With apologies to Kylie, I don’t think she was singing about access to the Great British countryside. Maybe I could adapt the lyrics, because today I had the most glorious walk and it struck me that not everyone can do this.
I walked out of my front door, down an almost traffic-free lane and onto a public right of way across fields. Meadow brown butterflies popped up all around, before nestling back down onto grasses and wildflowers. My favourite combination of wildflowers were the yellow-with-red birdsfoot trefoil and purple clover, a psychedelic combination.
A couple of fields further on, where the farmer had kept a passage through his oat field, a skylark sprang up from nowhere singing as it went to distract me from wherever its nest was. Such an ordinary-looking bird, apart from its crest, but the song is just as pretty if not more so than Vaughan Williams’ interpretation.
Where the field had recently been cut for silage outside the neighbouring village, two buzzards and five red kites were having a bit of a fisty cuffs and slanging match. I wasn’t sure what was going on because the buzzards seemed to be fighting each other and the kites weren’t too friendly to their own kind either. My best guess was that there was something tasty on the ground and it was every raptor for itself.
Then the fun part – heading back home I got to a stile over a ditch into the next field, where 25 bullocks stood looking at me. I’d encountered these chaps before and knew them to be mild-mannered. But that was then and this was now, and they’d grown a bit and seemed that little bit too brave for my liking. Still, I was desperate to get home for a Pimms, I mean a cup of tea. So I stood on the top of the stile, wondered about doing a James Bond and stepping on a series of heads to get past the danger, came to my senses, waved my arms up down a few times and said Har! Har! as one is supposed to do (praying that no one else is around to see you), and they scarpered. I clambered down and walked purposefully to the next stile – thankfully it wasn’t far – turning round a few times to Har Har them again when I heard them getting too close.
Back home, ‘tea’ in hand, I reflected on how normal and natural today’s little adventure had been for me, and how too many people wouldn’t have a clue what I’m on about because they are stuck in concrete jungles with, if they’re lucky, a badly manicured area of cultivated parkland full of other people, dogs, bikes, and beer bottles, criss-crossed with ugly tarmac paths, the only lark being of the kids’ playing variety.
Thanks for nothing, Planning Authorities.
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