Another breakfast at 7:00 so bit chilly at the start of walking but still only wearing a shirt on top.
The terrain has become more undulating and it is strange when one has been walking on the level for two days the slightest rise is felt out of allproprtio.
Where the Way leaves the road out of Mendsm the OS 1:50 is not precise enough and I trogged across a ploughed field and back again before finding the exit from the road. I should have known because all such points have been well marked so far.
There were many crop field edges but paths were still good. The fields are I me see and often growing turnips. Who needs all those turnips. I wondered how many it would risk to fill an "Olympic sized swimming pool" a vague means of volume measurement often used by lazy writers. Anyway how do you calculate its volume? They usually have sloping bottoms, often shelved. You would need. volume based trigonometry and those dreadful tables with minute print we used st school - the likliehood of error reading and transferring the long numbers was enough to cause failure in O Levrl maths as was the case with me. I bet not one in s million has had recourse to using those tables since leaving school.Then I wondered if you could get all the turnips in one field in particular into one of those pools snd came to the conclusion "no." I wonder what effect Brexit will have on the turnip market, and as another aside the contractors who install Olympic sized swimming pools?
Towards the end of the day's walk the Way lead across flat fields for quarter of a mile passing through four new galvanised footpath gates with new footpath signs attached leading to a double bridge arrangement over two unfordsble rivers. The bridges were boarded up with a notice from Norfolk CC saying unsafe. I climbed round onto the first one but the second was broken in half lying in the water and totally beyond any gung ho intentions I may have had. Why on earth didn't they put up a notice earlier? I had to retrace my steps and find a private road through a farm to get onto the main road snd walk the long way round into Bungay.
I was early snd found a café. They had one fruit scone left and only served tea in mugs. I had the last scone - I think it had been the last of a batch made a few days ago. I could hardly bite through the outer crust. After eating part of it I surreptitiously wrapped the rest in a paper serviette and put it in my rucksack.
I am now very comfortable, st great expense, in The Castle Hotrl at Bungay. I took s photo and now see that it was previously called the Whit Lion - I wonder what the poor old lion did to become disinherited?
I have now found I can't scroll back to the top so earlier typos will have to remain now I'm going to brave trying some photos. One will show a grassy path through fields which characterised quite a bit of the walking.
It has taken me over an hour to type that then I can’t scroll back to correct the many typos. I am wary of trying to sort it in case I loose a whole hour’s work.
ReplyDeleteWhat a fantastic string of thoughts triggered by a field of turnips!
ReplyDeleteWhenever we visit the top of a tower, Mick has me doing mental arithmetic to work out how long an item dropped down the outside would take to reach the ground, and how fast it would be going when it got there. I can only imagine that if he'd been with you today you'd have been working through a series of assumptions about the volumes of the average turnip and of an Olympic-sized pool.
(Worry not about the typos. Typing on a virtual keyboard is always a trial and I didn't have any problem knowing what it was you meant to say.)
Ripening turnips must mean Burns night is nigh - but that is January - perhaps stockpiling in case of panic by scottish remainers - with assumes they prefer those tiny white french globes to robust british cannonballs (I'm told these are names of popular varieties - among the cognoscenti)
ReplyDelete- do Olympic pools have sloping bottoms ? the only one i have swum in hadn't (perhaps i should say 'floundered in') but it was near the equator, which might explain why it did not know which way was down : a suitable topic for cogitation on this (generally) flat walk, perhaps.
Gayle - well it’s more interesting than doing logistical calculations about one’s journey. If you go back to RR’s coded comment a few posts back I reckon he is hinting that blog posts on walks would be more interesting if thoughts and the like were voiced rather than just a description of the walk
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Gimmer - surely turnips are more connected with Halloween than Burns Night which would link better with your Brexit aside if used appropriately? I feel we should now leave OSSPs. We may be getting out of our depth.
Comment on Angles Way - day 2, continued
ReplyDeleteImagination is not a malady, a drug-induced state, or a delusion. It is a facility, pooh-poohed by many, with which one may add to conventional experience. Not always happily, of course; when we are ill we may imagine ourselves getting worse, even dying. But under less stressful circumstances it may widen our enjoyment.
We are walking across a moor and the wind, blowing through tussocks, is making a certain sound. Because the sound is familiar it reinforces our conviction that we are doing something we want to do. But our legs are in fine fettle and our thirst is quenched so it isn't necessary to review our physical state regularly. Our mind picks at our memories. That wind/tussock sound has, as it were, siblings. Someone close to us, breathing. A slice of bacon starting to fry. Some mechanisms of a steam engine. A jazz drummer stroking a hi-hat cymbal with a wire brush. A cyclist freewheeling downhill.
But no, we tell ourselves, let's not complicate life, let's stay with the tussocks and the wind. Why is that sound as it is? Presumably because the strands of grass in a tussock vibrate under the wind's pressure. Does that cause a consistent sound? Surely tussocks are irregular, loose strands of grass above, denser packets of grass below. Does the sound vary? We listen carefully and realise it does.
But we are, alas, a walker. Why the hell are we flirting with physics? Walking is walking. We get out a map, a compass, stare at the horizon for identifiable features, doing the things we've done a thousand times. Reassured by the repetition. Hey, that's a wall, and a wall's a wall. A great leap of our mental faculties and we see - Whooee! - it's an old wall. Good grief, that came close to a process known as ratiocination. Except, being a walker, we don't use that word.
Imagination is great. But for many it's just around the next corner and that corner turns out to be undefinable.
I created the above comment and added it without reading your post. Now I have read it. My word...
ReplyDeleteRR - I didn’t want to reply directly to your comment so employed politicians’ tactics but now I think you see that I didn’t miss the point - if I did so be it. It is not easy when you are battling misbehaving software at the same time- see my own comment on my Day 5 post.
ReplyDeleteBrings to mind "Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall"
ReplyDeleteBC - I.’m not familiar with your quote.
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