Dogs

Unlike the comedian WC Fields, who remarked that anyone who hates dogs and children can’t be all bad, I have no objection to well-behaved dogs (or children). 

In the UK, roughly 40% of households own at least one dog; 20% of dog-owning households have two dogs; 6% have three or more. Here are the totals.  In 2020 there were approximately 10 million dogs, by 2026 that count had risen to over 15 million, a 50% increase in six years, partly driven by acquisition of dogs during Covid. 

Further increase in the indigenous canine population arises through the ‘rescuing’ of dogs from places like Romania. There are, it occurs to me, alternative ways of dealing with unwanted dogs, other than ferrying them halfway around the world to a country which already has more than its share.

As a walker unaccompanied by a pooch, many owners do not understand that other people are intimidated by their dogs barking or leaping up at them and appear unfamiliar with the notion that to take animals into the public domain they should be appropriately trained. 

Tim Martin, the owner of Wetherspoons, has partially redeemed himself in my eyes for having supported Brexit by excluding dogs unless the owner can produce documentation proving it is a genuine assistance animal. No one regards the requirement to produce a driving licence on demand as an imposition, yet dog owners have reacted with indignation to this entirely reasonable rule.

The re-introduction of the dog license, with exemptions for genuine assistance dogs, would make people think more carefully about owning a dog. The RSPCA supports dog licenses which they argue would help to reduce dog attacks and counter illegal puppy farming.

Many other countries operate dog licenses. In the Republic of Ireland, a dog licence costs €20. In The Netherlands it ranges from €60 to €150 by municipality. Some countries operate a sliding scale depending on the breed or number of dogs.

When the UK dog license was introduced in 1878, it cost seven shillings and sixpence. The equivalent today is over £50. 

With over 15 million dogs in the UK, charging the equivalent of the 1878 cost, £50, would yield an annual income of £750m, part of which could be used to fund local dog wardens who would check compliance by scanning embedded microchips, thus creating additional employment (entailing lots of healthy walking) as well as encouraging responsible dog ownership. 

 

Notices

Until 1966, the Times posted births, marriages and deaths on the front page, the rationale being that this was the information of most interest to its readership. Relegation of the register, as it is known, to the inside pages and its replacement by news was greeted with much harrumphing from loyal readers. These days, life events of celebrities and public figures, as well as one’s own relations and friends, are shared through social media. Formal notices in national newspapers are reserved for the denizens of the echo chamber who view communicating in this way as a mark of social standing and prestige.

Despite having repeatedly attempted to cancel it, I am still the recipient of my school magazine. Each one is larger and glossier than the last, its primary audience being prospective parents who they wish to dazzle with the extravagant stage productions, comprehensive sports facilities and outstanding academic achievements. Alumni are included in the circulation and periodically exhorted to donate additional funds to augment facilities which already outstrip by some margin anything offered by publicly funded schools. Flipping past the self-aggrandising content written in that curiously stilted prose favoured by such publications, I turn to the inside back cover where old boys who have died since the previous edition are listed, along with their age and school dates. 

Two of my form died not long after leaving school. The first, an aspiring racing driver, in a helicopter accident. The second of a heart attack on the rugby field. Since then, I have gleaned little of my contemporaries from the magazine. The class of ‘69 endured traditional education management where corporate punishment was endemic. A more humane environment, which recognised that living in constant fear is unlikely to be conducive to learning, was still over the horizon. But at a time when the vanguards of many aspects of social change were gaining traction, we were a peculiarly rebellious cohort with the consequence that little communication appears to be had with the school magazine unless the group is so remarkably fit and healthy that the absence of death notices simply reflects unusual longevity.

I cannot account for my morbid fascination with these notices of passing. For none of my classmates do I wish for a speedy demise, nor am I deluded enough to think that their predeceasing me is in any way a consolation for the inevitability of my own mortality. Idle curiosity is the only explanation.

The same must apply to my dilettante interest in the later lives of those with whom I spent my secondary schooling. I know of a few. A clergyman living in the United States issues an annual ‘round robin’ whose smugness shares its literary style with the school magazine. Glowing accounts of his children’s successes are outnumbered only by breathless celebration of their increasing progeny, none of whom the recipients of the missive know or are ever likely to meet. 

There were some notable trajectories. Becoming an eminent Cambridge professor could have been predicted by one boy’s academic performance at school, exceptional even by the high standards of the institution. Another, equally predictably given his predilection for driving cars without a license or insurance, ended up in prison. But when I hear of most - so and so became a teacher, so and so became an accountant - the information, so valued in anticipation, is received with merely a nod and a shrug. Those bald fragments tell me nothing. Does it betoken a lifetime of fulfilment and satisfaction or, in the words of Thoreau, quiet desperation? I will never know, and frankly, for the most part I don’t really care. 

So I shall stick to glancing down the list of death notices and wondering whether they will bother to publish mine, and if so when.

Hypocrisy

Everyone with a heart is radical when young; everyone with a brain is conservative when old, goes the adage. Early in his political incarnation, Donald Trump was a democrat but became one of the most right-wing republican presidents. Whether this is proof that he possesses either of the aforementioned bodily organs is moot. 

A more modest ideological shift was performed by a British politician who started out as a Tory and ended as a vocal advocate for Reform UK. But what was most notable about their moral stance was their opposition to abortion coupled with support for capital punishment. No doubt arcane religious arguments could be constructed to reconcile these apparently conflicting views, but to me they illustrate the ability, possibly unique to humans, to blithely occupy two opposing positions simultaneously. 

