“This is lovely,” I say, “just how I remember it.” My wife and I are on holiday in the Yorkshire Dales and, as we like to do, we’re going for a walk.
“Can we walk a bit faster?” I add.
“You are the one who says we should walk slowly so we don’t miss things,” my wife says.
“Yes… but I want to overtake those people over there,” I explain.
I don’t think I’m a particularly competitive person, but when I’m walking, or cycling, I often find myself growing determined to catch and overtake people who are ahead of me. There’s no particular purpose, I just like it. I suppose you could call it a hobby.
This is one of the reasons I prefer to go running early in the morning, when there are few other people out and about - I don’t want to get caught up in the same impulse. It ruins the fun.
‘Don’t compare yourself to other runners, they’re not running your race’ I read somewhere once, the writer then added: ‘they’ve already finished your race and now they’re on to the next one.'
I’m not a fast runner, partly due to my habit of stopping to look at interesting things, birds, animals, trees, sunrises, mud, you name it - I’m happy to stop for a look.
“What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare?” wrote the Welsh poet WH Davies. This seems to me a very sensible approach to life, you miss a lot if you don’t take the time to look.
But this attitude seems to compete with my baser instincts.
“Come on, lets get past them,” I say but my wife is distracted.
“Is that a dipper?” She asks, pointing. I pull out my binoculars. The small plump bird has long legs and a white chest. It stands on a rock, bobbing its head a bit. It’s quite charming.
“A dipper I think, yeah,” I say. We look at it for a few minutes. You don’t get dippers where we live.
The people in front of us on the path disappear over the brow of a hill.
“There’s a lot of water here isn’t there,” she says. “All that rain, I suppose,” she adds. The water looks amazingly beautiful. Elemental.
‘A poor life this if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.’
“I’m going for a paddle,” she says, rolling up her trouser legs. Moments later I’ve forgotten about the people ahead of us.
‘Saturday columns’ are short, (relatively) funny, basically true* stories of mundanity and mishaps from my life. There’s not supposed to be any point to them. But they might make you smile. Bear with me if I don’t manage every Saturday, I’m working on it.
*Some names, locations and other details may have been changed to protect the guilty.