Category: Lockdown Walks

Day 53 June 17

Day 53 June 17

A strange juxtaposition of light is often present on the sea and in the sky these days: panoply of ever-changing patterns. It reflects how it is for us. As we move from Lockdown back to the landscape of the known, the flux of change within is inevitable. 

The clouds are like the cities we made of them as children. Sandcastles in the sky I called them. Fantasies of other worlds reflect our wishes. We want it all to be perfect. In our dreams everything lives in harmony. But when those dreams translate into acquiring more and more materially, we become displaced; discontented, until a wakeup call appears. 

And this was it! 

It is clear to me we can’t just go back to the old ways. We wear the dull cloth of habit because it’s safe. Now we need a real dream of a better world. The clouds and colours, the startling blue on slate grey, the soft paintings of finger clouds; the translucent wash of mauve on a silver sea: they remind us of what beauty there is in the un-acquired. 

Nature has shown us how much she improved when we stopped. Birds sang louder, the light seemed brighter, certain animals appeared in spaces we had vacated: Innocents that have no hidden agenda but to live in their natural habitude. 

Can we dream a better dream?

I like to think we can…

 

Day 52 June 12

Day 52 June 12

I feel like I have been in a space ship on a mission to a distant galaxy. Now the crew are nearing earth’s atmosphere and there’s a flurry of activity after incubation. How strange this sense of re-entering density; the pull to earth heavy and dull.

My walks have been faster and shorter in the past week; my head often filled with plans. Returning to the known.

But is it ever known?

What my mission out of the known has taught me is that everything is always new, if you simply look without referring to memory. Just like my view of the sea seen every day from the window. The same sea but never the same. Paradoxical.

Every day since I started documenting my Lockdown walks I have seen Nature in flux. It has delighted me; opened another room in my mind; a clear space, brought back from the distant galaxies I fancied I’d visited. 

What an opportunity Lockdown has been. But now as the streets fill with more people, shops reopen, cars whiz by, and work beckons, I can still, and will, go walking and looking from my new space. It’s good to visit other galaxies, to discover we are much more than the stories we weave. 

These past few walks yielded more untold wonders, and all close to home, passing the same points. Yet entirely new! 

I return to earth with a new perspective:

Nothing is ever the same twice. 

 

 

Day 51 June 7

Day 51 June 7

I am off to visit my elderly friend near Summerfield Woods who enjoys a good old natter from the kitchen door. On the passageway leading to London Rd, I hadn’t noticed the sign before: “Please stop stealing our plants. The garden centres are now open… Buy your own!” There has always been a congregation of flowering and edible plants growing in varying pot sizes along here, just as there has always been a smattering of opportunists who don’t think of anybody else’s needs but their own. Sad but true.

Kings Rd has more shops open: the refill store; a bric a brac shop or two, but few people are out. It is more like a traditional Sunday when a day of rest was the norm. Or perhaps they’ve migrated up to London for the peaceful protests. 

The courtyard in front of Warrior Square station is deserted. I love the signs that have no current purpose: OUT when nothing actually went in. Like those Spaghetti Western towns where dried bush rattles in the wind across an empty square and a sense of unease is in the air.

Lockdown may be easing but maybe people are not easy. Not yet. 

Across the bridge and two chairs sit as if at a tea party close up to the litter bin, who speaks rubbish at them through his big mouth. Up Southwater Rd household rubbish has taken on a new meaning: mattresses, bed frames, old computer desk, bags of garden waste spilling out of thin black bin bags jumbled up against walls. A sudden overwhelming thought hits me: all the families and individuals in their private burrows, in their private heads with their own opinions.

How can we ever agree?

I look up and a tree like a giant totem pole rises above it all.

Along the way there are always new things to wonder at. A flaming bush spilling over the wall, the top of the church gateway, like a pyramid hinting at wisdom and solidarity; and a meadow, the same meadow as before, but now with foxgloves and thicker grass. In the wood the trees watch warily as I pass on dusty paths.

 

Day 50 June 5

Day 50 June 5

What a sky today! I couldn’t stop gawping at it as I walked along the seafront. These clouds are less like cotton wool and more like chunks of alien worlds that have fallen through Earth’s atmosphere and landed on a sea of sky. 

They drift imperceptibly, waiting to be rescued. Out at sea there’s a frisky set of waves and on the prom people stand around, or sit on the picnic benches opposite Goat Ledge cafe, which has opened again for takeaways. A little boy can’t wait to get whatever treat his mum has ordered for him! So delightful. Rose-tinted spectacles? Maybe…

Earlier I was feeling mentally rattled, my body dark, lifeless. I knew it was coming up to another eclipse and I seem to be susceptible to these energetic shifts. Like the clouds I was to see later, I feel at these times that I have fallen through a rabbit hole into another existence. I have learnt to ride it out, to know that if I move, walk in fresh air, don’t try to fix it with my brain, which never has a good solution, I will be beamed back up to my brighter world. Which I was, so, whether it’s rose-tinted spectacles or just the sheer joy of life arising, who cares?

