A windy walk

Strong winds carried from the west were busy whipping long grass back and forth across great acres of open agriculture land, each blade dancing in turn in a shimmering green sea of nature's equivalent of jazz hands. If they could talk, hundreds of thousands of tiny voices would all be calling out in chorus ‘look at me, look at me!’ Lucas would have testified to its mesmeric beauty were it not for the fact it was fucking freezing and the cold was shaking hands with the mug of tea now sat in his bladder that he'd finished not twenty minutes before and was now being unfairly instructed to make a reappearance with the world. That in itself wasn't so much an issue, however, the woman walking her dog some thirty foot behind was, and so he quickened his stride and hoped like the majority of dogs it would disobey its owner enough to create a gap where he could vanish into the trees and relieve himself before he did it down one of his trouser legs. No one warned you at school how hard it was getting old. He battled on for another couple of minutes and mercifully for him the pair were now some way off and so he sort solace behind an oak tree, some centuries old by the evidence of the circumference of its base which he was now busy watering. He soon found he was sharing the space with a rather tubby bumblebee who presumably was equally desperate to get out of the wind and cared little for the man busy tiddling against the tree, an act for which it would have no name other than something beginning with buzz. 

Bladder now emptied he left the tubby bee where it was and without looking right to see where the woman and dog now were in relation to him out of that classic British embarrassment than men have bestowed upon them from birth, he continued left and managed to walk six or seven minutes at the most before he felt a small stone which had jumped into his footwear and wiggled it's way down under his left foot and so Lucas stopped again and relieved himself of his secondary problem. Who says men aren't problem solvers? 

Finally he had walked himself somewhere that was out of the wind where he was reminded that the giant sun in the sky is a provider of warmth after all and not some sort of giant illusion on a spring day. Lightning a smoke he basked in it's glow as he strolled along happily shortening his life to the afternoon chorus of birds tweeting around him. Somewhere high in a tree above him sounded a bird like a small child saying the word tweet tweet tweet on a loop but he couldn't identify the source and it was soon out of earshot and he was readying himself for another round of his mug of tea to visit and this time at least was duly able to discharge it without the added worry of anyone catching him in the act and he ambled his way up a hill where trees creaked like old doors on hinges that had never been oiled and the wind blew through their tops and made the sound like that of the ocean. 

A cockerel crowed and several seconds later something clucked. Then a pheasant parped and several small twigs were busy deciding they no longer wished to be part of a tree anymore and we're twanging onto the mud below. Upon reaching the clearing at the top of the hill Lucas would be forgiven for thinking that it wasn't a windy afternoon at all, as here it now felt not much more than a breeze as daffodils happily danced around the base of trees. 

The two dogs behind the walls of a static caravan gave their usual cheerful greeting to him, by which it is to say they barked vehemently and ferociously at him. Up another little hill and through a kissing gate he disturbed a kestrel from where it had been clung to the line of a telegraph pole and it tried to fly off without much grace into the wind that had returned with a vengeance and was turning his exposed elbows into ice blocks and so he allowed both soldiers to bid a quick retreat and rolled down the sleeves of his jumper back down to his wrists. 

The wind attacked his face and in particular his nostrils like an unwanted finger trying to ferret out the snot formed by the cold. He beat them to it and gave his nose a good blow which made him sound like a ferry coming into harbour. 

In a garden he passed someone was burning wood and the smoke took over the role of attacking his nostrils from the cold and his mouth was left with the unwanted tang of charcoal. If that combination had been bad enough on his senses his eyes took a bashing upon the sight of a female pheasant who'd met her maker on a country road with her entrails a metre distance from the rest of her body having clearly lost an argument with a vehicle with some considerable impact, much to her detriment. 

A yellow tractor was busy turning the fields that now lay before him two tones of brown, one dark and fresh, the other baked lighter and still to be turned. He thought of Eric Cantona in his press conference after his infamous Kung Fu kick and a French voice inside his head was now busy saying - when ze seagulls follow ze tractor. That followed by his own pedantry correcting Eric that there was no such thing as seagulls, though it was of course true that some gulls lived by the sea and Eric this clearly is ze countryside not ze seaside. 

He looked down the road and saw a jogger in red t shirt and black shorts coming towards him, looked left at the tractor and when he looked back the jogger was the other side of the road and running away from him. Lucas suspected he had just run round the bend into the wind, caught a draft up one of the legs of his shorts and thought to himself bollocks to this and done a U-turn that the Prime Minister would have been proud of in the current political climate. 

