Walking with Plato (21 page)

Other farmers allow their dogs to roam freely around the farmyard and molest hikers to their doggy hearts’ content. These dogs are never such life-threateningly vicious brutes as the chained-up ones, but are nevertheless perfectly capable of causing injury, should their inclinations ever turn that way.

On this particular day, our route took us through one such farmyard.

My heart sank as we drew near and heard the sound of barking. Moments later, not one but three dogs came tearing towards us and then began leaping up against the farmyard gate and barking at us. They were young dogs – border collies –– but quite old enough to bite.

Wendy and I approached them slowly, hoping, but not really expecting, that the farmer would appear to call them off.

He didn’t.

I turned to Wendy and grimaced. ‘What choice do we have? We have to go through . . .’

I eased open the gate, squeezed through, and entered the farmyard in what I hoped was a suitably calm and assertive manner. All three dogs immediately set upon me: jumping up, balancing their front paws on my chest, and nuzzling and licking me in an ecstasy of delight.

‘Quick! Take a photo!’ I said, handing my smartphone to Wendy.

As she fumbled with the controls, I abandoned myself to their canine caresses. It was a beautiful moment.

Then, from a wooden kennel close to the farmhouse, Mother emerged. She lowered her head and shoulders in a ready-to-pounce attitude and gave a low growl that said, in no uncertain terms, ‘Leave my kids
the fuck
alone!’

I left her kids
the fuck
alone, and walked swiftly, non-aggressively, and pseudo-calmly through the farmyard and out the other side.

The young dogs, which moments before had been doting and fawning upon me quite shamelessly, now adopted their mother’s attitude and posture, and escorted me from the premises with growls, snarls, and bared teeth.

The day’s second canine-related adventure occurred an hour or two later. This time while we were walking along a narrow road, near to a small village.

On this occasion, the dog concerned was walking towards us, unleashed, beside a young woman in green wellies and a waxed jacket. As they drew near, the dog, which was a fair-sized beast, came bounding and barking towards us.

Wendy and I had no idea what its intentions were. So we stood quite still, and looked to the young woman for aid.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘he won’t bite!’

I wasn’t so sure. So, recalling some advice from TV’s
The Dog Whisperer
, I held out my hand, palm up, for the dog to smell.

He sniffed at it for a while, seemed satisfied, turned around to look at his mistress, turned back to look at me, bit my outstretched hand, and then started barking again.

The young woman hurried towards us, clipped the dog onto a leash, and then glared at me. ‘He doesn’t usually bite!’ she snapped. ‘It’s your backpack! He doesn’t like it!’

She held her glare for a few moments, presumably waiting for me to apologize for inciting her dog to violence, and then off she marched, doubtlessly muttering to herself about how many irresponsible backpack owners one has to contend with nowadays.

Late in the afternoon, Wendy and I arrived at Far Coley Farm, just outside Little Haywood, where we had booked a very – almost worryingly – inexpensive night’s bed and breakfast.

Since we had booked the cheapest possible accommodation, we were placed in a four-roomed log cabin rather than in the farmhouse itself. But since we had the cabin and its shared bathroom to ourselves, we were as happy as pigs in clover. We spent the evening, until darkness fell, sitting on the cabin’s pretty little porch, looking out upon the pretty little farmyard and its pretty little duck pond, and gazing further out upon the rolling hills of the Staffordshire countryside.

The next morning, as we sat in the farmhouse conservatory enjoying a leisurely breakfast and
not
having to pack up our tent, I wondered how long the thrill of comfy beds, soft towels, cooked breakfasts, and leisurely starts would last.

The happiness I felt, by this stage of JoGLE, was of a very particular kind.

In the Book of Corinthians, in the Bible, there’s a passage about love that often gets trundled out at weddings: ‘Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.’

Strange as it may seem, those words capture something of the way the happiness of JoGLE felt. It wasn’t a greedy, egotistical kind of happiness – or, rather, it wasn’t the kind of happiness one feels when satisfying greedy, egotistical kinds of needs. And it wasn’t an exciting or passionate kind of happiness. Instead, it was gentle, steady, and serene.

Readers with good memories will recall the change that came over Wendy when we left the A9 behind us and ventured forth onto the Great Glen Way.

Although I had been delighted to see that change in Wendy, it had come as no surprise, since I know she is an outdoor girl at heart, and is never more herself – that is, the best of herself – than when she is out in the wilds.

