Walking no dogs

The thing about dogs is that they get you out of doors. Which is just as well, because indoors they’re good at interrupting, or at least restricting, your work. You don’t believe me? Try typing with a dog resting her head on your elbow.

Luci being endearing. But making it hard to do much work

Getting me out of doors is a fundamentally good thing. I’ve taken to heart the injunction to take 10,000 steps a day, even though I’m far from convinced that this limited form of exercise does me all the good that’s claimed for it. In fact, because when I get one of these fixations I generally go way over the top, I try to do 15,000 steps. Even though, in my heart of hearts, I know that even that level is unlikely to be that beneficial.

Still, if you set yourself a target, the least you can do is try to hit it. For that the dogs are invaluable. Rain or shine, summer or winter, day or night, they have to go out. And when you’re out, well you’re racking up the steps. Great.

But what happens if you’re deprived of the dogs, even temporarily?

This happened when my wife, now happily retired, decided to take them to Ashridge Forest the other day. When lunchtime came around and I realised I was terribly short of my daily step target, I felt strangely embarrassed at the notion that I might go for a walk without the dogs. It felt as though I was proposing to go out naked.

How could I justify my presence in the park without Luci or Toffee?

It was only at the price of some serious soul-searching and internal debates that I convinced myself that people do, after all, often go out on walks. Admittedly, mostly they’re with friends, or family, or indeed dogs, but some of them walk on their own. ‘You’ll never walk alone’ the song proclaims, but the most enthusiastic singers of that song are fans of Liverpool Football Club, among whose number I have to admit I’m not to be counted.

What was there to stop me getting out there? Even alone?

So I went.

At least I could walk more quickly than I usually do with the dogs. I feel no inclination to keep my nose on the ground, or to dart off into the bushes in pursuit of a squirrel, the remains of a mouldy sandwich or, quite often, as far as I can see, absolutely nothing at all. That makes for significantly better forward progress.

It meant I could even see a few things that I hadn’t counted on. In Wardown Park, surely the most prestigious of the parks which are Luton’s best feature, I popped into the museum and, specifically, the room in which we attend occasional Sunday concerts. On this occasion, there were no musicians, but an artist, Nicola Moody working on a loom, creating a piece to be called Running with Thread.

Nicola Moody working on her jack loom
in Wardown House

Every Saturday, there’s a 5 km Park Run in Wardown Park. One of my sons, Nicky, has taken part three times, winning once and placing in the top three on all those occasions. A number of my friends also run, though they tend to place less far up the leader board, especially when pushing a buggy around with a child in it. It’s a great illustration of the joy of simply taking part. That’s something to celebrate, though I don’t participate myself as it happens, preferring to watch the illustration and celebrate it from the finishing line.

Nicola Moody’s weaving will produce three pieces incorporating the length of stride, heart rate and running time of three participants. She tells me that her kind of weaving is now recognised as a true art form. Indeed, the Tate Modern is running an exhibition of one of its major exponents, Anni Albers, right now.

Back outside, I went on to the old cricket field nearby. This was where, nearly a quarter of a century ago, I came to watch that same son Nicky playing a match against a team which, if I remember, consigned them firmly to the position of second best. But I was as always simply pleased to see the place, with its stone banks of seats on two sides and a pavilion on the third, and a perfectly even, smooth surface for this noble game between them.

For my recent dogless walk, I had chosen a fine day, with a clear sky and bright sunshine. There was however a touch of sharpness to the air that made me grateful I’d chosen to take a jacket. Autumn was definitely on us, summer was no more.

That was an impression confirmed by the sight that greeted me when I reached the field. In the winter, it’s given over to football instead of cricket. And, indeed, a game was in progress when I got there.

The cricket ground in its winter manifestation as football pitch

Ah, well. The tougher time for the walks is coming fast. But the thing about dogs is that they make you go out. Rain or shine, summer or winter, day or night. Soon it’s going to be a lot more rain than shine, a lot more night than day. The dogs won’t mind, because they just like to go out. For us? Not so much fun. But at least they’ll ensure we do our steps.

