Well, We Did It

                                                    Linda at the highest point on the walk

We completed the Hadrian’s Wall walk without any casualties. The first few days were pretty demanding, averaging about fifteen miles a day. Indeed at the end of the first day, we wondered whether we had bitten off more than we could chew. Also, in our hotel room, the door of the ensuite bathroom fell off its hinges. Never a dull moment.

I walk more slowly than Linda, and you can’t go for fifteen miles at someone else’s pace, so we came to an arrangement that Linda would wait for me to catch up every half mile or so. My excuse is that I am four years older than her, but in fact she has always gone faster than me. She reminds me of what they say about Hungarians- they go in the revolving door behind you and emerge at the other side in front of you. To paraphrase the humorous writer David Nobbs, she walks everywhere as if she were going through Portsmouth on a dark night. To her eternal credit, she never once complained about my sluggishness.

The path can’t always follow the line of the wall, and indeed the wall has disappeared beneath the turf in many areas. However, in the middle section, about forty miles from the sea in either direction, the wall is still there, rolling over the hills, and the path follows it.

At this point, the scenery is at its most spectacular. My appreciation of it was marred by the fact that we had just walked around twelve miles on the third day when the path started to climb seriously upwards. At every rise, I would think, This must be the last one. Then I would reach the top and find that there was a slight dip followed by a bigger rise. After about eight times, I began to suspect that I had died and gone to Hadrian’s Hell. Linda continued to march purposefully on, waiting every so often for me to catch up. But as you can see, the landscape was pretty impressive at this point.

 

We’ve done this sort of holiday before, where you walk or cycle from place to place and the company takes your luggage, and it works very well for us. One point of interest is that you have no choice about where you stay, and the variety of hotels and inns can be amusing. In one place we stayed in a wooden cabin in the back garden of the pub. It was OK, that is to say bearable, but Linda wasn’t best pleased with it.

We had walked from west to east, so we finished in Newcastle, at Wallsend. Newcastle is a great city, with the ups and downs which go with a great city. The last few miles ran alongside the rather rough-and-ready areas of Byker and Walker. At one point on the path, a chap sat quietly beside his bicycle. Every so often, someone would roll up to him, there would be a quick exchange of money and substances, and the satisfied customer would make a swift departure.

                                                        Baltic Arts Centre, Newcastle

Anyway, the walk was a great experience, and we are thinking about the Camino de Santiago next year.

A Postscript to Last Month

In last month’s wittering on about bathetic but amusing lyrics, I forgot a particular one, which is also apposite to this month’s report on the hike along the Wall. The late Barry Humphries, in his alter ego as Dame Edna Everage, once sang the following to the tune of ‘I Love to Go a-Wandering’- you know, the one that goes ‘Fol deree, fol dera…’

Anyway, Dame Edna’s version of the song went:

‘I love to go a-wandering, along the Alpine piste.

I used to take my husband, Norm, but now he is deceased.’

May Poem

The poem for May has already featured in a previous blog, so it is included here only for completeness. Suffice it to say that it was inspired by the first face-to-face meeting of the European Union Guidelines Development Group on Breast Cancer Screening and Diagnosis following the pandemic. Here goes.

May

Varano Borghi, May 2023. Tribute to Lampedusa

 

The lake is ringed with wooded hills; a town

Slumbers on the far bank, no traffic noise.

The water oscillates, the grebes dive down.

The bulrushes sway with becoming poise.

 

For long-drawn years in fly-blown corridors

We met and did our jobs in Lombardy.

In draughty chambers, meetings took their course,

But in the evenings we were family.

 

We ate and drank like kings in central squares

Of Lake Maggiore towns. Stayed up too late

And woke in hotel rooms with hangovers.

We pressed on with the work in fragile state.

 

And then the wind of plague scattered our souls.

Lives were ruled by wireless, screen and cable.

Three years of headphones, emails, online polls.

Yet now we eat again at the same table.

 

Green from the rain, Lombardy carries on.

Older and balder, we’re almost strangers.

Still, let’s ignore our age, we’re not yet gone.

“Everything changes and nothing changes”