A Short Walk in the Wiltshire Bush

I live in a valley. To the North is a range of low gentle hills that are about two miles distant and form a gentle horizon. To the South is a four-hundred foot sandstone ridge that rears up abruptly less than a mile away and seems to hang menacingly overhead. The steeper portions of the slopes are thickly wooded, the lesser gradients are still too steep for cultivation, but sheep and cattle without fear of hieghts can manage to graze on the lush green grass in dry weather; when it's wet they just slide helplessy down the slippery slope and cluster against the hedges at the bottom.

At one point the ridge seems to jut both outward and upwards to a very prominent peak, although it is still too wooded to discern the exact outline of the ground. I had looked at that peak for months, wondering what it would be like to stand there and gaze out over the valley. One Saturday morning a few days ago, having been unable to get the garage to take the car in to look at the blowing exhaust, I decided I would climb that peak.

I had to go downhill first, following the railway line and then cutting across a field to the small river that gives the village its name. The blossoms in the hedgerows had begun to give way to Eliza Days.
I didn't realise until several hours later how sharp their thorns were, or how subtle, until the broken tips in my fingers began to throb. These photographs were obtained at a price.

I had a water bottle, but little food. The village fete was being held that day, and I decided it would be a nice touch to take lunch on the way, but when I entered the field the barbecue was still unlit and the only cakes and jams available were for judging, not for eating.

I carried on back out of the gates and crossed part of the common land. Whatever this is, I haven't seen it before, and I think it is an escapee from one of the gardens.

I have also tried several times before to get a photograph of these flowering heads. only to have the shots appear blurred or indistinct. It is a lot harder than I suspected, because the camera autofocus is an untrasonic device, and this plant is too slender to echo enough sound back for the camera to work out exactly where it is. I must have been lucky on this day.

I don't know if this was cultivated by a farmer with an interest in the bizarre, or the trees in this area have some incestous streak in them. Apparently the Elm trees that the Romans planted to line the roads grew very like this, connected half underground and half above ground by shared roots and trunks. This was their weakness that the Dutch Elm disease was able to exploit, for when one tree had it, the adjacent trees for hundreds of yards also succumbed.

In the distance is my destination peak. Something I have not really observed before is the path. I would have expected it to have been worn bare, but instead it is greener than the surrounding grass. I wonder if the particular plant grows more vigorously for being trodden on.

Since leaving the village I had been steadily climbing in the heat of the midday sun.
It was pleasant to escape from the open fields into the coolness of the trees. For a while the gradient eased, but this was only a temporary relief, it would soon become much steeper.

A small collection of houses huddled at the foot of the cliff, and the path I was following lead close to their back gardens, and someone's play area. The slope is greater than 1 in 3 for most of the climb, sometimes as steep as 1 in 1, and climbing it becomes a matter of scrambling from tree to tree.

The top was a great disappointment to me. The trees were so thick that it was impossible to see out over the valley, or discern the highest point, or even look down the slope and appreciate how steep it was.

I found that the level ground behind the edge of the cliff was grazing land, ending abruptly with a few strands of barbed wire to stop the cattle plunging down the tree-tangled slope. As I walked along looking for another path to descend, I noticed some large moths. When I waited patiently for them to settle on bracken I found they were tiny, although each had giant antennae.

I had two choices, to either walk back along the road, or to scramble down the path I had climbed. I chose the path because I had spotted an intriguing fork in it just before the houses, and found a small weed-covered pond where early dragonflies were out and about.

A little further on I found this clump, each tongue well over a foot across. These are supposed to be edible, but I have never had the courage to try them. They are also rare, I have only ever seen one other clump of this size, a few miles away in the Blackmoor Vale.

I made my way back into the village and had to make do with chocolate cake and ginger parkin, nobody had thought to exhibit savoury items, apart from hamburgers and sausages on the barbecue, and I'm sticking to my quasi-vegetarian beliefs for now. The roads leading in and out of the village were lined with parked cars; nobody who is anybody walks where I live. But the ludicrous part of it all is that, for all the traction and horsepower in their 4x4 off-roaders, they couldn't have travelled to any of the places I had visited that day.

