Beyond The Wolds
On a June morning, at 6am, the sky, an indominatable lid, is clamped down once again across the vaguely defined hills, distributing unseasonable gloom and claustrophobia within the tight, visible space of life. To combat this oppression, this anvil of cold elements and compounds, he took two tablets with his mug of tea and set off on his bike.
For three hours, the damp corrugations froze his exposed limbs as he pedalled hard to keep the heart rate up and the endorphins flowing. For three hours the battle raged between the half empty and half full glass of contentment, until the great orb of life burnt through the haze and dispersed the grey-white clumps.
Then he eased off the cadence and crossed The Trent at Gainsborough, took in the fertile plains of fenlike nothingness to Caenby Corner, Harpswell Cliff, Glentham, Bishops Bridge, and the quiet lanes to Osgodby and so to The Wolds.
The very Wolds that he painted as a student, that he criss-crossed on his Raleigh Nimrod as a teenager, that formed the only semblance of hills for the first formative part of his life. These were not necessarily happy memories: the place, he knew, remained inward-looking, the villages just small parcels of suburbia, the roads, though quiet, ploughing through high hedges hiding rhomboids of uncertain produce.
And so through Claxby, Thoresway - evocative in name, at least - Beelsby, Barnalby-le-Beck, and slowly, painfully, into Waltham. It is Sunday, and the strimmers and trimmers, the mowers and blowers, and all the other nasal, whiney machines are out across the bloated, satisfied village. Everything he hated about growing up crept up to him to taunt and test him. But he was cycling, and he was on medication, and the world beyond Lincolnshire had taught him many things.
So he pulled into the neat drive of his ailing parents' bungalow and dismounted, oven chips and grilled fish at the ready (Strudel to follow), a listening ear for the same old stories at the ready, and a prepared script for how life is going in his mysterious world.
Oh yes, he feels guilty whenever these thoughts percolate through, these teeming thoughts of weary bitterness, and he knows they are his bits of knotted twine alone, not easy to share. But he has left behind a life he never chose, and made a different life bent more to his will, elsewhere, beyond The Wolds. What else can be done?
Even then, a cocktail of chemicals and endorphins ward off the cool embrace of memories.
Later, when he sets off for the train station in Grimsby (what mixed memories and emotions coalesce there) the sky is completely clear, a bowl of indeterminate blue like Raku, and yet an icy wind blows in off the North Sea, like a nagging doubt, a spanner in the works. He smiles, but at the same time shivers, as though someone had already trod on his grave.