But it did surprise me, at this stage, seven hundred miles into JoGLE, to discover that the same change had taken place in
me 
– someone who had previously exhibited no special fondness for the outdoors. It had taken much longer in my case, but Mother Nature had finally worked her magic. I had a new lightness in my heart and in my step.

In
The Conquest of Happiness
, Bertrand Russell says: ‘[W]e are creatures of Earth; our life is part of the life of the Earth, and we draw our nourishment from it just as the plants and animals do.’

He goes on to say that those pleasures that have in them no element of this contact with the Earth – gambling, for example, or, in the modern world, computer gaming or TV – are ultimately unsatisfying. The moment they cease, they leave us feeling empty and thirsty.

But, Russell continues:

Those [pleasures] that bring us into contact with the life of the Earth have something in them profoundly satisfying; when they cease, the happiness that they have brought remains, although their intensity while they existed may have been less than that of more exciting dissipations.

And that describes my experience exactly. The pleasures of JoGLE, though rarely what you might call ‘exciting’, were, to me, profoundly satisfying.

From Little Haywood, we walked for three miles along the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal to Milford Common and the start of the Heart of England Way. Then we walked an additional fifteen miles southeast along the Way itself, first through Cannock Chase and then through farmland, to the small cathedral city of
Lichfield
.

Cannock Chase is a vast area of heathland and woodland in the county of Staffordshire, which has been designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Crossing it, on a mid-September day, when early rain has been succeeded by mellow sunshine, I could see why.

The woodland and forest areas were fresh and green, showing only the faintest hint of autumn colouring. And the heathland, which was dominated by heather, gorse, and bracken, and embellished with a few scattered trees, had its own austere beauty. Some traces of mist hung in the air, lending both woodland and heathland an air of enchantment.

It put me strongly in mind of the forests of Merrie England. So strongly that I would scarcely have been surprised (speaking poetically, rather than literally) had I been accosted by Robin Hood and Friar Tuck, or caught a glimpse of an elfish figure scampering through the bracken, or stumbled upon a she-wolf or a wild boar.

There must be something about Cannock Chase that gives rise to such fanciful musings. Since the nineteenth century, sightings have been reported of all manner of strange creatures there: phantom cats, hellhounds, werewolves, and – most recently – a ghostly black-eyed child. Fortunately, we passed through unmolested by any such horrors, and continued merrily onwards to Lichfield.

Lichfield is, by all accounts, a splendid little city, with a magnificent three-spired medieval cathedral and lots of attractive Tudor and Georgian buildings. But, as was so often the case on JoGLE, Wendy and I saw little of it.

We arrived, early in the evening, too tired and hungry to be bothered with history and culture, and made only the very briefest detour to admire the cathedral en route to our city-­centre hotel.

We had booked the cheapest room, but for some reason were given a free upgrade to an opulent room about the size of a football pitch. What with that, and with ‘Fish Friday Club’ at the nearby Wetherspoon’s, we began to feel almost guilty about how comfortable and easy JoGLE had become.

From Lichfield, we walked eighteen miles along the Heart of England Way, and then took a three-mile detour, off the trail, to the small town of
Coleshill
where we had booked a room at a pub-hotel. As the day unfolded, I began to appreciate just how aptly the Heart of England Way is named.

For this was the England of my dreams: the England of quiet lanes and modest footpaths, of steepled churches and genial graveyards, of lush pastures politely bordered by hedges and trees, of shady woodlands vibrating with birdsong, and of slow barges on sleepy canals.

Even now, looking back on it, I feel my heart melting within me for love of England.

Throughout the day, I had those famous lines from Alfred, Lord Tennyson running through my head:

On either side the river lie

Long fields of barley and of rye,

That clothe the wold and meet the sky;

And thro’ the field the road runs by

To many-tower’d Camelot.

Which is weird, since we saw no river, and – as far as I know – no fields of barley and rye. But somehow those words expressed precisely what I
felt
while passing through this bit of England.

Prior to setting off on JoGLE, Wendy and I lived for five years in Vietnam. It was an exciting and exotic place to live, and, on the whole, I enjoyed being there. But sometimes I would feel a twinge of nostalgia for dear old England. And the England I conjured up in my imagination at such times was precisely
this
England.