May 14th Parsley and Sage

I have been in trouble with my editor for getting too academic and too philosophical about major existential dilemmas. She actually called me ‘a teacher’ which I thought was a bit below the belt. Naturally I have disagreed with her, because that’s what we do and each of us has gently and cogently offered our point of view to the other. Tracking my blogs over the last 8 weeks there seems to have been some veering away from the original focus on blessings and detail and observation. It was always meant to be a record of how we change as well as how the world springing up around us is changing. Over time some of my comments have become soured and it has become almost possible to predict the mood of a blog by the weather. Today the sun is quite dazzling on the windows and instead of being the pessimistic sage I will examine parsley.

Cow Parsley is one of the things that has changed in the last few days. Another thing that has changed is I can now ascend the Tors steps like a moon probe, stopping to refuel about half way up. But on the lower steps I am sweeping my way through cow parsley that has sprung up and is overwhelming the path and on other parts of yesterday’s walk we were having to edge past nettles and trample through waving long lush grass. I was reminded of the heady opening lines of ‘Cider with Rosie’ in which the three year old Laurie Lee experiences: “The June grass, amongst which I stood was taller than I was and I wept. I had never been so close to grass before. It towered above me and all around me, each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight. It was knife-edged, dark, and a wicked green, thick as a forest and alive with grasshoppers that chirped and chattered and leapt through the air like monkeys.” Time has made us taller and pesticides have obliterated much of the insect life, but this year many of us have noticed a vividness in the springing around us which could be the result of a wet winter, or a warm April or because we have time to stand and stare. Across a meadow smothered in buttercups whole terraces of white hawthorn, ‘may blossom’, seemed to be stacked up. Along the canal tow path we were enveloped in them and for the first time I noted the perfect structure of each flower. In an ecstasy of poetic absorption similar to that of Wordsworth when he saw the daffodils, I cried, “Hey Google, tell me about May blossom,” and proceeded along the canal ignoring the flowering all around me reading my phone and nearly walking into the canal. There’s rather a lot of worrying folk-lore around ‘may’ or ‘white hawthorn’ involving slaughtering maidens and bad luck bringing the blossoms into the house. Moral – don’t Google on the canal path.

Another change over the last couple of days is seeing visitors in gardens. Released by Boris, people, swathed in scarves, hats and gloves are sitting in folding chairs drinking coffee and conducting conversations with friends and neighbours across the flower beds. I looked carefully last night at the mathematical formulae used to gauge the ratio of family member to friend and the parameters of personal territory that can be occupied and the boundaries of property within which one should remain according to the deeds of one’s house and the level of one’s fitness in relation to one’s age and decided that everyone quite sensibly was addressing the spirit rather than the letter of the law. In a lapse moment yesterday I handed a coin to someone and suddenly realised the danger and leapt back as if he had stung me. Needless to say I had gloves on and rushed home and decontaminated myself. Yes – things are feeling a little more relaxed but I’m not sure how relaxed I feel about being among a population which is acting a little more relaxed. We encountered some drivers today who, having been deprived of their rights to terrify pedestrians and cut-up cyclists, now felt liberated to do just that.

Speculation about the long term effects on the economy is now beginning to replace the death tally headlines. How far must we project our worries into the future now, especially at our age – our savings, austerity, our children and grandchildren, care, our precious life style which we boomers have so cherished? Better to live in this moment and only to consider “the lilies of the field”? How far ahead do we look when we are driving, to the horizon or just peer over the dashboard and confront the most immediate decisions? Stretching the metaphor, if we are merely living in the moment, we’re just looking at the dashboard and will probably crash. My task is to decide on the best length of view for me and practice it. At which point Deirdre asks if I fancy muesli or porridge for breakfast. This requires considerable reflection, taking a long view and a wide view. The sun shining hints at muesli, the cold at porridge. I can’t decide. We have porridge.

In fact the new guidelines require us to do a lot of decision making in the interests of ourselves and of each other. We have to decide how clinically vulnerable we are, and how clinically vulnerable do we want to be! How old do we feel and are we ready to submit to being dependent. I’ve been thinking for some time that there’s a certain amount of decision making involved in the aging process. We all know people who have given up “rag(ing) against the dying of the day.” Some seem to retire and sit as close as possible to a radiator and wait to die. When do we accept our limitations and for how long do we fight on denying them? Do we go careering through Sainsbury’s with our trolleys looking for Complan and Steradent or allow someone else to go for us? Back to my inspirational J.Alfred Prufrock, “Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?” Out walking and coming to a picturesque, but rather high stone stile – do we vault it, sit on it and swing our legs, perch on the top swaying precariously, get our feet on the wrong steps and execute a flying 360 degree turn on the downward tumble? Because we are trying to minimise hand contact with posts and walls these manoeuvres have become especially significant. These decisions take forethought and strategic planning in the light of observed data.

Sitting on a bench outside Dethick Church I had to decide if the white hawthorn

along a ridge was like a bridal train and the chestnut flowers like candles, or were these rather corny clichés and did we need similes at all. Certainly the beech trees were tiered and majestic and this fungi needs identifying. Meanwhile some small children running through a meadow of buttercups just were small children running through a meadow of buttercups.

Walking to Dethick and arriving at Babbington (or Babington according to the OS map) Farm you realise that round here all your walking is skirting history. Poor Anthony Babbington was hung, drawn and quartered for his part in the Catholic plot to free Mary Queen of Scots. A generation earlier Thomas Cromwell was asked for help from some of his distant relatives who lived here. Many generations later a descendant we know lives in Ulster and is a committed Protestant. Somewhere along the bloodline the family must have realised which side their denominational bread was buttered on. Along the footpaths we are meandering along a historical timeline, not designed by surveyors but trodden down by lead miners going to work in the winter darkness, shepherds and agricultural labourers, gypsies, pedlars and pack horses. I’ve also been noticing the little iron garden gates, their railings wrapped in ivy, their latches and padlocks rusted. They stand shy in walls between splendidly dressed stone gate-posts, presumably the vestiges of kitchen gardens or ancient enclosure; jealously guarded accesses on some nobly managed estate.

These hard trodden sunken footpaths emerge from the past and we linger on them in the deep shadows for a moment, admiring the chestnut trees, the beech, the hawthorn.

A chilly wind ruffles the leaves and we move on.