You might not guess it from reading our blog posts, but the fact is, we don’t get out much.
(Eh? Oh, you had guessed. Well, how perceptive of you.)
This morning, though, we set off on a long-distance journey. A round-trip of a whole two miles; probably nearer to two-miles-and-a-bit, if you want to be really precise about it, although personally I couldn’t give a tinker’s hoot for all that metric nonsense. Since Shana’s fall down the stairs (or rather, the bottom three steps of our stairs, where they turn ninety degrees to the left) last July, she hasn’t felt fit enough to do much walking, apart from going to the Co-op and back. More recently, her reluctance to venture out has been due to nervousness and feelings of panic. She’s felt much better during the last couple of weeks, though, so we decided today would be a good day to try going a bit further afield.
Besides, we had a Mother’s Day present to post and, we agreed, the sooner that was done (bearing in mind how lackadaisical the British postal system can be) the better. Our nearest post office (now that the Gowt’s Bridge branch on Lincoln’s High Street is closed) is in Rookery Lane, just over a mile away.
Shana’s navigation skills were useful right from the start — unlike my own talents for dithering and daydreaming. I was so busy looking out for unusual brick walls that I completely missed a short cut she had found. True, it is interesting, albeit briefly, to notice a single course of Flemish bond in the middle of a wall that is otherwise built entirely of stretchers; but if it hadn’t been for Shana’s spotting a gap between two houses we’d have had to walk all the way up Henley Street to the High Street, along past the Co-op and back down along the south bank of the river, which would have added easily an extra half a mile of walking. Take a trip with me and you’re sure to get plenty of exercise — whether you want it or not!
Our walk was accompanied by a continuous soundtrack of birdsong, punctuated by intermittent moans about aching calf muscles, creaky hip joints and totally unwarranted suggestions made to each other along the lines of ‘perhaps we’re not quite up to it’ or ‘maybe we’re a little bit out of shape’. On that basis, I have personally ruled myself out of the London Marathon this year, although if they have a marathon meat pie eating competition I might decide to come out of retirement for that.
After entering the dimly lit interior of Rookery Lane post office (and realising it was only dark because I was still wearing my sunglasses) and sending our parcel on its way, we stopped at Curtis, the butcher’s in the little row of shops nearby. We sat on a low wall in Boultham (pronounced ‘boot-em’) Park and had a cornish pasty each followed, after only the shortest of intervals, by an eccles cake, after which we figured it was time to set off home. The return trip was full of architectural interest from garages with mock Doric columns to the modernist exterior of Lincoln Indoor Bowls Club on Hall Drive. “It’s just like the Pompidou Centre,” I said. “See how that big air conditioning pipe and those extractor fans are all on the building’s exterior? If that ain’t modernist, I don’t know what is!”