Examples abound.

A friend is a member of the climate activism group Extinction Rebellion, one of their tenets being opposition to air travel and censuring people who take multiple overseas vacations. Yet visiting children resident outside the UK, they consider adequate reason to flout this edict. An illustration of the principle that one’s own indefensible decisions are characterised as the product of valid reason, but other people’s vilified as evidence of flawed personality. 

I am not immune to similar behaviour. Recently retired to Devon, I claimed the moral high ground by forswearing flights (having spent the previous three decades virtually camped at Heathrow) until I realised there were foreign parts I still wanted to visit. While I acknowledge my inconsistency in that instance, many years earlier, I saw no conflict. Enjoying a picnic with members of the Vegetarian Society (don’t ask, I’ve since repented) I was ostracised as soon as I let slip that I was working at the National Institute for Medical Research, where among other perceived enormities, armadillos were infected with leprosy for medical research purposes.

But that transgression (if such it was) is dwarfed by the one which dominated my professional life. Privately militating against capitalism and all its works, I devoted my career to furthering the profits of the consultancies which employed me, despite eschewing on principle the products and services of many of their clients. But even my bankrupt conscience baulked at working with tobacco clients. It turns out was not alone. Later, as an independent consultant, I was approached (fruitlessly, despite juicy financial inducements) by my former employer to lead a project for Imperial Tobacco because by then no consultants within the organisation would sully themselves with that industry.

Politicians supply the most egregious exemplars of the contrast between principle and practice. In Anthony Trollope’s novel series, The Pallisers, adhering to his principles, the MP Phineas Finn votes against his party on the issue of tenants’ rights and consequently loses his job. But in a later novel, Phineas Redux, he has become more worldly and votes with the party against church disestablishment, despite being personally in favour. He attempts to justify his hypocrisy by pragmatism. Even worse, the whole Liberal party supports disestablishment, but votes against it merely because it has been proposed by the Tories! 

What a pity that comparable behaviour is still in evidence amongst politicians today, legitimised and enforced by whips, and tolerated, while politicians who change their mind for sound reasons when new facts appear are branded as weak rather than thoughtful and considered.

Numbers

My mother’s favourite number was 17 but she detested 21, maintaining that it was dark and ugly. My father, who revered mathematics, would shake his head wearily as if to indulge her delusion. It wasn’t until years later, when one of my sons declared that each number had its own unique and consistent colour, that I encountered the relatively widespread phenomenon of synaesthesia, which was the obvious explanation for my mother’s remarks. The concept would not have been accepted by my parents, who took the view that all psychology was quackery. In their eyes, it belonged in the basement of the science pyramid at the top of which stood mathematics.

From the age of 8 to 11, I caught the number 75 bus to the only school I attended with pleasant memories, despite once being caned by the headmaster for a minor misdemeanour which tells you all you need to know about the others. During that time, the bus fare jumped from 11/2d to 2d, a scandalous 33% hike, the farthing being so little used by then that a more modest increase would have been impractical.

Mathematics was a subject in which I never flourished. My father’s insistence that I nevertheless took A-level, in the implacable conviction that it was essential for prospering in any scientific discipline, was a mistake. The alternative, biology, would have been a better alternative and opened the path to a more appropriate university course choice.

Another family obsession was prime numbers. Reaching a birthday whose number was prime was considered to have extra significance. When I attained 51, it was several months before I realised that it was not prime but the product of 3 and 17.

Thirteen has long been held to be unlucky, with most American buildings omitting the number from rooms and floors. I discovered a more substantial omission in the Millennium Hotel in New York. One bank of elevators runs from the ground floor to level 25 while a second bank serves levels 30 to 42. As I proved by walking the single flight of stairs between levels 25 and 30, the missing floors do not exist! In a city defined by height, the quirky numbering is simply designed to enable the hotel to seem taller than it is.

  

Love

Love each day as if it's your last, one day you'll be right quoth Woody Allen. 

‘Do you love me? ‘The spoon, loaded with cereal and fruit, pauses before the lips. The right answer will evoke a knowing smile. The wrong one, or a hesitation, will return the spoon to the bowl. Breakfast will be over.

No one would be surprised if you confessed to never having hated, but anyone professing to be unfamiliar with love, as giver or recipient, would be regarded as eccentric or perverse. Yet do we understand what it means? English is celebrated for its richness. If a word doesn't deliver the precise nuance, there are half a dozen not-quite synonyms to choose from. More awkward is when the same word carries multiple meanings. When they are quite distinct, confusion is rare. No one would construe ‘I have a beef with you’ as confirmation of joint ownership of a cow. But when the meanings overlap, that is the territory of miscommunication. My son says he loves pizza. That doesn't mean he is attracted to it as a sexual partner nor that wants to spend the rest of his life eating nothing but pizza (although occasionally I wonder).  In this case, ‘love’ is simply an intensifier, meaning ‘like a lot’. 

Parents love their children which is a shorthand for saying that they would sacrifice many other things in life, sometimes life itself, to protect them. Children love their parents, often caveating that this does not necessarily mean they like them. It means they have a sense of gratitude, often manifested through dutiful care.

The state of being ‘in love’ is well-documented. Intense physical attraction combined with infatuation producing obsessional and irrational behavior when decision-making is impaired or impulsive.