A man in a flat cap and sunglasses sat atop a podgy face slapped red by the wind was practising Nordic cross country skiing without the skis ambling up the road towards him, using a pole in each hand. The man may have said the world's quietest afternoon or it could have been the sound of the trees but to be on the safe side Lucas acknowledged him back with a louder afternoon of his own and threw in a smile for good measure. 

Turning north down a country lane the wind that had been driving at his back now bit greedily at his fingers and he thanked himself for being the sort of man who'd not exposed his legs to the sun for the best part of 25 years and wouldn't have swapped clothes with the jogger in shorts and T-shirt at that moment for all the tea in china. The sun jumped out from behind a bank of trees but it was just an illusion once more and the sum total of fuck and all use in keeping him warm. 

In another field a green tractor was sat in the corner, engine switched off, the driver waiting for something, but as to what it was it wasn't obvious. Maybe Christmas? No, more likely Easter you silly old bugger he said administering himself. By the verge were two large blocks of perfectly cut mud like you'd find when testing cheese, one cylindrical, one cubed, but on a grander and muddier scale and he assumes far less tasty to the human tongue. 

A good 80 to 100 metres away he spotted just the ears of a hare who was busy escaping down the side of a mud embankment away from view. He knew it was a hare because he'd felt they were his kindred spirits having been blessed with large ears himself. Finding a secluded spot he tested himself as to whether he needed a just in case wee and found he that indeed he did and deposited what must have been the last of his mug of tea onto the rock hard mud below.  

A couple of hundred metres later despite an open field to the left of him he found some restbite from the wind but it transpired it was playing a cruel trick on him and it reappeared and slapped him round the left side of his face for good measure. A few steps later he allowed himself a giant yawn, mouth wide open like a lions, clearly overdosing on too much oxygen. 

Someone new was running towards him in the distance seemingly more appropriately attired for the cold winds in a blue fleece jacket and black bottoms. It could be a jogger or or could be a Tesco employee late for a shift, he'd have to wait until they came much closer to ascertain the actual answer, which eventually turned out, as he suspected to have been the former. The gear belonged to a man in his early 30s who was wearing a matching coloured blue band on his head which must have been a good six inches wide and made Lucas wonder how big his slap was hidden underneath it. He had a memory of a good fifteen years previous when his then boss was sporting a black and orange Super Dry coat for which he'd paid a small fortune and was clearly rather proud and chuffed with. That was until Lucas had asked him when he'd started moonlighting for B&Q and did the jacket come as part of the job? He chuckled to himself in much the same manner as he'd done when he'd first said it all those years ago, immensely proud of his own joke. A good joke heard twice with enough time in between can still be equally funny the second time around. A squirrel then played peekaboo with him before vanishing up a tree. 

Turning north west he ambled across the public green where a collie was doing a large turning circle at a rate of knots. The fishing lake shimmered in the sun but no one me was stupid enough to be sat around fishing in this weather. A woman walked towards the car park wearing shorts showing off a pair of thighs that looked like she could easily crack a walnut between or a man's head if she chose. The man in the ice cream van sat in the front looking like someone busy going over all his life's choices and where they'd gone wrong. Another man walks with black trousers with white squiggles all over, side panels of red down each side. Perched on his face clear rimmed sunglasses. The man of African dissent was pulling off the look with consummate ease. 

Two more joggers one tall, young, slender with a full head of hair. The other older, shorter, tubby and with a centre parting that now stretched across all of the top of his head, passed going in different directions. 

Turning back west the wind smashed into him so hard that Lucas had to take a step back and as he did so a wheelie bin in front of him crashed over so at least he knew it wasn't just his age that had stopped him dead in his tracks. Taking out his handkerchief for the umpteenth time he tooted his flute once more and as he did so his eyes watered and he was temporarily blinded in one eye before clearing it with the sleeve of his jumper. 

Lucas laughed at a man talking to his dog saying “I'll get the ball then shall I?” Then said hello to a ghost of his past and they both agreed it was jolly cold but in much coarser language and they didn't stop to chat, only exchanging notes on the weather as is the want of two Englishmen who've not spoken in several years or the want of Englishmen who may have indeed spoken only just yesterday in passing. An old school friend was jogging with his younger wife, he told him to “put them away, it's far too cold,” in reference to his exposed legs which the wife found terribly amusing and laughed behind the poor man's back. Rounding the last corner for home a dog jumped up at him but stopped as it's owner, apparently speaking dolphin which the dog somehow understood, clicked at it and it obeyed to Lucas’ relief for he is allergic to canines. He thought to say thank you but didn't know what the dolphin equivalent in clicks for it was and instead half smiled at the man whilst thinking maybe just put the blasted thing on a lead. Then finally he'd made it home and back into the warmth.