Shares in misfortune

Life isn't all bad all of the time, and although I found life in the cube strange, the security section omnipresent, and my colleagues over-dependent upon email, I at least was able to spend most of my spare time satisfying some of my curiousity about what is out there in the great big user-created mess we call the internet. I was once again becoming fascinated not with the mysteries of missing mountaineers or sunken submarines, but with the seething interest that these generated amongst people who now had a medium by which they could quickly publish their theories, no matter how odd or out of line they might be.

I wandered across a website one day while I was sitting in my cube, waiting for a batch of software to finish compilation checks. I can't even remember the search string I had typed in, it was probably something to do with the Everest mountaineers or the Hunley, but I found myself looking through an intriguing page about a group of European Gypsies trying to sue IBM for complicity in the holocaust. It seems that a spin-off company sold the Nazi authorities sets of census machines which used punched cards to record, collate,and analyse the data collected by thousands of officials in the 1930's. This information was subsequently used to determine who was sent to which camp, and what was then done to them once they were out of sight behind the barbed wire.

IBM were resolutely defending their position by arguing that the company was a completely seperate entity, and therefore not under their control, or in any way their responsibility. The gypsies, using research by several historians, felt that they could show that the parent company not only knew exactly what the spin-off company was formed for, but also knew week by week throughout the war exactly what was still going on behind the war frontiers. The Swiss court also felt that there was enough to it of interest, and on appeal, granted the gypsies leave to proceed with their case.

I showed the article to my cube-colleagues, explaining a bit of the technical background for them since they were all too young to have heard of Hollerith cards. Their reaction was uniform; it was wrong to hold IBM accountable for something that had happened so long ago, and it was also wrong to hold a mere manufacturer of computing equipment responsible for the actions of those who bought and used the equipment.

I explained that the last argument was not as simple as it first appeared, because these early computers required teams of engineers to service them, and to add extra codes to them whenever the German authorities required an extra classification for those souls they were sorting and slaughtering in their camps, and since the equipment was located within many of the camps, the visiting engineers must have known a good deal more about the purpose of those camps than mere salespersons.

It didn't convince my cube-colleagues, they still felt the court case was wrong on a matter of principle. A car-maker was not liable for the death or injuries caused by its creations, neither was a gunsmith. I wondered for a while whether this same concept explained how none of the large Japanese corporations had ever been called to account for alleged abuses of prisoners of war. Whatever the reasons, there are still plenty of people around with grievances against remnants of the German and Japanese governments and corporations, and despite time winnowing their numbers, they won't lie down and go quietly into history.

A couple of things happened recently that got me thinking about the concept of associative guilt, firstly the case of the shareholders in the company who purchased products from a second company which carried out animal testing. Are such shareholders obliged to question the morality and ethics of their company, or are they able to invest their money and pocket their returns whilst claiming innocence of all wrongdoing? Initially, I felt much as my cube-colleagues did about IBM and the census machinery. Then I read about the GTA affair.

GTA, or Grand Theft Auto, was a computer game in which the players stole cars and raced them through the city streets trying to evade police and rival gangs. A crack for the game surfaced in Germany, whereby the game could be made to display scenes in which some of the characters had sex with each other. In case you're still stuck at the keyboard playing Dungeons and Dragons, modern graphic computer games are getting incredibly realistic, super-realistic in the case of some of the special effects, and these sex scenes would probably have been a lot more interesting than a typical triple-x video. The uproar in America was considerable, and many games stores decided not to go to all the trouble of putting the game on the top shelves and insisting on purchasers providing proof of age. They stopped selling it.

No action was taken against the company responsible for creating the game by any outside bodies; there was no censorship imposed on them, no corporate penalties were imposed. Instead, the shareholders of the company took action against the board, citing loss of profits resulting from the retail outlets pulling the game from their shelves.

Does this mean then, that the shareholders in a company have a duty to scrutinise the actions of the company to see if any ethical or moral actions might compromise the company's financial state? If so, does their taking no action imply that they are happy with and accept the board's decisions? In which case, are they not also in some way complicit in the actions of the board? Because if so, then I feel that they must also accept some of the responsibility for the actions of the company.

"We were only following orders" was not accepted as a defence for war-crimes, and I feel that "We were only collecting our dividends" is similarly unacceptable.