Part of me was grieving for that space, now fast dissolving, of divine limbo where I didn’t have to plan, but could simply allow time to unroll like a giant carpet at a film premier. What a gift it was amidst all the uncertainty and panic. I had an excuse to stop trying to keep up with the world that had begun to spin faster and faster. It was like I’d won the lottery. Now, all around me I see the quickening of cars, people, shops being spruced up with fresh paint; new window displays going in, ready for the 15th June, when all the wheeling and dealing starts up again. 

Meanwhile in the park and up in the more residential parts of St Leonards where I like to walk, all is sedate and quiet, in stasis still, except for men (I am not being un-pc here, just factual!) tinkering with cars or the rotor-cutting of hedges and the gardens, like market stalls, displaying their regal wares, as if preparing for a state visit. No match for their humble wildflower cousins. 

Tonight the clouds are still there looking at me through my window. In the course of half an hour a residue of sun, having slunk out of sight, leaves a pink trail under the cloud on the surface of the sea. 

Life is filled with harmony. Like a symphony, it has different movements, each enhancing the whole with its variations. Without this contrast we would be nothing.

 

Day 49 June 3

Day 49 June 3

There’s something easy about chatting to strangers. You feel close to them in a way that you don’t always in longer term relationships. There is no baggage, no history. You chat about dogs; the wonders of living in St Leonard’s. Many are DFLs (down from Londoners) who have a born-again texture to their joy. I remember that same sense of wonder 35 years ago which has been rekindled in this time of apparent deprivation. They talk about the sea, the clean air; but most of all about their dogs and the things dogs get up to; all shared communality. This morning a man with two border collies was being dragged forward by the young one and back by the old one. “Gilbert sit or stay whichever command you like!” he shouted jovially. Gilbert did neither. Later I saw him again and asked if the old one was called Sullivan. “No” he said, ‘but he should be.”

I didn’t get photos of them. I like to snap when nobody is looking. This is all so innocent. And yet… in the other world, the one I collectively inhabit, untold horrors unfold.

In the plant world you see what we call garden flowers standing next to wildflowers and what we call weeds. In truth they all flower so are part of the tribe of that which grows out of the earth. There is no sense of I’m better than you. 

Words give meanings to things that were born wordless. We separate them with our definitions. We learn from the cradle. Mummy says, as you stuff mud into your mouth cos it looks like the mashed up food you eat, “Uh uh. Dirty. Mustn’t eat that.” You talk to a stranger. Mummy runs out and drags you away. You don’t understand but you learn to avoid these things.

They say weeds multiply and their roots kill off the more worthy plants. A poppy is a kind of weed, an interloper. Each year in my tiny garden a poppy or two or more grow in a different spot, or out of the cracks between the well-worn slabs on my walkway, their random seeds impregnating the earth without a by your leave. And I love it. Can’t wait to see what will appear each spring and where. But disharmony injustice, marginalisation of animals, plants trees humans, has at its root cause the idea of one being better than the other. Celebrating difference rather than fearing it is our greatest fear. We’ve learnt to stamp out the different: I’m a flower you’re a weed. No. I live and you live and we are equal. 

What horrors are committed in the name if individuation.

In the park there is a sense of harmony. It is hard to be aggressive surrounded by the all-inclusive sheltering arms of this aspect of Nature. In the jungle I would be afraid. There is savagery there. Fight or fly. But “Man” is supposed to be superior. Man developed reason. 

Some reason..! 

Yet here I am, my senses fed with every step I take; newly born beauties leaning their heads towards me as I pass. 

It is important we keep the balance between that which transports us and the bitter pill of the human story. Removed from an actual event, rather than disempowering ourselves with justifiable anger, we may be of more help by remaining sane, by examining where our own aggression towards those we meet daily lies. The raising of our own awareness and consciousness leaves its energetic imprint on the world. 

As I see it..

 

Day 48 June 1

Day 48 June 1

Yesterday I went for an early evening walk. It wasn’t things to look at but smells that captured my senses, the evening air drawing them out. I passed a bush that may have been elder in blossom; its sweet pungent scent followed me for a bit, dropping back as I walked on, to be replaced by the rank smell of stale exhaust fumes mingled with dust. 

