Lockdown

Lockdown

It happens every year at Christmas. Shops lower their shutters, the streets go quiet, everyone is closeted indoors with their family. And this hiatus is repeated a few days later over New Year. So the first day or two of the Covid-19 lockdown didn’t feel strange, or more accurately, the only strange thing was that it didn’t feel strange. By the third or fourth day, the strangeness, or lack of it, had worn off and was replaced by a weary acceptance, at least for those of us suffering no immediate adverse impacts on either health or finance. The sharper the shock, the longer the implications take to sink in; dissenting voices are already murmuring of sleep walking into a police state.

Most weeks, my calendar is studded with events which provide some traction to my sense of purpose. But enforced use of the delete button has created empty space as forbidding as the fresh white page of a Monday morning. My grip on the value of living, ever tenuous since I stopped productive (and reproductive) activities, is less secure. The carefully curated catalogue of pastimes – voluntary, leisure, social - assembled to fill the chasm left by work has been dismembered with nice precision, cancellation email by cancellation email. Death by a thousand cuts. Only assiduous attention to my regime of running and walking by the river provides some diversion.

The normal dance executed when opposing pedestrians wish to give way to each other is replaced by a scrupulous veering to the edge of the path, with communication limited to a shy smile or a grunt of thanks. Even strolling along a perfectly straight path, one is obliged to adopt a zigzag trajectory to give an adequately wide berth to overtaking runners or cyclists and oncoming pedestrians. The friendliness of strangers, which so attracted me to Exeter, has been replaced by the tense wariness practised by passengers in London tubes, where any acknowledgment of others is perceived at best as a social solecism and at worst as an incipient threat.

Marauding families colonise the byways previously the preserve of walkers and birdwatchers. Surly fathers and harried mothers trail two point four children. The disconsolate teenagers, fermenting their sense of injustice, are sulkily submissive. Parents are visited by memories of pushing buggies around draughty playgrounds, counting the minutes until the sun goes over the yardarm. 

Friends meeting by chance during their ration of daily outdoor exercise face each other across yards of no man’s land as inviolable as if it were mined. The distance necessitates raised voices so their amplified conversations are audible to all passers-by and, with the addition of hand gestures for emphasis or elucidation, give the appearance of a play. Watching this street theatre from a bench where I was resting for a drink, I was reminded of a performance of Under Milk Wood featuring Cy Grant in which the characters bawled their lines to one another from the front doors of their homes placed around the edge of the stage. I was taken by my mother who invited the daughter of her best friend with whom she was trying to match me, a bloodless creature who was no more interested in me than I was in her. The outing was not a success. To this day, I find the conceit of Under Milk Wood repellent.

Last night there was no wind. After the tumult of recent storms, the silence was especially intense. Unlike the muting of ambient sounds by snow which is calming, this silence had an eerie quality. Sounds were not being muffled, they simply weren’t there. As I stood on the bridge at the quay surrounded by darkened windows, I could hear clearly the paddling of a single swan thirty feet beneath me. One of the riverside restaurants had left lights on in its empty riverside terrace, to create an illusion of cheery normality. Passing through their reflections, the swan shattered them.

© David Thompson 2020

Virus

Virus

The future of the world is normally only of concern to desiccated academics. The well-trailed environmental apocalypse to be visited on our grandchildren, if not our children, was occluded by the imperatives of consumption and aspiration, the engine of the economy. Now, in the absence of most immediate distractions, the shape of the future and floundering for a purpose to the present, is the legitimate preoccupation of us all.

Regime changing adventures, hubristically initiated for domestic political advantage and built on brittle ideological foundations, notoriously lack exit strategies. While this campaign still in its infancy, predictions about its resolution multiply. None is too gloomy, or too optimistic or too far-fetched to gain traction in some quarter.

