscapes. New horizons. Unexplored paths.
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Blue. Sun. Clouds. Flowers. Art.
Friday 17th July. Newport Wetlands.
^^47/2023^^ Giovanni’s Room (James Baldwin)
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July 18, 2023
Day 117.
I think I have another favourite writer.
Last year I read If Beale street could talk and loved it. If you can say that about a book so raw and powerful, that I chickened out from watching the movie adaptation. Then recently, Baldwin keeps appearing everywhere, interviews, talks, articles and essays… and I really began to think it was the universe that was trying to tell me something.
I don’t know why I chose this particular novel… and I’ve been sitting on it since finishing because I don’t even know where to start talking about it.
Heartbreaking.
On so many levels.
The story is simple, the protagonist in an American living in Paris, he’s engaged and while his fiancé is away travelling in Spain he begins a passionate love affair with Giovanni… she returns, and his choices will have tragic consequences. It’s a story about love, about finding out who we are, about society, about fear, about mistakes and accepting and deceiving ourselves.
It’s a long poem. Every sentence so full of meaning and subtlety and piercingly accurate observation on feelings and what is it that makes us who we are or who we want to be, on what it was like to be gay or bisexual when it was still considered immoral and was still illegal to be so.
The fact it was written in 1956, when homosexuality was a crime in many countries, is also astonishing. And it’s also interesting that the author is black and writes about white characters, given the debate raging these days about the ‘appropriateness’ or the capacity of an author to really being able to do that. Personally I don’t see any issues of this in the novel at all. James Baldwin left the US at the age of 24 and moved to France because he wanted to be seen as more than simply an Afro-American writer, which is what he was seen as in the US; he was a poet, a political activist, an essayist… he left behind him so many powerful words.
I urge you to read it. It will leave you richer… and a little heartbroken too.
Half way through sewing this the pedal of my sewing machine got chewed right through, I could have sworn he was on the other side of the room the just a split second earlier…
I was trying to make the backing for a beautiful sashiko sampler cloth that mum had embroidered in order to turn it into a table runner type thing. My brother, a missionary in South Sudan, wants it for the altar in their church. The African fabric came from three shirts that were donated to my boys when they were little. So cute.
I love the contrast between the Japanese front and the South Sudanese fabric in the back. The rich, contrasting colour looks great together too.
Luckily for me we had an electrician doing some work in the garden and he managed to temporarily fix the cable for me.
Next job? Face masks… they’re finally becoming compulsory in shops in 10 days’ time and I need to get sewing!
Yep still counting, it’s slightly dramatic but it helps me remember there was a before and now there is now.
Let’s talk about walking. Do you like it? I had forgotten how much I do like it actually and I feel very foolish thinking about the years I’ve wasted (I tried running on many an occasion, but I feel those days are behind me now… I get quite bored, there, I said it. And i know it’s not cool to say it, the ‘lockdown’ seems to have turned everyone into a runner… but me? I’ve always like doing the opposite. Also, running when it’s cold it’s not fun at all, trust me. So now I walk. And you have the time to see so much more when walking. And think. You have time to think, or not to think, and listen to music or podcasts, or audio books. But mostly I like the silence and the noise of what’s around me, I like the rhythm of the steps, I like the smile and shy ‘good morning’ when you meet some one else out like you before the world is awake.
At first, I walked to get out of the house on the allowed ‘one exercise’ a day (as if normal people would do more??), and find some space that was mine alone. (Mine and all the other lycra clad new-joggers… cabin fever is and was real, people!)… Then I began walking to explore the streets around where we live, and believe me when I tell you I walked them all. Frankly, who knew that urban streets could be so interesting? I could be a taxi driver, or a local guide: I discovered lanes, and back streets, shortcuts and dead ends. I discovered cool graffitis, interesting architecture, little brooks and hidden parks. New houses, old houses, bike lanes, underpasses, disused railways lines. And then… I bought a couple of books and realised there is literally a whole world out there waiting to be explored within a few miles radius… after all, everything is walking distance if you have the time.
I walked alone and I walked with friends, with the boys and with family.
I bought a new rucksack, one with lots of strange pockets and hooks and a chest strap and a waist strap. I’m considering walking poles (which I used years ago on the Dolomites and I know they really help)… but don’t tell the boys just yet.
I’m anxiously waiting for the puppy to be able to come with me (it’ll be months… sigh).
This morning, the husband and I left the boys (and a friend, a girlfriend and two dogs) and went for a walk around Bourton-on-the-Water. We were following one of the routes in this book:
which is brilliant and I highly recommend it, the directions are clear and the maps make sense.
It was a five mile circular walk back to the town and there may have been an impromptu fish and chips for lunch… maybe… I’m not saying… what goes on tour stays on tour…
And it was good. I’m grateful.
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