The Conclusions of 2021

Wrapping the 2021 Season
at Shipley railway station.

As 2021 slips into history, we again find ourselves in the moment of reflection, looking back at the end of (almost) a whole decade of walking around the West Riding of Yorkshire, and beyond, and being mildly amazed of how much we've seen and learned across the course of those years, how a few months of useful exercise back in 2012 have become no less than an active career of travelling on foot, seeing more sights and pacing more miles than I ever would have thought possible, while again pondering the annual question of What Have We Learned in 2021? Honestly, most of the take away from my tenth season of walking amounts to 2021 has been an extremely frustrating year, as a simple extraction of achievements from the list of targets that I posted last January would make it look like this year has been a significant success in light of the ongoing pandemic conditions, a more reflective regard would have things appear very differently. Indeed, my local aims in the early season came together very well, getting down plenty of miles in the circuits from home during the third national lockdown, before expanding the season in April while I waited for travel restrictions to be lifted and the effects of vaccination against Covid-19 to take hold, getting in my local multi-part trial before then busting it open wide in May, starting out my long ruin of trails between Calderdale and Airedale and getting in the cross-country trail, in the form of the Bronte Way, which I had promised myself. Summer then saw us being mostly successful in pushing my experience field out to the northwest from Calderdale, over the high moors in that corner and making ourselves acquainted with the Boulsworth Hill massif and the lay of the East Lancs valley, before keeping the legs going through the autumn's dour months to check off most of the unseen paths in the vicinity of the Calderdale - Bradford high moors and the most notable towns of their boroughs, while pressing ourselves past 500 miles on the year, which was always my stated goal, and achieving the 5,000 miles before I'm Fifty target with considerable ease, with almost three and half years to spare.

Spring Rain ruining my day,
in Bradford.

The reflective look will see that I failed to do any walking in Leicestershire when I did get to my week away from home, which I'll put down to the rare and insane heat that we experienced in that few days in July, and though we did get away for my Summer week, albeit not especially far from home, the original three day trail plan that I for that week fell by the wayside, while I completely failed to get to doing anything with My Sister and family in the West Pennines, either in May, September or later due to the conflicting schedules that we had, but there's deeper reasons for those seemingly minor failures. The truth if the matter is manifold, and only really explicable at length, starting with the fact that the weather has been just brutal this year, throwing more wet Saturdays across the season than I had experienced during any of the previous nine, and when you've arranged your plans to maximise use of every weekend, that's going to put a knock-on effect to all your planning, with three trails, in May, July and October being abandoned due to heavy rainfall, and four whole days being lost across the Spring and Summer due to the unseasonal inclemency. All those lost half days did get all their lost miles walked, but at the cost of forcing other plans to get shuffled backwards, so that the high summer trails got pushed into September and the late Summer moorland walks ended up in October, not the ideal time for either, and while only two plotted route got left on the slate, the entirety of the Mary Townley Loop, on the pennine Bridleway, in upper Calderdale and Rossendale had to be left for a future occasion, and a couple of significant trajectories in the northwest never even reached the planning stage, to probably not be picked up until 2024 at the earliest.

Summer Rain ruining my day,
in Shibden Dale.

If there were any doubt about the gravity of the global climate crisis that we find ourselves in, this past year ought to provide grounds for some reflection and reconsideration, as it has not been normal in Britain for the high season weather to be this turbulent over the years, and the reality of global warming for us in these isles might well be not a future of increasing temperatures and drought, but one of colder weather and much more rain as the warming effects of the Gulf stream in the Atlantic Ocean and the Jet stream in the atmosphere take their temperate benefits elsewhere. On top of this, we have the now familiar levels of mental stress that I've been taking on, still tested by the ongoing pandemic and all the ridiculous behaviors that have gone along with it, which has been coupled to trying to find a happy work - life balance after changing roles, and sites, in my department at the Leeds THT, and something has had to give in all that, and it turns out to have been my desire to write and my interest in continuing this blog, which has always been more of a chore to compose, week in and week out, than it ought to have been, but has become an absolute millstone around my neck over the last year. You'd not notice from the dates of my posts, but this journal has been organised significantly ex post facto for the entire season, with time off work and holidays in July and September being dedicated to trying to get it back in order, while the late season trail have ultimately been written up to three months after they were walked, lingering on my to-do pile and not getting done right through until this January, and the effort that this blog demands has all gotten to much, meaning that this will probably be my last year of long-form writing, and while I do intend to continue to dwell here on blogger, I'll probably be sharing a lot fewer words over the next three years.

Autumn Rain ruining my day,
on Cold Edge.