This historical inflection point is marked by firsts. Exeter Cathedral is closed for the first time in three centuries; the pubs are closed for the first time in – well, who knows how long; ditto schools, shops, National Trust houses. Of the government’s edicts, the most curious relates to curtailing exercise. People have been told to limit themselves to getting off the couch just once a day and abjure places most conducive to outdoor pursuits, such as national parks and suburban playgrounds. In a nation not noted for its devotion to physical activity, with the obesity statistics to prove it, such a prohibition seems de trop.

As the satirists were trumped by politicians’ iniquities over Brexit last year, so is the left wing now discombobulated by the radical on-the-hoof policies of the most electorally secure and doctrinaire Tory government since Margaret Thatcher. Nationalising the railways, refusing to bail out airlines, meeting employees’ wage bills; it has not merely parked its tanks on Labour’s front lawn, it has rewilded the entire estate. Hell, at this rate, by installing thousands of new beds in privately owned conference centre and exhibition halls, including the Excel Centre (notorious for staging international arms fairs), Boris might even fulfil his election promise of creating forty new hospitals.

© David Thompson 2020

Rivers

Rivers

Few are the cities not sited adjacent to rivers. The benefits of proximity are many: drinking water, transport, power, access to trade, not to mention fish if you’re lucky.

‘Is this the river?’ friends would ask as we rode the Docklands Light Railway to my flat on the Isle of Dogs.

‘No,’ I replied, ‘these are the docks, or what’s left of them.’

‘Is this the river?’ they persist as we traverse a narrow stretch of water.

‘No, it’s the canal linking the docks to the river.’

The River Thames, when we reach it, is unmistakable. The confidence of its broad sweep dwarfs the manmade docks and canals. From the air, on the approach to London City Airport, the opposing promontories of the Isle of Dogs and the North Greenwich peninsular fit into the S-shaped bends of the river as neatly as teeth on meshing cogs.

Visitors to Exeter are equally bewildered when I take them for walks along the River Exe. What it lacks in majesty compared to London’s great river, it compensates with profusion. In places, there are four parallel waterways: the Exe itself, leats dug to power mills, the Exeter Ship Canal and, the most recent addition, the wide flood relief channel. Further downstream, they all succumb to the pull of the river. Having served its purpose, the leats slyly rejoin under the cover of brambles or discharge audaciously from concrete culverts; the flood relief channel empties into an accommodating bend; the canal is absorbed into the river at the estuary where the confluence can be viewed from the grounds of the Turf Hotel.

Unlike the Thames at Greenwich, the Exe is not tidal here, but the water levels in all four bodies fluctuate with the seasons. In the summer, the river’s roar over the weir subsides to a whisper. The flood relief channel, a river in its own right after a storm, is reduced to a meandering stream and bog-loving foliage erupts on its gently rising banks. Starved of supply, the trickling leat diminishes to stagnant pools separated by isthmuses and strewn with fallen branches. As the pools evaporate, a muddy skin pimpled with stones forms in the bed. Only the canal, its flow carefully regulated by locks and sluices, stays constant and reliably navigable to rowers practising for the annual regatta.

© David Thompson 2020

Trew's Weir

Trew's Weir

The first thing is to get the name right. John Trew was the Welsh engineer engaged to build the first short, shallow section of the Exeter Ship Canal, so the weir on the River Exe which bears his name merits an apostrophe. But these days pedants are held in as much contempt as experts.

The smooth muscle of water wrapped around the bone of the weir is scrambled into an eggy foam as it cascades into the channel beyond. Two days after a downpour, when rainfall harvested in Exmoor has traversed all of Devon, the river rises, disturbed sediment turns the water an opaque brown and the weir becomes invisible under a furious cloud of spray. It takes only a few weeks of dry weather for the weir to be transformed into a mere rocky outcrop abandoned of purpose. Moss is exposed on the desiccating surface and small boys tightrope the weir’s lip, arms flailing for balance. Downstream, scrappy islets emerge like memories of lost civilisations and are commandeered by nesting swans oblivious to the peril of flash floods. These seasonal fluctuations in flow would make a hydropower installation at Trew’s Weir, even were it permitted, a risky enterprise.  

