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.

With apologies to G.K. Chesterton...

Her sins they were forgiven her, or why do flowers run
Behind her, and the hedges all a-strengthening in the sun?
The wild thing ran from left to right and knew not which was which;
But the wild rose was above her when they found her in the ditch.
God pardon us, nor harden us - we did not see so clear
The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton pier.

Inside the map

In Mongolian, the word for west is the same as that for right, and the word for left is east. It’s as if this traditionally nomadic people, making their way and their way of life across steppe and desert, forest and mountain, are in fact inside the map, looking out. It suggests to me an enviable quality of rootedness in movement, of belonging on and shaping your own path.

I’ve more often felt on the outside of the map, staring stupidly in and trying to make sense of what I see. Over the past four years in particular, I’ve been a paid observer of the lives of others. Now, as the days fill up with time and my diary with the dates and times of planes, trains, hire cars, lunches and dinners, perhaps I am worming my way back into the map.

If I were to open my brightly-painted ger door one of these fine late-spring mornings on the recent map of Ellieland, I would see, rolling into the middle distance:

Vines aligned like contour lines between 15^th century churches under a southern sun

The road curving through the woods of Gascony and opening onto avenues of plane trees

A frantic pre-dawn, pre-pedestrian search for the RER, unhelpfully off the map

The cobbles of the Louvre under the scudding wheels of a happily irreverent motorbike, the cable car to Montmartre, the retraced potted history of French monarchy since the Revolution

The lines of imagined rhododendron petals punctuating a Nepalese dance rehearsal in the 15^e arrondissement

The ley line from blinking infant to smiling mother in Herblay, home of musketeers

The Piccadilly and the Metropolitan lines, converging on Thai food and catch-up

The cantering lights of a night-time taxi ride from Brooklyn to Manhattan

The gentle, sometimes circular, sometimes backward motion of a rowing boat on Central Park lake

…And the whole intersected by the criss-cross lines of affection, humour, interest, love and concern that tie us together.

Edible art

I want to eat the Guggenheim. It would be like one of those old-fashioned mints, a little chunky and dusted with icing sugar, that you crunch into to release the softer sweetness beneath. Except that to bite into the perfectly satisfying shape of the giant Guggenheim mint would be to unlock the vast array of equally satisfying, stimulating and/or beautiful works of art inside.

The right forms and colours in the right place, connecting with ideas we can make sense of, meet an almost physical need, filling a hole which must be the aesthetic equivalent of the ‘dessert stomach’. We gorged ourselves on ‘The Great Upheaval’ at the museum yesterday: delicious.

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/on-view/the-great-upheaval

The invisible manicure of the market

There are 12,000 yellow cabs in New York, according to our guidebook – that’s one for every 667 people (which would be a squeeze). Curiously, on the basis of our highly scientific survey, there are approximately 540 nail bars on Manhattan island (one for every 7,556 women, to be gender-discriminatory), and about 200 psychics and fortune tellers (only one for every 40,000 people). Yet all of the cabs are full, and all the nail bars empty. So who’s palm-reading the invisible hand of the market…?