After a beautifully bright, warm lockdown Spring we now face an equally beautifully misty and mellow lockdown Autumn.
And we also face all the bloody new nature lovers who can’t spend their days choosing tiles in B&Q or picking over the Pizza Hut buffet so are schlepping round our woods instead.
Out with the dog this weekend we came across dozens of people where it is rare to see more than one. Not only did hardly any of them have a dog, some had cameras and others had children – in prams.
They were all out ‘for a walk’. Without a dog, which is weird. No-one has gone for an innocent walk in the woods since Thomas Hardy’s heroines.
It was the first lockdown that did it. Everyone took that prescribed ‘single hour of exercise a day’ edict sooo seriously and started going for ‘walks’.
In our local wood.
Where we have been going almost daily for the past ten years as part of the silent army of dog walkers who pitch up, rain or shine, poo bags in pockets, ready to find dead bodies (always ‘a man walking a dog’) and tread the nettles down.
But when lockdown hit, the woods were suddenly full of people taking their hour of exercise who, despite living here all their lives, have obviously never set an unsuitably-clad foot in there before.
We came across people taking pictures of trees, or pictures of their children in front of trees, pointing at pigeons and collecting leaves. Because they are really rare and unusual, leaves are.
The families usually look strained. It’s bloody hard pushing a stroller through mud. And nature walks involve – surprise – quite a bit of walking. Through nature. Which is hard work and boring when you’re seven, no matter how many fir cones you see.
The older couples have brand new little rucksacks, because you need a rucksack full of water bottles, sandwiches, Kendal Mint Cake, the Observer’s Guide to Fallen Leaves and distress flares when you are never more than a mile away from a main road.
The younger ones – who try to walk hand in hand until one of them turns an ankle and falls off the path – wear cosy fleeces and fashionable boots, all in pastel colours, like they are in a Boden advert. Good luck wiping the burrs, brambles, mud and dog shit off all that when you get home.
In the summer the new wood walkers tailed off abruptly when Eat Out To Help Out came in. Us dog walkers reclaimed our lost land like Ancient Britons after the Romans sloped off. We could safely let our dogs off the lead without worrying some child would get itself bitten, or some panicky pensioner would get a bit handy with a Nordic walking pole.
But the rucksacks have been dusted off and they are back, taking pictures of toadstools to put on Facebook and Making Memories as they tell their kids kicking dead leaves is much more fun than getting extra mini Smarties at the Ice Cream Factory.
We are lucky, so lucky, to have our woods. They are an escape from the difficulties of current life, they are somewhere you can see something wholly beautiful every day, they are a place you can really breathe.
I should be thrilled more people are appreciating them, especially families. But I’m not. I want the woods to myself.
* they aren’t our woods really, obvs, but I have been walking in them for years so have a strong sense of proprietorial ‘we were here first’ ownership that probably has a name and dozens of phd thesis about it. It’s like being the first group in the pub, you resent all the noisy latecomers, or when the newcomers always got voted out first in Big Brother. It is quite a nasty emotion actually and probably responsible for an awful lot of witch burnings and race riots over the years.
Scimitars and Scarves 