Day thirty-five

 4th June 2009 ENGLAND

The heart of a proper princess

I slept well last night… or at least I’m guessing I did. Its five o’clock and I’m wide awake. The early morning sun is also waking up stretching its light across the landscape, sneaking rays into the cracks of this old shed like building. The swallows I had shared this place with, dive in and out with their distinctive song that seems to include a mix of twitters, clicks, warbles and a whirling kind of noise, almost sounds mechanical… like each morning somebody has the job of winding them up with a key and setting them free. Hands behind my head I stay in my warm sleeping bag for another hour (maybe more), I try to figure out what these little guys are saying… it takes a while, after un-muddling some of clicks and putting the twitters and warbles in the proper order, my understanding is that they are saying (..singing) “Good morning universe and how are you today”… with a little bit of “Thank you for the days”… I could be wrong; my swallow grammar is not what it should be.

Yesterday evening Dominic and Sarah had told me I could come over for breakfast in the morning if I wanted to… I would have done, but felt it was still a little too early …it’s a tiny bit after seven, my bag is packed. I leave a thank you note on the tray tucked under the flask… tie my laces, throw my bag over my shoulder and head out of this open shed, I look up at a sky that is a little bit blue and a little bit pink and like the swallows I say, “Good morning universe and how are you today”. I turn right onto the lane headlining towards the Roman town of Cirencester, I look across at the cottage on the other side of the lane, I don’t see anybody, but still I raise my arm high and say a “Thank you” to both Dominic and Sarah.

By nine o’clock I’m sat in Jack’s café in the middle of Cirencester, in front of me a pot of tea and a basket of toast, “Thank you”. I dig out the map, Jon a guy I have known from my time in the Royal Air Force got in touch with me… ‘if you get to the small market town of Wootton Basset, I’ll come and pick you up’. Jon and his family live about six or seven miles west of Wootton Basset in a village called Wroughton. I to as a kid once lived in Wroughton, my dad was stationed there for a few years in the early seventies… It was where I had my first weekend job, alongside the RAF camp was a farm, I was friends with the farmer’s son (Michael)… a handful of us would walk the cows down from whatever field they were in, to the milking shed. I remember at the time, with stick in hand, seeing myself as a proper herdsman, in truth my job was to open and shut gates… the cows knew where they were going. Looking back, it’s not hard to imagine the herd looking at each other, shaking their heads while giving us a sideways glance and collectively thinking ‘not these numpties again’… Sorry not sure how that story fits in with the story of this walk.

I again sit in the cafe longer than maybe I should…and maybe not… have not cafés always been places people go, a place (for a moment) to sidestep a busy world, or to catch up with a friend, a place where thoughts can wonder or sometimes a space just to sit with a pot of tea and do no more than to watch the world go by. It is hard to image a world without a café (or a pub come to that). Shut my eyes and I can picture the Romans of this town (Cirencester), fifteen hundred plus years ago sat outside a coffee shop… yeah ok maybe not a coffee shop, it wasn’t and till the first half of the 17th century that the coffee bean reached Britain… but they did have places where they could grab a hot drink and a snack, these cafés were called MacThermopolium’s (the name has a Greek origin literally meaning ‘hot shop’ or ‘hot food’ (the ‘Mac’ bit, is just me being silly).

I’m about to finish by tea and get back to kicking stones when the owner of the café (Jack I’m guessing) drops two more slices of toast into the basket and puts down a fresh pot of tea. I don’t know what to say, of course I say, ‘Thank you’, but I wanted to say more. Yesterday I talked of stepping into the shoes of saints, sages and the founders of our different faiths… that doesn’t mean we need to be able to turn water into wine… not when we have the ability to turn bread into toast and then putting that toast into new wineskins, sorry I mean a breadbasket on the table for a stranger… yeah… that works for me. It is not about the wine nor the toast… it is about a heart that wants to give with no thought of gain.

Back on country roads, a mix of blue and white skies above and green fields and hedgerows as far as the eye can see. today feels like I am walking through some of the hidden corners of these islands, places in between places. Close to midday I walk into the village of South Cerney. The village sits within the wetlands of the Cotswolds. A really nice place… a church, a pub, a village green, a chippy… hmm I wonder. I step inside, share a little of what it is I’m doing and in return given a bag of chips… the generosity of people knocks me over every time. 

On this adventure and in life more broadly, religion (of whatever creed) teaches us that we should walk with both a heart of gratitude and of humility… I think also we should carry with us a sense of being in debt, not just for this bag of chips I have in hand… and not for the purpose of making us feel rubbish either… but for the purpose of not taking the people we know and the many things that have been given to us for granted… I think with this kind of mindset, it pushes us to give back… to keep the balance sheet in check, nobody wants to be in the red. Of course, it is wrong of me to suggest it is only people of faith that want to live life as best they know how… faith or no faith, people have the desire to be good… people do care (this walk has absolutely shown me that to be true)… I cannot help but wonder… wonder at where does all that come from.

All the chips are gone, I head out of South Cerney and wind my way around the many lakes that make up these Cotswold wetlands... a sanctuary for birds… I surprise myself at just how many of the birds I can name. I think that can be said for most of us… step into a garden, take a woodland stroll, spend time on a farm or walking around a wetland… we soon run out of fingers when adding up the birds we know the names of. As a nation, each year we spend something like two hundred and fifty million pounds on birdfeed. I think it’s fair to say we are an island of bird watches, many of us bad bird watchers (I include myself in that number) but bird watchers none the less.

