In the Blues

Usually, the blues get to me from time to time - many reasons, all familiar, common even. Each one particular to me, and probably you too. They are different to the panics, when I fear it will all come tumbling down, because it hasn't now for quite some time and, so far as I can tell, it won't, because of all the its I know, none of them are precarious. Music and poetry are useful carriers, and I have in the past let Schubert's songs to carry me along. He knew his panics too, and knew they were coming to pass. Poetry carries deep feelings for other bloggers and sometimes, jolts in time, they resonate with ours. Thank you RM.

Easter has been tricky, a reminder of the darkness before the light ... though it now feels more mature to celebrate the light as our forebears did ... leaving behind the darker side of Christian beliefs, in company with those who believe its just short of a couple of millennia since the life of Christ was grafted onto older beliefs. Celebrated in my post Happy Eostre which I would now love to relive, so here to click on is the LINK. The comments to that from blogging friends are a joy.

This Easter I seem to have bypassed the sorrow and emptiness and leapt straight into a resurrecting spring. The weather, this glorious unprecedented warmth and light and joyfulness, carries me along. With the Tramper. Into these blues ... and out of the other sort.

(Old Blogger used to let me insert pictures wherever in my text I wanted to ... not now ! Does anyone know a way round current Blogger slapping them at the top, and not letting me click and drag to where I want them to be ?)

Testing out the Tramper's capabilities in prep for a planned eight mile walk with friends on another of these repeating bank holidays. The Tramper's manufacturers (click on this LINK) say thirty miles on flat tarmac, and I have whipped in for three hours over dry plough and through bosky glades, so there is some confidence to setting out today, alone, at the Tramper's Class 2 limit of 4 miles per hour - which I reckon is a good comparison to fit friends' walking pace. So today, for three and a half hours I circled high droves and blue woods, flicked the switch to 8mph for a quick dash past the smelly farmyard, then slowed and kept out of the sun along long rides through thinned plantations. Oh, bliss it was. Then I found myself at the end of a long walk I used to do with Airedale Sally, thrilled to be there again after fifteen years, forgetting the gate, the forbidding gate with a view of my WAV - it took me another half an hour to get back onto the bridleway that returned me, gateless, safely to my starting point.

Safety is good.