The more I learn, the less I know

Isn’t it strange how you think you know a place back to front, which you certainly ought to after living there for forty years and living just up the road from where you live now for five years before that, and then you realise that you always take the same route to places?

We did a fair amount of exploring during Covid, and I learned a lot about the history of my home area, but that was just one small area. We were playing hunt the parcel the other day because the delivery company wanted us to see if we could recognise the house that they’d left the parcel outside. I am so going to have to use that as a way for people to meet, with quite possibly a dead delivery driver, because it keeps happening, so doing that fictionally is such a fun revenge. There could be a theft ring, illegal immigrants and all sorts of things that have already happened locally. There, it’s one for Lucy Williams, and now you’ve seen how I do this.

Anyway, we went a different route without spotting the house they chose instead of ours, so we crossed the road at a different set of traffic lights by the church whose graveyard is rich with daffodils and very beautiful, as you can see in today’s photo. We were going to walk down and get back on track for our usual route, but then we decided to walk down a very steep hill, which is a quicker route, but there is no way I’m walking up it! That meant we came into the park by a different entrance and were on the same side of the road as the cake shop. We’d been having a frustrating day, so the sensible thing seemed to be to go and visit it in case the staff had missed us.

I don’t know if they had or not, but I’d definitely been missing the pistachio cronut and the apple streusel slices, so we walked back through the park which took us past the trees we planted when we were volunteering to help to replant the park to make it more conservation-friendly after they’d got a National Lottery grant. The ground was awful, and the digging was back-breaking, but the trees have taken amazingly well and have bushed out nicely. Birds were singing in them as we walked past them, so that was a happy, smug moment of knowing that two ordinary people had, in a small way, helped to make the world a better place for birds and people

I get the same feeling when I help to clear litter from the beach while enjoying meeting other people who feel the same way, because I’m not a natural demonstrator. I want something done rather than shouting about how someone else ought to do something, and I firmly believe that it doesn’t matter if I can only do a little bit. If we all do it, then it will change.

So here’s to small changes this weekend. To planting trees, to walking instead of driving, to putting my rubbish in the bin, which I always do because litter is a pet hate of mine. And to thinking smugly, I’ve had a good walk and done some good, so the cake really doesn’t count. I know it probably does, but I promise that I’ll leave you your illusions if you’ll do the same for me.

Have a great weekend, let me know what you’re doing to change the world, and see you on Tuesday. For now, here’s that lovely church with its incredibly moving Commonwealth and local gravestones. As always, reading the inscriptions leaves me feeling so grateful for all I take for granted.