‘Do you love me?’ That breakfast table question, triggered by some imagined slight, momentary inattention or lapse of propriety, probes the partner for a different message. It's easy enough to say yes, but when I say I love her, do I mean the same as when she reciprocates? Am I attracted to her physically? Certainly. Do I want to spend the rest of my life with her? Yes – well, at the moment. Would I stand between her and a grizzly bear? Unlikely. Unpacking the component parts of ‘love’ and holding them up to the light to see if they match our feelings is unlikely to get us on to the scrambled eggs.

Look, we've come this far, we rub along pretty well together, neither of us irritates the other excessively, we often have fun and it's too much effort and too high risk to look for perfection, so yes, I do love you. Or, as David Sidaris confessed, he planned to stay with his partner for the rest of his life as he couldn't bear the idea of going to another gay bar.

Loss

The inflection points at which the number of wedding invitations decreases and the number of funeral invitations increases coincide. At this point, more attention is paid to friends. Like physical fitness, friendship is slow to attain but decays rapidly if neglected. Even the slender thread of an annual Christmas card can pull through the sturdier rope of reignited friendship in propitious circumstances. 

With no digital backup, in the past even the loss of a tattered address book, edge etched with letters of the alphabet for easy reference, could sever a friendship. Work contacts, their status determined by context and poised uncertainly between acquaintanceship and friendship, wither through indifference or relocation. Mass slaughter of entire networks is the byproduct of divorce, when jointly held friends express their allegiance or self-righteousness by taking sides. Long after the wrangling over money and children has been settled, it is the loss of friends which leaves enduring bruises. 

In old age, as the count of friends dwindles from natural causes, the remaining stock becomes more valuable, if only because of scarcity. It also triggers the realisation that the longevity of a friendship has inherent value. As the saying goes, you can’t make new old friends. The grumpy old buffer, tetchy through ill-health, frustration and disappointment, nevertheless shares a hinterland of experiences, joyful or horrific, which form part of both parties’ personal history and identity. 

So the deliberate termination of a four-decade long friendship, must be a decision taken only as a result of the gravest offence. And nevertheless, of this action, three people will suffer. Two at least have their grudge to comfort them, I am left with perplexity.

Hitchhikers

                                                            Hitchhikers

Navigating a roundabout near Bovey Tracey, I spotted an unusual sight. On the bend leading to the slip road, an unkempt figure, backpack at his feet, was waving his thumb. I pulled up around the corner, half-hoping he hadn’t noticed I’d stopped.

When I was offered a place at St Andrews University, I assumed I would travel there from London by train. But in the period between attending the interview (yes, in those days, universities admissions tutors interviewed candidates face to face) and starting the course, Dr Beeching had closed the branch line from Leuchars Junction to St Andrews. Buses were no more reliable in those days than they are today and driving was not an option. I had not passed my test and even if I had, car ownership in the days before Japanese competition forced British manufacturers to improve their quality control sentenced proud owners to weekends spent under the bonnet or scraping rust. On the one occasion I flew, the plane was diverted to Glasgow, landing well after midnight to the annoyance of the friend in Edinburgh with whom I was spending the night and who drove there to collect. It didn’t take long to realise that the cheapest and least inconvenient mode of transport was hitching, in those days an entirely acceptable and widely used option.

Most of my trips between London and Scotland entailed multiple lifts, often no more than twenty or thirty miles apiece, so that accomplishing the journey in one day was ambitious. My most successful hitch was a single lift from Edinburgh to the outskirts of north London. Embarrassingly, I broke the first unwritten rule of the hitchhikers’ code by falling asleep ten minutes after being picked up, thus depriving the driver of the quid pro quo of company during an otherwise tedious journey at the time when fewer cars had radios and CDs had not yet been invented.

A hazard of hitchhiking was exposure to drivers whose primary incentive was to impress with their skill. Having escaped from a maniacal mini driver who gave my girlfriend and I a lift from St Andrews to Edinburgh on a Friday afternoon, we tried to invent a plausible reason to decline his offer when he saw us by the roadside two days later waiting for a return ride.

By the time I qualified for a company car in the 1990s, hitchhiking in the UK had all but vanished. On the rare occasions when I spotted a lonely figure by the roadside, I always offered a ride (probably in contravention of the firm’s insurance policy) and on one occasion bought the traveller dinner, a favour which had several times been extended to me in my hitching days. 

My most recent experience of hitchhiking was three years ago in Norfolk. My companion and I had planned a walk which relied on the local bus service to return us to our starting point. Having miscalculated the timing, she suggested we try hitching. The idea would not have occurred to me and I doubted we would have any luck, but within a few minutes a car pulled up in the adjacent layby. We ran towards it just as a second vehicle stopped. We stated our destination and dumped our bags on the back seat. It quickly became apparent that the driver had not stopped with the intention of offering a lift but merely to consult with the following driver about the route! But by this time we were comfortably ensconced so they had no choice but to accept us.

The decline in hitchhiking can be explained by several factors. Wider car ownership; restrictions on parking near motorways; a general fear of strangers. In an increasingly atomised world, David Cameron’s Big Society initiative of 2010, allegedly designed to ‘help people to come together in their neighbourhoods to do good things’ made no reference to hitchhiking.

My Bovey Tracey hitchhiker placed a rucksack attached to a two wheeled trolley on the back seat and got in the front. I leaned across to offer my hand. 

