CARELESS WALKING

It being the Chas and Camilla weekend, we motored over to The Place for Plants in East Bergholt, which is partly a plant-centre but also a 20 acre garden, where you can have a longish and surprisingly uncrowded walk.  The handout you get when you enter says the place is inspired by the landscape of Cornwall, though this would have passed me by if it hadn’t been pointed out.

 

PHOTO BY CAROLINE GANNON

There were ducks and bamboo and euphorbia if you like that kind of thing – and it so happens I do.

Last week it rained quite hard so it wasn’t surprising that parts of the garden  were wet and muddy, though in fact some parts weren’t.

 

Now, I may not be the most cautious of walkers but I’m not the most reckless either.  And although I understand that in the interests of heath and safety, when a garden is open to the public you may well need to put up a few warning signs, ‘Do not walk on the water’ and that kind of thing.  But I thought they overdid it at this place.

 

It seemed fair enough that there were signs telling people to take care:

But then there were signs telling people to take extra care.

And I’m really not sure that I know the difference between taking care, and taking extra care.  What would be the measure?  What  strategies should the extra careful walker employ, as opposed to the one who’s simply taking care?

There is possibly a philosophical walking conundrum here.  We went to the tea room.

SUNDAY MUDDY SUNDAY

I was going to say, ‘Before we finish with John Cage ..’ but I think I’m never really going to be finished with John Cage, so there’s this.  We were walking in the mud yesterday, following the footpath along the south side of the River Stour, right across the water from the Cattawade Nature Reserve, which has no public access, which I think is very cool.  It wasn’t meant to be an expedition, just a Sunday afternoon walk, and that’s what it was until we hit the mud.

 

         I mean, I knew it had been raining, I knew that the footpaths in these parts had muddy patches here and there, but I wasn’t expecting the full Glastonbury–Woodstock-Somme experience.  And as a matter of fact it was actually far worse than it looks in these pictures.

 

         It was hard work, walking through this stuff, but after a while, as Billy Shakespeare almost said, ‘I was in mud, stepp’d in so far that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er.’

Thinking of Shakespeare helped a bit, and also thinking that John Cage had written a book on the subject, with Lois Long, one of his collaborators on The Mushroom Book. This one was The Mud Book.  I’ve never seen a copy 'in the flesh,' but apparently it looks like this: 

 To be honest, I wasn't really in the mood for making 'pies and cakes.'