Rumination: Summer Jollies (with Trains, Birds & the Night Skies)

Featuring: Ruswarp to Whitby - 1.5 miles, via the Rail & Riverside Path. 07/09/23

Esk View cottage might be the
 best letting we've scored so far!

Back in May, I pontificated some on the real value of a holiday break away from home, having let the disappointing opening of the year pass away and getting the spirits lifted with a warm week away on the Yorkshire Coast to get my walking year going properly, and three months on from the revivifying benefits of my Spring Jollies, I can tell you that exactly the same benefit can be felt at the End Of Summer, having endured two of the most frustrating months of poor weather, low energy and lacking motivation, heading away from the persistent gloom and changeability that has blighted July and August to be rewarded with the bright and warm week and the universe knew I spiritually needed. It’s another Friday-Friday let that we’re taking, going back to the coastal edge of the North York Moors after Mum expressed an interest in staying in the vicinity of Whitby, and I pulled up a very plausible pair of walks on the moors that got plotted when I was first seeking out rail trails at the start of my walking escapades in 2012, having managed to find a cottage at a significant reduction in price for the week after the end of the schools Summer break, just outside the town in the village of Ruswarp (which is pronounced Ruh-sup, if you were wondering), in a peaceful little idyll of its own, away from the tight streets and general throng of visitors that comes with this most beloved of coastal settlements. Even arriving having passed over moors under the heaviest of damp palls hanging in the air via the A169 does not do anything to temper our enthusiasm that we feel for Esk View cottage, and even on arrival we know that we’ve scored ourselves a gem that will be absolutely ideal for our rest and relaxation needs, amply sized and quietly out of the way at the end of its close, right on the north bank of the river Esk, with its own terrace and directly across from the railway bridge, which means that there will be entertainment to be had, even when settled in at our holiday base, be it on the rails above the water’s surface, or on the banks and their surroundings. 

Rumination: Morley Gets A New Station

New Station means Selfies!
at Morley 'New' Station.

After a rough start to the year, we finally managed to get a good turn on the walking year as passed through May and June, but as the midway point on the year arrives, we need to have a rest from the regular weekends on the trail, as we already feel like we've been spreading ourselves rather thin with the efforts of keeping myself going through working and walking in the midst of the post-covid experience and having put a decent wad of miles downs so far, a rest feels overdue, before we refocus ourselves on the task in hand, namely getting a whole 300 (Three Hundred!) miles down on the year, a triumphant sounding amount that's still less than half of what I achieved in 2022. It doesn't mean that we don't have things to talk about though, as there's not been a shortage of things going on locally, even if we're going to have to cast our minds back a bit, which shouldn't be too much of problem considering the usual condition of this blog, to two weekends ago, when the engineering possession through Morley station was only on its second day, and I decided to stay in to dedicate myself to writing and housework on Sunday 18th June, with full anticipation that redevelopment progress was going to be slow and the main activity of the long week would be tidily spread out and thus easily observable on the casual. This turned out to be a poor choice, as when I rose on the early morning on the Monday and progressed down to the station to await the rail replacement bus, we found that a lot of activity had gone on since my passing by on Saturday morning, with the footbridge span removed and the 'up' platform completely dug out, with the rails and ballast on the Manchester-bound side also removed and the alignment partially flooded, (due to rain or the spill out from the concealed stream below) with drainage being apparently installed, which pretty definitively drops the curtain on the old L&NWR Morley Low station after almost 175 years, marking my arrival there on the Friday as the last of the in excess of 6,000 journeys that I must have made via it since arriving in town in 2007.

Rumination: Spring Jollies & Planet Spotting

Blogging with a View, in Scarborough.