‘Hi, I’m David.’

‘David’s my birth name,’ he said, ‘but I’m known as Bryn now.’

He explained he was going to Leicester to buy a van. He was well into his sixties and I was surprised to hear he had just passed his driving test. He explained that he enjoyed the life of a tramp and that the van he was buying would be suitable for sleeping in and also accommodate a wheelchair in case he needed to transport either of his parents, both in their nineties. I thought of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London in which he describes the ‘spikes’ used by itinerants. Rather a different concept of tramping from travelling about in a van. I dropped him at Exeter St David’s from where he would get a train. I wished him well and he seemed pleased that I remembered to call him by his assumed name.

Afterwards I reflected that Bryn’s acquisition of his own vehicle, late in life, marked the demise of one of the few remaining hitchhikers and the decline of a mode of transport which had been a familiar feature of British life until the late twentieth century.

Desire

One of the bitterest ironies of old age is having the time and, if one is fortunate, the resources to indulge one’s childhood dreams, yet lacking the desire to do so. In some cases, it is even worse. Owning a car matured from a teenage aspiration to a family necessity to a convenient but resented liability. 

I developed an early interest in photography. My parents bought me a Kodak 127 for my 10th birthday which was hardly any more sophisticated than a pinhole camera. I recall taking the first role of film, 12 exposures, and then inadvertently fogging it before it could be developed. I went through a phase of commandeering the bathroom which had been part of a rental unit on our top floor as a dark room to develop and print photographs. My impatience and incompetence (foreshadowing the same qualities which ended my brief career as a research biochemist) produced indifferent results. 

There was a shop in Blackheath called Butcher, Curnow which was half a pharmacy, or chemist as we call them in those days, and half a camera shop. On the left, behind a long mahogany counter, were stacked rows of bottles with coloured liquids. On the right, up two steps, was the photography counter. Each day, on the way home from school. I would gaze at the shop window drooling over the unaffordable Pentaxes. At lunchtime, with a similarly obsessed friend, I would visit the local library which subscribed to Amateur Photographer and marvel at the images produced by professionals. 

For my 13th birthday, which occurred while we were spending the summer in Chicago, where my father was working, I received a Voigtlander Vitoret, a rangefinder camera which by father, an optics professional, had selected on the basis of its lens, which he assured me was the best in its class. But without an exposure meter, and in the blinding Illinois sun, almost all of my attempts, turned out to be woefully overexposed. I envied my father’s Konica, considerably superior and sporting an exposure meter. (When I inherited his belongings, I took it to a secondhand camera shop reluctant to part with such a treasure. The owner shook his head sadly when he saw it. Lovely camera, he said, but I can’t sell them. He pointed over my shoulder to a shelf where there were three identical models with a label underneath, saying simply ‘offers?’) 

Five years later, I splurged most of my first term’s allowance at university on a Practika SLR. With minimal funds to buy film, my attempts of photography were minimal. 

Two decades further on and with access to real money, I bought an expensive Canon. This was transferred to my second wife, who subsequently lost it. 

I went through a decade of acquiring a succession of digital cameras, the last of which was stolen, along with my passport and other valuables, in Spain. Since then, like most people, I have managed with a mobile phone. 

I still look in the windows of camera shops. Now that I can afford to buy any model I choose the allure has faded. I read the descriptions, note the prices then shake my head and walk on.

Dartmoor

Dartmoor

In my corporate days, we were exhorted to 'walk the walk, not just talk the talk" which was toe-curling management speak for getting the stuff you'd promised to do done. A prime example of this being observed in the breach is rail companies' implementation of their cycle policies. Supposedly committed to welcoming bikes and striving for integrated transport, instead their cycle space booking process (itself unnecessary in the days of capacious guards' vans) is both labyrinthine and error prone. When I booked my journey to Newton Abbot online, it was not until I fetched the tickets from the machine - for some reason, obligatory once you request a cycle space - that I realised it had only reserved a space on the return leg, not the outward trip. Fortunately, the booking clerk was able to rectify the omission.

The facilities provided on board for cycles are lamentable. Two hooks are suspended in a space the size of a broom cupboard inadequate for accommodating two bikes, and one hook is so close to the ceiling that I was unable to fit the front wheel, admittedly with a 40mm carbon rim, on it. Instead I lurked in the corridor holding my bike in a more dignified horizontal position for the 20 minute journey.

Of the dozen or so waiting at Newton Abbot, most had travelled by car, a few had taken an earlier train while one had cycled from Exeter. The latter feat, a two hour trip, was on an electric bike which, although only a few years old, was already of a design which looked old-fashioned and clunky compared to the latest generation, which are almost indistinguishable from their mechanical counterparts. (And yes, I can’t wait to add one to my collection. The adage, oft repeated among the cycling fraternity, is that the optimum number of bikes is n+1, where n is the number you currently own.)

Newton Abbot is known to its detractors, which includes almost everyone not locally resident, as Newton Armpit. The soubriquet seems unjust once you leave the high street, which itself is no more depressingly unloved than most. Our canal side route took us past attractive waterside terraced houses, although their view of the warehouses and declining industrial units lining the opposite bank meant they fell short of offering a rural idyll. 

Traversing a narrow section of tow path under a bridge, a woman pushing a buggy remonstrated that we were supposed to dismount. I acknowledged the mistake, saying, truthfully, that I hadn’t seen the sign. She was not mollified and continued to abuse cyclists in general and us in particular. My guilt was increased by recalling how incensed I used to become when cyclists refused to walk through the Greenwich foot tunnel.

