Halfway through a ten-day house exchange, and it’s a rest day, sitting around the house listening to the rain. Rest days are much to be enjoyed following days of getting out and about, either into the melée of Brussels or the frantic road system. Rest days renew the dissipated spirit, refuel the knackered body, prepare for the affair of the holiday to begin again. You might have got the impression that I quite like them.

It might  a bit unfair to rough up the habits of Belgian drivers for they are not quite as the French. Within minutes of entering the roads you have a car up your backside as you obey the very reasonable 50 km suburban speed limit. Not so the locals, who treat speed limits, unless policed, as reference points from which to indulge their boy-racer persona. I was wrong, they are as bad as the French.

Brussels has had a bad press, largely due to their having torn down so much of their architectural heritage in the 1960s. Despite that, in parts it has a lovely Parisian feel, supported beautifully by the predominant language of French at which we are not bad, at least ordering food, buying stamps and the like. There are rewarding quartiers to explore, sinful beer to try and don’t you just love the transport: efficient and cheap, at least the latter beating London. Best of all is coming home to an exchange-house that clasps you unto it, sets you down in the quiet, soothes the fatigue of older age.

Yesterday we drove to Leuven, drove rather than on the tram/train/bus as planned, not only for Suzanne, who has attempted too much after her operation, but also for me with this blasted plantar fasciitis that has persisted for months. Appearing in the square above the car park we were greeted with one of the modern sounds of summer: the banging together of racks of chairs preparing for a rock concert. Another victim of the wars (it’s beginning not to matter which) when the Germans razed lots of the old town for no apparent purpose, Leuven is the country’s oldest university town (1425).

Towards the end of the stay, we visited the town museum where I expected my eyes to glaze over with exhibits of bits of Flanders cloth or spiky mediaeval helmets. Instead, your 10 euros bought four floors of weird arrangements of children’s blocks on tables, pointless films of Indian dancers, pictures (and not many of those) of bits of rope or hairy carpet, and most disconcerting of all a three-act play with two child-robots talking in an American accent to projected films of pole dancers. We did not stay beyond the first act.

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(Image: https://mleuven.be/en)

While Dad fought in the Korean War, and when I was 9, my mother and my brother lived in the Highlands of Scotland. Strathpeffer (pop. 1,500) was and is an old Victorian spa town whose imposing Highland Hotel was commandeered by the army in WWII for army families, many still billeted there in 1953. It had a sweeping, varnished staircase up which I once saw a man in brown overalls carry a tiny coffin; it had spacious grounds with rhododendron bushes where I played; and my mother would gather other children from the hotel and take us walking up into the mountains. Like the Pied Piper, Mum would lead us joyous kids along tracks, through woods and beside clear-running burns. Once on a narrow path we came across an adder, the only venomous snake in Britain. I can see her now, worried sick for us, waving her flock behind her, raising a rock above her head, crushing the poor reptile to death.

It’s a town in Lancashire, population 79,000, known since the Middle Ages for cotton spinning, black puddings and now Metrolink, a train that becomes a tram once it enters the nearby city of Manchester. Auntie Alice and I once travelled to and from Old Trafford on this system in 1993, even right behind Warne when he bamboozled Gatting first ball of the series. One of its famous sons, Sir Robert Peel, founded the Metropolitan Police and sadly the Conservative Party. Another of these sons was my father, born 1923 around the corner from the Bensons Sweet factory. And he, indirectly, was the reason that we drove to Bury one recent Sunday.

We were going to a birthday party, my Aunty Lily’s 90^th. Lily has lived in Bury all her life, still manages well on her own, although her eyesight is failing. Well known in the town because of her lifelong voluntary work with schizophrenia carers, she received the MBE one day at the palace in 2006; I know this, because on my 62^nd birthday I watched the HM pin it on her.

These days we don’t undertake such long drives: 175 miles over three and a half hours along two of the busiest motorways M1 and M6 – at least it was a Sunday. And we were late, having to stop for the loo at a Macdonald’s. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘it doesn’t matter, we can just mingle surreptitiously.’ No chance. When we entered Elton Liberal club, the celebration was a sit-down job, with china cakestands, tablecloths, trimmed sandwiches and pots of tea. And there seemed over a 100 people, including the town mayor and his deputy in their chains and ties.

My sister and her West Yorkshire contingent of husband, son and daughter had kept places for us, so we were thankfully able to ease into the throng quickly but more publicly than I had wanted. Lily looked pretty amazing for her age and was infused with birthday pleasure. More formal that I had thought, speeches were delivered including my own one about the late 60s, when as a student I would take buses to Bury from Stockport and do the rounds of clubs and pubs with aunts Lily and Alice. Those events were not as alcohol-fuelled as separate outings with my Uncle Jack, who besides paying for my beer gave me half-a-crown for the and bus fare. Boundless was my gratitude since my grant was always much diminished; most likely both our as Jack was often on the dole.

Back to the tea party, where its time slot (hire-free to pensioners) was coming to an end, and we were to drive over the Pennines to my sister’s, where my niece was to have her own birthday do. We had a rushed goodbye with Lily, actually had to queue, and still she was lapping up being birthday girl.

As we drove away, I remembered how Dad hated going back to his home town. Memories of the Depression, unheated houses, outside toilets, horse-drawn moonlight flits, being fostered out for several years and once age 15, having run away to sea, his mother dragging him back for the pittance he earned from some god-forsaken job, all did not endear him. Thatcherism or a derivative of it administered the coup de grâce, and it doesn’t look much like I knew it 50 years ago, let alone almost a hundred.