Sometimes, the value of a week away from home really cannot be understated and before we press on into the High Season, it's worth pausing for a brief moment to contemplate just how good getting away from it all has been for me at the end of May, completely breaking away from all that's going on in my regular life and work in Leeds, and putting some considerable mental and physical distance between it and me, allowing me to properly unwind after some testing weeks and to allow me to get back into a creative mindset that had almost fallen way to the point of irredeemability, restoring my belief that I will be able to continue pursing the hobbies that I've invested so much into over the last decade. Peace and Quiet is wholly under-rated need in this age of almost constant activity, and we really managed to find that on this break away, keeping away from all the disturbances that you might expect when staying in a seaside town, which we were only just doing, as our let was to be found about three miles out from Scarborough town centre, right on the edge of the Throxenby and Newby estates, and looking over the hillsides of the North Yorkshire Moors, where the River Derwent and Scalby Beck rise, on an urban country lane where there was little traffic to be had outside of commuter hours, allowing us all the silence that we needed to allow us to unwind. Thusly, across all my days off the trail, we had time in the mornings and evening to get busy with catching up on almost two months worth of blogging, which you wouldn't know from the timestamps on these posts, but anyone who's been following me for a while should know that my time-keeping is a complete tissue of lies, and that I work better when away from my own desk, despite it being set up for my needs with an appropriately adjustable chair, leading me to conclude that I do my best work when sat at a dining table with an uncomfortable seat that needs to be padded with random cushions, working in a posture that surely couldn't be doing my back, neck or arm joints any favours. 

Rumination: Returning to the Support Bubble

The Following is For Reference Only.

One year ago, on the very same weekend at the end of April, I made the second of my trips to Manchester with My Good Friends from Calderdale, for beers, food and the music of RVW, which marked the final collapsing of the public social interaction bubble which had been forcibly imposed in March 2020 and which I chose to maintain for more than three years, and at the remove of 12 months I find myself at an entirely different philosophical place than I did when the passing of the Covid Pandemic seemed to have happened, almost entirely due to the lingering after effects of my own infection, six months ago. This time around, I'm ripping it up to Mytholmroyd and Manchester again on Saturday afternoon to enjoy a long weekend in the company of my still enduring Support Bubble, even though the wider climates have completely moved on, as a sociable weekend with them is good reason to take time out from the walking year and get in some proper R'n'R after the third stalling of my walking year, not that there will be too much activity going on as it's been a tiring few months for all, and friendly ears will be leant as we chat about enduring the effects of a post-Covid syndrome and living with CFS (which I really hope isn't the path I'm on). Chatter over food and wine, and whatever sports are on the TV, is all very well, but we also need additional entertainments, and the Sunday os the focus for these, as my visit manages to coincide with the Cragg Vale festival which sees the Cragg Road being closed for the morning as many local runners and cyclists take the opportunity to run and ride the length (or at least part of) the longest continuous road ascent in England, and back again, and these energetic feats need to be observed as we stroll up the valley as far as Lower Clough Fold before we get to the real meat of the May Day weekend. This sends us in the direction of the Bridgewater Hall, where an afternoon concert brings us the Poulenc Organ Concerto and Saint-Saens Symphony #3 (avec Orgue) as performed by the Halle Orchestra for one of the loudest, and busiest shows, that we've seen in a long while, where the opportunity is also presented for beer and food at Society, where Vocation Brewery still having a thriving business with a surprisingly diverse clientele, where three pints of their finest ales and pilseners can be consumed, along with Chicken Katsu Curry that literally hits all of the spots that it needs to.

Rumination: The Tiers of Relative Proximity

Another weekend drops from the walking year as the bloom gathers and the pressure of balancing work and an active lifestyle keeps me in bed on Saturday morning, feeling drained and grabbing a couple of extra hours of sleep as a small bonus, stalling the season again though all is not lost as a result as there are still some minor creative endeavours to get involved in while we are resting up, which mostly involve directing my thoughts to where we might actually direct this twelfth walking year when I am feeling energetic enough to get myself going. This comes together thanks to having myself a new laptop to play with, replacing my previous one of almost nine years of service, one which is notionally a gaming PC, which I acquired thanks to it having a significantly more powerful processor which can actually handle running Google Maps, which my old machine absolutely loathed causing it to run obscenely slow to the point of absolute frustration, which led me to using Google Earth for my plotting purposes instead after drawing several routes that took almost as long to plot as they did to walk. Eleven seasons' worth of data was thus available to reassemble on two maps, the first being The Ongoing Walking Career, which needed to re-done as the ten layer limit on a MyMaps sheet rather scuppered my intent to have a layer for every walking season, though the extraordinarily high limit for plots and markers on a single layer means that I could still have a good couple of decades to add to that before it becomes so data-bust that only a computer with a god-tier processor and graphics card would be able to handle it. The second idea was one that came to me during the lockdown walks of 2020, when being confined to local circuits for three months had me expanding the scope of terrain that I'd seen when walking from home and got me thinking about how relatively close come locations were to my base in Morley, having blazed trails to many of the major settlements in West Yorkshire and encompassed areas of South Leeds and North Kirklees in my local travels, while other parts of the county still seemed rather remote, even as my Field of Walking Experience expanded into North and South Yorkshire and over the top of the Pennine into Lancashire.