Along the Falaise walkway above the White Rock, overlooking the ship-wrecked Pier, grows an abundance of pink flowers on little dense green bushes. They exude a sweeter scent than the elder, which stayed with me until I reached the street and my eyes took over from my nose.

Today I went for my swim quite early opposite the Royal Victoria Hotel. I staked my spot along the groyne and, as if peeping over a garden fence, I spied two men on the next beach splayed out on the shingle: one his skin as white as bloodless fingers on a cold day, the other so tropically brown I half wondered whether it had come out of a bottle! I braved the sea and swam counting seconds. That may seem odd but it helps me stay in when my mind is screaming: It’s too darn cold!!! I managed 7 minutes and will do more each day.

I had never noticed the exquisite beauty of the groyne posts before, worn to different textures and colours by the relentless tides. 

Back via the winding closed church steps to West Hill Road. I wanted to go further but all public toilets are closed. Thereby hangs many a grouse by residents regarding the droves of visitors who come down for a day out by the sea as Lockdown eases. Enough said! 

Into the park that looks distinctly regal as you enter via the archway attached to the Lodge. Another favourite tree whose foot clings precariously to the edge of the bank, flanked by a gaily clad rhododendron and an assortment of green suitors, catches my eye; as do the waving grasses springing out of the ground by a weathered stone wall.

Nature hones and carves man-made structures into sublime ancient beauties that we admire more than the newer, bland constructions. She grows the fruits of her womb to different seasons, each season having a beauty of its own. So it is with humans, yet we fail to recognise that the ancient is as radiant as the new; that a gnarled hand, like the root of the tree, holds the memory of untold riches in its palm. 

I walk back through Stanhope Place and pass a newly-painted house sporting an artfully arranged installation that is too good to be real, even though it is. Further on a chaotic joyous gaggle of pots and gaudy flowers that make me smile. 

Home and time to switch on my head…

 

 

Day 47 May 30

Day 47 May 30

There’s a kind of surreal quality to living by the sea today. From my window I watch people wander along the prom: couples, groups, family units in gaudy summer gear; they sit on the beach or stand in the sea cooling off on the Costa del Hastings. Today, Spring has come to full term and given birth to Summer. 

So what’s surreal about it? Apparently we’re in the midst of a pandemic. Not here though. Today Lockdown is out sunning its pasty face. To the South there’s not a mask to be seen. Go North up London Rd and it’s a different day. People in wide berth, some masked, queue up for bread, or fruit and veg. In Boots a perspex-headed guard indicates the one way system with an Elizabethan flourish, doing the same as I leave, like a bit-part actor trying to make his mark.

Down Kings Rd I stop to buy a vegan sausage roll in the deli and avoid engaging with a tongue-tutting woman who wants to rant about the two metre rule. She persists. I tell her firmly: It’s just the way it is and swerve off up the street.

Well, it is the way it is. 

I was enroute to visit an older friend who isn’t feeling well. She loves people. She just needed to see someone; to laugh a bit. On the way I met a yellow rose nodding over a wall and then a tree with brazen yellow hair.

My friend embroiders stories in colourful threads, not only with words but on actual canvas. She is a wizard at weaving whatever is in her life at the time. In the past weeks she has woven the Corona story. As it unfolds she adds to it, looping the panels together in one piece. 

When I leave I cut back through Summerfield woods out into a small meadow, past the quiet law courts and the police station where two police cars idle under the trees; on down Magdalen Rd, pausing by the church courtyard to admire a view of another church; then home down the little alley where a not-so-famous-as-Banksy graffiti artist has done a statement portrait of the Queen circa 1965.

Later, a quick walk through the park where families sit on the grass in perfectly-spaced clumps. The tutting woman would have had something to say!

As I write this it is as though I have been wandering through a vast film set, somewhat like The Truman Show, and at any moment I might turn a corner and bump up against the flats. 

Life is surreal.

“All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players…”

William Shakespeare

As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7 

 

 

Day 46 May 29

Day 46 May 29

Did I ever think I’d get to a point in life when I would just simply be happy for no particular reason?

I used to think happiness depended on some thing; some mythical future state that would lead me to planet Bliss. It begins in the teen years: a vision of romance, true love, from film star crushes to actual boys (I am being personal here). It morphs into ambition with a bit of the other on the side, then the perfect match with whom you can share your life: a solid, reliable love-you-forever type, with all the trimmings.

Hmmm. 

As I walked I reflected on the seasons of life and I got it! I really got it: Not the special relationships, the career; or, later, the self-improvement groups, meditations and taoist practices..all aimed at becoming a perfectly balanced, back to factory settings type. None of those. Nothing (and I’d worn all the tee shirts) with an agenda attached could ever make me happy!

