For the love of England

First run of the year. Running up the hill being chased by my dog, we run parallel until I am an inch ahead of her then she races ahead leaving me in her tail’s trail.

I have been away a lot recently, traversing the country. I have seen sea, tilled fields, rocky cliffs. Once I found myself staying in a fairy tale place with a stone castle stood in the middle of the village. It dates back to the time of early Christendom and is contemporaneous with the Tower of London, I was told. Now a ruin on an escarpment; sturdy, thick-walled, held together by clods of flint. You couldn’t bulldoze it, but it has been worn down over millennia by forgetfulness. 

Some entrepreneurial agriculturalists used its fortified plains of grass to graze their sheep. People looted the castle remains for building materials. Feudal systems waned, industrialisation peaked, people got replaced by other people and they forgot why the castle was built.

ROLO accompanied us on all these journeys to bygone picturesque places around England. We walked as a pack along the white cliffs of Dover. I kept her on a leash as one unflappable guide at the lighthouse at the end of our walk told us a dog ran off the side of a cliff only the other day. No fences. Not at a National Trust site – where talk of carving a giant bust of Vera Lynn was met with grand disdain – for the love of conservation!

Last weekend I found myself staying in the middle of a field in a tastefully converted ginormous farmhouse. Nothing for miles apart one tractor working its engine off. Tilling the land with heavy machinery. Couldn’t think of anything I had less knowledge of. I met a boy that day wearing a T-shirt with a tractor design on its front, and I couldn’t be sure, but these were my only two touchpoints to tractors. Tractors as a symbol for something like toys? Big cars? Horses? And then an actual tractor (with me watching it move slowly across the landscape) hurling piles and piles of dusty earth in its wake. 

What was it doing? I asked the Uncle of the family horde. He said it was probably churning fertiliser into the ground. Oh right, I said. From that point I couldn’t even extrapolate what happened next. Does it have to rain for the fertiliser to work? What then grows? How long does it take? Basically, what steps need to take place before the fruit/veg appear on the shelves of Tesco? I couldn’t tell you. So, experiencing the real tractor in life made me question food supply chains and reminded me of the rising cost of living. How milk now is £1.10 and I swear it was 90p quite recently. Maybe this is just London prices and milk goes up arbitrarily like the cost of pints. I wondered then whether the alt-milk movement was pushing up the price of milk as there was less demand.

I was glad that family weekend offered much free booze and many distracting conversations otherwise my city brain might not have coped. ROLO was also put in kennels for this episode, so I yearned for her whilst the others tempered my flurry of emotions and told me she was having a good time playing with other dogs. Making new dog friends. I texted the kennel owner – Ronnie and he texted back saying she was ‘very nervous’. My extended family are very kind to me.  I’ve learned from watching them and being amongst them that love knows no limits.