Rumination: The End (?) of Winter...

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.

Rumination: Stumbling into Season 12

The Following is For Reference Only.

As we reach the last weekend of February, it's pretty clear to me that this walking year is not going to plan, even with the restrictions that the Post-Covid Experience has brought upon it, as there's nothing happening at present which is inspiring me to challenge my body against the chill of the Wintery temperatures that have persisted for the whole month, as my lack of energy can't seem to fire itself up when greyness persists, and when it is bright it's also freezing cold, and the desire to keep out of the cold that keeps us immobile through December and January persists when we should be feeling the need to be active. The bitter truth is that my internal motivation has completely collapsed, as my brain resolutely fails to focus on the idea of walking, as there's no will at all to start planning for where the year might lead me, 'To The East' being to sole generic sum of it at present, with only the last pair of walks planned for last year sitting on the slate at the moment, as I'm not of a mindset to get plotting again, having not been so for the entirety of the dark season, and that also extends to not being ready to get going at the start of any weekend, as I really need my Saturday morning lies-in after my regular working weeks. At least I do seem to have sufficient energy to get up as normal on weekdays, despite being in the grip of a sleep debt that seems to have worsened throughout the Dark Season (which seems like a rather counter-intuitive development), and I have enough drive to go through the morning routines when called on to do so, and to power myself across the LTH Trust sites as my managers decide which hospital I might be most useful, but I'm otherwise dead to the world once I get home, meaning that useful housework, and other fun projects can only be approached when energy levels allow for it, and that means the weekends. This has been the case for these last pair of days, with the gloom meaning I'll be not venturing any further than Morley Morrisons, and the laundry and kitchen work will be otherwise be keeping me busy for the duration, having previously expended energy on acquiring, assembling and fitting out a new Ikea cabinet to display my extensive collection of classic Space Lego (a passion of mine that I don't think I've ever mentioned here, but is out of the bag now), labours which extended from long week NIW and perhaps gave me the best indication of just how little stamina I seem to have left in me at present.

Rumination: The Longest Dark Season

As we lapse into February, we find ourselves at the conclusion of another Dark Season, easily the longest one we've experienced sine walking became our primary pastime, having effectively been sat down for 16 weeks since Covid knocked me off the trail in October 2022, having achieved 1,000km in the season but falling short of a mileage total that should have been the best that I could do, feeling that this bad quarter of the year has taken much longer than usual, and that my familiar slump in mood and energy levels has been so much worse, for hopefully obvious reasons. The usual down turn that comes through November and December has not been aided by the turn that the weather took, settling in with periods of persistent low temperature and gloom that have not inspired any sort of need for displays of energetic activity, almost ensuring that sitting tight as the brutal cold set in outside, which every one of us had more awareness of than before thanks to the surge in bulk energy prices that are sure to afflict our energy bills for some time to come. So the slump of the year towards the festive season was filled with warmth maintenance and energy saving schemes, which in my case meant ensuring that new thick curtains were purchased and kept drawn throughout my flat to keep the heat in, and attempting to regulate the temperature indoors with only one storage heater on, which turned out to be entirely plausible to keep the space at a consistent and comfortable 20C, and experience drops that barely got below 18C, and only needing to power up the halogen heater (which has been barely used since I got it more than a decade ago) on the chillest of days. Otherwise we did well to feed the curiosity of what gets sold at Decathlon, having needed additional gloves to add to the box, and finding that this is an excellent store to find all your cheap fleece needs, where layers and cover-alls can be acquired for a modest sum, which will add to your warming yourself rather than your living space needs, if you are willing to overlook the synthetic fibre nightmare that you are engaging in, and if we add a more sociably presentable Regatta fleece from TK Maxx to the pile, we ought to be set fare to retain warmth for a good few seasons into the future.

