| Weather: cool and cloudy with sunshine later |
| Distance covered today: 21.2km ( 13.2 mi) |
| Last night’s B&B: The Old Post House (£45) |
| % Complete:24.7% |
| GPS satellite track of today’s route: Day2 (click!) |
Writing this blog can be a frustrating process! It transpires that since I am not as familiar with WordPress as I was with Blogger, I have not yet managed to master it. This, combined with some very dodgy internet connections and a full schedule throughout the day and the evening, has led to some issues with the blog. I still can’t work out why yesterday’s photos came out all elongated, let alone fix the problem. I was just in the process of doing so when the connection went down. I’ve wasted an hour and got absolutely nowhere! I haven’t even started to address the issue of why the link to EveryTrail isn’t working! Last year, at least I had four months to sort myself out. This year, I’ll be finished before I solve the first problem! On the other hand the sun is shining, we had an excellent walk today, my daughter, Anna is joining us tonight for the day tomorrow, so perhaps I should stop complaining and just apologise for my ineptitude. I’ll get there!
Today, we took a pragmatic approach to the walk. The excited canter of the first day developed into a steady trot; a sort of maturing process. There was a sense of leaving the unreality of the “frozen in aspic” tourist Cotswolds to the real world in Winchcombe. We had higher hills to climb and a longer distance to walk, though we did at one stage take a shortcut to avoid a circular deviation on the official path, which didn’t seem to make any sense at all! Our conversation matured as well, mostly because I did less talking, hard as that may be to believe. We even stopped for lunch at a teashop rather than a pub!
It was there that we met Kelly. Julian would probably see this as synchronicity, but we had been discussing career choices since John and Yasmin arrived. We had approached the subject from a number of angles, each of us (I, endlessly!) recounting how it happened that we ended up in the careers we had. We looked at it from the perspective of the changed world, where companies offer less in the expectation that employees will leave, and where employees promise less in the expectation that companies will not look after them. This vicious circle of alienation is compounded in the current recession with its promise of a debt-laden decade of decline in the western world, by a sense that if neither the state nor your employer feels any sense of responsibility to your long-term welfare, then perhaps you should take things very much into your own hands and do whatever it is that turns you on.
Kelly owns the teashop. She is a well-educated graduate, attractive, articulate and intelligent; a refugee from London, where, from her accent and her bearing (and the fact that her parents live in Surrey), we could deduce that in a previous generation, had she wanted a career, she would have joined a big company on the basis of her assets and entered the graduate programme. Her choice? She found a teashop for sale in Winchcombe, applied to the bank of Mum & Dad for a loan, bought it, redecorated it, learned all about tea and cake, and opened her business to the public. She said she knew about the catering business from years of serving in bars and restaurants as a scholar and a student. She loves tea, and she loves cake, and she likes being her own boss. She wanted to combine these things to make a business that was out of the ordinary, using her personality and skills to attract people who would welcome it (and no doubt pay a premium to get it). Hers is a stylish, welcoming business offering the mundane and the exotic, and she made us feel instantly at home. I was interested to note that her shop was located close to the edge of town where the many walkers on the Cotswold Way would be gasping for a cuppa just as they entered town, analogous to something I learned early in my career about the optimum location of service stations (first on the left on the way out of town)!
We decided Kelly was a thoroughly modern woman. She may not make a fortune and I worried whether she would ever save enough for a pension that would allow her the freedom that I now enjoy to pursue the things that interest me. But she is far less constrained than I was for my 34 years in corporate prison. She may not face the career vs. family compromises that so many modern women must endure. She lives in a truly beautiful place which is in gracious and aesthetic harmony with its environment.
Tomorrow we climb to the top of Cleeve Hill before heading off on the longest day yet, to Birdlip. I am though happy in the knowledge that for me it will pass in an instant because I will walk in the company of my daughter. I will rue the passing of every mile.
She, on the other hand, may find it more arduous!
A blurry view from my bedroom this morning, but more evocative than you might think
Stanway House
Furrow and ridge fields all over, dating from mediaeval times
It may be environmentally incorrect, but the rape is photographically electric!
Yet another monastery destroyed by Oliver Cromwell. This is Hailles. According to legend, he sat on a promontory above it and watched it burn!
Kelly in her tearoom
Winchcombe and its contrasting yet harmonious architectural themes
Retired racehorse making eyes at Yasmin. I don’t blame him!
His brothers. We are clearly approaching Cheltenham. I offered one a mint and he knew not what to do with it. Clearly he doesn’t live in Surrey!
More of the colour of rape
John and Yasmin preparing to practice 104 of the Karma Sutra in the Barrow of Belas Knap near Cleeve Hill
Time to Walk the Cotswold Way 
Interesting that you see yourself as the norm of times gone by Kev, yet there’ve always been people like me who lunge from job to job for years until they find something that isn’t prison but instead grabs their energy and passion for some time. Also, not everyone thinks of retirement the way you are experiencing it, my fear is the day I can’t find more work to do, I don’t have retirement fantasies at all! In fact you and Jim are the only people I know who worked for one employer from start to finish and then retired! I think you’re the exceptions not the norm. I wish I were coming on one of your days I would so love to be part of these perambulating conversations!
Yes, well! All that analysis and it gets defeated moments after I commit it to electrons!! You make an excellent point! I might reply (rather weakly) that you are an exception to most rules and all of my sweeping generalisations, simply because you are such an exceptional person! How many people get PhDs in their declining years rather than their formative years? You also live in a country where the demographic and work situation is very different. Also, unlike you, most of my colleagues in the UK do indeed retire and many choose to retire as early as possible. But I do totally agree that if you like what you do so much, there is of course no reason to stop doing it!
Thank you so much for your ever pithy comments!
KTB, Wonderful light and colours in the photos. Commiserations with the the tech. issues, but it really doesn’t spoil an interesting blog. The old synchronicity/serendipity/fate conundrum rearing its head already on day 2 eh? Personally I’d suggest that Kelly might have read (or now seen the DVD) of ‘The Power Of Myth’ by Joseph Campbell and decided (to quote his wonderful phrase) to ‘Follow your Bliss’. This was at least an interesting prompt for us to jump off the wheel. Anyway I guess this is what you 3 fellow walkers could be said to be doing right now?…… BW GH
Well, it’s certainly true for me, though I’m not sure right at the moment that John and Yasmin are seeing that way!! I keep getting questions like “So didn’t you find times last year when you just didn’t want to walk during LEJOG?” and being very sceptical when I denied it!
Phyllis and Yasmin, I’ve just been watching a program which uses wild garlic flowers in cooking. Kev, some of those horses looked like they could be in foal….?! Are you sure they were purely retirees? Did you, er, look underneath?
Now that would be really embarrassing! I thought they were all geldings, but now that you mention it!! Don’t tell John! He thought I was being incredibly knowledgeable about horses. If you are right, my credibility will be severely blunted!