What a Long, Strange Trip it’s Turned Into

The man who says, “I’ve got a wife and kids” is far from home; at home he speaks of Japan.  But he does not know—how could he?—that the scenes changing in the train window from Victoria Station to Tokyo Central are nothing compared to the change in himself.  

        And so, back to China. 

        This is Steve once more; it’s extremely unlikely that Kathryn will ever write or utter those five words—she left with such strong dislike for the country.  But changes are afoot again, so it seems a good time to bring things up to date here. 

        I realize that as far as The Herald is concerned I never left China, though in fact I did, in November, 2012.  I have been living in England since then—mostly in Oxford, but with a two-month stint in London while doing the DELTA, a murderous, advanced teaching course from which I am still recovering three months after its conclusion.

        The epigraph above is from The Great Railway Bazaar, by Paul Theroux, my current read, and if you substitute Chinese references for the Japanese, you would have a good thumbnail sketch of my mindset at this point.  The nearly 10 months in the UK have not been a happy time for me:  England and I seem to rub each other the wrong way now.  But I don’t want to dwell on that because it might upset someone—several someones, in fact.

        Instead I’ll write about my best day in England, which was yesterday and began, unpromisingly, with a mild hangover.  But I was determined to get out and indulge in one of the real pleasures of living in Britain, which is the opportunity to go for a long ramble in storybook countryside.

        I don’t know if you could say that the footpaths and bridleways are the unsung glories of Britain, but I would argue that they are at least undersung.  According to beenthere-donethat.org.uk, England and Wales alone contain more than 140,000 miles (225,000 kilometers) of these public rights of way, but if you asked people to identify an attractive feature of Britain I would guess that many more would name Keira Knightley, say, than would mention the footpaths.  I think that’s a shame.

        What splendid encounters these paths provide with the checkerboard English landscape, after all.  The hills are gentle (in Oxfordshire, at any rate), and so the views are generally modest, but what of that?  What you can see is so pleasing to the eye—the deep green of the oaks and beeches; the blazing red of the hawthorn and rowan berries; the dark burgundy of the ripening elderberries; and the tawny mown grass, lying in fragrant rows, waiting to be gathered into hay bales.  And because the vista is never too distant, ramblers are not intimidated by insurmountable miles to cover.  This keeps a spring in the step, and every few minutes one is rewarded with fresh prospects by passing through a gap in a hedge or rounding a stand of trees.  I cannot understand why these paths are not talked up more in the tourist books.

        Here is a network of trails, after all, that would stretch more than halfway to the moon; they give access to some of Britain’s loveliest scenery, and they provide pedestrian connections between remote settlements.  They are a legacy of the days when people went most places by foot or on horseback, and so most of these paths are actually over private land (I’ve been unable to find by what proportion).  But since they have been used for centuries by the tramping commoners, the right to continue doing so has been grandfathered in and codified, much to the credit of British law.

        And because these rights of way pass over private land, you are often walking among grazing cattle or sheep, or across cultivated fields—in fact, the law specifically gives walkers the right to pass through planted crops, provided they (the walkers) stick as closely as possible to the designated rights of way.  This I did yesterday at one point, then had a rest as I sat at the edge of the field and emptied my boots and socks of all the seeds and burrs they had accumulated during the crossing.  It took some time. 

        In other fields I encountered young cattle that were clearly unused to having a human being on their side of the hedge.  The stragglers bolted when they saw me approaching, only to collect some friends and return in my direction at a trot that would have been unsettling if it hadn’t been clear that they were just curious.  Playing the good hosts, they maintained a courteous distance and saw me safely to the stile at the far end of their pasture.  I’ve since had a suspicion confirmed, which is that bulls of a certain age (10 months, it turns out) are banned from fields crossed by these paths. 

        During my 13-mile (21-kilometer) walk yesterday from Thame to Oxford I encountered rabbits, pheasants, quail, kites, and swans, but only one other trekker—a solitary fellow who was some distance ahead of me and soon took a different path.  On the one hand this perplexed me, since the breezy, sunny weather was absolutely made for rambling, and I couldn’t imagine what better use everyone else had found for such a day.  But whatever it was I was glad they were at it, because it left me at large on my own in the countryside, free to astonish the livestock by singing some of my favorite tunes at them as I passed through.

        But I need to get my fill of such things while I can because, as mentioned above, I’m headed back to China—in just over three weeks, as a matter of fact.  This time it is on a two-month contract in Jinan, Shandong province.  Jinan is in the north of China, on the Yellow River and is closer to Beijing than Guangzhou, where I was before.  At 4.4 million people, it is among the top-20 cities in China by population, but only just. My contract ends in mid-December.  “What then?” you ask.  More change, of course:  watch this space.