The Conclusions of 2022

Wrapping the 2022 season
(prematurely) at
Dodworth railway station.

The ten-plus weeks that have elapsed since a Covid infection knee-capped my walking year already feel like a bit of a miniature lifetime as we sit down to reflect on the passage of Season 11 of my on-going career of travelling on foot, feeling about as detached from regular walking activity as I ever have, while feeling hopeful that we might be able to power on again into 2023 after we've asked the variation of that question of ourselves that comes with the turn of every December, What Have We Learned in 2022? Most significantly, before Covid put me on the canvas and ended my year in a technical knockout, We could consider the 2022 season as my best yet, as we got out to a strong start and just kept on going, with the energy levels and enthusiasm remaining high as new routes stretched out to the south-east and into the lower Dearne and middle Don valleys, expanding my field of walking experience in quite the most pleasing of ways after expressing doubts about the viability of its continued expansion only 12 months prior. It had been planned out as a moderately level year after my stretches around the hills and valleys of Kirklees, Calderdale and Airedale over the last few years, but the modest undulations of South Yorkshire gave me plenty to get busy with as we racked up the miles, aided by shedding only two weekends and one holiday week across the entire year from the walkable schedule, while also maximizing use of both of the bonus bank holidays we got thanks to the Jubilee and Funeral of HMQE2, pushing my distance traveled beyond the 600 miles and 1,000km markers. Indeed, as of our last weekend, we had four trips to still plausibly drop into the 2022 schedule, which could have put another 40+ miles onto the season, giving us a final total for the year in excess of 670 miles that I honest could have regarded as absolutely the best that I could do in my nine-month window, which now looks like it might be impossible to replicate as I regard the pace that would have to maintained to get that close again, which I don't think could be done while I still work for a living, continue to age, and face the vicissitudes of the climate of West Yorkshire, which is a good reason to curse my Covid infection just that bit more.

Rumination: The End of the Walking Year

The Following is For Reference Only.

Toasting the end of Season 11
with My First Beverage
in Absolutely Ages!

The acid test for getting myself a finale for 2022's walking year was always going to be factored by how well my body responded to a week of actual labour, and in the wake of a week of work, I think we can conclude that that this season is done, and has been ever since I rode the train from Dodworth station three weeks ago, feeling like all the energy had been drained from my body, as a push through five days of being almost completely desk-bound at the Medical Records Library at St James Hospital has left me feeling absolutely spent, as I knew it was going to be tough, but felt like it ought to be within my compass as a Nine Day Weekend of annual leave was scheduled directly after it. Returning to regular business proved harder than anticipated, even though there was no massive impetus to get into very early starts as per usual, as train strikes (or rather the aftermath the cancellations thereof) meant there were only bus rides to be taken on the mornings of my first two days, rocking me up a little later than normal, and being relieved of physical duties meant that a eight hour stretch at my desk was all I had to get on with, at a nicely moderated pace that nonetheless had me ready for a heavy refuel and an early night once my working day was done, sleeping like the dead as all my energy reserves had expended themselves. Come Wednesday, my body has already given up on me and I'm over-sleeping to the tune of over an hour, and having to force myself into work, clearly still in the grip of a bout of post-viral fatigue, which my senior colleagues warn me is something than I'm likely to be dealing with for a while, plausibly until Christmas, as a post-Covid recovery doesn't have those day by day incremental improvements that come in the wake of most viral infections, and a six-week restoration to normal wouldn't be at all unlikely, so it's mildly encouraging that a bit of a physical bounce returns on Thursday, perhaps because we're over the hump of my five day week and abbreviated return to work spell.

Rumination: Still Wrestling the Covid Beast

The Following is For Reference Only.

Well, Ain't That a Relief?

