Man the Decks

It's been a disappointingly cool May, but I've grown to like the soft, pastel colours and muted shadows that grey skies produce. Even mundane objects like this Victorian flint and brick wall can seem a thing of beauty.

I'd probably feel differently if I lived in somewhere like Croydon, where overcast skies only serve to accentuate the drabness of concrete office blocks and municipal car parks. But in the South Downs, a grey sky looks like an Eric Ravilious watercolour.

My book business is going through a rather quiet period at the moment, so I've taken the opportunity to transform our garden from a toxic, post-apocalyptic wasteland into something that looks vaguely respectable, with decking, pot plants and freshly-painted walls.

The decking was done by a retired man, who proudly told us that he'd learned his carpentry skills at a borstal. According to his son, he should be dead, having been electrocuted twice, surviving a heart attack in his 50s and falling off a number of buildings.

He also has a metal plate in his leg.

"It's his own fault," the son explained. "He's never been one to worry about health and safety. He's got this daft idea that it's safer to walk on a roof barefoot."

On one occasion, the son was working with his father on a roofing job when he heard him crying out and sliding down the tiles. Suddenly, the sliding stopped.

"It's all right," the father yelled, "My foot got stopped by the top of the ladder. I'm okay now...wooaahhh..."

At this point, the ladder began to fall backwards and the father was catapulted through the air.

He escaped with barely a scratch.

Fortunately, the cavalier attitude had clearly mellowed over the years and he worked carefully and conscientiously, producing a wonderful result. It was inspiring to watch a man who was 20 years older make light work of such a demanding job. What was his secret?

I decided to be brave and ask him how he kept so young: "So what's your secret then?"

His face lit up. He slowly turned to me and said "That would be lovely. White, no sugar please."

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.

Far From the Madding Crowd

Some years ago I was given the opportunity to open a new bookshop in the Science Museum. I knew very little about science, but managed to bluff my way through it and the shop seemed to do very well. There were a few little niggles, like the time I wasn't allowed in the stock room because the area was being decontaminated for radiation; but on the whole I enjoyed myself.

I even liked my commute to South Kensington on the District Line, which was a refreshing change from crawling along the M25 at rush hour. I could tell that my fellow passengers were irritated by the wailing Gypsy beggars who occasionally appeared, or the young South African men who used to leap into the carriage with a guitar and shout "Hi guys...Today, is gonna be the day when they're gonna give it back to you...", but I wasn't bothered. It still beat looking at a sign saying QUEUE AT JCT 8.

However, there was one aspect of the Science Museum that started to really get to me: the lack of daylight.

After spending hours in an air conditioned, windowless hall, I became increasingly disorientated. Was it light or dark outside? What was the weather like? Which season were we in? At first I just found it strange, then I began to sense a creeping depression. What could I do to shake myself out of it?

I don't know how the idea came to me, but one day I decided to walk the South Downs Way on my days off. Not all at once - it's 100 miles long - but in 10 to 25-mile sections, depending on where the nearest railway station was. I began in Winchester and, over the course of five months, walked to Eastbourne.

It was a wonderful experience in so many ways and, as I walked along the Downs above a town called Lewes, I remember thinking how lucky the locals were to have this countryside on their doorstep. If I lived here, I'd be up on the Downs every weekend.

Two years later I was living in Lewes, but was I up on the Downs every weekend? Of course not. Instead I was going up to London, making the most of my Tate Gallery membership, or seeing friends for drinks.

However, one of my resolutions for 2013 is to take more long walks, so this afternoon I took a train to Glynde and walked back to Lewes along the Downs. This may not be the most spectacular countryside in the world, but it works in mysterious ways. I didn't meet a single soul for the entire walk and the isolation was liberating:

The first part of the walk was awful: a steep climb from Glynde village that made me realise how out of condition I was. At one point I imagined that there was a pain in my chest and I started to think of the various news reports about men of my age - outwardly healthy - who suddenly keel over and die from a heart attack. Who would find me here?

But then I reminded myself that the first part of any walk on the South Downs began like this, as the muscles demanded extra oxygen and body took a while to adjust. I wasn't dying.

At the top of the Downs, the wind was unforgiving and my cheeks felt scoured by the cold. No wonder it had taken the snow so long to melt on the hills. But it's a continental climate here. In the summer, it can be oppressively hot, with no trees to provide any shade.

The physical exertion gradually induced a sense of deep relaxation that was compounded by the silence and isolation. It would probably be trite to say that the journey was mental as well as physical, but the bleakness and emptiness of my surroundings had a profound effect.

Eventually, Lewes appeared in the distance, like Bunyan's Celestial City:

The path took a turn a made a steep descent. As I walked down, I saw a group of geriatric hikers slowly advancing up the hill and felt both admiration and hope. Someone once suggested that I join a walking group, but I told them that they'd missed the point. It was the isolation that attracted me.

However, I suppose there's safety in numbers when you're over a certain age.

Entering a world of noise, people and things felt strange. Here were thousands of people, all neatly contained in this space of narrow streets and cramped little houses, while less than a mile away, there was a vast, empty wilderness.

 I shall be returning to Glynde at the earliest opportunity.

The View From My Door

I've moved to a new workplace. I think I'm going to like it:

When I was younger, standing on windswept suburban platforms, watching trains full of exhausted people make their way back to the less fashionable parts of London, I used to dream of escaping to the countryside.

But instead, I moved to a small, affluent London suburb that had been picked up and dropped in the middle of the Sussex Downs at some unspecified point in the past. The dinner parties with people from Stoke Newington continued unabated, but without the absurdly long bus rides (or the nocturnal cab journeys, driven by someone who had only just arrived in Britain) between places that were only a few miles apart.

It was the perfect solution. I could see the countryside in the distance, but wasn't obliged to engage with it in any way.

However, during the last few months I have spent a lot of time on farms and have grown to love the silence and remoteness. Ridiculously, I didn't know how much countryside there was. My journeys along arterial main roads hadn't exposed me to the vast interior of the Weald, where it is still possible to escape from light pollution and the distant roar of traffic.

I love the fact that I can be sitting in an office, connected to the internet, but all I can hear is the sound of sheep, cows and birds.

Last week I was sitting at my desk, answering some emails, when a sheep came up to my window and stared at me for three minutes. I tried waving and flapping my arms around to get a reaction, but it continued to look me calmly in the eye, with a uniquely ovine insouciance. In the end, I was rescued by the distraction of some gamboling lambs.

I'm sure that my rural idyll will seem less appealing in December, but at the moment I feel as if all of those hours spent at Clapham Junction and countless bus stops, have finally been rewarded.