Up a creek, didn’t paddle

June 4, 2017 at 10:22 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Gets deeper

So I find myself staying in a hotel in Plymouth, a couple of miles away from all three of my old schools, only two of which I was expelled from.

It seemed rude not to try a run that went to them all, even though the rain was a bit biblical, and I’m not that familiar with the bit of town that linked them all up.

I gave the map a cursory look before leaving it behind, planning a big loop, that just needed me to turn left at the right moment, not right at the wrong moment.

A quick potter round school #1, and the ruin in the trees where the nuns turned a blind eye to us smoking,  then down through Tamerton to pick up the fields to Whitleigh.

Following my nose, and following the stream on my left, the road seemed a bit more isolated than I planned, but it was too good a road for it not to go somewhere worthwhile.  Having said that, I also thought about a theory I have on paths through bracken in the hills; the ones that end up going nowhere look the best trodden, because they’ve been trampled twice by people coming back when they found a dead end.

And the stream grew to a creek, and the creek to an estuary, and my hopes of a bridge gradually dissolved, and I kept on going on because that’s what we do.

And after half an hour when I got to the dead end that we all know now was lurking all along, I did a loop through the woods and looked at the sea, and faced the facts about going back the way I came, and I stumbled across a mountain biker. I asked him whether there was some other way of going somewhere, and he said yes, you can do a loop through the woods and look at the sea, and go back the way you came.

And having redefined the idea of going back they way I came, from being the worst-case scenario into being the way I wanted to go all along, I ran back drenchedly, turned the right way down the other side of the stream that would become the creek and sea, and gradually found streets and houses that looked a bit more like where I wanted to be.

I left schools #2 and #3 for another day or year though, and the old lady who I asked the best way back to Crownhill told me there was a bus stop up the road, and I ran back the way the school bus used to take me. And still it rained, but I’d been wet through for ages, and quietly tired and happy for even longer.