It ought to come as no surprise to anyone that my Covid infection put me out of circulation for another seven days, what with me not being able to return to work until I've managed to return two negative tests, and with my seven day period of self certification ending, requiring me to contact my GP to obtain a sick-note, or a fit-note as they're calling them these days, which turned out to be a much less testing an experience than I had anticipated, getting a telephone consultation only five hours after I'd contacted my surgery on Monday, getting signed off for another week without much by way of questioning, aside from finding that getting said documents e-mailed to me is a surprising difficulty at their end. They even offered me a potentailly longer spell off, which is nice of them, but I felt it more appropriate to negotiate my return to work role with my employers rather than spending too much time out before I felt 'right' again, as despite returning my first negative result on Tuesday, I still felt like absolute garbage with most of the now familiar Covid symptoms having now settled on me, like the Covid Cough, which we've all gotten to know with its dry, rattling resonance that doesn't really shift anything, the deep muscular aches that remind you that Covid is really a neurological ailment rather than a respiratory one, and the utterly baffling loss of your sense of smell which frustrates when consuming food is one of the few joys you have left. The only symptom that I seem to have avoided is the high temperatures, which is fortunate  as sleeping off my illness gets more appealing, as the night time turn-ins get earlier and no day has me roused earlier than 8am, or rising before 9.30am, settling me into an under-active routine that feels a lot like being unemployed, only getting busy because I need to eat, as Covid plainly isn't a disease that you can starve like a fever, and my paranoid preparations of the last few years means there's plenty to pull out of my cupboards, while I prop myself up in the kitchen to bulk-prepare meals to freeze in order to see me through the dark Autumn, and otherwise keep myself entertained by sorting through the thousands of digital photographs that I accumulated for myself across 2012-15, allowing me to mentally travel while still being housebound.

Runimation: Remember Covid?

 The Following is For Reference Only.

Well, ain't that a Kick in the Stones?

If you've been regarding the world in 2022 with a casual eye, you could easily believe that the Covid-19 pandemic has long since ended, judging how far it has dropped from the public, political and media consciousness over the last year, some might consider it having concluded when HM Government declared the end of all social restrictions in July 2021, while others might have considered it all done after the Omicron wave passed over across the end of 2021 and the start of 2022, and if you paid attention to governmental actions you'd figure it over as attention fell to the war in Ukraine, the cost of living crisis and people choosing to create new problems where they didn't exist previously. The horrible reality is that it's still here, and ongoing with much vigour, maybe not with the deadliness of the initial waves in 2020, but with enough force to still pose a significant health risk to the clinically vulnerable and the un-vaccinated, and to cause problems for healthcare networks worldwide, especially considering that the OG variant is now barely present in the population, while the much more contagious Omicron variant has now gone global, to present everyone with a new transmissible disease, that wasn't around only three years prior, to be afflicted by with the passage of the seasons. Reflecting on the fact the the NHS in the UK still has a backlog of 7 million elective operations to perform, while still needing to work around many internal infection prevention measures, it's very easy to believe that we literally got the bad ending to the pandemic endgame, where the disease wasn't contained by restriction in 2020 after being imposed too late and lifted too early, while prolonged global mobility has ensured that every subsequent variant has had its opportunity to infect the worldwide population, resulting in the situation where the disease is now endemic, and able to afflict and kill thousands every year into the foreseeable future, like an unwanted companion to influenza and tuberculosis, which those in power globally completely failed to prevent.

Rumination: Collapsing the Bubble

The Following is For Reference Only.

