I went further afield today. For the last two months I've stayed pretty much within a 1-mile radius of my home - a couple of long walks not counted; I certainly haven't driven far since March 14th, when I drove to a gig in Hampshire.
Hampshire feels like another country now. And that barn dance was almost part of another world! The little jokes the caller made about 'socially distancing' while dancing (it was a brand new term back then) and the worry about whether enough people would make it for the raffle. We had ploughman's supper - ripping the bread with our fingers, squeezing the grapes and pickled onions, and stuffing the great wedges of cheese into tough loaf-ends - no thought to who may have arranged it on the paper plate, or where that food had been! These were the last few days of the pre-lockdown world.
So today, now that restrictions have been loosened a bit, I drove out to see my friend Mike for a walk in the countryside. It was a golden evening. Long shadows fell across the fields and the brilliant setting sun painted the trees in their finest colours. Birds chased each other across the warm, blue sky as tractors rolled hay below them.
"It's a bit like holidays, this," I said at one point, while Mike twisted his camera lens in front of the sunset. "Evening walks in the countryside - especially as I don't really know where I am."
He found that amusing. I've lived in this part of the world a long time - to not know where I was was probably a strange thing to admit. But this particular slice of countryside really was all new to me. At one point we found a view of our town from such a curious angle, I just couldn't work out which bit was north, which was west or south or anything! Everything was there - the hospital chimney, the water tower, the wind turbine - but they were all somehow in all the wrong places.
"It's funny to think in the old days," said Mike, "...a mile's walk would have been a long way. The next village would have seemed like a foreign land, even with different accents and dialects."
True enough. The world would certainly have seemed enormous when the only way to get out of your bubble was by a lot of walking or an expensive horse and carriage ride. These days, and topically so, we all live a whole lot closer together; you can be in Los Angeles faster than it would take to ride a horse to London.
Well, not at the moment you can't. Right now, we're all restricted to a much more old-fashioned way of doing things - such as an hour's amble through the countryside, watching a lady round up her horses, or a mother and daughter collecting flowers from the roadside. It's all very... rustic. Rustic and delightful.
I asked Mike what he'd like to preserve from this time; how it'll be, when the great buzz begins again and we're tempted to get back to driving about everywhere in a fluster. We talked about some of the things we need to lay down, and some of the lessons we need to pick up. We talked about stopping once in a while to listen to the birds and the trees, and watching which plants grow at which times of the year. There's so much beauty in these natural rhythms - it would be a shame to miss it while we're out chasing life and significance. I really don't want to go back to that kind of thing, as I keep saying. It's worth being intentional about it making a difference.
There were some lovely cottages on the walk today - the kind with thatched roofs and roses growing around the door. We passed an old chapel that had been converted into a stunningly modern apartment: angled wooden beam roof and wide, airy rooms; plush staircases and modern art were visible through what would have been the chancel window. It was all quite idyllic, very quaint and still, made even lovelier by the evening light, falling as it was through those large windows. As I always do, I allowed myself a second or two of dreaming and then shook my head back into reality.
I hope we can create a slower pace. There's something ever so luxurious about it. I don't really know how to do it, but still I hope I'll get a little closer. Sure, I probably won't wind up in a chocolate box cottage in the Berkshire countryside, or a minimalist barn conversion with mod-cons and velux windows. I probably won't have Audis and BMWs glimmering in the drive, or colourful hanging baskets exploding from the porch. But I can live a little slower, a little more rustic, a little more local - for sure?
After all, in this age of lockdown and old-fashioned travel within a radius, we're all a little more local than ever we were, aren't we?
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