A Quest for Serenity in a Slightly Apocalyptic World
This blog is an ongoing journey of many walks and it's basically a lengthening love letter to my local area. A place I have lived in all my life but I only truly began to discover from March 2020 onwards when an eccentric yeti in a suit had appeared on my TV screen and told me everything had to close. The madness and sadness of death graphs and toilet roll stockpiling that led me to looking at OS maps and getting really excited about potentially pleasant public rights of way for my wife Stace and I to explore with our dogs. I’ve always liked the outdoors really and we'd already been up a few mountains and along a fair few trails. I had generally seen outside as somewhere nice to go on a weekend though, rather than it being a proper hobby, a challenge or a necessity for my mental well-being. When covid became a thing, we'd had a stressful and upsetting 8 years of IVF treatments and as yet, none of them had lead to us having a baby. We weren't down about it all the time, but at the lowest points, getting away and going for long walks had been good for us.
I am from Ledbury in Herefordshire. At the time of writing, I am 40 years old and live 16 houses away from the one I grew up in. I absolutely love my home town, but in normal times I do leave the area quite often with work, weekends away and to watch football. An old work colleague once told me that they were never truly comfortable unless they could see Ledbury church spire. I’m not like that. I mean, I am a bit to be fair, but I wasn’t always that way. It’s a small town that is a wonderful place to be when you're over 40 and perhaps less interested in things that some people might describe as "lively". It’s not so great when you are 18, you aren’t really interested in hills or footpaths and are yet to discover that most other people are really irritating.
In December 2019 I went to watch my football club Bristol Rovers play away at Ipswich Town. I'd driven there on my own to meet some friends in the pub before a game I fully expected to end in defeat. I hadn't been to Ipswich before though and I'm used to watching Rovers lose, so it seemed worth the trip. We ended up winning the game 1-0 and it was a brilliant day out. I still had to drive home though and the weather forecast was diabolical, with torrential rain on the cards. It ended up taking me 6 hours to get back to Herefordshire from Ipswich. At one point on the M4, the rain was so heavy I could barely see a couple of metres ahead of the car.
I went on Twitter when I got home and found out that the Rovers manager had resigned after the game because he was sick of eating ready meals and wanted to move back up north where his family lived. Properly bizarre. It was around this time that Covid-19 was starting to kick off in Wuhan and as we all know it all went completely mental for a while.
It all made me wonder if the rain storm I'd driven into was actually a portal to a new and slightly apocalyptic world. I'm not a lunatic, so I didn't really believe that but coincidentally things started to go a bit weird after I'd gone through that rain. I'm no covid sceptic either, but the world had undoubtedly gone insane and we had to follow some ridiculous rules at times that made zero sense. You could go to a pub, but only for a meal and you'd then have to leave immediately, letting some other potentially infected local come in after you to take your table and have a quick meal. A regular, flowing cycle of possible virus carriers. Perfectly logical. I couldn't have a picnic, but I could go out with my mates and shoot some pheasants. I didn't do that, but I could have done if I liked killing things for a laugh. It's no surprise that the more it dragged on, the more people started thinking it was some sort of daft conspiracy.
I am from Ledbury in Herefordshire. At the time of writing, I am 40 years old and live 16 houses away from the one I grew up in. I absolutely love my home town, but in normal times I do leave the area quite often with work, weekends away and to watch football. An old work colleague once told me that they were never truly comfortable unless they could see Ledbury church spire. I’m not like that. I mean, I am a bit to be fair, but I wasn’t always that way. It’s a small town that is a wonderful place to be when you're over 40 and perhaps less interested in things that some people might describe as "lively". It’s not so great when you are 18, you aren’t really interested in hills or footpaths and are yet to discover that most other people are really irritating.
In December 2019 I went to watch my football club Bristol Rovers play away at Ipswich Town. I'd driven there on my own to meet some friends in the pub before a game I fully expected to end in defeat. I hadn't been to Ipswich before though and I'm used to watching Rovers lose, so it seemed worth the trip. We ended up winning the game 1-0 and it was a brilliant day out. I still had to drive home though and the weather forecast was diabolical, with torrential rain on the cards. It ended up taking me 6 hours to get back to Herefordshire from Ipswich. At one point on the M4, the rain was so heavy I could barely see a couple of metres ahead of the car.
I went on Twitter when I got home and found out that the Rovers manager had resigned after the game because he was sick of eating ready meals and wanted to move back up north where his family lived. Properly bizarre. It was around this time that Covid-19 was starting to kick off in Wuhan and as we all know it all went completely mental for a while.
It all made me wonder if the rain storm I'd driven into was actually a portal to a new and slightly apocalyptic world. I'm not a lunatic, so I didn't really believe that but coincidentally things started to go a bit weird after I'd gone through that rain. I'm no covid sceptic either, but the world had undoubtedly gone insane and we had to follow some ridiculous rules at times that made zero sense. You could go to a pub, but only for a meal and you'd then have to leave immediately, letting some other potentially infected local come in after you to take your table and have a quick meal. A regular, flowing cycle of possible virus carriers. Perfectly logical. I couldn't have a picnic, but I could go out with my mates and shoot some pheasants. I didn't do that, but I could have done if I liked killing things for a laugh. It's no surprise that the more it dragged on, the more people started thinking it was some sort of daft conspiracy.
Despite all that, it was invigorating to find new places to walk our dogs and get away from the misery of the world on our TVs. Essentially, a global pandemic that would seriously restrict my movements had actually sent me on a voyage of discovery to the woodland and hills surrounding my hometown. Hopefully life might change for the better in other ways too.
A top walk along Top Walk in the Frith Wood with Dottie and Wilf
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