The longest-day walk (revised!)

In 1979, a group of friends and colleagues, Jan and Dad among them, celebrated the light night of the summer solstice by convening on the evening of 21 June at the Motte and Bailey pub in the pretty Hertfordshire village of Pirton. They then walked the two miles across fields to Shillington, returning several pints later in the dark (possibly in more senses than one). Over succeeding years, the one-room, two-cask Musgrove Arms in Shillington offered welcome and sustenance – in the form of Abbot, IPA and pickled eggs – to swelling numbers of annual ‘walkers’. Partners and friends periodically joined in, and the longest-day walk developed its own mythology, fed by anecdotes of ill-fated camping endeavours, gun-toting farmers and expeditions to retrieve sozzled members of the party from ditches miles back with a fading torch.

Later on, the walking became a bigger part of the event, and individual friends started planning alternative routes for the group through the Herts and Beds countryside, sometimes covering 12 or 15 miles between pubs. The original band of colleagues had scattered to other jobs and locations so it became an annual reunion, and when the 21^st fell on a weekday, people would take leave and make a day of it.

When they’d had 31 years to get the hang of it, I decided it was time to tag along. I realised within half a mile that I may have waited about a decade too long, as the youngest of the original crew are in their sixties and the pace has slowed to an amicable amble. Extremely enjoyable, but not much preparation for Machu Picchu later this year…

But I soon realised it didn’t matter a hoot. More talking the walk than the reverse (with the exception of a few turbo-charged front-runners), but while the conversation’s good, who cares?! Not to mention the dear old English countryside, still doing its thing… Poppies abloom by the field-full, plumy stands of wheat turning from green to gold, birds trilling and butterflies flitting.

Sadly my brother couldn’t walk it at all, being on crutches with tendonitis, but that marred events for the rest of us less than it might have, since a) he carries it off with more panache than most could muster, b) he was with us at start, lunch and finish, and c) he drove us all to the initial rendezvous and back from the final pub. It also gave me more time with my sister-in-lawlessness, alongside an assortment of half-remembered legends of my childhood and adolescence, many of them 30 years on offering a remarkable collective advertisement for the joys of retirement with health, humour, energy, creativity and a community of good friends.

…Making it essentially a one-day master class, since that is more or less what I’m rehearsing over my seven months of hedonism, of course.

Nothing doing

Christopher Robin: '...But what I like doing best is Nothing.'

'How do you do Nothing?' asked Pooh, after he had wondered for a long time.

'Well, it's when people call out at you just as you're going off to do it, "What are you going to do, Christopher Robin?" and you say "Oh, nothing," and then you go and do it.'

'Oh, I see,' said Pooh.

'This is a nothing sort of thing that we're doing now.'

'Oh, I see,' said Pooh.

'It means just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering.'

'Oh!' said Pooh.

Prodigal friends

How is it possible that you can go eight years – eight years! – without giving word; can miss a wedding, a birth, illness and heartache and celebration; can leave friends supposing you kidnapped or killed in the wilds of who-knows-where – and then walk back into their arms and into their lives, welcomed and known?

I left the velvety green hospitable plenty of the Gers behind me and climbed hairpin bends into the bleak, beautiful, half-forgotten Pyrenees. And arrived, two hours and 96 months late, to find man and boy and watchful black Labrador waiting for me at the corner, to point me down the road to where a smile about a mile across stood at the gate.

The next three days were like walking through the landscape of dream and memory. Those places you go to in your dreams that are so familiar and yet which you couldn’t place in the waking world – I wandered into them turning a corner or opening a door. And after holding my time twenty years ago in the Pyrenees and its vine-covered foothills in my head as a golden bubble of warm memories, how magical to step back into the remembered stage set and have it become real again! And to understand it differently, and see how it has moved forward in the interim.

But most amazing has undoubtedly been the experience of taking up friendships with a break of eight years and finding the connection is still there. We’re all a little older, and most of us look it; and what we do with our time together has moved on – less hanging out with the older boys and more playing pirates with a five-year-old, for instance – as has what we talk about. But the pleasure and interest and sympathy and capacity to learn from one another is right where we left it, beautiful and blessed.