What I've learned recently: The journey can be better than the destination!

 

The perils of leaving home

I have a confession.  Once, during a more stringent phase of the lockdown, we pushed the rules to breaking point.  Remember when we were allowed to drive for longer journeys to get exercise, as long as the journeys weren't longer than the exercise?  Well, we drove the half-hour journey from our house up into the hills above Ringinglow in Derbyshire.  I had been coping with lockdown well, but I have a history of anxiety and I was beginning to get a little edgy and feeling that the black dog was lurking at the end of the garden path, so P thought that getting a change of scenery would help calm me down.

We took some sandwiches and a flask because the rules at that time said you could stop for food while exercising.  But in fact, we parked the car in a layby and just ate our food.  We thought we might take a walk afterwards, but I have been having problems with my back and I knew I couldn't actually go hiking for miles over the hills.  There was only one other car anywhere in sight, parked like us in a layby. It contained an Asian couple with three young kids in the back, and it was several hundred feet away from us.

There were cyclists going past, and, as everyone knows, cyclists - at least when they're wearing lycra and pedalling up hills - always have the apparently godgiven right to be as self-righteous as they choose.  One bloke rode past our car and started yelling abuse at us.  He was also gesturing with his hands as if to say 'Unbelievable!  Do these people not realise they are endangering both themselves and others?' (but with more expletives).  I wished I had had the forethought to bring a pop-up sign saying 'Do you realise that frothing at the mouth while riding a bike without a mask and yelling abuse at harmless strangers is much more likely to spread the virus than eating a sandwich inside your own car with the windows wound up?'.  He then moved on to vent his ire on the family in the other car, which incensed me even more than his yelling at us as I kept thinking how scared the children, who were very young, must have been.

Shaken up by this incident we decided to return home without having a walk.  As we drove down the hill we were passed by a police van, presumably heading off to set the dogs on the other car...

I can understand the argument that using our car increases the risk of a breakdown or accident which would be a drain on the NHS and put Green Flag workers in unnecessary risk of infection, but our car is regularly serviced, reliable, had new tyres and a full tank of petrol, and we are careful drivers, There were few cars on the roads anyway.  And there was no way we were otherwise spreading the virus.  We had been in self isolation about five weeks by then.  I can also appreciate that if beauty spots were filled up with visitors, social distancing would be difficult, and that rules are meant to be obeyed. But we hadn't broken any rules except that we didn't do the exercise we intended to do, and that was because of the abusive cyclist.

While my natural instincts are always to break rules, I am also sensible enough to want to be a good citizen during a pandemic.  We had gone out to the hills in order to try to head off a simmering mental health issue, but in fact the abusive cyclist made me feel like I never wanted to leave the house again.  I have always disliked the smugness of the lycra brigade.  I have no problem with people riding bikes in their normal clothing for fun or to get to work. I even think that cycling is a good way to get fit and save the planet. I don't even mind actual athletes who are training for events.  I would never want to prevent any cyclist from cycling round the British countryside and on the British streets (as long as they follow the rules of the road which they often don't).  But I have known many incredibly sanctimonious men (they are usually men) who think that owning an expensive bike and wearing a skintight yellow jumpsuit and a pointy helmet entitles them to feel superior to everyone else.  Apparently, they are single-handedly saving the planet and still have time to yell abuse at young children and middle aged couples.  I know that this ghastly cretin who screamed at us up on the hills almost certainly spent time that evening tweeting about how 'fucking unbelievable it is that there were TWO cars parked on the hill with their occupants eating sandwiches!'.  But we weren't breaking the rules at that time, and we certainly weren't spreading coronavirus. Whereas he was riding round, sweating profusely, spitting and coughing as he screeched, spreading his bodily fluids over the innocent countryside, while dressed in an outfit that made him look like a banana.  I think that should be against the rules, myself.

The only thing worse than a Covidiot is a self-righteous, judgemental tit on a bike.

Anyway, to move onto a funnier subject, you should have seen me walking through the woods near my house last week.  As I mentioned above, I've been having a problem with my back, but I didn't realise how bad it was until I was in the middle of the wood.  The forest near our house climbs up a steepish hill, and going down this hill seemed to trigger my back pain, which shot up from an Ibuprofen-dampened three to an excruciating ten.  There was nowhere to sit, except large rocks and fallen trees. I was shuffling along so slowly that I was being outpaced by a bright green caterpillar on the path beside me.  We were quite a distance from the road, and I was beginning to panic because I was in such pain I felt I might not make it down the hill.  With P's assistance, and after a ludicrously long time, I did make it to the Heritage Centre car park where I half collapsed on a low wall while P jogged home to get the car.

As I sat there, feeling pointless, several very elderly men with their equally elderly dogs, an old woman with a walking stick, a young woman in flipflops and with her ankle bandaged, and a toddler on a scooter, passed me, heading cheerfully home as if taking a walk in the wood was the easiest thing in in the world.  Self-satisfied gits.