A narrow footpath enclosed by railings on both sides passes the weir. On the nearside, they serve to prevent people falling into the lagoon. Chains looped through metal hooks just above the water level would be the only means of escape. The railing on the far side prevents trespassing on to a triangular promontory no larger than a Basingstoke back garden, which abuts the eastern end of the weir. A sign asserts that it is reserved for private fishing, although I have never seen anyone using it to catch their dinner. A local man believes he bought it from the Council when he acquired several unconnected riverside parcels with a set of allotments, but he confessed that he has never trawled the historical trail to establish ownership and no one is of a mind to challenge the matter. (Astonishingly, more than 10% of land in England and Wales is still not registered because there hasn’t been a transaction on that property since registration became compulsory in the 1980s.) The putative owner has given a nearby resident permission to maintain the land. Periodically, dressed in heavy duty wellies, vivid orange overalls and a welding visor, he unlocks the gate and strims the tussocky undergrowth. He has improved my view, so I should not deprecate his efforts.

© David Thompson 2020

Budleigh

Budleigh

I needed a change of scene today so decided to take the car to Budleigh Salterton. It felt vaguely transgressive but in reality there is no more risk in walking there than my usual riverside meanderings and I wanted the sea views. I dressed warmly. Although the rain has stopped, there is a brisk north-westerly.

The roads were as busy as usual, if not busier. Maybe everyone is already beginning to suffer from cabin fever. 

I found a space between two SUVs in the free car park at Budleigh. Two women with dogs were chatting at a respectful distance. The sea front at Budleigh has a special serenity and the prominent stand of trees at the far end is irresistible to local artists. I passed the apartment block, blemished with the rust-coloured streaks characteristic of sea-sprayed buildings, where Hilary Mantel lives. Last time I was here, she was enduring publicity photos on the pebbly beach, shivering in a shawl in a passable impersonation of the French lieutenant’s woman.

It’s only half an hour’s walk to the end of the beach so I then turned inland. The River Otter is home to beavers reintroduced by Devon Wildlife Trust in a trial arranged in conjunction with Exeter University. One day last summer, Marion and I spent dusk crouching in silence on the river-bank, watching for them. At one point, there was a commotion in the water and I clutched Marion’s arm excitedly but it was only a dog cooling off in the shallows.

My destination was Otterton Mill where they mill locally grown wheat using a water wheel. I had coffee and carrot cake. Irredeemable transgressive and a treat which will become a fond memory. Elderly couples sat at outside tables, dutifully well-spaced. Some looked as though they would have benefited from megaphones. There was only one topic of conversation.

Otterton Mill claims that it is the eighteenth oldest business in the world, although exactly what that means, let alone how they know, baffled me. But their flour is tasty and I bought a bag to blend with stone-ground Canadian for bread. Last year I relented and bought a bread maker, which is ironic as I now have more time to bake by hand, but I enjoy trying different recipes in the machine’s booklet.

A viewing platform has been built next to the path. Carvings in the wood illustrate the resident and seasonal waders for those who, unlike me, have remembered to bring binoculars. Instead of the bold statement of an estuary, the river broadens into an untidy straggle of ponds and marshes before slipping through a gap to reach the sea. From the distance of the platform, the ragged shingle embankment forms a straight horizon between the distinctive coppice on the left and the blossoming blackthorn lining the path on the right. Pairs of walkers silhouetted at either end of the embankment hold it in quotation marks.

On the high street, sunshine had brought out more folk. Most had dogs, a few trailed grandchildren. The good burghers of Budleigh, deprecatingly called God’s waiting room by the rest of Devon, are a stout bunch.

At the western end, the cliffs lead to Exmouth, past the holiday park where Emma‘s mother has her caravan. I walked part of the way, paused at a bench and closed my eyes to listen to the sea. The constant hissing is interrupted by dissonant surges, cymbal-like claps and occasional thumping booms. It is a symphony that has been playing since time immemorial and will outlast us all.

© David Thompson 2020