Three or four miles on, and close to two hours of walking I turn up in the village of Ashton Keynes (I guess it shouldn’t have taken much more than an hour to walk… but kicking stones, watching birds and enjoying a landscape will always slow you down). There is a house set back from the road, they call ‘The Horse and Jockey… and it’s been the saviour of many a walker… and I should know I’m one (yeah, that didn’t really work, did it). The Landlord after hearing the story of my adventure makes me a pot of tea and tells me to find a table… and again I am properly grateful. I sit with tea, map and notebook in front of me… an hour goes by, catching up on the journal of this walk, scribbling down ideas, thoughts and thank you’s. I look at the map and give Jon a text to let him know I would be in Wootton Basset by five… Jon texts me straight back ‘I’ll be there’. Those few word (no idea why) kinda hit me, I push the chair back on two legs, fold my arms, close my eyes for a moment, when I open them, I gaze into the middle distance, vision a little blurred… anybody would think there was water in those eyes… that would be wrong, you forget I’m a truck driver. I fold up the map, push the notebook into my bag, say thank you to the landlord and head out the door, back to blue skies and country lanes.

This is a landscape I should know better, I have lived in this part of the UK a couple of times in my life, once as a kid when my dad was stationed at RAF Wroughton and again at RAF Lyneham when I myself was in the Air Force… there are no mountains here, no waves crashing up against a pebble beach, no wide open moors… maybe I’m not as rugged as I would like to think I am… don’t know why, but I feel at home walking through this part of the world, yeah…this is my island in the sun… where my people have toiled since time begun’. In my head I picture those early guys that began to tame this unkept land with ox and plough, I imagine them sitting in a house called the ‘Rising Sun’ sharing a beer with those that work the land today … I think they have much in common, I hear their laughter as they walk out to the carpark, where a John Deere and an ox stand alongside each other… I see a Bronze age guy climbing into the tractor… oh boy. 

I don’t know why, today I feel a huge amount of that stuff I talked about earlier… gratitude, humility and the sense of being in debt… maybe it’s because I know this adventure is coming to an end… for the people that has made this walk possible… or maybe also for the people of these islands that had toiled before me… or for the swallows that had woken me up this morning… or the innocents of childhood, that kid swinging on a gate with a stick in his hand… my mum and dad come to mind, I don’t think it was always easy moving from one military camp to another with four young boys in tow… or maybe it’s the landscape that I am walking through and the blue skies above… or the thought of meeting up with Jon later on today (a friend that I have not seen for the longest time)… I guess a mix of all the above.

Gratitude, humility and the need of wanting to give back, is I think at the core of whatever belief system we belong to. Those attributes are a part of how it is we are put together… and yet something seems to be broken… wires got crossed… many times instead of gratitude we have resentment, arrogance instead of humility and that sense of debt, we turn it into an attitude of ‘the world owes me a living’. Maybe the ‘Fall of man’ really did happen… some guy, way back in the past fell out of his truck and banged his head, ok maybe not that but something happened. Whatever it was, we are left with having to work out how to un-muddle muddled up thoughts and to figure out how we can untangle and fix broken wires. The quote from Solzhenitsyn comes to mind ‘The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being’. Again, I am just a truck driver walking, with his very own muddled up thoughts… but I do believe the only way arrogance, resentment and hate get into this world is through the human heart (I don’t see there being another way)… to solve that problem, I’m thinking we need to go back to that truck driver that fell out of his truck and banged his head (figuratively speaking that is) and then take another step back to before he fell out the cab (into the realm of ‘What if’)… and this is where I start getting out of my depth… I just know that there is a mismatch between the world we see today and the far better world that always seems to be just out of reach. What I do know is this, before anything comes into existence (be it this truck that I sit in, the laptop propped up on the steering wheel or that far better world) it first needs to exist in the invisible realms of heart and mind. 

We are not without hope… turning vision into reality is something the human race, if it wants to, can be pretty good at.

The weather is good, and the roads are quiet and I’m again kicking stones (if you want to clear your head go find a stone to kick… it works). As I get closer to Wootton Bassett… memories of RAF Lyneham fill my head… it is where I first met Jon, that would be thirty years ago (it is also where I first met Steve from Day 24 of this walk, in Wales and Gary from Day 25). A head full of memories that have little to do with this story, only to say if you had passed me in a car, you would have seen a raggedy guy with a stupid grin on his face and occasionally laughing out loud to himself… your thoughts would have been ‘best give that guy a wide berth’.

I meet Jon at a roundabout on the outskirts Wootton Bassett, in the twenty-minute drive back to his home we catch up and poke fun at each other, as you do. It is really good to see him again. At the front door I am met by Wendy, Rory, little Ellie and the smell of a full roast dinner in the making. Jon tells me to go grab a shower “you stink”. I wonder at when it was, to have a ‘hot shower’ became a common thing… a hundred years ago, maybe less… I am among the very few people who have ever lived, to know how good it is to have a hot shower… that is something to be grateful for. After we all sit down to a huge dinner and then coffee... "Thank you Wendy”. For much of the evening we sit and talk as if we were still back at Lyneham (sorry Wendy). Proper friendship is an extraordinary thing that should never be taken for granted.

My last thank you of the day goes to little Ellie, she gave up her pink bedroom with pictures of princesses on all four walls, for a raggedy tramp she had never met… that is the heart of a proper princess.