The Following is For Reference Only.
As we find ourselves five days into British Summer Time and a whole ten days into the flourishing of Spring, there seems to be no indication in the air that would suggest a change of seasons, and once again we find ourselves stymied in our walking ambitions at the end of our late March week of being NIW, and chilly climate and a pressing need to rest up prevent any action on Saturday, and after that the plan is to be Down Country at My Mum's place, where only one day presents itself as being even vaguely pleasant, which was Monday, but also presented itself as intensely cold meaning the most activity we had out of the house was touring around Sainsbury's. It's pretty clear from my point of view that all is still not well, and though I'm still not wholly willing to tag myself as having Long Covid, the physical indications all seem to be pointing that way, as my internal motivation seems to have no power to overcome my almost constant lethargy and to face down the lingering chill of winter that has now persisted unbroken for all of the first three months of the year, feeling significantly colder than the regularly snowy start of 2018, and offering little of the warm sunshine that overcame the late season icy blast that landed in 2013. My fatigue and stamina issues have also not aided me in having time for most of my creative endeavours, as paid work and regular chores have used up most of the energy that I have before we get them, and even in this week, where we find ourselves entering the fourth year of clearing the accumulated debris of personal history in Mum's house in the wake of My Dad's passing, getting busy proves to be beyond me as a burst of yard work, one trip around the loft and a final book raid from the shelves has me tuckered out by mid-afternoon and not much use for anything else. At the start of the month, My Sister sagely observed that I was probably struggling just as much mentally as I was physically, and at a few weeks remove I am now in complete agreement with her assessment as I've clearly settled into a depressed funk that is doing nothing to get me motivated when faced by a body that needs more mental stimuli than it ever did before, especially as it's not used to being unwell for a long period, something which I've never faced in my entire lifetime, which is particularly unfortunate to be attached to a grey and cold atmosphere which is doing my seasonally affected issues no favours at all.
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| Venus and Jupiter above Troy Hill, Morley. 10/03/23 |
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| Ascending Venus and Declining Jupiter. 10/03/23 |
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| Crescent Moon and Daytime Venus, St Paul's Square, Leeds. 24/03 |
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| Crescent Moon with Earthshine, and Venus. 24/03 |
So, two months into the supposed walking year, we still don't find ourselves in a place where we feel like we can plan for the future, in regards where we might be targeting our trails or building a slate of routes to start working off, and there's certainly no chance at all that we'll be holidaying in the Pennines again to do the Rossendale Way or the Irwell Sculpture Trail as I know my legs aren't ready to approach the High Moors on long solo days, and for our May break, we'll instead be looking towards the coast as the 22 miles of The Cinder Path on the old Scarborough & Whitby line offers some easier going, which I've had in my mind for some time, and My Mum is all to happy to drive us towards. There's not going to be much coming on on the first weekend of April either, as having been driven back up country in the wake of my book raid, having Mum in tow means that we have some housekeeping business to involve ourselves in to burn off the last of the holiday energies before we return to work for an admittedly short week ahead of the much more versatile long Easter weekend, coinciding with the point in the year when I always assert that the warmth of the sun starts to offset the chill in the air, indicating the beginning of the six best months of the walking year, when things might just start to get going again. ~~~ Otherwise, at the end of the month we reflect on the relative successes that we had in our other ongoing pastime of extremely amateur astronomy, where we completely missed the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter on the 2nd, as predicted, due to it occurring in the middle of a two week spell of heavy cloud loitering in the skies, with only the post-snowfall cold and clear spell on the 10th revealing them again, having apparently swapped places in the sky since the last sighting on the 23rd February, before we get a look at Venus and the waxing crescent Moon on the evening of the 24th, the day after their closest approach, making a rare daytime appearance as early as 4pm. All this planetary observation even gets Mum interested, so when in Leicester we are both spying Venus in Aries in the west again, on a four planet night and supposedly making a close approach with Uranus on the clear evening of the 27th, which also has the Moon in Taurus bearing down on Mars in Gemini, before revealing its waxing gibbous self in a close approach to Castor and Pollux on the 30th, which gives us a small flavouring of what star-gazing in the later hours of BST is like, ahead of us hopefully going mercury spotting in April.
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| Venus over Leicester. 27/03 |
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| Mars, Elnath (Beta Tauri) and the Crescent Moon. 27/03 |
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| Venus and Hamal (Alpha Arietis). 27/04 |
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| The Moon and Castor and Pollux, in Gemini. 30/03 |
2023 Total: 25.9 miles
Up Country Total: 5,467.4 miles
Solo Total: 5605.5 miles
5,000 in my 40s Total: 4537.9 miles
Next Up: The Easter Weekend leads us into Leeds's Hidden Valley.
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