Coupled to the issues brought by our capricious climate and the mental toil that I still experience, we have the ongoing physical issues that I have alluded to over the last few years, which were particularly emphasized at the end of 2020, but start to feel like a major problem as we stand on the cusp of 2022, as my ongoing condition of worsening tinnitus has has a disruptive effect of my sleep and my ability to focus on my work, another reason why writing has become an absolute chore, while my limbs start to feel the effect of being overworked and under-used simultaneously. The immediate reaction that I had to my questionable right hip starting to grind that bit more, and make my upper thigh and glutes persistently sore, was that all this walking was starting to take its toll on my body, taking me past my usual levels of wear and tear and putting me on the fast track to needing a hip replacement, but the reality of it proved to be that I was a lot more physically comfortable when walking, and most of the soreness was experienced when sat down, either at work or at home, which really leaves me none the wiser as to what's going on. It will probably need medical attention in the future, whenever I choose to add myself to the 6 million backlogged cases needing treatment in the NHS, but for now I'll look to keep going, taking myself away from the tests of the Pennine moors and dales for the next couple of years, to see if less physically challenging excursions are better for me, and while walking with my stick at all times has become a fact of life at 47, giving the impression of being someone who needs to use the priority seats on the trains and buses, when the new season resumes, I'll also look to start walking the 30 minutes between town to St James' hospital, twice daily to keep limber and shed some of this bulk that I've gained over the last year, thanks to eating too much and taking on job roles that have had me sitting down for most of my worked hours.

West Yorkshire's last frontier?
The East Lancs Valley and Pendle
Hill, from Boulsworth Hill 

That was a lot of chatter for a single point wasn't it? Maybe I ought to have been bit more concise in making my points, something that you'll know I struggle with if you've kept reading this thing over the years, but I only really have one other discovery to note for 2021 as I've found that after a decade of tramping its many lanes, over its hills and dales, I might have started to run out of new vistas to see in West Yorkshire, and not just in the sense that there are no towns and few villages that remain unseen, and no significant hilltops and valleys that haven't passed below my feet so far. Having now approached and traversed most of the high moors on the Calder - Aire watershed, and made my way over the English watershed to land in the East Lancs valley, I start to feel like there aren't any new horizons to see whilst walking from home, as the view towards Pendle Hill on the western horizon, with lower Ribblesdale and and the Forest of Bowland beyond is going to be the last new one that I'll be seeing for a while, when you consider that last year brought us new sights to the southwest over Greater Manchester and the Cheshire plain, all the way to the first range of hills in Wales, the Clwydians. Between the these areas, Rossendale was traversed in 2015 on my way to the Irish Sea coast, and the West Pennines Moors and valleys are familiar from multiple visits to My Sister, while to the northwest, there's not much to see anew having started my walking life in 2012 by traipsing into the southern corner of the Yorkshire Dales on a pretty regular basis, which was followed up in 2013 by burning the Dales Way trail up to the Lake District and getting intimate with upper Wharfedale too, which was then revisited extensively in 2018 also.

So where do we go in the future?
The clue is in the landscape,
at the Lad Law summit.