Pandemic Thoughts - April 2022 

More than 25 months on from the World Health Organization declaring a global pandemic, we cannot really allow ourselves to think that it’s over, as there’s been no further declaration made as such, but the reality of the situation is that the spread of Covid-19 and the risks that it poses have fallen far down the list of issues and anxieties in the modern world, to be replaced by a burgeoning global economic crisis and an open conflict in Europe that shows no signs of abating, while the behaviours of so many are such as like the health crisis is now far from their minds. I’ll finally put myself into that bracket, after reserving judgement for so long, taking the opportunities presented to me during April 2022 to collapse my imposed bubble of isolation from general socialising that we maintained throughout the months, covering the first and second waves of Coronavirus infections of 2020, and through the spread of the Delta and Omicron variants in 2021, having somehow come out of the other end without having become unwell, and ready to face the hopefully diminished risks in person, now that covid can be largely regarded as an infection that would be unpleasant to get, rather than a matter of life and death. So, naturally, it’s with my Good Friends in Calderdale that I make my breakout, after they were so good to me after the last two years, twice making an excursion over the Pennines for evenings out in Manchester, not exactly hitting the town hard, but going into a crowded venue for the first time since Christmas 2019, on both occasions braving the throng in ‘Society’ on Barbirolli Square to get in the beer 'n' burgers, as the mix of Vocation Ales and Slap & Pickle’s creations are worthy of the trip in their own right (despite having closer and more convenient outlets in Hebden Bridge and Leeds). 

Out of The Dark Season, and Onward!

In all my walking years, I cannot recall a Dark Season which has passed as rapidly as this last one did, seemingly come and gone in about half the time that they'd normally take, and that has to be in part due to effectively going to ground completely after the end of 2021's open season, taking a well earned rest that rapidly turned into an extended period of isolation - hibernation as the risks posed by the Omicron wave of the Covid pandemic washed over ahead of Christmas, when all focus fell upon having a normal sort of Festive Season before we embarked on 2022's journey.  I can't place how we managed to get January to shift through so quickly though, as it's always the month of the year that feels like it's over six weeks long, but this one has flushed through in no time too, come and gone rapidly after getting in our necessary weekend of social interaction at its start while toiling through a busy month at the hospital which never gave me the opportunity to feel bored, with the sunshine returning in the evenings with almost indecent haste, all combining to make our passage from Samhain to Imbolc, via the festivities of Yule, almost bizarrely short. Maybe it helps to find distractions to pass the time away, and becoming a moon watcher in 2022 has helped with that, as I've never quite been familiar with its phases and location in the sky through its orbits, and this has been a particularly good month for watching it wax and wane, awhile taking an interest in seeing it in its crescent and gibbous forms, revealing it cratered features and many mares when contrasted in shadow, around the appearance of January's full moon, the Wolf Moon, which I can only hope every howled at on the evening of the 17th. Now having a decent idea of where to look for it in the mornings and evenings, that can be fitted in around a renewed engagement with a bit of astronomy, an interest of mine that has become very minor over the the last decade, and the month has also been spent spying Jupiter in the evenings during the early going, while chasing Venus in the dawning skies later on, both repeating the reality-altering experiences of my youth when I first regarded them with binoculars, namely spotting the former's system of Galilean moons across the vastness of space, and seeing the latter resolve as a crescent showing it as a planet, and not just a bright star in the morning sky.

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.

Pandemic Thoughts: November 2021

The Following is For Reference Only, the 2021 Summary will follow in four weeks' time.

Another month starts with our attention having wandered away from Covid for a while, instead taking interest in the COP26 intergovernmental conference on Climate Change, with a small amount of hope that after nearly two years of health crisis conditions around the globe,  world leaders might actually start to take the existential threat of the climate crisis just as seriously, but despite what feel like weeks of discussions little seems to come out of it, aside from a non-binding agreement to phase out coal usage, which hasn't been signed by the remaining major coal consuming economies. It's a horrible realisation to make, that those who would govern all of us have little real interest in long term planning for the benefit of future generations, setting targets to be met by 2050, long after any of them will have any stake in the future well-being of the world, but we really shouldn't be surprised, as we ought to be aware that as soon as challenges to the enduring problems of contemporary economics are faced, the wagons are circled in an attempt to protect the status quo, and after all this is the 26th such conference on the matter, and all the previous meetings have failed to create binding agreements and actions. So we have one less reason to feel hopeful after all that, and instead reflect on where the Pandemic is leading us as we transition out of the light half of Autumn and into the Dark Season, and despite having a few days of infections spiking above 50,000 per day, a renewed surge in the rate doesn't come to pass, and the familiar sort of numbers continue throughout the month, apparently fired most prominently among family groups, and with the under 12s being the most harshly affected group for the first time, showing that circulation among the un-vaccinated is still the major issue. It can all look like that Covid is becoming socially normalized, and the risk of infection has been allowed to become 'just one of those things' that people catch, with a panel scientists speculating that even in a best-case scenario, it could very plausibly be 2023 before Covid becomes a background disease, among the mix of regular ailments suffered by the general populace, while bad scenarios could have it lasting another five years, with social counter measures and annual booster vaccinations being a regular feature for some time to come.