What agenda can I have with the air, the weather the sun, rain, clouds, the leaves on the trees and the flowers thrusting their necks out of their stalks? Nothing is asked of me and I ask nothing of it. 

Sometimes it takes a lifetime to be at ease with you, just as you are, as the large green plant, an ungainly and utterly beautiful stoic on the footpath, is simply its own unselfconscious, unique self. 

We see everything in fragments – like glimpses through the gaps in fences: Houses, gardens, washing on the line, the imagined lives inside. Storylines criss-crossing. Being a passer-by can be exhilarating just because nobody else’s life can ever be yours. The one you’ve got is the one you have. 

There is nothing more glorious than being part of the natural world. When you simply show up as you are the whole vista of life lays itself out before you as you pass by. 

This is planet Bliss!

 

Day 45 May 27

Day 45 May 27

After a visit to the quirky independent hardware store up London Rd, home to a thousand types of nails and all manner of other oddments, I traipsed up Tower Rd West clutching bamboo poles for my fast-growing potted peas. This morning their tendrils were flailing about blindly seeking something to wrap themselves around. I had thought I’d just eat the pea shoots but they’d already gone beyond the miscarriage stage and were sporting little white flowers. Maybe I will actually witness the birth of a pea pod or two! I am very new at growing veg, and flail about equally.

How everything changes in every moment. Yet there is the illusion of stasis. We don’t catch Nature growing. No sudden movements; just an edging in slow time towards a full expression of itself. Like a graceful dancer in slow motion, arms extending up until there is no more stretch, then the same steady descent. Like the pink roses I passed in a scruffy garden: just on the turn. 

I hear people saying they can’t wait to get back to how things were, as if there was such a thing to go back to. We too, like Nature, morph imperceptibly from child to young adult and all the ages that follow until suddenly we are old. As the poet Pablo Neruda observed so eloquently: “All old people carry in their eyes a child and children at times observe us with the eyes of wise ancients.”

Whatever we “go back to”, it won’t ever be the same as it was. A lot of grief would disappear if we could accept this.

On my way to the hardware shop, I crossed over the bridge at Warrior Square station where I paused for a moment to look along the empty platform. A shaft of sun fell down at the entrance to the tunnel. I leant out looking for the nose of a train but there was only a pin head of empty light in the dark

Along Southwater Rd I was amused by two cars boasting look-at-me colours. Earlier I’d seen a pink one on my morning walk. Things came in threes today. As I walked back home via the seafront three people sat on the socially acceptable seats waiting for a bus. I pretended to take a photo of the sea… but captured them!

I was struck again by the jolly junk garage below the terrace where I live. My living room window with the stunning sea views is the middle one on the top floor.

How lucky I am!

 

Day 44 May25

Day 44 May25

I rather pride myself on my ability to walk at a gallop up hill. I do this partly for exercise and partly because I’m keen to get to the more solitary and less cultivated parts of my walk. But today I woke with the temperament of a sloth and at this slower pace I was able to feed my gently undulating senses with hitherto unnoticed delights! 

These past couple of days I have found myself being pulled away from the immediacy of each unfolding day. An old voice whispers in my ear: It’s time to prepare for work again. The balance between allowing and planning is being tested. I find that when I arrive at a place of perfect equilibrium it’s hard not to try to hold on to it, which in turn leads to a sense of dissonance. But it is easier to re-enter the secret garden of now if I don’t go to war with myself and simply let the nagging voice be. In this way I fall back into harmony again.

I start by walking bare foot in the park, ( no relation to the Neil Simon play). Feeling the turf beneath me, prickly grass and twigs digging into my seasoned feet, revs me up! The light in the garden bordering the top end of the park enchants: Sharp contrasts from a cut-glass sun. And a cluster of red buds about to burst on the horse chestnut.

Along Boscobel Rd North new sets of blossoms on bushes, red, yellow blue. 

Through the cul de sac cut into Colinswood Drive with its large gazing houses, I look to the left and rediscover the footpath to the allotment, a big hedge cutting it off from public view; just a glimpse of burgeoning plots through a padlocked gate. This is a secret garden inhabited by others. Not mine. 

Some wildflowers are fading and others springing up. Long curving grasses wave at the end of the alley. 

Down West Hill Rd I stop off at the Burton pyramid/memorial and lie on the stone bench shaped like a kidney enjoying the sun. I read the inscription on a piece of granite planted near the bench and realise that, along with a taller slab, they are linked to the closed church. Sentinels of Scripture.

Nearing the end of the road a father holds hands with his small son who skips happily along. 

Then round the bend a view of the Masonic Hall and the back of Marine Court shacked up together. They make an odd couple.