I had a particularly thoughtful shower this morning. It was particularly thoughtful because the alternative would have been to have been particularly thoughtful whilst getting soaking wet outside – a prospect of damp, fog, melting snow, slush, mud and a very dirty sky. It was the mud that sparked off my thoughtfulness. Yesterday I went out for an afternoon walk and in order to stay out of the mud that’s now creeping up on Crich and enveloping everything like some brown gangrene, I decided to walk through the new housing estate that’s expanding and expanding on what were the green fields lower down. I tried to trace what was an old footpath but which the developer had conveniently lost. I found the original stile which was, of course, broken and unrepaired and continued to where site traffic had so churned up the ground that it was no longer passable except possibly on stilts or hovercraft.
The development has the advantage of bringing more young working people and families into the community. By young, in Crich, we mean people with more future than past and who are inclined to live in the future rather than the past. Many of the inhabitants have spent virtually their entire residency in the village during the Covid pandemic, which means they have never known about or experienced all our Live and Local performances, exercise classes at the Glebe, village fete, open gardens, well dressing, barn dance, singing round the Christmas Tree, breakfast at the Loaf, cake sales, children’s events at church, neighbours round for a coffee, singing in the Cliff or eating out at the Jeera or Black Swan. Then they have small children whose earliest memories will be of endless Peppa Pig indistinguishable from grandparents because they appear on the same screen. So my shower was thoughtful, then it became sad, then I turned on the cold to boost my immunity. After ten seconds it was so unbearable that I tried to turn it off, but once I’d finished groping around for the tap I’d had the regulation thirty seconds so now feel immune to anything. Except that is, to a mild depression as I sense our limited future being wasted watching snow turn to slush and slush turn to mud.
However, it is obligatory to voice the regulation mote of cheerfulness. Just as a few knobs of daffodils are emerging, there is talk of a future in the golden post-vaccine days to come. Ideas are being suggested, committees formed, dates inserted into calendars, mainly in pencil. Much of this is speculative, but we will need to address our habit of inertia and helplessness and re-skill ourselves and grow beyond the expectation that everything we plan will be cancelled. A different mind-set will be required than that which believes binge eating Bombay Mix in front of endless crime serials is the acme of existence, the peak of our heirarchy of experiences.
There was also some encouraging warmth in the sunshine as we trod our way round the lanes. Even the buzzard that was perched on a stone wall seemed to be enjoying the sunshine. Our current project is to try and remember road names around this village we’ve lived in for nearly twenty years. Today took us along Top Hagg into Chadwick Nick and onto Cowper Lane. We also boast Hogg’s Nick and Smith’s Rough. These aren’t thoroughfares for cissies but good Northern muscular names with echoes of Vikings pillaging their way along them. Hagg is actually a Viking word for a way. They wouldn’t have been impressed by Lilac Grove or Pansy Close. Our names are not only gritty, they tap into the messy strata of our history, geology and wildness. Chadwick was reputed to have been a Parliamentary Civil War officer who had his men hew a nick through the limestone scarp that was in his way. I suspect Cowper was a local farmer but it would be nice to imagine it was William Cowper the poet, who wrote the hymns ‘O for a Closer Walk with God’ and ‘God Moves in a Mysterious Way,’ either of which would have made a suitable accompaniment to our walk. Nevertheless I don’t think any of our predecessors on this route would have been terribly patient of our attempts to keep our shoes clean by mincing round the puddles, or wincing under a cold shower for that matter.
(from Asterix in Guardian.com}