THE ROUND

I grow, perhaps, unsociable.

Walking with others is a fine thing. But walking on your own ices the cake. It has the meditative benefit of quiet self-alignment. You see more. Nature runs away from you less. You hear more, with only your own breath (oh, and the entire Universe, of course) to listen to. Your walk can become focused on the walk, rather than on the conversation of the walk. Your pace does not have to be adjusted to another. More importantly, it can be adjusted self- indulgently to the interest in a thistle, the pattern of shade under an oak, the curiosity aroused by a fungus on the oak, which, when you press it, is almost as hard as the oak itself. You can stop to marvel at the ostentatious aggression of a bramble. You can listen to the curlew’s music. You can tune in to the humming and chirring of the summer land. You can stop at a sudden perfume, and wonder at its source, astonished that, attuned to it, attending to it, the humble clover flower becomes sense – filling sweet.

Thus are my constitutionals. Just as their pace is voluntary, so it varies. At times they are route march, sweat forming on my back. At times they are stroll. And at times they are lolling, lounging and stopping stock still.

In a six or seven mile round, I am disappointed if I do not see deer. I see few other mammals, scarcely ever other humans. Small rodents – shrews, field mice – they’re too scared of me to be seen. I sometimes see them when I am mowing the orchard. But only when the grass is long. Then they cower and scurry away from the blades and I am always reminded of Burns and his “wee sleekit, cowering,  timorous beastie”. Then I also see toads, occasionally murdering them for the hell of it. Once, turning over an old woodpile, I found a colony of orange bellied newts. Walking, I see stoats and weasels – like watching a thick nibbed orange pen, putting a dash across a road. Then they are gone. They don’t hang around for us. And you definitely don’t want to get too close to one. They could bite you through to the bone. I have a feeling that this year their numbers may be down. I have seen few, and, more telling still, there are hundreds of rabbits. Weasel v rabbit? Weasel, every single time. Put money on it.

On yesterday’s walk I went all the way to the penultimate stretch – a road section encouraging of speed walking - until I saw the deer. There were a few vehicles on the road and to get out of their way I stepped through a break in the hedge and into a baked field rather sparsely planted for an oilseed rape patch. I had a pee, and while the thin stream was coming out of me, noticed about eighty yards off a young doe, just at the field’s edge, just into the field, near enough to the shelter of the hedge and woodland beyond it to be able to bolt. Her head was tiny. I remember thinking momentarily “if I had a rifle I could get off a shot and take her, but not a head shot.” I’ll avoid saying “I put my weapon away” but I very soon abandoned all thoughts of violence. I stood for about twenty minutes, silent and watching her, peacefully grazing. It adds to my own peace immensely to know, that, within a mile of my home, and often much nearer, she and her kind are doing what nature intended: feeding, sleeping, excreting, mating, nurturing young – the great cycle in which we all live, to which, regardless of all human aspiration, we all contribute, into which we all return, and by which I am constantly inspired.