The other day, with Monday's vile headache threatening to return, I walked about 12 miles. I’d meant to walk about 10, but I got lost, several times. I'd picked up a recommended walk from the hotel website in North Yorks where Hubby and I had decamped for a few days’ R&R (that’s Rest and Relaxation, not Rum and whatever-mixer-starts-with-an-R).
The walk’s written instructions were accompanied by a small-scale map, with the route highlighted in yellow, obliterating key visual details. The text included Yoda-style wisdom (not) such as, “Continue up the hill through the forest”, where there were two possible uphill routes – one went northeast and one northwest. Another said, “Pass through a gap in the wall by the water trough”; there were several gaps and no water troughs.
I kept guessing (mostly correctly) which way to go, but in the end my luck ran out and I realised I should have been on the other side of a hill. To try and get over the hill onto the correct route might have got me more lost, more knackered or (more) bad-tempered.
So I ditched the hotel instructions and opened my OS map, worked out through guesswork, experience and female intuition where I was, and followed the tree-lined beck uphill until I came to a field of bullocks. Fortunately, North Yorks bovines appeared to be more docile than their North Bucks cousins, and I managed to cross their field in a straight line without any defensive actions on my part, such as Ha Ha-ing, raising my arms in the air (not easy with a recuperating rotator cuff) or running like hell.
After that, I skillfully (and not without a wee trespass or two) managed to find my way to a small reservoir, around which I ambled and returned the cheery good morning from the lone fisherman who, as I’d hoped and prayed, wasn't an axe-wielding psycho waiting for a lone lost female on which to pounce. Whatever, given the mood I’ve been in recently, he’d have come off worse.
Beyond the reservoir was open moorland, then another stretch of woodland with sunlight skipping off the beck, itself tripping over rocks and under a short footbridge. On the other side of the footbridge, I perched on a fallen tree for some juice and a homemade flapjack. I do make the best flapjacks. No contest.
It was lovely. I was totally on my own, the would-be psycho more interested in his fishing about a mile back. Dappled sunlight. Gurgling water. Laughing leaves. Sporadic bird calls. And that delicious, unmistakable yet indescribable aroma of rotting leaves and churned mud. I could have stayed there for hours, as I anticipated the evening sunlight through the trees would be quite Hansel-and-Gretelish. But I’d only brought two flapjacks with me, one now gone, and I knew my hunger (and thirst for a pre-dinner cocktail) would wear me down before the bewitching hour.
There was one last clump of woodland to navigate before arriving back at the hotel. Halfway through, I thought I could hear a plane. First one all day so I couldn’t grumble (but I did anyway). Didn’t sound like a SleazyJet or a Swizzair though. Sounded more military. Well, it was North Yorks after all. But not a fighter jet, more like a transport plane. It was getting louder. There was something different about the sound of this plane. Louder still. Really grumbly rather than whiney (bit like me then).
And there it was. Right over my head. Just above, and I do mean “just” above, the treetops. It looked like a military transport plane – old and cruddy, (bit like me then). It was rather unsettling (even though I assumed it was a British plane) because the previous weekend we’d watched a film (can’t remember the title) where Washington DC was invaded by maverick South Koreans (if I remember rightly) and the first hint of something not being right was a plane – similar to the one that was buzzing me now – skimming the surface of the ocean, eventually being confronted by US fighter jets that it shot down. Then it crashed into the Washington Monument, a moment that was probably celebrated by Antifa, BLM (are they different?) and all the other **&^^&^***!!! out there who bang on about Washington being a slave-owner, even though he became increasingly uneasy about it and provided for the emancipation of his slaves in his will. But that’s an inconvenient truth for some.
Back to my military plane. Were we being invaded? I had thought something similar about 17 years ago while walking Hadrian’s Wall on the Pennine-stretch, when we were overflown by not one or two but half-a-dozen fighter jets. I wondered then if Tony Blair had overnight declared war on Iraq. Whereas, this time I was fantasising that the low transporter was part of a ‘Let’s teach Macron a lesson’ exercise.
If only!
Back at the hotel, I ran a bath and poured in a whole bottle of bubbly (NOT champers), eased my way out of my mud-encrusted walking socks and trousers, struggled out of my thermal top (ruddy shoulder didn’t want to cooperate), threw on the courtesy, always-over-sized fluffy dressing-gown, sat in the comfy chair to do the crossword while the bath cooled down a little, and fell asleep. When I woke up, the bath water was tepid, but my headache was no longer threatening.
So the moral of this blog is, after several digressions, that there’s nowt like Mother Nature to put the world to rights in your head (at least for a short while), and humans mess with her at their peril.
No comments:
Post a Comment