Shambles

 

I was going to join a walking group. I found their details on the Internet and prepared to join them on their first walk of the season. They apparently walk at the speed of the slowest in the group and so I’d hoped to fit nicely amongst their number.

I got lost before I’d even reached the starting point and found them.

It was a wood I hadn’t been to before. I turn off too early and found that only by going back to the main road could I find the place. It was a different place altogether to the one that I had in mind.

I was ten minutes late.

Still I’m good at a quick turn of speed. If they’d just started off I could easily catch them up.

I put on my boots, hat and scarf and I go into these unknown woods. There are four trails and I have no idea which one the group was going to take. I opt for the one that has a length of three miles and start. It is a circular walk. I figure that I will either catch up with them or eventually meet them coming towards me.

It’s a spooky wood. Ancient. It is the last remnant of a wood that once covered two hundred square miles. A wood that kings once hunted in. There is a slight wind that knocks the top branches together and they rattle like bones and I feel so alone and vulnerable walking there alone. I speed up hoping to see the bright colours of jackets ahead of me, but there is nothing. Just the distant hum from the road. Then I try to forget about the group I’d hoped to join and I try to be in the moment and appreciate what there is about me. So I sit and a group of people come up the path from behind. There are many dogs and I wonder if they are them. The leaders say a cheery hello and I dare to ask a solitary walker if he is one of the Shamblers.

“No,” he says in surprise. "There was a group I saw, though.”

“Which way did they go?”

He points his arms this way and that. He really has no idea. He is a solitary walker who just happened to be walking near others with dogs.

He goes on his way.

In a woman’s magazine he would have stayed and chatted. Found some excuse to join me on the bench, maybe to free a troubling stone or to right a troublesome sock. But no he goes on. Only in a woman’s magazine story would he have spoken about the flight of the red kite or of how the siskins build their nests.

So I too continue on my way and I don’t find the walking group and I’m soon back at my car wondering why I ever bothered to travel so far and what on earth I got out of it.