2017 added Nidderdale to the experience fields, beyond the visibly impenetrable barrier of Norland Edge, but all routes to the north lead into Wensleydale, possibly beyond my capacity when attached to the practice of walking from home, and while the lands to the northeast and east, across the Vale of York and the Selby Levels are extensive, they're also extremely flat, and thus the North York Moors, Howardian Hills and the Yorkshire Wolds will always linger on the horizon when travelling in that direction, all of which can be seen from within this county. We also saw beyond them, in part, in 2015 and 2016 when tramping over and atop those chalk hills, while any regard to the southeast has to consider the fact that there isn't really an horizon in that direction beyond Wakefield district, not until you're well past the rivers Don and Trent and into the 150m summits of Lincolnshire, while to the south, beyond the well trammeled paths of Kirklees, even the moorland barrier of the Dark Peak doesn't entirely obscure what's beyond, as we've visited the Derwent and Hope valleys, picked our routes around the Peak district and seen the Cheshire fringe up close and from afar. So with my first 5,000 miles of walking already completed, checked off in a rather mundane fashion, and feeling barely worthy of mental notice or celebration (aside from calling My Mother on the day and having a dirty burger and some shandies afterwards), we find ourselves actually pondering seriously where the next three years, to the end of my 40s, might actually lead me, as we continue to seek new paths beyond what we've seen already, while still finding ourselves inside the realm of public transport from West Yorkshire, before we reach the limits of what is too costly in time and expensive in price  for this whole enterprise to continue to be viable.

~~~

Pandemic Thoughts: December 2021

This month, the first of the Omicron Wave, which might be the fourth wave of the Pandemic arrives with myself receiving a thunderously worded letter from NHS England which warns me of the new legal status of vaccination as condition of employment, which seem to be surprising necessity when you consider what hospital staffs have been going through over the last two years, and the apparent understanding of the needs for vaccination, but the really shocking fact is that almost 10% of the national staff have yet to receive a single dose, a figure only slightly better than the national average. I'll not rip them unnecessarily for informing me of this a full three weeks after I received my booster, but it seems that uptake has been slower than might have been expected, as a large chunk of my department finds themselves in the queues for the drop in booster sessions, having not pre-booked a month prior, and it does worry me slightly that this is the first month that we've directly had the need for regular testing addressed to us, which might have been a good routine to have gotten into when the Delta wave hit, and we received a massive of lateral flow testing kits back in May. Perhaps that's just how things get tangled up with all the mixed messaging that we receive, from inside the Health Service and without, which on the one hand had apparently cancelled our works Christmas do, only for me to discover that it was actually still on, in a wholly informal capacity, and no one had told me that it was happening, not that I was wanting to go, as the rise in infections across December had me feeling the need to stay out of harms way as well as could be managed, which would actually allow me to do Christmas with my family in person. It's pretty plain to any observer that the Omicron variant was not in any meaningful way contained by the travel restrictions brought in last month, but it has also become clear that while being much more virulent and contagious than its predecessors, it seems to be relatively less dangerous as the increase in infections has not seen anything like a comparable rise in hospital admissions or deaths, though you still want to bash some head together when it's reported that over 85% of people going into critical care are still unvaccinated.

It's nonetheless plain that some amount of restrictions do need to be reimposed ahead of Christmas, but it's pretty obvious that HM Government are reluctant to do any more than bring in their Plan B, which amounts to little more than legally permitting working from home again, and imposing some limits on venue capacities, while the health authorities request that rules be tightened further and many MPs go into conniptions about this terrible imposition on civil liberties (the irony of which is staggering when held against how they organise their Law & Order policies). I could believe that they really are starting to demonstrate how the Picard Syndrome works in reality, which means choosing to observe a potential threat at close quarters until its become an actual threat and it's (almost) too late to mitigate it, and despite seeing the infection rate going up at a speed unmatched since the start of the Pandemic, the messaging coming our from Those Who Would Govern Us is to get a vaccine booster, promoted with the tradition three word, or three part, slogan, while only giving the vaguest direction on what to do in terms of limiting contacts and amount of time spent circulating during the Christmas shopping and party season. I can be pretty sure that there is an acknowledged need to act at the highest level, but the moral authority of the Prime Minister has been thrown into stark relief thanks to revelations about the Downing Street staff's Christmas party in December 2020, which may have breached the rules in place at the time, and you can be sure that any suggestion of imposing social restrictions over the Festive Season would have resulted in them being collectively ignored nationwide, especially after it was effectively cancelled last year at the shortest of notice. So the month progresses, with the rate of infections hitting 600,000 total in the week ahead of Christmas, and then spiking to over 110,000 per day in the week after, showing that regardless of what else happens, keeping out of general circulation and maintaining self care is going to be key going into 2022, as everybody I spoke to seemed to have the attitude of 'Let's do Christmas with our families, and then worry about the consequences later' which isn't the best approach, but is an absolutely understandable one, and also uncontestable, as it's my attitude too.

So we slip into Christmas, having organised most of my shopping online, or done by someone else on their own behalf, and only making one trip into town, which was for an entirely un-festive reason, as it happens, as I needed to visit my mortgage lender, as I was approaching my 15 year review, and thanks to a legacy after my father's passing and a lot of careful saving, I decided that it was time to pay off the balance that I owed them, rather than be burdened for another decade, which coupled to my Student Loans having lapsed in May allowed me to become debt free for the first time since the 1990s. It's also worth noting that the ongoing supply crisis did not cause the shortages that hands were being so aggressively wrung over, and thus when the time cane for our four day weekend, everyone seemed to be ready to steel themselves for a Christmas get-together that felt absolutely about as normal as possible, which in our case meant having Mum travel up to mine on Christmas Eve and then having the two of us go over to Bolton to see My Sister and her family, knowing that having three triple-jabbed adults and two single-dosed teenagers(!) put us in about as secure a place as was plausible in the circumstances. So it's our first gathering of the whole family on Christmas Day for first time since 2017 (which wasn't even My Dad's last, incidentally), which makes you realize just how badly time has gotten bent out of shape over the last few years (as does the fact that both my nieces are above my shoulder height now), which is a very pleasant centrepiece of of three night stay that would have felt low key in any other situation pre-pandemic, as we eat and drink enough, but not to excess as we set our worlds to rights, while absolutely no one complains of feeling unwell which is positively unheard of across our normal festive gatherings. Separate ways are then gone, having waited months for our normal Christmas before it's so suddenly finished, and there's no telling that our decision to get together was wise as of yet, but indications are at least good at six days remove, with no news being good news so far, and just for that added blanket of security, I get to spend my post-Christmas week in a people-free bubble at Seacroft hospital, doing three days' cover instead of immediately getting back into the scrum at St James' (and it'll also be another week before I get to do my usual celebration of the New Year, as my Calderdale friends aren't available as 2021 ends).

Next Up: So where is 2022 going to lead us?