Going for a walk with my dad

Warning: this post contains descriptions and images of going outdoors which some readers may find distressing.  There has been a lot of talk this weekend about whether or not the government will increase restrictions on going outside after some people went sunbathing and had picnics and barbecues in parks in London. Now, I am a Londoner through and through, born and raised, none of your Green Man Boggart Robin Goodfellow rural Englishness for me, I am pure Pepys Dickens Ian Dury Arlo Parks London to the core. I have been in Dorset for [I'm going to have to check this on my calender - anybody else losing track of time?] a week and a half [whaaaaaaaat? I was guessing at least three weeks] so naturally my response when I heard this was This is ridiculous, I can't believe that the government is so London-centric and is going to make rules for the whole country based on what a few people in London do. Nothing like the zeal of the converted. But I will be devastated if restrictions are placed on exercise, because my greatest pleasure in this lockdown is going for walks with my dad.  This is my dad: 

As you can see, social distancing is not too much of a problem in Dorset.  When I was growing up I made the mistake, which many of us - all of us? - do, of thinking that my family was normal. It took me a long time to realise that we weren't, and even longer to realise that there is no such thing as normal. Conventional there is plenty of, but that's another matter. (I think the death knell for me and "normal" came when I was having a conversation with the very normal-seeming, which is to say, outwardly conventional mother of a friend of mine who happened to casually mention the time she spent in clown school in Russia.)  Anyway, I could go into lengthy details about all of the ways in which my various family members are unique / special / weird / crazy, but I'm just going to talk about my dad today, and even with that I am going to have to confine myself to a small area of his unusualness, which is to say his exercise unusualness, leaving aside other aspects such as his work unusualness or his getting up close and personal with predators and trying to talk the rest of us into it unusualness. (One for another post.)  My dad, who is 82, swims outside every day of the year, and has done so for at least forty years. At the moment he is swimming every morning in the sea here in Dorset, currently a balmy 8 degrees. This means that alongside the walks, he is breaking the recommended guideline (though, crucially, not the law) of only exercising once a day, but we reckon the chances of him encountering someone else in the sea at the moment is fairly low.  In the afternoons we take walks together. There are two kinds of walks we do around here; much beloved tried and tested walks, and walks that my father has figured out might become beloved, based on his perusal of the map, or, frankly, just guessing. My mother comes along with us for the former, but life experience has taught her to avoid the latter - one of my dad's walk catchphrases is "wasn't I clever getting us out of that" - but inheriting half my Dad's DNA has made me fairly impervious to wading through nettles, leaping over brooks, and wriggling under electric fences, so I like to go on those ones too. There have been some low points - getting lost on Table Mountain with the dark and the fog rolling in, climbing a volcano with no water and only half a custard cream to keep me going - but plenty of high points too, often literally, at the tops of mountains.  So, for example, here is a typical walk from last week: we drive to the start of the walk, also breaking government guidelines but, again, crucially not the law. Knowing the difference between a guideline and a law is my dad's life work but it would be his hobby even if it wasn't. The drive is only about ten minutes and the walk is not busy (see above photo) so it doesn't feel too out of keeping with the purpose of the guideline-not-law, of keeping us all apart. Indeed, we avoid walking in the streets where there are people, to get to the cliffs where there are not. My mother does the driving and comes with us for the first part of the walk, about 45 minutes along a ridge (partly through fields of wild garlic so if you have any wild garlic recipes (looking at you, Jasper) please send them in.) We stop on a bench, which I think is #essential if you are 76 and 82, and my Dad looks out along the cliffs and suggests to me that maybe we could walk all the way back rather than driving - it should take us about a couple of hours. I mentally add another half hour to the estimate, but the weather is good and I'm in no rush to get home, so my mum heads back to the car and we set off.  It's so wonderful to be out. I love the bite of the wind and the kiss of the sun. The sky is huge. The world feels enormous and empty. I can see for miles in every direction - the Isle of Wight is clear, and I almost convince myself that an undulation on the horizon is France. Nature is doing that thing where it holds its breath just before Spring - the buds are about to burst, and on a walk a couple of days later, suddenly all the trees and bushes will be in bloom. I love nature's glorious, casual indifference, the way it doesn't care whether I am here or not. The grass that has never heard of Covid-19. I love, especially, the sheep, underrated animals, who just like to hang out in peaceful groups, eating. I will never be insulted if you call me a sheep. I aspire to it.  'There's a couple of steep bits,' my dad warns me. There are always a couple of steep bits. So I'm not too alarmed, even when we climb over the fence that says 'no through route' and we pick our way down along the path of a stream - 'this can be pretty unpleasant when it's rainy' - jump over the water at the bottom and start making our way back up the other side. In fact the first steep bit is so steep that someone has put in a rope so that you can haul yourself up it. Off goes my dad, undaunted, up the rope, walking stick under his armpit. I follow on behind. We take a break at the top to admire the view then set off again, enjoying a stretch of flat clifftop before plunging down again into another gully. This time, rather than a rope, there are two hundred or so steps carved into the slope to help get us back up again. My dad emerging: 

(It's hard to tell from the picture quite how steep this is. I did take a few other shots which were more indicative, but they were portrait-orientated, and when I uploaded them, the tinyletter software turned them on their side. Very disappointing. But we'd started off at the top of the central ridge, so that gives you some idea at least.)  'It's nice easy going from here,' he says, but he's overlooked another, smaller gully maybe twenty minutes further along. We climb down it, and then up it, and then down again, and at this point I recognise where we are, because we've connected to a beloved tried and tested walk.  'It's about another two hours from here, isn't it?' I say. 'Hmm. Yes,' says my dad.  We have been walking for almost two hours since we left my mum. It is 5.30pm.  'Are you sure you want to keep going?' I say. 'Of course,' says my dad.  We trudge on a bit. The land here is seriously boggy when it's wet. Right now it's bone dry, but a lot of cows had been using the field when it was rainy, and the ground has hardened into a vast network of deep hoof holes resembling, I imagine, the surface of the moon, if the moon were covered in cows. Any one of these holes could easily snap your ankle, I think, if you put your foot in it at a bad angle.  'Just checking you are absolutely sure you want to do this,' I say. 'I'm sure.' 'OK. I'll just call Maman [my mother] and tell her we're going to be two hours late.'  But I don't have any reception. My dad concedes that we don't want to worry my mother, so at this point we throw in the towel and cut back up to the nearest road, where I can phone my mum and she comes to rescue us in the car. My mother's level of surprise: zero.  We get home and we wash our hands thoroughly.  It's not going outside that's going to kill my dad. It's staying at home. And how about this for a twist, pun intended: sometime between starting this post this morning and right now, I have knackered my back, either by doing an online yoga class indoors or just by sitting at my desk for too long. My lower back is completely spasmed up and I can only shuffle sideways, like an arthritic crab. I've never injured myself on a walk, not once. I know people do, but then again, my mother once broke her leg hanging curtains. There is always going to be some risk to whatever you do, and Coronavirus is not the only thing that can hurt you. So even if they change the law, I'm afraid that I am going to be carrying out some civil disobedience, because much as I enjoy Yoga with Adriene, it's no comparison to the joy I get from Walking with Nicholas.