Senility is beginning to assert itself and I am appalled that it has dared to attack so soon after my 70th birthday. I have developed ear worms. You must have heard of ear worms. No, not those horrible things from the planet Zarg that they put in Chekov’s ear in that episode of Star Trek. I mean the phenomenon of a tune that plays in your mind on a constant loop, so that you end up singing or whistling it incessantly. Typically, as the affliction is happening to me, the tune is not something classy like the Second Movement of Dvořák’s New World Symphony; it is not even Jupiter from Holsts’s Planet Suite. No, the tune I am currently stuck with is a jingle from 1960s British commercial television, advertising pink paraffin [kerosene to Americans] to the tune of Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by The Platters:
They asked me how I knew,
It was Esso Blue.
I of course replied,
“With lower grades one buys,
Smoke gets in your eyes”.
Now where on earth has that come from? Somewhere in the lumber room of my brain? I suppose it deserves full marks for the advertising executive who came up with the jingle sixty years ago, though it will not help Esso much now; who buys paraffin in bulk these days apart from airlines? Of course, in the 1950s and 1960s it was common to use the stuff for heating: our house initially had no central heating so a large paraffin heater dominated the upstairs landing on winter nights, throwing out a tremendous amount of heat and gurgling periodically, like a giant swallowing. I can remember the overnight sound to this day. Now, paraffin heaters are relegated to greenhouses and outhouses, if used at all, and it wouldn’t surprise me to discover that that heater we had back in 1963 was dangerous by today’s health and safety standards. What is left is that damned tune that I can’t get rid of.
August is drawing to a close with cool temperatures and soon the little blighters children will be back at school, their parents will be back at work, and the country’s beauty spots will quieten down again. Or so I hope. It is not that I begrudge folk a well-deserved holiday after several lockdowns, but rather that the tendency for so many people to remain in England for their holiday this year has resulted in gross overcrowding in resorts and national parks, and choked roads. Cornwall seems to have been particularly badly affected, with queues reported not only of cars and other vehicles, but of pedestrians. We spoke to one chap who had just returned from a holiday in Newquay and he recounted how he had had to queue to get into shops, to queue to get into pubs and to queue to get a seat in a restaurant or café; this on top of queueing in a car to get into Cornwall and queuing in a car to get out. Our neighbours have just returned from four days staying near Penzance and they could not even get booked in to a restaurant or activity: all were fully booked. Some holiday. Another contact, who lived in Newquay, said it took him two hours just to get across town – the main delay being pedestrians in the road. Dear oh dear, it is far easier to stay at home and just go for walks in the countryside.
The other day we decided to do just that. It took the form of a re-run of our first walk recounted in Blog 35, in those heady days of March 2020 at the very beginning of the epidemic, when the virus was young and we thought it would all be over by Christmas. I had been keeping that re-run for the day when the epidemic was over and lockdown was lifted: something to look forward to. Well, we haven’t yet achieved that goal and I am beginning to wonder if we ever will, in the entirety; but it may be the closest we will get. The last time, we did the walk from Much Deeping through Clyst Magna and Little Wallop then back to Much Deeping and spent a restful period eating sandwiches and drinking coffee from a flask in the churchyard at Clyst Magna. The printed directions that I had at the time proved faulty and we ended up scrambling through a quarry before traversing precariously across a noisome farmyard silage pit. This time, I decided to plan the route myself and to travel in the opposite direction: there would be no pitfalls as we would be walking on a designated National Path labelled The White Mare Way. We parked our car, as before, in the church carpark of Much Deeping and set off through the village with the sun shining: down a road, up a cut, down someone’s private drive, and out into the countryside – heading for the site of Bovington Castle (or so it said on the map). Through cornfields and meadow we strode, and met no-one. We are blessed, in England and Wales, by