So my walk without dogs made clear what awaits me with them. Far, far too soon. But that didn’t stop me enjoying it.

England: the redeeming features

It was a wonderful day on Saturday, and we took advantage of it to go walking with a friend in one of most charming places we know: Ashridge Forest, about a forty-minute drive from where we live.

Ashridge Forest: lovely in autumn, lovely in any season

Our return to England, after five weeks of warmth and sunshine as well as clear roads, was made painful by the lousy weather and appalling traffic. Fortunately, England does have many glorious aspects to compensate. Saturday’s weather was one. As for Ashridge, where one can walk for miles though woods and fields, with occasional glimpses of deer, it’s right up there with the best of them.

These are the aspects of England, along with the friends we shall be leaving behind, that I shall miss when we complete our Brexit exit before the axe falls at the end of next March.

After Ashridge, our friend suggested we might like to head for the nearby market town of Tring, where there was an apple festival that day. That sounded like a good plan. I could already picture myself eating a sausage washed down with a pint of cider – I was planning to ask for pear cider, just to be perverse – at what I assumed would be cheerful, bustling fair.

Sadly, it was not to be. There’d be an apple parade in the morning, but by the time we showed up in town the festival was all over. Indeed, pretty much all that was left was to watch another friend and her Morris dancing group perform outside the Church.

Morris Dancing: more appealing than I'd expected

I’ve never been a great fan of Morris dancing, the rather strange custom mocked by many foreigners – indeed, by many English people – in which the dancers wear elaborate costumes decorated with bells, so they tinkle through the complex steps of the dances, accompanied by folk music played on traditional instruments, such as fiddles, guitars, squeezeboxes and tambourines. All a little weird. And yet, I have to admit, the group we saw was pretty impressive, the dancing spellbinding and highly skilful.

I think I could develop a taste for it, a discovery I’ve perhaps made a little late given that we’re about to leave the country where it has its roots.

The Morris dancing was outside the church, and it was inside it that I discovered the only trace of the apple festival: large sheets of paper on which people – children, I assume, for the most part – had glued cutouts of apples which they’d then coloured. I suppose it was gratifying to find some reminder of the festival, though it hardly made up for the brimming pint I’d promised myself and, in the absence of the sausage stand I’d been sure to find, it left me feeling hungry.

The closest we got to any apples. Let alone cider

The church smelled of incense, which suggested to me that it was probably High-Church: the Church of England isn’t content with being merely Protestant, it has currents running from the most Protestant Low-Church at one end of the spectrum, through Middle Church to the quasi-Catholic High Church at the other end. Fortunately, they don’t burn each other’s adherents anymore, so all these distinctions are now just part of the quaintness of English life.

Along with activities like Morris Dancing, festivals that are over so fast that you can miss them if you blink or pretty little market towns like Tring, which means places for the prosperous Middle Class to live and cultivate its charm.

The Church of St Peter and St Paul, Tring

I shall miss them all. Though perhaps not the church, fine though it was. If there’s one thing we’ve already found Spain isn’t short of, it’s Churches. Catholic, of course, almost without exception, but then the Church of St Peter and St Paul in Tring, with its scent of incense, isn’t really that different.

As for apples, well Danielle has plenty from her allotment. She'd turned a whole bunch of them into apple stew which we had with yoghurt when we got home. Pretty well made up for the lack of cider...

I have always depended on the cordiality of strangers

Often it works out well. On Sunday, we took both dogs to Ashridge Forest, one of the more magical places in the three counties Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire. Making up for quite a lot of places of the other kind.

For Toffee, not yet seven months old, it was a matter of sheer delight. I think she had never previously encountered such a medley of smells. She ran through mile after mile of forest with her nose trailing along the ground for most of the way, as she revelled in the experience.