Rumination: What is This? I Don't Even... 10/07/21

The Following is For Reference Only.

Every walking year seems to hit a point where my walking resolve starts to crumble, either from internal factors like mental or physical fatigue, or from external reasons like terrible weather, and we've definitely met the latter on those in 2021, but at quite the most unexpected time of year, as while early July can offer have weather that settles into roasting hot or markedly changeable, we have not seen consecutive weekends of awful weather in all of my walking years, having to go back to the infamously recalled year of 2007 with its latter half of constant rain and greyness for something comparable. Weather projections for this walking day had suggested we were due a day of sunshine and showers, that hard to read forecast that could bring weather that is sunny or damp, but when we rose in Morley we were greeted with fog, hanging low on the ground and not having been predicted to occur at any point in the week, which you wouldn't expect to endure at this time of year, so the walking resolve was steeled to go out and make the best of the mediocre conditions. The mental resolution for the day then started getting its beating right at the outset as we set out to hop on the #425 bus at Morley Town Hall, only to find it inexplicably cancelled and thus a half hour wait had to pass until the next service was due, putting me behind schedule and adding to the frustration that comes with a long enough wait of 20+ minutes for the #681 service at Bradford bus station, where it's painfully visible that the persistent damp gloom has not lifted even as we roll past 9.20am. The Halifax via Shelf bus is boarded, to ride us back up onto the Calder - Aire upland, and there's no sign of any improvement coming in the air, and indeed things look like they're worsening as we roll up at Odsal Top, as the skies darken and a sudden downpour comes on as we ride through Shelf, giving me an impromptu dousing as it runs in through the open bus window, and as we approach Northowram, conditions outside look no better than they did when I quit the path a week ago, and I stay firmly in my seat as my stop comes and goes a 10am, only moving on as we roll into the Halifax bus station terminus.

Out of the Dark Season... and Onwards?

Snowy January in Leeds.

With the passing of every festive season, I normally crack wise about hiding away for the remainder of January, and essentially going into hibernation for five weeks that lead us out of the Dark Season and on towards our renewed walking career, but 2021 has already given us enough reason to literally do that, as a renewed National Lockdown, our third since the start of the Covid Pandemic, which means my inclination for keeping out of circulation for the month has no been imposed on everyone else too, and as we look forwards to my Tenth year of walking, I'm feeling deeply uncertain about what's going to come next. Not with regards the pandemic situation, as I can honestly say I've finally gotten a proper handle on that, but with how I'm going to conduct myself as we look to get walking again, as restrictions look like they're going to be in place for a while, and although it seems like severe time limits for exercise are not going to be in place this time around, there seems every indication that local exercise is going to mean just that, and so all the plans that I'd been hatching for 2021 during the late passage of last year are effectively junked to comply with the instructions passed out. So for once, I find myself on the waning edge of the rotten three months of the year, looking forward without a great deal of certainty about where my walking year is going to go, as I'm not immediately feeling a lot of enthusiasm for making more trails around Morley, having exhausted the vast majority of the plausible paths during that long Spring of 2020, with my desire to engage with the walking year feeling like it's at its lowest ebb in along while. I don't think I'd really expected to be in such a place when my last walking year ended, with the country going back into lockdown in the teeth of a second Covid wave that my optimistic brain would have hoped would have never come to pass, indeed my thinking back in March would have had us on the tail end of this pandemic, as it retreated into the background after the effective and well considered actions of governments and health care systems worldwide would have taken a firm grip on it. 

The Conclusions of 2020

Wrapping the 2020 Walking
Season at Morley Hole.