having access to the countryside across Public Rights of Way established over centuries, with (in principle) gates, stiles, bridges and paths across cultivated land maintained throughout. Theoretically, in Scotland the situation is better still, with access granted to pass on anyone’s land subject to obvious exceptions, such as crops, private gardens and developments. In practice the situation in the UK is somewhat varied, with stiles sometimes broken or overgrown, dense crops obstructing paths or bulls in fields. Still, it is a privilege worth hanging onto and a system worth tolerating. The first sign of difficulty for us on this particular walk came when we were (supposedly) at the site of Bovington Castle at the bottom of a steep escarpment and a section of the path was blocked by maize. I don’t know if you have ever tried walking through a field of maize six feet high, but let me assure you that you soon become lost and disorientated because you can see no landmarks; nothing, in fact, but maize. Years ago we once went for a walk in such a field with some friends and actually started walking in circles: we only managed to get out by using a GPS to direct us to the stile on the opposite side of the field. This also proved to be the case on this occasion, but I was prepared for it and had my trusty digital Ordnance Map literally at hand, on my iPhone. It was a pity I did not also have a machete to cut our way through the crops, but we made it across in the end and staggered into the next field, where the farmer was apparently cultivating nettles, triffids, thistles and other hostile plants for reasons not at all clear to me. I must say, his crop was doing very well as the plants were five or six feet tall in places. We plodded on, following the contour line as per the map, me making reassuring confident noises and Jane grumbling mightily. Finally, we reached a high hedge of prickly hawthorn at the spot where, according to GPS, the stile should be. It was not there. Jane had insisted on taking her turn at carrying the rucksack on this trip, despite my protestations, and it just so happened that, at this point, it was her turn to carry it. I duly passed over the load and told her that, newly enlightened, I would set off uphill through the undergrowth to find the gap, while she followed slowly. I promised that I would return before nightfall. I battled upwards, stumbling over mounds and falling into badger setts, often losing sight of the horizon and soon out of grumbling range of Jane. Quite suddenly, out of the undergrowth appeared a man clutching a map, carrying a rucksack and wielding a very professional staff. We greeted each other and it transpired that he was on the same mission as I was: to find a way through the hedge. He, too, reckoned that we were at the correct place for the stile. We agreed to separate and to call out if we were successful. I advised him to look out for a grumbling woman with strawberry blond hair as he searched, but he said he thought he had already met her: apparently he had passed a very vocal woman in the undergrowth who had fallen over and was not at all happy. Five minutes later I finally found the gap in the hedge (not in the correct place according to the map) and I called out. Two minutes later Jane emerged from the undergrowth, her hair covered in bits of grass like a scarecrow, her clothes in disarray and her fleece covered in burrs.
“I’ve been stung!”, she said in an angry forthright manner, as if it were my fault.
“What by?”, I asked.
“Nettles and thistles”.
“Where?”
“Everywhere!”
She had stumbled in the long grass and fallen into a large patch of stinging plants. Encumbered by the rucksack like a large turtle, she had then proceeded to roll over in the stuff to make sure she got both sides done. She tried to get up, then fell over onto her back again. Finally, reaching for a dock leaf to neutralise the nettle stings, she managed to collect a third batch of stings. She was, it is fair to say, seriously cheesed off and it was All My Fault for picking that route. What could I say? I always thought she loved gardens and wild flowers, but wisely kept silence. I plucked the bits of grass and dandelions out of her hair, took back the rucksack and offered to treat the nettle stings using potions from the very comprehensive first aid kit contained therein. It seemed the only thing to do. She refused, but I accepted her decision and the lash of her tongue philosophically as a man does: my back is broad and the scars are many. We continued on our way through the hedge into the next field, me bringing up the rear and following the noise.