Sharing the joys of Ashridge in the spring

After giving the dogs their treat, we headed to the National Trust café which does an excellent line in homemade meals and cakes (not of course that we indulge in the cakes). The place was full – it took me twenty minutes even to get to the front of the queue, making me more grateful than ever the existence of a Kindle app on my phone – so we ended up sharing a table with other people.

By good fortune, we found ourselves opposite to women of Indian extraction, with whom we got into a pleasant conversation. We agreed about how awful racist objections to Muslim dress are, how desperate a state the Labour Party is in under its present non-leadership and how appalling it is that Britain is planning to leave the European Union.

It really is depressing watching someone self-inflicting a major injury. Especially when it’s your country.

I was amused that one of the women complained that she was constantly losing credit cards.

“How irresponsible is that?” she asked, I assume rhetorically, “what’s more irresponsible than losing credit cards?”

“Using them?” I asked.

“That’s what husbands are for,” she patiently explained, “to make sure you always have credit on the card.”

Her husband was clearly a different kind from my wife’s. With us, I was always the one running up the credit card bills. It was my wife who spent twenty-five years trying to train me to understand that my life would be a lot less stressful and a great deal more comfortable if I stopped treating “credit” as though it were “funds”.

These days I’m convinced that losing my credit cards would be a lot less irresponsible than using them. But it was fun meeting someone who took the opposite view. Especially in as glorious a setting as Ashridge.

Magic of a second chance after a first-time screw up

Charles Venables, the government minister in J M Barrie’s play What Every Woman Knows, tells us that the man whose second thoughts are good is worth watching.

Barrie strikes me as a deeply suspect individual (what is Peter Pan really about?) and this play is a vehicle for some pretty troubling social attitudes. Despite my reservations, however, I can’t help enjoying it and I particularly like the sentiment about second thoughts.

Of course, I work in business where it’s a fundamental principle that you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. Where the mantra is getting things right first time. Doesn’t stop companies getting things wrong again and again, or not getting them done at all, very often, but the mantra’s there.

So it was wonderful to have a second chance to get something right this morning. I’ve already recounted how two weeks ago I screwed up by taking us to the wrong place for an early morning bird-watching walk, in the breathtaking splendour of Ashridge Forest. That meant that we were up at 5:00 a.m. for nothing, and I’d spoiled my wife’s birthday: she'd set a lot of store by the charms of early morning bird watching in a delightful setting.

Even at stupid o'clock, Ashridge is a magical place
for a walkin the sunshine

Fortunately, the Ashridge National Trust people had organised another walk for this morning and though it meant a 5:00 start all over again, it was a tremendous relief to have an opportunity to correct things so soon. This time, I made a point of checking the details the night before, even looking at the map to be sure I knew where we had to go (like instruction manuals, I feel a real wimp if I have to consult a map). We were at the right place and a few minutes before time. A major success compared to the last occasion.

We’ve had nearly two weeks of nearly summer weather here in England, which is pretty long for any kind of summer compared to the last few years. It was no surprise therefore that we left this morning facing a grim weather forecast, with the skies turning grey and temperatures 10 to 15 degrees down on the last few days (and that’s real degrees, not the trivial little Fahrenheit ones). Why, it was even beginning to spit a little rain as we set out on the walk.

But still, England’s weather hadn’t fully plunged us back into November yet (that didn’t happen until this afternoon), and we had moments of glorious sunshine when, if we got out of the wind, it felt positively warm. As the guides warned us, we didn’t do so much actual bird watching as bird listening: the leaves are out and birds are mostly concealed, but on the other hand they’re pouring out their hearts in song. The first two species we were introduced to were jackdaws and yellow hammers, and I was just enchanted: town dweller that I am, I’m much more used to the sound of the jackhammer.

Two hours walking through fabulous scenery in sunshine that kept constant quite a lot of the time more than made up for the stupid o’clock start. And finishing it all of with a full breakfast in the National Trust café really put the icing on the cake (not that we had cake: it wouldn’t have gone with the bacon or egg).