After the canal, the route wound through wooded slops on an insistent climb, but gentle enough for everyone to keep pace with the two electric bikes in our group, the second being an older bike with a front wheel conversion kit and a battery dangling inelegantly from the handlebars. Our group has only recently admitted e-bikes, bowing to the increasing frailty of members and the growing choice of e-bikes. Apparently, they now comprise 90% of the revenue from new bike sales, although as they are pricier than leg bikes, that does not translate into the same proportion of units sold.

Our coffee stop was at 365 cafe in Bovey Tracey, a converted garage reinstated in 2017 using original, vintage and industrial materials which now caters for cyclists in great style with comfortable sofas and low lighting complimenting the excellent coffee and cake.

One of the pleasures of cycling in a group is the opportunity to converse with fellow cyclists. That conversations are inevitably subject to frequent interruption by the exigencies of traffic or weather can be an annoyance or a relief, depending on the person and the topic. On this occasion, I enjoyed exchanging views on local music events with Tim and even resolved, as a result, to become a member of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (a resolution since acted upon) primarily in the hope of nabbing the best seats during the priority booking period.

By the time we reached Moretonhampstead, my GPS informed me we had ascended over 400m but it had seemed fairly effortless, partly, because I cycle at a more sensibly sedate speed when I’m with a group than alone. We sat in the churchyard to eat our sandwiches. Mine, as usual, seeded rye rolls, one filled with chicken and avocado, the other Cheddar cheese and chutney. Very light drizzle started as we were packing up and during the afternoon we periodically donned and discarded rain jackets in response to the changing weather and the incline of the roads.

The roads were quiet, the only encounters of note being a vintage Rolls-Royce, whose width seemed unsuited to Devon lanes, and a succession of 1960s Rovers, presumably from some local rally, whose exhaust fumes lingered long after they had departed.

I had been supplied with approximate times for various landmarks to check I would make my return train. The only one I noted was Jay’s grave. Jay was an eighteenth-century servant who had fallen pregnant by her employer who subsequently disavowed her. She committed suicide as a result, but being thereby excluded from sacred ground, was buried at the meeting point of three parishes.

This was my first time cycling across Dartmoor and it felt adventurous to be in such high and wild spaces. We passed Hound Tor and Haytor Rocks, but the weather was not conducive to lingering and our interaction with the environment was confined to near misses with lambs frisking on the road.

The leader’s planning was perfect and we were in good time for my train, thence home for tea and medals.

Crediton

There is a sweet spot which occurs somewhere between the commencement of retirement and the onset of old age during which robust health, adequate resources and surplus energy render anything feasible. It’s not possible to identify the apogee of that period but it becomes apparent when it has passed. In my case, it appeared in the rear-view mirror during a holiday in Wales last summer when a steep and rocky descent signalled that the balance of risk and reward from hill walking had tilted inexorably in the wrong direction. Similarly, the weekly parkrun, although still pleasurable, brings in its wake stiffness of muscle and soreness of knee, a joint, I am told, which is in any case poorly designed for upright movement.

Cyclists visiting Devon are envious of our profusion of cycle paths and minor roads compared to many other counties and Exeter quayside lies at the nexus of this cornucopia. Southwest to Dawlish; southeast to Exmouth, northwest to Crediton, northeast to Sidmouth. For more ambitious jaunts, the newly restored train to Okehampton makes the Granite Way, and beyond to Tavistock and Plymouth, a day trip, albeit at the mercy of Dartmoor’s unpredictable weather. The train to Barnstable brings the Tarka Way in range and there are many more I’ve yet to discover.

Over the three years I have been exploring the environs of Exeter by bike, I have accumulated a rudimentary knowledge of the features and landmarks. No longer do I lean on a farm gate wondering whether that lump on the horizon is the Sidmouth Gap, only to be told gently that we are looking towards Dartmoor. I can compare the merits of the coffee at our various morning stops and allude with due disparagement to some of the unrepaired potholes boasting geological longevity. Arcane titbits gleaned from the YouTube channel Global Cycle Network fall casually from my lips, disguising that I have only recently learned what a ‘bottom bracket’ is or how to change the pads on my disc brakes.

In the company of new joiners to the group, I am a venerable old hand, in the same way that, as a teacher, it is only necessary to be one step ahead of the class to be revered as an authority. A phenomenon of which I took shameless advantage during my days in front of the blackboard. 

The Sunday ‘B’ ride to Crediton started at the Countess Wear ‘swing bridge’ amid confusion over which side of the road we were supposed to meet. A dozen or so of us, including three e-bikes one of which was a do-it-yourself conversion, set off to Haldon via Exminster. Morning coffee was at a Costa in a service area adjacent to the A38, a site benefitting neither from picturesque scenery nor palatable coffee and conducted in the pall of effluvia from the sewage vent. 

It was the first really warm day and by lunchtime in a buttercup strewn field, I was down to a single layer, plus my sunhat. The Queen’s platinum jubilee is imminent, and I shared my disgust at the whole business of royalty and the fawning induced in a population victim to false consciousness with Gareth, one of few (another being Hermione) who appears to share my views. 