The rest of the walk was not too bad. Soon we emerged into more open countryside and passed through Little Wallop before finally stopping in the churchyard at Clyst Magna as before. There, in the sunshine, we sat peacefully on a bench and ate our egg rolls, washed down with coffee from our flask, just as we had 18 months before. It was delightful, with England at its best and all of the world’s problems literally miles away. Soon, alas, we had to continue the final part of our journey: a very steep climb up the road from the village, back to the high ground. This was a killer, coming so late in the hike, and we only achieved it by taking it in stages of about fifty paces, then resting. Jane said that we should have taken the route in the opposite direction as before, as that would have been easier. I could not get across to her that if you climb down an escarpment of x feet, walk on the level, but then need to return to your starting point, then you will, inevitably, have to climb up x feet at some stage. This lesson in physics did not find favour with her, so I wisely decided to switch off lecture mode. Perhaps her nettle stings were bothering her. At last we reached the top of the hill and set off across the plain to the church at Much Deeping, far in the distance, where we had left our car. My hernia was giving me grief (such a joy to be old) and the two of us finally limped across the finishing line, me clutching my groin, having completed 10 miles up hill and down dale, through nettles, thistles, maize and hawthorn, awash with egg rolls and coffee, and covered in nettle stings. We never did see the remains of Bovington Castle – it was supposed to be the remains of an Iron Age fort and, later, a Norman castle. I think it must have been razed years ago and existed only in history and as a place on the map. Covering ten miles should have been nothing to us for we have walked sixteen miles before now, but we were absolutely shattered when we reached the car. It took us two days to recover. Still, it was good to be out – you never know when Boris will decide to lock us all up again.
Covid is still with us and reported infections are still climbing quite steeply. Unlike earlier in the epidemic, hospitalisations and deaths are not climbing at anything like the same rate as cases, but they are still rising weekly nonetheless, with no sign – at present – of levelling off. Average weekly deaths attributed to Covid in the UK are of the order of 750. There is now a belief in the scientific community that the efficacy of vaccines wears off over time, so that more fully-vaccinated people are now catching or dying from the virus. A booster shot in September is still being considered. We are far better off than the people of Australia and New Zealand, where the governments have locked down both countries with the vain hope of eliminating Covid altogether, though there have been few cases, fewer deaths, and a poor vaccination programme. Borders internally and externally in Australia have been closed and the very strict lockdown and curfew is being enforced by a draconian police force, supported by the army. One man was thrown to the ground by the police because he was not wearing a face mask and promptly had a heart attack; another man, on a train, was jailed for the same reason. Australians may remove their face coverings outside to drink coffee, but not to drink alcohol. There is a $1,000 fine for failing to wear a face covering, rising to $11,000 for continued defiance. The country and state premiers in Australia frequently berate their constituents for the rising infection rates in the country, claiming it is all their fault. What sort of country in the so-called free world, one founded on the principles of English law, sets the army on its citizens and treats them like that? To think that I actually considered emigrating to there at one time. No thanks, I’ll stick to Blighty and Boris for now.
Poor Jane, she has been in the wars again. Now she has gone deaf in one ear and has been diagnosed as having ‘sudden sensory hearing loss’, the treatment for which is a massive dose of steroids for a week. The side effects of this are that she may put on weight and that the drugs destroy her immunity system temporarily. Just the thing to have in a Covid epidemic. Naturally, for this reason, we have ceased socialising or mixing until she regains her normal defences again. I only hope it all works: so far, she says that her hearing has recovered though she has gained two kilograms. She has an appointment with an Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) consultant at the hospital in the Big City next week. Jane has scoured the internet and identified every measure, potion, pill or elixir that claims to improve the body’s defences. She intends to take them all. I am fine, thank you for asking, apart from that hernia that I don’t like to talk about: someone has to stay fit and well to look after Jane. As I write, she has just emerged from listening to a medical programme on the wireless that said that sunshine and Vitamin D will give her strong bones, healthy teeth and a glossy coat, and she is determined to exploit the new knowledge immediately. I am, accordingly, summoned to sit with her outside in the weak sunshine and northerly wind to soak in the rays (summer is over here in Melbury). She commands; I obey. Now where is that sweater?
Boom, boom, boom, boom: Esso Blue. Arrrrgh!
29 August 2021
"A Very Vintage Chap..." 