Day 101 - Room 101 - as I woke this morning I was facing Day 101. The temperatures had dropped. My walk was shouting to me . 100 walks . 300 miles or maybe more . I really do need that Fitbit . I grabbed that cup of tea , cleaned my teeth and headed out . Up the hill . For some strange reason there was about. Tuesday there should be people walking. It was not raining so where were they? . 101 days not a special number of days . Just one more than yesterday
I thought about what to throw into Room 101. Covid 19 for sure . That would be the first thing I would relegate to that room . Step after step I headed down the lane with a plan to head across the field to Stubbing Pond . I could see if I were able to find the coots or go the opposite way. I had not made my mind up. But as I walked things were being dumped into my imaginary Room 101.
me that she only wrote at Christmas . Her reasons that if you wrote too often you wrote about tat. By writing once a year she could concentrate on what was memorable and what was important to her . I always looked forward to the Christmas card with the letter tucked in . It would be read over a cup of coffee .
We met when the children were small . Our kids were at swimming classes . We enrolled them at the same time and each and every week we sat waiting for them their lessons and we talked . We talked politics . We had similar tastes in politics and would put the world to rights. We still do even though we have drifted in different directions and back again when to politics . We talked holidays . We still do it in our letter at Christmas . I wondered what our letter would look like this year . Dominated by Covid and how we had coped with it .. I probably will still be able to tell her about Christmas in France and our short weekend in Northumberland . She usually goes
to Europe to practice her German and French and would travel on trains across Canada . I wonder whether she would go anywhere this year . Both our lives had changed so much . Our friendship had been one of many years despite now living miles apart .
Would I put employers in Room 101 I wondered as I climbed the gate into the field? Employers who furloughed and now sacked their workers . Perhaps I would .
No cows today but I had to pick my way between mole hills and cow pats . Still not a soul about . No footsteps of those walking before me. Mole hills are fine . Cow pats - more room required in Room 101. I reached Salem Chapel - right or left . Toss a coin . Left - that will do for today . My thoughts went to a new lockdown in Leicester . The shops had only just opened up. The churches opened their doors . The campsites at the weekend would open . But would they?
Councils I thought - would I put those in Room 101? Perhaps I would. As I walked past derelict houses
all ready to be pulled down and a housing estate spring up. All those councillors who neglect to think of the impact of their decision making . No school spaces . No room at the inn. No room at the doctors . So it is room 101 for the planners . I can make room in my imaginary room for them .
Long grasses grow in the fields. Tussocks that show it is muddy and damp . Meadowsweet and then there is the heady smell of Mock Orange which takes me back years . An old house falling down . We bought it with a view to doing it up. It had a long history of building going back to the early 1800s . The garden a tangled mass of bramble and nettles . Marigolds growing in places . A pigsty covered in a green shrub . By Spring I had no idea what the shrub was . By summer the smell let me into the secret - a mock orange . I was taken back years this morning when I smelt the mock orange on my walk . And yes it has been the sunniest Spring since 1929.
