Change In the Air

          Last Sunday, shortly after I had swum a dozen, leisurely lengths of the pool, our local lido closed down for the winter. It seems premature, what with the sun continuing to beam down and the temperature still hitting 20 degrees daily, but the operator’s contract with the Council stipulates a rigid schedule, come rain or shine. Of course, the sea remains open but, before long, its temperature will fall below what I might be prepared to endure in the cause of aquatic exercise. Summer is officially over. However, its actual demise is gradual and tinged with sweetness. I returned to the orchards at Cothele at the weekend and was gratified by the plenitude of fruit ripe and ready for picking. Our fruit-bowl overfloweth and our freezer is stuffed with cartons of stewed apples.

          And, on yet another day of blue skies and stilled breezes, my OH and I took a hike on Dartmoor. On such a day, the moor’s reputation as high, bleak terrain, unwelcoming, dangerous and sometimes eerie, is hard to believe. The wide, quiet vistas extend to the coast and there are lush valleys that cut into the perimeter of the moor, anchoring it to the surrounding green, rolling farmland. For a while, we walked the disused railway, which runs past the disused Swelltor quarry, where a line of twelve massive, cut granite corbels are lined up, ready for consignment. They are left-over, surplus to requirements, after the 1896 widening of London Bridge. I was surprised that nobody had yet found a use for them – not even the American bloke who bought the rest of the bridge – but I suppose the lack of a functioning rail-track is something of a disincentive to shifting them.

          Further on, we encountered a lone hiker, talking loudly at his phone. Even at a distance of fifty metres, we heard him say that he was not looking forward to lunch because, although he had made cheese and pickle sandwiches, he had just realised that he had forgotten to put the cheese in them. Another of life’s mysteries. It reminded me of a Bill Bryson observation that ‘only the British could imagine they were having fun, crouching behind some windswept rocks with a Thermos flask and a cheese sandwich’. Still, our forgetful hiker might be consoled by the fine weather. We finished up at the prison town of Princetown, where the Visitor Centre now occupies the ground floor of the hotel that accommodated Arthur Conan Doyle while he was writing The Hound of The Baskervilles. He lived only fifteen miles away, in Plymouth, at the time, so I guess he wanted to immerse himself in his story’s spooky setting.

          Despite the sunny days, the nights are drawing in, which has prompted a return to the cinema. On Saturday, we saw Girls Don’t Surf, a documentary about the marginalisation of females on the professional surfing circuit prior to 2003. The story seems to have had an equitable, happy and lucrative ending. Moreover if, like me, you are puzzled by how livings are made out of such a pastime, the answer is revealed: more money than you would imagine is generated through sales of fashionable board-shorts.

         But there’s no getting away from it – these are distractions. Summer’s dream-time is about to give way to harsh reality. The long absence of meaningful or effective parliamentary activity is finally at an end, coinciding neatly with the burial of The Queen to draw a line under the political uncertainties of the past few months. Somehow, we must address the social and environmental devastation caused by a governing party that insists blindly on pursuing the discredited dogma of trickle-down economics. And, in the wider world, buckle down and deal with the humanitarian and economic consequences of Putin and all the other cruel, selfish regimes. It’s going to be a long, hard winter.