Second thoughts had more than made up for my total lack of thinking first time round. And my wife got her wish at last.

Happy birthday, again, Danielle. Just a couple of weeks late.

No bird pictures, I'm afraid.
But here's a Whitebeam catching the sun,
with all of Bucks and Beds laid out behind it

Why reading the instructions can be a smart move

Some may feel that 5:00 a.m. isn’t the ideal time to start a Saturday. But if your wife’s a keen birdwatcher, it’s her birthday and that justly exalted institutions, the National Trust, is organising a 6:30 birdwatching walk in that breathtaking place, Ashridge Forest, well, 5:00 is when you get up.

I’d made all the arrangements. I’d planned our departure time based on normal conditions but, of course, there’s no traffic at that time of day, so we arrived dead early. And then we sat in the morning cold watching the minutes tick by, while no-one else showed. I wandered over to the visitor centre, naturally shut, and checked out the posters: there it was, 6:30 on the 27th, beginners birdwatching walk.

The kind of thing we might have seen. But didn’t.

So where was everyone?

Danielle had been checking the web and had the answer.

‘At Steps Hill car park,’ she informed me.

Steps Hill car park? Where on Earth was that?

Ashridge doesn’t do helpful little road signs, marked with useful indications such as ‘Steps Hill car park this way’. In fact, it doesn’t even put names up on the bits of land it’s flattened here and there and designated as car parks. They’re just marked ‘car park’, which isn’t what I think of as uniquely identifying. Be fair, National Trust. I’d call that ambiguity, except that there’s loads of them. Multiguity, perhaps.

Eventually, though, we found a car park with several cars in it plus two National Trust ranger vehicles.

‘This must be it,’ said Danielle. Her tone wasn’t icy, precisely, but had just that kind of non-iciness voices take on when their owners are trying to be kind to the afflicted by not revealing their feelings.

It was 7:00 by then so we went home. Where I checked my e-mails. The one from the National Trust proudly proclaimed that the attachment contained ‘all the information you will need for your visit.’ I looked. And there it was: the meeting point wasn’t the visitor centre but Steps Hill car park. As marked on the attached map. With a grid reference and everything.

If only I’d read it. If only I’d printed it out. If only I’d taken a glance last night.

How did Whittier put it? ‘For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: "It might have been!"’

Ah well. There’s always next year, I suppose. Perhaps by then I’ll have learned to read instructions.

Meanwhile, happy birthday, Danielle.

A dog's life on a bracing day

‘Bracing’ is a great word, isn’t it? It does for weather just what ‘interesting’ does for a film, the kind you didn’t walk out of, and which you didn’t exactly dislike, but for which you can’t actually point to any redeeming features.

On winter walks, ‘bracing’ means it was wet, cold and muddy, but somehow you didn’t enjoy it any the less for all that, though on the face of it there’s no good reason why you wouldn’t find it frankly miserable. We spent a couple of hours today picking our way round the muddiest bits of rutted paths, hands stuffed in pockets despite the gloves, noses glowing like traffic lights on stop.

That was in Ashridge forest, one of our favourite places. We particularly like it in May when the bluebells are out, or in the autumn when the leaves are turning, but even with bare trees and ice floating on the puddles in the tracks, it was full of charm today. We saw a colossal herd of fallow dear and a monkjack dodging between the trees; we saw my favourite white horse who, as usual, I fed with some handfuls of grass though it hurt to take my glove off to pick it and all I could get was some miserly tufts; and naturally we saw huge numbers of dogs, including our own Janka who’s never so delighted as when she can be in that forest.

She was barking in pleasure from the moment we pulled into the car park.  Once out the car and into the field that leads to the edge of the woods, she was wild with excitement. Belying her twelve years, she reverted to puppyhood, racing in every direction and barking at anything that caught her attention, from an unusually high grass blade to a glimpse of her own shadow.

