vinculafido

  My, it’s cold today.   I have to use a hairdryer to persuade the boot of the car. During my drive to Coston, the roads look suspiciously black and shiny in some places where the sun hasn’t penetrated. There’s nowhere obvious to park, so I heave the Polo up on an angled verge where it won’t bother anyone, and gingerly make first steps up the lane which runs north from the ‘B’ road. Even so I still slip and slide on the black ice. The local forecasts in Morcott won’t admit to anything lower than minus 3 last night, but it might well have been less than that in the hollows.   Cars have to ford the Eye just past the first farm out of Coston, but the prolonged rain of Monday has put the stream into spate, and the water has gathered more widely on both sides of the tarmac. I stand and look at the rapid flow.   A helpful person who’s backing her car out of the farm assumes I don’t know what to do. She gestures at the side-path over the small bridge which gives pedestrians an advantage. I

There’s more to Wymondham than I’d thought – it’s just that you don’t see most of it when creeping up on the church from the Oakham side.   There’s a confluence of roads from the surrounding villages, a pub (The Berkeley Arms), and above the village beyond the site of the old railway station on Butt Lane, the Windmill, with a lovely café and a few courtyard shops. I begin the day there with a restorative coffee. Thinking about it again, and today being St. Edmund’s day, perhaps the saint was the derivation of ‘Edmondthorpe’ (the station was once ‘Edmondthorpe and Wymondham’). On the other hand, since you have to climb a hill for the windmill (duh!) there’s a nice symmetry about the two place-names, if ‘Wy’ can be stretched to stand for ‘west’ and ‘Ed’ is east. Viewed from the centre of Wymondham every way is up, eventually and a little bit.   This is not mountainous country. From the junction beyond the windmill, near a trig point which has my elevation at 133 metres, I take the l

…which is probably my favourite pop song mentioning rain, combining comment on the meteorology ( ‘falling on my head like a new emotion…’ ) with the frustrations we sometimes tended to feel about love when we were younger…( ’ talk to me, like lovers do…’ )     There are other songs mining the same vein. ‘It’s raining in my heart’ is an obvious one from childhood, a hit for Bobby Vee in the UK re-visited by (aargh!) Leo Sayer at a later date. My personal b ê te noire is Travis’s self-pitying ‘Why does it always rain on me?’ , which plumbs depths of whinge-iness perhaps only ever matched by Adam Faith’s ‘Poor me…’ I only mention this, because I’ve rarely walked ground as saturated as it is right now. As later I return to Market Overton along a field margin, each footstep is pulled out with a squelch as if I am crossing a marsh.   ‘E was in there to the top of his ‘ead, and ‘is ‘oss under ‘im’.   And this is only mid-November… The stocks on the green at Market Overton Leaving Mar