Social distancing isn’t always so easy on the hoof. For example there’s the situation where you make a sharp turn round a dense privet hedge to find some steely-eyed individual bearing down on you along the pavement at Mr. Wilkins’ customary four miles an hour ( cf. Anthony Buckeridge’s ‘Jennings and Derbyshire’…) Or there's the leotarded occasional runner, gasping for breath and about to expire who’d run straight through you if you didn’t step into the gutter. Or the bloke staring vacantly into space while yelling down his I-phone. Or the family with two kids and two dogs who occupy their own mobile, self-isolating space five metres by five metres, imposing their right of way by sheer force of numbers. The ratio of times I take avoiding action compared to the occasions other parties give way? Probably about four to one. It’d be different if I was six foot six and eighteen stone - which is why dictators are so often small of stature. They’re taking their revenge on society. Better keep tabs on that Michael Gove then…
Down near the mill I come across a woman I’ve seen before. Her exercising m.o. is to drive her toddler and his push chair forward at about a three hours thirty marathon pace. Amazingly she still has the puff to say hello. Her (their) regular morning run is six miles. Respect!
The path above the reservoir describes a lazy semicircle towards the Bedford road out of Northampton. Then I move forward on a towpath past the Britannia pub, where the owner is using the closure as the opportunity for a spring clean and spruce up. In contrast, above the Rushmills lock there’s an untidy collection of decrepit narrow boats whose hippie-ish inhabitants have strewn the river banks with a decade’s worth of ordure and detritus. One of the boats is decorated with the words of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. I harrumph to myself that if this local environment represents the Nirvana to which the boat-dwellers aspire, it’s a pretty poor outcome. ‘Imagine there’s no heaven…?’ Exactly! Never liked the song, not one little bit.
A guy and a girl are exercising beside the path near the Rowing Club, laughing as they stretch and pull. The white water course is dry, the canoes safely tucked up in the boathouse. I turn about, and crossing a side channel to the river, see a young snowy-white egret, stealthy of tread, patrolling the water. I pass under the disused railway line which once would have taken business people and shoppers from the St. John’s Station (where the Morrison’s supermarket now is) via Olney to Bedford, and then I’m in the Brackmills Industrial Estate. I pass the Wickes warehouse, and then the British Pepper and Spice factory, with the sixties-university like castle of Barclaycard away to my right. A few years back the Pepper and Spice place burned down, and great was the conflagration. Now all is made new, and as I walk past I'm taken on a rather extraordinary aromatic trip around the world. There’s pepper to be sure, but also cumin and tarragon and something more exotic still. I find Houghton Lane, more a cycle path than a road these days. It pulls up out of the valley and emerges at the corner of Hardingstone village by Back Lane. The views are a little obscured now but as at Gayton, there’s a sense here of where the money in Northampton ended up – gracious houses on a balcony overlooking Delapré Park. That’s not the whole story of this village though, because as the name perhaps suggests, the area was also a source of ironstone for building the expanding towns of the county, winched down to the Nene on a tramway by a fixed steam engine.
It takes a bit of mental effort to connect the idea of pilgrimage with this semi-urban stroll. Even now, as I write up this walk, with all its references to pop music and children’s literature, its recognition of history and sense of place, its acknowledgement of the people I've passed, I struggle to remind myself of the point of it all. I suppose I’m underscoring for myself firstly, and then for you as my reader- companion, that we owe everything to God, that despite the way I sometimes feel, everything is under his care. More than ever at this weird time, the words of Richard Gillard’s fine hymn ‘Brother, sister, let me serve you’ come to mind: ‘We are pilgrims on a journey/And companions on the road/We are here to help each other/Walk the mile and bear the load.’
Today is St. George’s Day. The odd thing is that he wasn’t always England’s patron saint: his predecessor was St. Edmund (‘King and Martyr’). Edmund was deposed from his patronage role thanks to Richard I who felt that George had been of material assistance in the winning of a battle near Jerusalem (always a place to encourage strong inclinations and rash decision-making). There remains a body of opinion which would like to see Edmund reinstated even now, and after a petition the House of Commons was mandated to debate the notion as recently as 2016, though I must say that passed me by. If King Aelfred’s life is cloaked in myth and dense historical fog, it’s pretty transparent compared to E(a)dmund’s. It would seem he was a king of East Anglia, and was killed by the Danes. His reputation was such that coins were struck in his name long after his death, and even the Vikings came to honour him. Apart from that, there's next to nothing – slim stuff on which to build a national saint…so we’re stuck with the ubiquitous and not so very English George. But I guess more churches are dedicated to Edmund…
I drop back down the lane to walk home a different way by Great Houghton, through the surprise of Brackmills Country Park with its trees, lake and relatively lofty elevation, to the (in railway terms) steep incline of the Olney line’s trajectory away from Northampton. I pass four Eastern European factory workers, sharing a jovial and distinctly non socially-distanced lunch, and then two labourers sawing tree trunks within a hair’s breadth of each other. The next months are either going to be a chaotic, semi-managed passage into ‘herd immunity’ or to acceptance that we now live with a multi-variant, more virulent analogue of the common cold. Once again I'm brought to a sober assessment of my own mortality. And this too is what pilgrimage is about. It’s not all rollicking, bawdy tales on the way to Canterbury, you know. Or even being paid for filming a fortnight’s celebrity jaunt to Istanbul, very good and sometimes moving though the recent BBC2 programmes were…
A report from Alison Grantly, Assistant to the Stat-Man…
15 km. 4 hours. 1 stile. 18 gates 5 bridges. 19 degrees C. Fine and sunny. Exactly 100 people passed Mr. Cross on the way, cycling, walking or running, not counting those working in their gardens or place of business. That means in raw statistics, there’s the likelihood he passed at least one person with the Virus. But of course, nothing’s ever as straightforward as that…
Heavenly Father
I've been to enough funeral services
to understand
that 'in the midst of life
we are in death'.
You know
(because in Jesus your Son
you’ve been there)
how frightening this is
when it becomes personal:
I mean…that personal.
Help me to rejoice in each new day
and thank you for it,
and to deal with the unknown
with courage.
And help me rise above my own fears
to assist with the needs of others:
their distress:
their pain:
their failing of faith.
Amen.
·
(re: ‘On the road
again’: there’s the eighties’ song by
Willie Nelson, which in the version I know sounds like the studio was full of
everyone in the world who Willie ever played with, bashing or strumming
something. Personally I prefer the quite different sixties’ blues ditty
recorded by Canned Heat and sung by their physically massive frontman Bob ‘the
Bear’ Hite in a strange near-falsetto – quirky, oddly chilled, spliff music
from a time when ‘psychedelia’ often depicted a more nightmarish inner world.)
And in the absence of collective worship try a little 'TEN ON SUNDAY'.
Please go to: www.vincecross.co.uk and click on the menu.
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