vinculafido

  Waiting for the rain to clear, I sit in Grantham’s Costa and look across the square at Isaac Newton.   The shopping centre itself is named after him, and so is a pub and a primary school. Quite right too.   He was a pupil at the King’s School before he went up to Trinity Cambridge. His home was at Woolsthorpe Manor, not so very far away. Woolsthorpe is now a National Trust property, complete with an apple tree which may or may not have inspired the notion of ‘gravity’. There’s a contemporary-sounding twist to Newton’s experience. He returned to Woolsthorpe in 1665, interrupting his Cambridge studies. It was the plague year, so one can imagine he was entering a kind of self-imposed lockdown, away from coffee houses and the communal life. I suppose each Christian, perhaps each person , could be placed on some kind of x-y grid in terms of their beliefs about the relationship between religion and science. Do the two fields of activity occupy the same space for us? Or in a...

  I’ve worn the same winter boots ever since I started the first of my long pilgrimage walks in 2016, but now they’re showing the first signs of falling apart. If I had to ford a stream of more than two inches in depth, I’d be shipping water.   This is a worrying moment: it could conceivably be a great boon to have the extra grip a new pair of Berghaus would give me, but equally well, there’s no telling whether blisters will start appearing where there weren’t any before. And then there’s the expense, of course… I park in Great Gonerby’s Long Lane, and at its end take the downward-trending path beside horsey fields to cross some stiles and emerge on Belton Lane. This road is busy, and a bridge across the main railway line is narrow and hump-backed, requiring exceptional care since there’s no verge. It’s been an untidy morning under cloudy skies, and now there’s drizzle in the air. My spirits are low.   The onward path takes me across the fairways of a golf course, and...