A Walk In The Heat

I must admit, for one reason or another, life's been a little difficult since returning from Ireland. Some well-worn problems raised their ugly and familiar heads to haunt me, and I fell into some bad, old ways. At one point I nearly escaped to France. But you can't run away from challenging situations, can you? You will only take them with you. Changing countries solves nothing, for you always have to take your head along. In his blog The Goat That Wrote (do check it out, it's terrific), the Goat serendipitously comes across this cookie-cutter slice of wisdom: We carry within us the wonders we seek without us. (Attributed to Sir Thomas Browne.) Equally, I think, we carry within us the worries we misguidedly seek to evade by travelling.

Anyhow, yesterday, in the muggy, sweltering heat, I took a twenty mile walk down to Oakham, the southern terminus of the Viking Way. This church in Sewstern looks pretty ancient at first glance, but actually it's only mid-nineteenth-century. A guy inside, cleaning the aisle carpet with his Dyson, introduced himself as the Church Warden, then launched into a long and convoluted history of the diocese. Bless him, but I had to be on my way, so I made my excuses and left ...

        

After negotiating what seemed light years of flat farmland, cereal fields, straight, stony tracks and a roadway bloody with roadkill, I finally arrived at the quintessentially English, square church tower of Thistleton ...

At 'The Plough' in Greetham, Ian, the landlord, mixed me pint after pint of blackcurrant juice and lemonade - with lots of ice. I had water with me, but was worried about getting dehydrated. The day was very hot, and I still had many miles to go ...

The next village was the idyllically pretty estate of Exton. Here's the village green ...

... and here's one of its many lovely cottages. I haven't a photo, but many of the cottages had straw-thatched roofs ...

Exton church is a gem, and was well worth the extra half-mile detour...

Inside there's an unparalleled display of memorial carvings from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, including this work of art in stone by Grinling Gibbons, normally more celebrated for his woodcarving ...

If my depression had not entirely lifted, it had certainly been pushed into the background by the sheer physicality of this walk, and the stultifying heat! Oh well, as I said in this poem, bees come and go on the marjoram, depending on the sun ...