We met a woman walking two dogs who said she always took them for a long walk before going to Ashridge, so that they wouldn’t be that excited when they got there. Clearly Janka isn’t alone in getting carried away by the sheer joy of the place. On the other hand, why would we walk off her exuberance beforehand? If Janka can’t be a little wild in a forest, where else should she be?

Sharing Janka’s pleasure would have made the walk worthwhile anyway, even if we hadn’t enjoyed it for its own sake: there’s a strange quietness in winter woodlands which is gently soothing, and it was good to share it with Danielle and our middle son Michael, over for the weekend from his home in Madrid. We wrapped the expedition up with a burger which exactly fitted the appetite the walk gave us, especially as what we ate wasn’t any old burger, but one made of veal and topped with bacon: Ashridge is managed by that venerable institution, the National Trust, and not even its burgers are ordinary.

Besides, just before we reached the end of our walk, the sun slipped below the clouds and flooded the landscape with light. No particular warmth, for sure, but golden light that transformed every prospect.

As the sun flooded in, we enjoyed Ashridge as much as Janka

Despite the bracing cold and the mud

It was a useful reminder that a winter walk can be just as rewarding as it can be bracing. A sentiment which Janka entirely endorses.

Rutting or no rutting

For a couple of weeks each year, stags turn from placid, timid creatures into fearsome brutes. In the main they turn their ferocity on each other, though they’re perfectly capable of picking on any human rash enough to get close.

Not wise to tangle with one of these...
See more?

That happens is the rutting season when the females are fertile and the males battle for the right to impregnate them. They famously bellow as they do so, making the sound of their aggression as awe-inspiring as the fights themselves.

Over the last two years, Danielle has taken groups of friends to see the sight, but I’ve been unable to accompany them on either occasion. That’s a pity because I’ve always wanted to be there, if only in honour of William Harvey. Yes, that’s the man who did the work on circulation of the blood, way back in the seventeenth century; what’s less well known is that he also did some ground-breaking research on reproduction.

In the days when I was working on eighteenth-century French science, one of the controversies I came across owed much to his account of the eggs he found in the wombs of rutting does from Windsor Great Park. 
For my part, the only bit of this story that I disliked was the idea that he’d been cutting up females for no better reason than they’d got pregnant. That’s the kind of behaviour that I would associate with worst kind of fanatical extremist rather than a leading scientist. Perhaps with even certain excrescences of the Tea Party, though I suppose they’d be less likely to be that punitive about a female getting pregnant than over her not being pregnant any more.

Harvey: a fine physician but no friend to does

In eighteenth-century France, less squeamish about causing torment or death, but much more prickly about dignity and status, fashionable ladies were appalled by the idea that they might produce eggs.‘What? Like hens in a farmyard? Who do they take us for?’ 

If, like their successors today, you think yourself a cut above other people and born to rule the roost – to use, I think, le mot juste – I suppose the idea that anything links you with animals you roast and eat must be pretty shocking.

Harvey, however, reported what he saw, and I was hoping to pay a small tribute to him when we stepped out of the car in Ashridge forest yesterday.

The forest is one of those places that makes living nearby a privilege to be treasured. Heavily wooded over a large area, it’s the perfect place for country walks at any season, though at its most striking in late spring when the ground is carpeted with bluebells or, indeed, in the autumn when the deer are rutting and the stags bellowing.

Ashridge bluebell carpet

Alas, I was destined to miss that spectacle again this year. We were too late. There were lots of deer and very attractive they were too, but they’d returned to their customary docility. No bellowing. No clashing of antlers.

Getting ready for a clash?
But this was a picture of Danielle's from last year, when I wasn't there

The disappointment was, however, limited. In the first place, should we really be encouraging that kind of behaviour? Rutting stags hardly show an enlightened approach to females, do they? To say nothing of the approach to each other. Why, outside a British pub on a Saturday night, where you’re likely to witness similar scenes, it could lead to an arrest and a night in a police cell.