This journey, into which I was rightfully pressed as family duty, reminded me of my paternal roots. Dad was 14 when The Road to Wigan Pier was published, a shocking glimpse of the living conditions of the British underclass (compare to the Grenfell Tower fire, 80 years later so – plus ça change). Lucky me to be born into the fairer socialism of postwar Britain; or not, because I don’t have a town to call home. And that’s Dad’s fault.
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(Photo above is actually from Lily’s 80th birthday)

Buckingham Palace, 2006

My career took place in business class,
Living out of an impossibly small
Roll-on that never saw the hold.

As a perk of this caper, I read novels,
Drank champers and ate
Smoked salmon that I got to hate,

Flew a day and a quarter from Sydney to
Delaware to the maw of corporate HQ, where
They talk a language I’ve guiltlessly discarded.

From London once, all day to the Caucasus
I read and drank the silences from
The empty seats beside me, fore and aft.

That afternoon the pilot banked obligingly
Over Istanbul to balance me above
Coppery glints of minarets and domes.

At darkening India, I fell asleep over
My third novel and dreamt of
Ants at prayers in mosques.

Ampthill
28 January 2008

A friend has a grand Edwardian house in Westcliff-on-Sea, and generally comes to visit us because she and I walk, footpaths being handier here. On this occasion, we drove the 77 motorway miles to her one afternoon in May. She had also invited her daughter and two children so we had a sort of domestic afternoon, including a visit to the beach. A chilling wind blew off the flats, the two- and four-year-old indifferent to it, intent on patting sand, while the adults stood around in warm coats.

Leaving the others to themselves, I wandered off towards the Crowstone, something I had heard of but only seen its tip in the estuary waters. It’s a 14-foot-high granite obelisk with a history going back to 1197, but most recently re-erected in 1836 to show the seaward limit of the City of London’s jurisdiction over the Thames. Nosing around it alone, taking in the sea air, I remembered childhood days at the seaside on the Isle of Wight. When the little boy came up, I showed him how to skim stones off the water.

After the beach it was back to Camelot, for so is the house named, and for mum to get the children ready for bed and their sleepy car journey home to Bromley. I was roped in to read a story to the now pyjama-clad little boy, who had equipped himself with no fewer than three children’s books. Took me back 40 years, especially my own son being 44 that very next day. They don’t change: after three books were despatched, he waited for more. I asked, ‘Which one shall I read again?’ He chose Bear Hunt, an illustrated narrative by Anthony Browne, in which your ursine hero evades a pair of incompetent hunters by deftly drawing rescue devices with a pencil on the page. For example, a hunter advances behind with a noose and Bear draws a horn, which on the next page is at the end of a menacing rhinoceros. An interesting metafictional device that the lad couldn’t quite grasp when I put it to him.

Outside in the spacious garden, a mangy fox padded over the lawn. Later, Mr Grey, a tomcat of the same colour meowed at the back door for his tea. Mr Grey has a (bad) thing about men so I had to pretend that I wasn’t there, but he dashed in for his grub, and out again, eyes wide-eyed with distress.

Next morning, the party reduced to three adults, we drove forth through Southend and beyond to Shoeburyness, the end of the train line to London. Here we walked up to Poppies: Wave a marvellous adaptation of the moving Tower of London remembrance poppies of 2014. At the end of a pier on MoD land, it’s on a UK-wide tour, a stream of bright-red poppies on stalks flowing towards the estuary. Lovely. You could leave a handwritten note to be displayed and laminated by red-poppy-coloured volunteers; on mine I wrote ‘Thanks to Dad, Sergeant Yates of The Black Watch 1942-1961’. (Dad went up Gold Beach on D-Day and wounded later, served in Germany, Korea, and Kenya where he was also wounded.)

To nearby Shoebury Garrison, set up for the Crimean War but now the defunct garrison’s buildings are rather posh residences. Driving around the development reminded me of my own life in barracks more or less until the age of 21, and how most of my old homes are not just defunct but demolished.

Back to Camelot for coffee, motor back to Ampthill.

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Poppies: Wave: http://www.visitsouthend.co.uk/poppies/poppies.aspxCrowstone: http://southendtimeline.com/crowstone.htm

I did not start serious hiking until I returned to live in my native country, in December 2004. Just a fortnight later on a black January morning at Devil’s Dyke, I was beginning the South Downs Way with a friend, now of fifty years. Since then I have completed the SDW, the Thames Path, Greensand Ridge Walk and John Bunyan Trail (both twice), besides extensive local walking in the pretty but flat local Bedfordshire countryside. All this for twelve years and the body holding up fairly well. Until now.

What has this to do with the infamous Benito? Another friend (isn’t it easy to mistype it as ‘fiend’?) of mine, a wag of sorts, and who doesn’t walk as much as I do, listened kindly enough to my tale of woe about the bad foot that has brought my walking to a stop. In fact, so stopped is it that my doctor has ordered only walking around the house, whatever that means: I am housebound, and for a month. That was ten days ago but I broke the rule a few days later when I struck out the almost two miles to the station and a suburban pub crawl in St Albans. Not a good idea, and since then I have followed the doc’s advice to a T.

Must hasten to the point. The wag likened my complaint to an imagined horticultural assistant to Il Duce. A painful condition of the heel, it’s called plantar fasciitis.