Landscapes of Limbo

 

The dog days are back. It's no-man's-time again, the unendurable, enervating hours during which the ticking of the clock slows to crawl and echoes, loudly, around the room. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock; it feels like a death-knell, friends and relatives gathered round to mourn the passing of an era. Entropy sets in, no place to go, no direction home. 

In-between times have their plus points. For those who have neither the time, the money nor the inclination for a full-blown mid-life crisis they're good for catharsis and you don't have to fork out thousands on a Harley Davidson or a bottle-blonde bird or toy boy. Sadly, I'm getting a bit old for those sort of shenanigans, my stasis is now more cerebral than libidinal, stuck fast in the borderlands between submitting a thesis and having to defend it and unable to return to my beloved Pyrenees. 

In my book the best form of defence is attack and the only way to take on ennui is to kick out the jams. Trouble is, the sort of landscape which really pumps up the adrenalin currently lies out of reach and I'm more or less confined to the flaky friability of Wessex chalk. Talk about anthropomorphism!

Don't get me wrong! I love chalk, I was raised in the Cretaceous and I have calcite flowing through my veins. It's gentle dips and scarps have, over the duration of five decades, come to my emotional rescue and soothed my troubled soul. But right now I need the brash and the brazen, not balm.

Dry valley. Even in times of tempest the chalk remains a waterless land

You'd have think I'd have learned enough about psycho-lithology by now not to underestimate the capacity of the Cretaceous of affect spiritual change. More reform that revolution, only the igneous can truly rock my world but the subtlety of a soft sandstone can work wonders for tired minds. 

 

And man, am I tired! Worn out to a pale husk treading the downs like one of Tolkein's barrow-wights. Not physically, like one of those Duracell bunnies, if you start me up I'll never stop. Never stop. But I've been running on emotional empty far too long. It's time to tune out and plug in, deep, deep into the earth, to those parts of the lithosphere where the strata still recall the orogenies that violently re-shaped their world. For them, the Hercynian passed by like the blink of an eye and the momentum which folded and faulted their sediments hasn't quite run out of juice. If you stop and listen hard you can feel the earth moving beneath your feet.

'Ain't no way but the Ridgeway, get used it it ...'

What, dear readers, passes through your mind when you're out on the trail? Worried you didn't save that important document you were working on before sanity prevailed and you slammed shut your laptop and laced up your boots? Wonder what you might have for dinner this evening? Where you might spend your summer holidays if and when they arrive? Or maybe you knock back the kilometres contemplating existential possibilities and epistemological cul-de-sacs?

Me? I'm stuck in an ambulatory infinity loop. When I'm out walking I think about ... you've guessed it, walking. I don't just plan future hikes, I follow them with my mind's eye, fantasise about spending day after day on a trail that has no end, much in the same way that you might fantasise about running your fingers over the soft and gentle curves of your lover. 

I am the land, the land is me. It will happen, one day, that much I can sense as I cast my eye across the horizon and let the porous chalk soak up my Weltschmerz. Ultimately I have no say in the matter. The moment will arrive when I wake up one day and just walk, day after day after day. And it'll be sooner rather then later because spending seven years of my life writing about walking has stripped me bare. I live to walk and walk to live, nothing else matters.

It's all downhill from here ..

It takes me a while to get into my stride. There was a time, many many years ago that I might step out into the landscape and not feel the buzz. That the landscape wouldn't hate me but be oblivious to my presence. Listen, I can live with hate, it's just the sunny side of love turned upside down and I thrive on tension and conflict, but to be spurned by the thing I love with a passion so fierce it often overwhelms me? If that ever happened I'd sit on the hill and bawl my eyes out but thankfully those days are long gone.

A shower passes over. The skies are grey and the breeze has a chill but once I'm up on the ridgeway the horizon seems to reach into foreverland, and on either side of me possibilities unfurl themselves like leaves of bracken. The dry valley tells me one thing, the scarp another. To the north the vale of the River Nadder is calling, like the bells of Bow Church spoke to Dick Whittington: 'turn again, Sian Lacey Taylder, Ramblanista - or whatever you're calling yourself nowadays'.

But is this 'lady' for turning? 

You'll just have to wait and see ...

Rock folly