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| The Old Vicarage Garden |
‘It is widely known after all, that real life takes place in movement’ says Olga Tocarczuk's narrator, in Flights. (Or, as the reviewer suggests, a better and more literal translation of the title would be 'Wanderers'.)
I read this on the bus south and I smile because I remember writing something very similar to that, only recently. Or maybe it was some time ago, maybe it was even last year it is so hard to keep track of when one thought something sufficiently to write it down. (Time, after all, is another 'wanderer'.) The other thing about thoughts is that one tends to think the same or very similar thoughts, quite frequently. Just read what you wrote a few days ago, years ago, decades ago even, if you reread your journals, you may be surprised, I often am, at the repetition of my thoughts, though they may be approached from a different angle, arise out of different circumstances, and are clothed in different words. (Our thoughts seem to follow a labyrinth-like pattern, traversing similar almost conjoining paths, yet never quite going back over the same ground.) Yet so often, some thought or other can emerge as a fresh and original insight!
As for ‘real life’ taking place in movement, I would probably have written it in a questioning mode, even though I feel it to be true, at least sometimes I do. I felt that on the bus as I travelled south, the wonderful feeling of movement. But I liked the narrator's statement in Olga's book - with its flick of irony, its sense of ‘everybody knows that, so it must be true’.
Near Carlisle, in the north east of England, I meet up with my friend Sally, and she drives us to her brother’s house in Cumbria, the Old Vicarage, with its big garden, old trees, and the rooks calling in the evening, as they rustle in to roost. 
The next morning, I’m walking along the old road, the narrow empty road to Kirkby Lonsdale, a few birds singing, near-silent lane, beech tree borders and other old massive trees. There is such an atmosphere, a presence, from these thick and spreading trees, and the heart rises, singing, as ‘real life takes place in movement’, the rhythm of the walk along the lane, with grass growing in the centre. It turns into a path leading to the Devil’s Bridge, a primal path, that’s what I think, the first kind of travel, a way for people to walk, between these glowing trees, silent but not silent, with their hum of sunlit joy connecting to the heart and the rhythm of the limbs.
In a charity shop in Kirkby Lonsdale I hear one woman at the desk say to another
...that couple who just left, they often come in, you know ...
I move around the corner from the clothes racks to the CD and bookshelves, as if studying the books but of course I am eavesdropping.
...you know, you have to be careful.
What do you mean, careful? says the other woman.
Oh well, I can’t really explain right now, says the first, and I know exactly what she means and why she doesn’t want to be more precise, as I, a customer, am in the shop, as if I didn’t have experience of shops and selling,
...just, you know, careful …
Why, because they’ve got a foreign accent? says the other, and I don’t hear what the reply is, if any.
When I take my purchases to the counter, the lady seems preoccupied, as if she is still smarting – (I recognize her voice as ‘the other’ though she is on her own, her colleague has disappeared somewhere) from the coy comment about ‘being careful’ about the young couple with the foreign accents.
Down Collier’s Lane the high hedges sprout either side of a blue sky. Thistledown lifts from the plants, airborne, so many from a distance I thought they were a cloud of insects. Birds hop from the hedges, pause in the road, turn into leaves. Leaves on the gravel take off, spread wings, turn into butterflies.
A yew tree in St Mary’s churchyard,
and through the churchyard, a view over the river Lune, it’s known as Ruskin’s view as it was a favourite of his. (Though perhaps should be called Turner's View, after his painting of it.)
*
The next day we drive to St Bees, on Cumbria’s west coast. On the pebble beach I pick up a perfectly round stone, hot from the sun. The sea sparkles on the surface, in the sun’s path. Children and dogs douse themselves with water. We wade into the sea. From the sea, even if it’s just been your feet you’ve immersed, you come out changed. The sea baptises. Your feet remember. All of you remembers.
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