Long shadows

I finished off the willow fencing in the back garden this morning and then went for a more local walk to make the most of the good weather whilst it’s here. It didn’t do much to win me over in terms of favouring the old spot. I persevered through churned mud, quagmire and frankly dull walking until it became impossible and I turned back the way I came, hanging on to fences, teetering on bits of stone and clumps of grass and rushes, opting for the lesser of two evils and grabbing gorse and barbed wire to hang on to impossibly narrow margins between wall and deep mud, slurry and crap.

It was still glorious sunshine so I decided to find another spot that I’d been to some years ago to check out other possibilities for another time.
This was thankfully much better (and on my way there I spotted a hare racing across a field) but I don’t like the feel of the area sometimes and you might not want to look at the extra. You have been forewarned, it’s not pleasant farming practice but still pretty common.
As I was walking back I passed a man over a garden wall who was digging over a vegetable patch. We exchanged ‘hellos and lovely day’. He asked me if I’d walked there before. Just the once, years ago, I said. By this time I was thinking he was vaguely familiar and he was clearly thinking the same. I said ‘I feel as if I know you from somewhere’. He agreed and asked me my name and then promptly dropped his spade, came round the garden wall, through the gate, and gave me a big hug and we twigged the connection from years ago. I asked how he was doing and he said he’d had to give up work now and held out his hand to demonstrate the obvious shake of Parkinson’s but he had happily been able to move to this council house with his wife and escape the stress of his previously privately rented place. We exchanged crap landlord stories.