The Long Man

This morning began normally enough. My wife refused to get up until she'd read another chapter of the new Anne Tyler novel. I fiddled around on my phone, looking at a selection of pointless updates on Facebook. My older son remained asleep, while his brother crept downstairs to play on the computer.

I knew that with a little application, we could continue doing this until lunchtime, blaming the weather for our inertia. But a brief glint of sunlight from a passing car hinted at a morning that was too good to be squandered. A walk on the South Downs was the answer. I told my younger son to get his coat. 

 

We started here, in the shadow of the Long Man of Wilmington. The beauty of this hill figure, "as high as forty men", is that nobody knows anything about it. It may be thousands of years old or just a few hundred. We don't have a clue who built it, or why. 

Whether it's a fertility symbol, a warning to enemies or a simple work of art is anyone's guess. That's the beauty of the Long Man.

Erich von Daniken would probably assert that it's a signal to visiting aliens. As if.

I once had the misfortune to work in a bookshop with a large clientele of New Age fans, during which I met a number of charlatans and some people who probably needed more help than a quartz crystal could provide. As a result, I avoid visiting the Long Man when there's any likelihood of spotting a druid.

Ironically, they spoil the mystical atmosphere of the place.

My son, who is nine, looked very thoughtful and said "This is marvellous. You know, when I was younger, I preferred the city to the countryside, but I find that as I get older, I prefer the countryside."

A wise head on young shoulders.

I didn't have any particular plan, other than to walk to the Long Man, but my son seemed to be enjoying himself so much, it seemed a pity to stop. So we didn't.

The largest hill is Firle Beacon. Virginia Woolf regularly walked across it when she went to visit her sister Vanessa, at Charleston, which is probably a small dot in this photo. Beyond Firle Beacon is Lewes, where Woolf bought her baked beans and bottles of stout.

After walking for a mile or so, we saw a village in the distance. I realised that it was Alfriston and suggested that we'd better turn back and walk to the car, but my son was determined to press on and marched ahead, singing 'It's a Long Way To Tipperary'. 

My son loves singing. He has no idea that he is completely tone deaf.

The path that was supposed to cut through fields to Alfriston was flooded, so we took the long way round and walked past some idyllic, asymetrical cottages and solid, Georgian homes. It was almost the perfect, picture postcard village, but was spoiled by a constant stream of traffic.

I noticed that my son was extremely pale - he'd never walked this far in his life - so I suggested getting a taxi back to the car park. Unfortunately, I couldn't get a phone signal. The only answer was to either accost a kindly Morris Minor-owning vicar, or consume some calories.

We found the village store, where a nice woman made me a delicious sandwich that contained at least twice as much beef as I was expecting. Within minutes, I was beefed-up.

My son chose a Curly-Wurly bar and I watched the colour slowly return to his cheeks. I was unaware of the restorative properties of the Curly-Wurly.

As we left Alfriston, a pterodactyl-like silhouette circled above the flooded fields. My son had never seen a heron before and was impressed by the huge wingspan. "This is an adventure," he said. "We never know what we're going to see next. Those Disney places pretend to give you adventures, but you know what to expect."

Good, I thought, that's saved me several hundred quid and a weekend of hell at Disneyland Paris.

After a fairly steep climb, my son asked to stop and we sat down for a few minutes. I looked at the piece of grass next to me and saw that it was actually made up of many different plants, some of them barely visible, clinging on to a bedrock that was comprised of the bones of billions of prehistoric creatures. It seemed miraculous.

Then I noticed an odd, whorl-shaped object:

It was a snail, unlike any that I have found in my garden. I looked closer and realised that the whole area was littered with these tiny shells. I will be contacting the relevant authorities about the discovery of the Cochlea Steerforthum.

As we walked back, I thought of a conversation I had with a friend in the pub, yesterday evening. We both agreed that we had reached an age where we could no longer afford to squander time. We might live for another 40 years and remain in reasonable health for much of it. But we might not.

Going for a long walk on the Downs may not qualify as a 'bucket list' activity, but it had the sense of being what Frank O'Hara called the "real right thing" and that, I think, is all anyone can ask for.