Our 'Best Laid Plans' and all that jazz

Is the Hadrian's Wall Path walk a DNF or just like a very long read that we put down and pick up when we can much later down the road?

We posted our first walk and some of you may be wondering what happened next, Where did we go? Further East from Drumsburgh or did something else befall Carole and I?

Well, it wasn’t along the Hadrian’s Wall Path, but we certainly had challenges and adventures of our own. The day after our first day walking, Carole’s health took a knock eventually leading to a diagnosis of pneumonia, not that we knew it at the time. She has a six-week rest period under doctors’ orders. The end of this coincides with leaving for France for the summer and so, although it may look like we are over before we began, it is a postponement rather than a cancellation. A chance to allow the body to recover to build up to the walk in a sustainable and healthy way. We smile at the irony of publicly announcing a venture, just to have our plans change, but such is life. Best laid plans and all that jazz (Robert Burns didn’t quite say it like that but his old adage still rings true). Had we kept it to a post expedition book form rather than with additional real time blog format then all would be none the wiser but we live and learn. This challenge was never about pushing through to our detriment but rather coming to it eyes open, in a nourishing way, a bit like our writing practice. 120 years on the Wall will be back.

With this in mind, I am re-branding my Substack again to reflect as such as I still want to write and share my words and it feels un-aligned having it under the 120 years on the wall banner. I may still write about the area but it won’t be about the walk until Carole is feeling fit and I have the time and it is back on.

So let me introduce: Reading my Way over Shelf and Sill.

A reference to both the Hadrian’s Wall landscape and geology I love and also where I store my books! My main theme is still books and reading, the landscape of the North and my day to day connection with nature and the writing that inspires.

I hope you stick with us and we look forward to bringing you 120 years on the wall when health and time allow. In the meantime, I hope to entertain you with my doing - reading - thinking exploits such as:

·       I was a parent helper on the year three trip to Vindolanda and although the weather was typical in its wind and rain, it didn’t put them off learning about bath-houses and walking the two thousand year old stone road. They got to hold a curved handle of an amphora jug the volunteer excavators had recently found in their current dig section as well as discover the extensive roman sandal collection in the museum next door.

·       I have started reading Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontё as my friend and I are going to see The Unthanks band sing an Emily Brontё inspired song cycle to commemorate her 200^th birthday next weekend, reading it in less than a week will certainly be a challenge, but it is one of those classics I have never read but had it in the back of my mind I should and I love when fiction inspires music; like Led Zepp and The Lord of the Rings, like The Shining Levels and The Gallows Pole, I’m sure there are more, i may even blog about it in the future.

·       I wrote a short piece involving a hen wife; an archetype like crone or witch but she shares her wisdom in a more accessible, connected to the domestic and within the community way. That was a pleasurable rabbit hole of research to go down.

This is around the edges of two days on the farm, driving the John Deere with a roller on back over fields of brilliant green with yellow buttercups that no doubt inspired the colour branding of the vehicle back in the day. The swallows appreciated the insects I sent up, darting and swooping around me as I go back and forth over the ground. The crows too, hop and land in my wake. My job this week is to roll in the manure previously spread on the fields to keep it at ground level to nourish the soil and not move up with the growing grass.

There we go, I will bring you more of my reading and writing exploits as they arise under the Reading my Way over Shelf and Sill banner, and thank you for sticking with us, the HWP is not over, we are just circling around.