Jane Metcalfe

What an invigorating walk yesterday afternoon! I was preoccupied at first by the sad news that Hastings Borough Council is embarking on a weed-killing fest at the sides of local roads with a toxic spray. 

Weed – a definition: that glorious array of little and large beauties who lift their heads out of all sorts of nooks and crannies and nod at us as we pass by. So much nicer to contemplate than bare slabs of stone and concrete. I know that weeds ruin roads, but doesn’t this follow on from what we’ve already seen in Lockdown? Nature recovers very quickly when we stop engaging in what we call “progress” or “improvement.” I have no problem with cutting back to grow again, but poisoning? Please… 

The song Where Have all the Flowers Gone? popped into my head. Of course it has more to say about war than flowers as such, but the symbol is apt. The song is synonymous with the first Aldermaston march (CND ban the bomb) I went on in my early teens.

As I walked up Maze Hill past the flower- infused wall of The Uplands my eyes feasted on an abundance of blossoming plants erroneously separated, in name only, from the supposedly upmarket “flower”. They will overcome! (1960s anti war songs rising in my mind!)

My walks have been mostly over old ground recently, but I took a new short footpath, going to the right of the usual one in the elbow point of Albany road. More new delights awaited me!

I share some of them with you below. This bright bin made me smile, nestling on the burgeoning carpet of greenery and a new tree to fall in love with. On the pavement in West Hill Rd; outside the newly built houses on the old College site, was this strange pattern made by the boots of myriad workmen. Like the imprint of a reptilian skin. 

My days always seemed to start with one intention and end with something entirely different – a diversion from what my habitual yet fallible mind decreed. We are told to have a plan, write things down, get sorted. As if we are all filing cabinets filled with neat and orderly folders! 

We pit ourselves against others who seem to have it sorted and think that must be the way to go. Yet this is the dichotomy that’s puzzled me all my life. When I am in freefall, when I step outside the kaleidoscope of patterned thinking, as on my walks, simply doing what comes next, or as the song goes, doing a what comes naturally (!), there is no policeman directing the traffic of thoughts in my head. No collisions. Just a steady stream.

Yet there does need to be some order in my world. Hanging about mooning over natural wonders all day does not feed my body – aside from the occasional wild garlic or nettle soup! 

But this collective situation, this radical shift from a habitual modus operandi, has enabled me to make peace with my dichotomy. I have discovered, quite accidentally, how to merge the two lanes of my existence seamlessly, if I don’t treat them as separate in the first place. Nature is still my soul fodder but equally the same sense of harmony is to be found in the more practical deeds of the day.

Nothing is taken for granted. 

My last couple of walks have been about noticing the manmade that harmoniously lives side by side with nature. 

The smoke from the garden bonfire next to the park hanging round the trees; the engine red iron post at the end of the soft stone wall of the arch; the Road sign nestling in the hedge and the houses in London Road glancing through the sober trees in Gensing Gardens.

Seamless coexistence.

I haven’t walked up Kings Road for quite a while. I don’t mean the Chelsea one of course: Kings Road, St Leonard’s on Sea. It sounds exotic when you hear it, conjuring up noble gentility, when in fact it has struggled for decades to thrive. Kings Road leads down from Warrior Square Station, morphs into London Rd and within minutes you’ve emerged from the canyon of shops and are standing next to the sentinel clock on the promenade staring at sky and sea. What could be more dramatic than that? 

But in fact I was turning my back on my salty companion, my daily familiar, going up and away into the thickets of shops and beyond. 

Since the steady influx of urban escapees there is a new plantation of quirky shops and cafes – mostly closed now. The dog parlour, Tails of St Leonards, was open. I briefly entertained the idea of begging for a trim. Our canine friends are Kings and Queens in this our “country of the blind.” The allusion to HG Wells’ satisfying allegory was brought to mind by the window display in The Bookkeeper, an Aladdin’s cave of a shop; a book rummage of essential (to me) wordly goodies. 

Their window display is about books in all senses. You don’t see it properly until you get up close, but the cascade of what looks like two rumpled off-white curtains, is made from book pages. At the foot is a copy of The Time Machine and a long quote from it on a hand-written scroll. One is put in mind of a time capsule, which, under the circumstance, may be intentional. 

It’s the best bit of installation art, aside from Nature’s daily displays, that I’ve seen for a while. It tells of stories within stories and reminds me of the preciousness of books. They must never become extinct. Contained in them in a vast array of style and description, are the guts and blood, spirit and being, of whole humanity. 

I had intended to share the walk that followed. But this is what came out. You will see where I went after. To the woods…but that opens up another story of trees and books. 

“What a piece of work is man…”

Hamlet, Act 2, scene 2

Walking whilst talking to a friend. We were discussing how there is no “normal.” It’s just habitude. We had got used to thinking in terms of earning enough money to pay for rent, council tax, utility bills and anything left over going on food. Constant working out of how much for this and how much for that. Well for me and for her and many others, it’s all gone. Somehow though we’re muddling through as best we can, and neither of us feels worried. A calm has descended. More than that: a frisson of excitement. There is another way. 

It never felt natural striving all the time; dancing to the piper-of-poverty’s drab tune. What were we all trying to prove? That we could win a race against all the odds? That was not living. What I have now is unearned. It is free.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my interaction with people, the joy of connecting. Singing is a great way to reach places within where logic cannot go. Like mining for seams of gold. 

It’s just the uncomfortable cost of it all… 

Back to walking and imbibing those natural delights that feed the soul. Yes, my soul may have had glimpses, but it is lapping up the daily treats, as if it can’t quite believe its luck!

On the way, the quirkiness of ever-evolving Upper Norman Rd: a bike behind insect eye windows and opposite, a mint-green house.

Westhill Rd has been really the greatest on-my-doorstep rediscovery. The views today from the mini pyramid dedicated to the Burtons, the father and son architects who gentrified much of St Leonards, were breathtaking.

Later on down Boscobel Rd North, overlooking Filshsam valley, the sky beckoned to me, its vast mouth filled with clouds like wild meringues. 

Then drinking chilled white wine on the terrace with my neighbour friend, both wrapped in winter jackets and scarves, planted on chairs apart in the last of the sun.

Nine lives. 

As I was walking a cat darted out and ran across the road with the bizarre illusion of centipede legs that running cats display. There were no cars but it was a cat definitely on a fight or fly mission. 

It got me thinking that humans have nine lives too. I spent a portion of my walk looking back at mine and coming to the realisation that – nothing.to do with any particular decade – I was in my 7th life. It’s when we can look back, as if in a gallery, at a series of pictures of the characters we were, that we see ourselves as we might do a little known relative. I can hardly recognise those other manifestations of me. Different cycles, like skins shed, we emerge blinking into a new era.

I find overall I am quite content with this picture I am currently starring in! It’s been full of surprises and I doubt that it’s over yet. Then of course beyond the personal story there’s the big wide world shifting uncomfortably on its axis. That is another story – yet to show its face fully.

The walk grabbed my attention. Like the picture gallery, images leapt out at me: Look at me. No me. And me! So much beauty and this all morphing seamlessly from one cycle to another. 

The stark-fingered branches turn lush green then later gold..and all the rest too in its season and cycle: Life uncomplainingly doing its thing! 

These pictures remind me I am a part of the ritual of Life.