In any case, an autumn forest walk in good company is sufficient pleasure in itself. And one of my favourite Ashridge characters, a gloriously friendly grey horse I always make a point of visiting if I’m nearby, was in his paddock and only too glad to have me pull up grass to feed to him.

Always good to catch up with an old friend

So it was a successful outing even without the deer making a scene. 

And, in any case, there’s always next year, isn’t there?

Bluebells and recycling

Talking about the weather is as dull as when I last mentioned the subject, so you can imagine that I only raise it now for reasons that go way beyond the merely meteorological.

It’s another extraordinarily glorious day. And yet it’s a bank holiday Monday.

Bank holidays are a peculiarly British institution. The term comes from the fact that even the banks are closed on those days. Of course, they’re not really closed: the work of the banks goes on night and day – after all, when you’re striving to milk the economy for all it’s worth and every twenty-four hour period can add several thousand pounds to your bonus, you resent giving up even a single day to mere recreation.

The key point about bank holidays is that they always occur on Mondays rather than on the day associated with the festival they mark. This is a much better system than in France, where holidays fall on the right date. If that happens to be a weekend, well, bad luck, you lose the holiday. But if it happens on a Tuesday or Thursday, you get a ‘bridge’, the Friday afterwards or the Monday before, to make a long weekend of it. Why, I’ve met people in the public sector who get double bridges when the holiday falls on a Wednesday, or even ‘reverse bridges’: the feast day is a Friday, but they get the Thursday as well, on the basis that had it been on the Thursday, they’d have had the Friday too.

It’s to avoid such terrible abuse, unbearable to the Puritan principles of our Protestant tradition, that we’ve gone for the Bank Holiday Monday. Of course it’s a real problem for certain people: a teacher friend was telling us just the other day how hard it is to complete any courses if the classes fall on a Monday.

But bank holiday Mondays have another, quasi-mystic quality. I’ve probably mentioned before, and if I haven’t I should have, that Britain has no climate, only weather. And despite my utter abhorrence of any kind of superstitious attribution of intention or spirituality to physical phenomena, I have to admit that there is an undeniable tendency of all bank holidays to have bleak, wet weather. ‘You’re taking the day off?’ the weather seems to say to us Brits, ‘well, take that,’ and it flings floods of water at us.

And yet today the weather is fabulous. On a bank holiday Monday. The time, it seems, is out of joint. What does this portend? In earlier days, we might have thought something awful like a war might be about to break out, but we like to get involved in so many wars these days that it’s become pretty banal. ‘Let me see, if it’s April, it must be Libya,’ is the way things have become.

So that leaves me with the disturbed feeling that something must be about to happen though I don’t know what.

Which isn’t to say that the weekend hasn’t been packed already. For example, the bluebells are now out, so when we went to Ashridge Forest on Saturday, it was as though we were wading through carpets of blue.

Ashridge carpet

And this weekend has also marked a personal milestone for me: I’ve mastered the recycling system in Luton. And let me tell you, it’s not that simple. For instance we have a green bin for recycling which among other things takes all plastic, such as bottles, but not plastic tubs, except that you can put in the labels from the plastic tubs, but only if they’re made of cardboard.

Apart from that, the green bin is actually too small for our recycling, so with the agreement of the Borough Council, we’ve reclassified our green bin as grey and our black bin as green. The third bin is brown and is referred to as the ‘green bin’ because it’s for garden waste.

So our green bin’s grey and our black bin’s green and our ‘green’ bin’s brown.

Put the wrong things in the wrong bin, and I’ve been given to understand that the earth falls into the sky and the trees all hang with fishes.

So mastering all that is a pretty remarkable achievement. Which makes me wonder whether perhaps the blue skies and warm temperatures, in spite of the bank holiday, have nothing to do with menacing portents. Maybe they’re just my reward from the gods for coming to terms with a system of such staggering sophistication.

Enough of all this metaphysical speculation. I’m going to stop writing about the weather and take the dog out to enjoy it.

The green bin's grey, the black bin's green
and the brown bin's for green waste