The afternoon route to Crediton was unexpectedly hilly. I can survive most hills on my carbon-fibre framed bike, even if it means stopping once or twice for a rest to catch my breath. The downhills were steep but being dry the anguished squeal my brakes emit in the wet, despite numerous attempts to quell the noise, was muted. Bizarrely, all the cafes in Crediton surrounding the pleasant market square are resolutely closed on Sundays so to avoid a second Costa, we opted for the motorbike café. These motorised brutes have become bigger and louder since the days my class-mate Alan Northcott would go ‘up Chelsea Bridge’ on his 250cc machine to meet co-religionists. But the coffee was surprisingly good: presumably even bikers’ expectations have risen.

It turned chilly on the way home and I relaxed under a hot shower immune to the rising cost of gas.

Cremyll

Of the Exeter-based Met Office, the conventional obloquy is ‘all they’ve got to do is look out of the window’ when the forecast turns out to be annoyingly inaccurate.

The 50mph winds they confidently predicted on the day before had mysteriously vanished when Wednesday came, so although the prospect of rain was uninviting, the question, previously abandoned as impractical in view of forecast storms, of whether to venture to Plymouth for a boat trip to Cawsands and a coastal walk back to Cremyll, now became pertinent.

My preference was to delay for a day, but that would have entailed Gerry travelling by himself so when he rather endearingly remarked it would be ‘more fun’ in my company I conceded that the weather seemed worthy of a try.

The boat trips on offer for excursions or fishing required prior day booking but the one we were aiming for was a ferry and therefore more of a commuter service with tickets available on board.

I devoured an extra slice of toast in anticipation of a late lunch and we quick marched to St David’s. I always like to have a train in hand in case the target is missed and that was the case on this occasion. So although we arrived in Plymouth in good time to walk to the Mayflower Steps, there was sufficient drizzle to justify a taxi. It took most of the 15 minute ride for Gerry to recall the last time he had indulged in such luxury.

The rain had subsided to a demoralised drizzle by the time we reached the ticket kiosk. With little ceremony and less apology, we were informed that the Cawsands ferry was cancelled due to ‘bad weather’. Having just put on my sunglasses to cope with the glare from the flat calm of the sea, I challenged this. ‘It was windy this morning was the explanation.’ In vain I protested that while it was indeed windy earlier, such was not the case now.  An inner voice told me to save my breath and I fulminated instead to Gerry in an uncharacteristic reversal of our usual roles. Possibly induced by an hour’s train journey on the sacred Dawlish line, he was in a state of unassailable cherubic calm.

An anodyne lunch at the Flower Café, proudly flaunting its encomia in the local press on the walls, passed the time until embarkation. At the quay, while waiting for the ferry, we engaged in conversation a deck hand from the vessel preparing for the harbour cruise. Recently graduated from Plymouth Uni, she was passing a pleasant year in this fashion while deciding whether to return to her native France. Disarmingly, she spoke faultless English with a Plymouth twang.

Mount Edgcumbe is the chief attraction of Cremyll. Only the Tudor walls of the symmetrical house with towers at each corner survived wartime bombing and the family subsequently rebuilt the inside. Flaneuring around the grounds replaced the more ambitious walk we had intended but Gerry was mightily pleased by the absence of any charge for ambling through the grounds and perusing the craft workshops. We took tea in the converted stables where I tried the homemade carrot cake flapjack, a not entirely successful blend of two coffee shop staples

As usual, the connecting train to Exeter Central was just pulling out as we crossed the bridge, a fact which Gerry bemoaned but I privately celebrated as our tickets were not valid for the extension and GWR staff are assiduous in their application of penalties. In consolation, we took a short-cut ginnel on the way home from the station entailing a steep climb to the Picturehouse which avoids the Exe Bridges roundabout (or more accurately, gyratory) and much noisome traffic.

Dinner was the remainder of the cauliflower cheese we had made the night before, to her discomfiture, for Jilly.

Rufus

It took me only two weeks in Exeter to make a decision which I had pondered in London for two years. The flat by the river, the kingfisher at dawn, the spontaneity and friendliness of the natives were factors. But the turning point was Belle Isle Park. The ‘Quiet Riverside Park’ was its apt subtitle on a noticeboard not entirely obliterated by graffiti. 

That summer was hot and still. At night, the covers would be discarded one by one until, as sunlight filtered through the thin curtain at 4.30, only a sheet remained. I’d discovered Parkrun and spent early mornings in the company of other runners, distracted from efforts to improve my PB only by the statuesque heron or an egret high stepping through the river’s fringe as delicately as a duchess skirting a puddle. Belle Isle Park was on a short cut from my rented flat to town. A profusion of wildflowers dominated by scarlet poppies turned the open grassland into a flickering Monet. This was the territory of a ginger cat at one end, a tabby at the other. A large boulder, holding a plaque recording the date the park was opened by the local MP, marked the division of the cats’ territories. Never did I see either animal stray past that boundary. 

It was the ginger one which caught my attention. Some days it would run up to me, eager for a stroke. At other times, I would be studiously ignored, its mind focussed on surveying its manor or preoccupied with feline philosophy. 

When my granddaughter visited, I tried to distract her from picking the flowers with the ginger cat, who by then I had christened Bella after the park. But she was more interested in the dogs, which, not allowed in this park, were abundant elsewhere on our walk. Later my son Jake, who had a cat of his own, visited. Proud of my new friendship, I introduced him to Bella. Unprovoked, the cat bit him. 

