Day Ten

Well, so much for me saying I’d write everyday for the Walk and Ride Festival. Poppy left home yesterday. We drove her down to university in London, and didn’t get back home until eleven at night, by which time I was too tired to blog. And anyway, the only walking I’d done was along London streets and the riding was all in a car, and I don’t think that counts.

It was a lovely day though, and one which brought up all sorts of mixed emotions. The most obvious being to do with our eldest daughter fleeing the nest and going out into the big wide world. Like Johnny said, it felt strange taking our little girl to the middle of one of the biggest cities in the world and leaving her there alone. Everyone asks if I cried, but I didn’t. I think missing her will be something that creeps in slowly, in tandem with getting used to her being gone. And now I’ve got an excuse to go and visit her in London as often as I can anyway.

Because part of the weirdness of the day was wishing it was me. Not going to live in student halls with a bunch of eighteen year olds. That would be a bit strange. But going to live in London, having a new place to live and carving out a new life. It’s years now since I lived in London, but I never really meant to leave, and a part of me has been hankering ever since to go back.

We’ve lived in Hebden Bridge for nine years now, the longest I’ve lived anywhere in my adult life, and the roots I’ve put down are pretty deep. I feel connected. I walk in hills and know what I will see at every turn. In the woods at the end of our road I know the individual roots which cross the path, I notice if a stone has been moved or a branch has fallen. When the recent floods changed the whole structure of the ‘pond’ in Nutclough, it felt almost like a personal assault. I love it here.

But walking along Mile End Road yesterday, seeing the tall terraces and the traffic, the sun shining through the plane trees and the people around the tube station, entering and leaving like bees in a hive, I felt the tug of older roots, and a longing to be back there, in the Great Wen, the Smoke, the busy cosmopolitan hub of life which never fails to thrill me whenever I visit. Every time I arrive in London I feel something wake up inside of me, a person I’ve forgotten existed, a person I love being. A freer, more dynamic, excited person.

Even when I lived there I had to get out into the countryside. I haunted Hampstead Heath, visited parks, squares, cemeteries, any of the green breathing places with which London abounds. Every few weeks I’d hop on a train and escape – to the sea, or to my home in Warwickshire where my roots are buried far into the depths of childhood.

The trouble is you can’t have everything. You have to make choices. And for now my choice is here, the beautiful Calder Valley.

Yesterday there was a walk up to Stoodley Pike called Obelisk of Peace. I love Stoodley Pike. You can walk for miles and miles in any direction, look back an there is the monument sitting on its hilltop. It’s the pivot around which we all move, still and serene, decorated with a peace sign and wearing its history of  pacifism on top of shadier undergarments – stories of murder, freemasonry and feudal ownership. When you’ve been away and you’re returning and take a bend in the road and see it there on the hill – that’s a homecoming.

But sometimes it feels like it’s pinning you in your place and you want to run away. Thank you Poppy for providing a bolt hole.