In retrospect, it seems entirely plausible that I cursed this past twelve months before they even got started, as the previous year's summation boldly declared both '2019 has been a rough year that I do not care to see a repeat of', and 'I'm going to need my good mental health as much as ever in 2020' almost as if I had accidentally wished upon us all a year of pain, frustration and intemperance with my hopeful words for the future, a reality that gave the world a stiff old kicking and left us all in a much less certain situation than we started out in. But if we ignore the Covid-19 pandemic and all that came with it, which we really ought to in the context of this walking blog, 2020's active season turned out to be far from ruined, as in spite of all the obstacles thrown in its path, like losing two months of Spring to absolute lockdown and being unable to travel beyond Morley, we managed to make the best of the Summer and Autumn while keeping ourselves mostly removed from the risks of the disease which has blanketed all our experiences. I'm really happy that my resolve to keep walking managed to hold so firm after losing so much of the first half of the year when compelled to keep my exercising local, and despite all the stresses and strains through the back half of the year, I managed to get all the way through all of the trips that I had originally planned for the four lost months, keeping going until the last available day of the year and reaching a final mileage which made it not even close to my least impressive year, surpassing both 2012 and 2013's totals. Indeed, only one walking weekend between July and November was actively under-utilised, as I gratefully absorbed the hospitality of My Good Friends in Calderdale, and while I might have not managed all the route across the Pennines to the fringes of Greater manchester, I managed to keep a tight focus to gain the landscape knowledge of another part of the county that had been absent from my walking field for too many years, giving all the lands between the Colne and calder as much exposure as they could have ever wanted. So while we may have seen more of my home town that I'd ever have anticipated, and only done half of the long trails I may have wished to have paced, I don't feel like I've missed out on the expansion of my walking experiences at all, as all you really need are a high viewpoint or two to look beyond what you know, such as ascending the Pennine ridge and looking west across the Cheshire plain to the Clwydian Hills, or east to the North York Moors and the Wolds, giving you a new visual horizon in excess of 100 miles wide.

Rumination: Lockdown 2.0

Pandemic Thoughts - November 2020

The Following is for Reference Only, the 2020 Summary will follow in a Month from Now.

On December 2nd, the second National Lockdown to attempt to arrest the resurgent spread of Covid infections came to an end, and even after four weeks of renewed restrictions and attempts at containment, I'm still not entirely sure what to make of it, with most of my most substantial thoughts having been shared at its outset, as it hasn't seen me get out of work, predictably enough, and aside from having no opportunity to travel away to visit Mum, it had no other impact on my plans which mostly involved hibernating my weekends away at the onset of the Dark Season. I'm sure all those involved with the hospitality, leisure and non-essential retail sectors will have really felt the sting of it, especially after so many weeks of mixed messaging from those who would govern us ahead of the inevitable, but being in the business I'm in, and having so little social interaction beyond my familiar circle, I really can't make any more useful observations beyond the facts of trains into Leeds being noticeably quieter in the mornings, but inexplicably busier in the evenings. It's not been an experience anything like the first national lockdown though, where most businesses shut down and so many people were effectively confined to their homes for two months, as this time around schools have stayed open, and suffered all the fluctuations in attendance and operations that might have been expected when operating through a pandemic, while there have been a lot more retailers opened up and offices not doing nearly as much working from home as before. I'm sorry that I can't report anything personally in more detail, but my attitude towards self-protection during this crisis means that I've been witness to so very little, and can only really reflect on what I've learned through the usual methods of reportage, such as noting that the Covid infection rate dropped by 30% during the past month, which is a substantial drop and not a stat to be taken too lightly, but it feels less like a good reason to return to normality than a reason to get everything back to normal, than a cue to keep things shut down for another month to arrest the spread further. It's certainly discouraging to see the increasing infection rate in school age kids, and the dangers that it presents to families nationally, and for the first time in months we've started to look seriously at the death rate again, which HM Government had massaged down to 41,000 at the start of July, but has since risen to 60,000, presenting the horrifying reality of this second wave, with the ONS suggesting that the rate should be revised significantly upwards again to reflect all the indirectly caused deaths that have occurred due to medical access restrictions during the months of pandemic conditions.