I continued to salute the cat when I traversed the park. Another walker, on their way to coffee at the Quay or to meet a friend, stopped, reached out a hand and stroked it. 

‘Everyone knows Rufus,’ he said, casually, looking up at me. 

‘Oh, is that his name?’ I didn’t admit I had privately bequeathed him a female handle. 

‘His owner comes here to fetch him every evening. Lives near St Leonard’s church.’ 

He gave Rufus, as I must now call him, a final tickle under the chin. 

The best thing about my new home was the garage. I’d never owned one before and without a car to accommodate, the space was a magnificent bonus. I would open my front door, stroll across the apron between the garage blocks and stand in the maw of the garage relishing the emptiness. 

One day, when I returned to the flat, Rufus was inside, staring at me challengingly from the top of the stairs. He became a frequent visitor after that, but not a regular one. Days when I longed for his company he was nowhere to be seen, not waiting by the door, not in the park. At other times, he would lurk outside the front door, demanding to come in just as I was going out, like Eliot’s Rumtumtugger. 

Rufus’s visits have a routine. As I open the front door, he slips between my legs, races up the stairs and peers down at me from the landing. When I go up, he follows me into the kitchen, waiting for a saucer of milk from which he will take few disdainful slurps. To begin with, he would stay for only a few minutes, signalling the need to return to his duty policing the park with a peremptory miaow. The day he leapt on to the sofa, fell asleep after washing and stayed all afternoon was special. In his company, I feel the need to do nothing – just being with him is enough. 

As dusk falls, gazing out of my window across the river path, I often see Rufus cradled sleepily in the arms of a short, bald man taking him home for dinner.

Flying

Flying

‘In the meantime, sit back, relax and enjoy the flight.’

For years, those words were the alarm clock signalling the beginning of my working weeks. Words, intended to calm, which invariably triggered latent fear.

In the teeth of all the information, with which I’m familiar, around the robustness of planes, I am frightened by turbulence. It is as though the lurching, vibrating sensation engenders a visceral reaction which bypasses or neutralises reason, perhaps in the same way as the fakery of religion penetrates otherwise rational minds.

Travel was essential. Some weeks, I spent longer travelling than in the office. No matter, travelling was work, increasingly so after the advent of mobile phones and as laptops were untethered from graunchy dial up and replaced by ubiquitous wi-fi. Work outbound, sleep inbound. That was the edict for transatlantic flights. On short haul, the assumption was you worked both ways, or at least until the abundant free alcohol took effect.

So paralysis by fear of flying was as impractical as demanding your own office on the grounds that open plan triggered agoraphobia. I took a flying desensitisation course being offered free by the local newspaper in return for the right to plaster the rag with images of cowering passengers vomiting on the tarmac or being reluctantly hauled into the maw of a plane. 

The morning session was devoted to lectures from a flying instructor standing next to a crisply attired airline captain. 

‘How do planes actually fly,’ we asked? 

‘Because the air passing over the curved upper surface of the wing has to travel faster than the air traversing the flat, lower surface, thus creating a vacuum and producing lift.’ 

A simple, neat and convincing answer. Unfortunately, it’s wrong, or at least a gross over-simplification. (In the award-winning radio comedy, Cabin Pressure, there is an embarrassed silence when this theory is challenged innocently by the observation that planes can fly upside down.) 

After lunch, we were herded into the plane, a beefy Boeing 757. At the top of the steps, one victim, a mousy woman who had sat with a glazed expression at the back of the class, refused and tuned tail, unabashed by the ignominy matched only, to my mind, by making one’s way back down the ladder from the platform of a bungee jump and the main reason it’s not on my bucket list. Another got as far as her seat before fleeing through the still open door. The rest of us clipped in dutifully, well-spaced around the mainly empty plane, and listened to the reassuring commentary (‘hear that click, it’s the undercarriage retracting’) from the crisp captain flying us from Birmingham to Glasgow. 

It was early spring, and the air was as calm as the atmospheric equivalent of a millpond. My son had been born the previous week and it was without the blessing of his mother (whose only challenge on her ten-mile drive to work was the occasional traffic jam) that I was indulging in this trip. There was no turbulence, so that while others endured the entire trip remoulding their arm rests with whitened knuckles or eyes squeezed shut in an ecstasy of terror, I sat demurely at peace as we made our way across northern England, circled Glasgow airport and returned with a feather light landing to the Midlands.

The only value I derived from the event, other than avoiding several nappy changes, was the instructor’s encouragement to request a visit to the cockpit on future flights if we felt that would calm our nerves. On many occasions since then – we are talking 1990’s, oh, halcyon, innocent days! – I would signal to a passing flight attendant, reach up to them conspiratorially and make my request, deploying the open sesame phrase, nervous flier. Always, it was granted. The theory was that seeing confident, self-assured people crisply in charge of the plane would dissipate the anxiety. In my case, it was the boyish fascination with the switches, knobs, screens and lights, such as lads of the early twentieth century might have experienced on the footplate of a locomotive, which provided such a distraction that fear lost its grip.     

Late in my flying career, I was approached by a confidential flight attendant during a trip to Stockholm. 

‘Mr Thompson?’ he inquired. 

I froze. Why was I the passenger he had picked to inform that we had run out of fuel/a wing had dropped off/the pilot had had a heart attack and I had been selected to land the plane?

‘Mr Thompson, I have just had a message from the Executive Club. At the end of this flight, you will have flown half a million miles with British Airways.’ 

He looked as chuffed as if he had personally booked and paid for all my tickets. 

‘We would like to offer you a glass of champagne to mark the occasion.’ 

I nodded my acceptance. In traditional BA style, it was lukewarm.

Since ending my working life, I have had no need to fly and have smugly occupied the moral high ground, deprecating aviation for its contribution to global heating. A stance which has been annoyingly devalued by the forced grounding of everyone else by coronavirus. I see pictures of aircraft, tessellated nose to tail, in the Mojave desert, nicknamed the boneyard, and rejoice.

But Google and Apple, who know me better than I do myself, mine deep into my history to excavate secrets and release demons. Periodically, interspersed between videos demonstrating how to repair bicycle punctures and showcasing the latest innovations in electric cars, I am offered footage of the pilot’s eye view of a 747 departing JFK, or a carefully coiffed senior first officer tackling a cross-wind landing in Dublin. I hesitate only for a moment. I pour a glass of wine and lower the lights. Now I’m sitting at the pilot’s shoulder watching the runway unfold. A robotic voice announces V1: the point of no return. Finally, I am able to sit back, relax and enjoy the flight.

Dads

 Dads

 

Today is my father’s birthday. Now just five years shy of the age at which he died, I ponder our relationship. Introspection is a disease of retirement.

 

Viewed through the wide angle of distance, how rosy was the post-war settlement! “You never had it so good“, was Macmillan’s celebratory exhortation with its undertone of admonishment. Zoom in. An economy in overdrive, jobs for everyone, the dawn of the jet age with its promises of exploration and freedom. Look, there are the new towns, the new houses, the new cars. Tighten the focus again. Now we are looking into those ticky-tacky homes. Mums in floral pinafores proud of their new top loader, dads polishing the Morris in the garage, 2.4 children scenting the approach of the 1960s. How successfully economic prosperity papered over the cracks! Who could be unhappy with a roof over their head, a full belly and the safety net of the welfare state? Post-traumatic stress disorder hadn’t been invented and therapy was an indulgence for middle-class Americans. Giving your children a better life than you had was not an aspiration, it was an inevitability. What could possibly go wrong?

 

My grandfather, my father‘s father, was a Communist. At some point in the 1930s, he left his adopted home in the UK and returned to the Soviet Union, taking his wife and youngest son with him. His teenage middle son, my father, was left in the care of his older brother, just five years his senior. It was a prolonged separation. Not until nearly a decade later did my grandfather return to London with my father’s younger brother but missing my grandmother who had died of starvation in a collective farm.

 

Abandonment by his parents in pursuit of an ideology must alone have been tough. But during my grandfather’s absence, the Second World War happened. My father lived through the London Blitz and, as a firewatcher, would have observed scenes as harrowing as any on the front line. Nevertheless, with determination of a calibre I could never match, he put himself through school, college and university emerging from the tunnel of the 1940s into the prosperous post-war daylight where my future mother was waiting to meet him. All his moorings must have been loosened by the events of his first thirty years. How else could he have fallen in love with and married a non-Jew? A fatal mistake, as his divorced wife acknowledged half a century later, and one which eventually resulted in the severing of all ties with my extended family on both sides.

 

How facile it is to lay the fault for our shortcomings at our parents’ door. Even when it is justified, that is only, as Philip Larkin tells us, because ‘man hands on misery to man’. And that is the dividing line between accountability and blame.

 

As I complete the last mile of the Countess Wear walk, the canal placid in early morning sunshine, I try to summon sympathy for a man who achieved the adoration of his students and colleagues while bearing the burden of his past, but at a heavy price to his family.

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

Craigavon

You have to admire a city which named its airport after a libertine and drunk whose most famous utterance was ‘I spent a lot of money on booze, women and fast cars - the rest I just squandered.’ Most airports honour politicians; Belfast chose the footballer George Best. When I remarked on this, Laura was startled and said blithely that most people still refer to it as Belfast City Airport. Which is not surprising since, unlike New York’s John F Kennedy airport (JFK) or Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport (CDG), the three letter abbreviation, BHD, does not reflect its soubriquet.

A single storey house, parallel to the road and separated from it by a strip of tussocky grass. Set lower than the road, rain had seeped under the ill-fitting front door and, despite a whirring humidifier, the hall was suffused with the smell of damp wool. Inside, rooms off a corridor whose windows, covered by blinds, overlooked the road. Mine, a small cell higher than it was wide; pale yellow walls; a wonky self-assembly wardrobe; a metal-framed single bed of the type you’d expect in a prison. A low wattage light with a corona of tiny flies, the ceiling smeared where they had been dispatched by a previous occupant; a wall calendar, open at December, with an asterisk marking the twenty first.

Opposite, a modern detached house behind ornamental metal gates with elaborate finials attached to pillars topped by brick castellations and moated by sterile lawns. Curlicued bargeboards and Georgian uPVC windows slightly too small for the intended grandeur. Even the picket fence was assembled from white plastic bars slotted into white plastic posts. A charmless glossy perfection, reminiscent of the buildings created in online games such as SimCity. Similar nouveau riche dwellings were interspersed with dismal pebble-dashed bungalows, but there were no older buildings lovingly renovated or rows of gentrified workers’ cottages.

It reminded me of a book I’d seen in a motorway service station comprising photographs of lonely roundabouts, the nexus of empty roads.

There was no one to be seen.