Back in the juggling game again

For two years I tried to live the dream, running a small web and phone-based business from home. The costs of running it exceeded my original estimates, and after the first few months I had to go out and do early-morning jobs to get enough money to feed myself and pay my own bills. After nearly a year of this dual existence I recognised I was beaten, and started trying to get back into the contract market. Apart from the obvious CV problem of a blank 2 years, I also faced a grim situation where there were too many applicants and too few vacancies. After 3 months of persistence I finally got a contract 50 miles away, at a rate half that I usually worked for. But at least I would be able to pay everything and keep bankruptcy off my list of life-experiences.

My new workplace was the largest open-plan office I have ever been in. It was the size of three football pitches laid end-to-end. I found it disconcerting to stand at my desk, which was at one end of the building, and look over rows and rows of partitions towards what was almost an horizon, without seeing anything that was identifiably another end wall.

I received a summons to visit security to get my pass, and walked into a room with an empty counter in front of me, a chair to my left, and a wall of lockers to my right.
"Sit on the chair and state your name", said a voice.
I sat, stated, and waited.
"There'll be a brief flash", said the voice, and there was.
"How do you spell your name?" the voice asked. I spelled.
"OK, your pass will be ready soon, enjoy your time here".
A small hatch opened in the lockers, and my pass was there. For all I knew the voice had come from a computer system. But the photograph was of me, and my name was written on it.

I sat in a cube, which contained three other people, each of whom sat in a corner facing away from the other occupants. In the centre of the cube was a round table, without any chairs. Alongside each of the computer desks was a long narrow locker with a top that folded up and away, exposing a single shelf about four feet long. I was told that I couldn't use the locker at my desk because it contained the regular occupant's stuff, and she would be back sometime soon. I would move to the desk space currently occupied by the contractor whom I was replacing once he had trained me and left.

I had parked my car in a free space behind a row which was marked 'Reserved for Visitors'. When I went out to it at lunchtime I found a large white notice on the windscreen, telling me to call security immediately. I went back inside and called the number.
"You've parked in the row reserved for visitors", I was told.
"But I thought that was the row in front of me".
"Both rows are reserved for visitors"
Since I wanted the work so badly I didn't ask why they hadn't labelled the second row similarly to the first row. I went back out and moved the car.

My new job used email a lot, so much that I found a third of my time was taken up with reading emails and filing them in various places. I discovered that our cube communicated almost exclusively by emails. Very rarely, they would all swing round on their swivel chairs and converge on the round table for a face-to-face discussion. After the third such discussion one of them realised I hadn't been added to the correct email server and was not seeing the message calling for a conversation. I soon realised that nobody spoke to anybody else without an email request first.
"Just like 'Dead Like Me'", I said, and then had to explain to them the similarity with George's new job, sitting in a small office with one other occupant, who only communicated by the email system, even when George had spoken directly to the back of his shiny head.
"Cool", they said.

I left my little notebook computer on the desktop by accident one evening in the second week, and next morning found it gone, and a curt note telling me to report to security. This time there was somebody waiting behind the counter.
"All laptops are meant to be locked away at night", I was told. I explained that I was hot-desking and didn't have the key to the locker.
"Then you can't be allowed to use the company laptops," he said.
"It's my own computer".
That got a reaction. He phoned the IT security department to get instructions, and was told to virus-check it.
"You won't be able to," I told him, "It's not a Windows computer."
He phoned IT security again, and was told to make me fill out and sign a form stating that any security breach, Information Loss, or other damaging event resulting from the misuse of my non-standard computer was absolutely my responsibility.

Within two weeks I had met security three times, and I should have only have met them once to get my photo taken. I walked back to my cube feeling that I was now a known troublemaker.

The long-term absentee returned, and I transferred to my new desk, displacing the outgoing contractor to a spare slot in an adjacent cube. The returnee spent all her first day on the phone ringing round old friends. It was the first time I heard anyone actually say "24/7". I had been out of touch for too long in my home business.

I began to notice the little personal touches in cubes as I walked in and out of the building, and decided to bring in some of my photos. I pinned them up to the sound-deadening material. The next morning they were gone. I broke the rule about emailing first, and announced to everyone "My photos have gone!"
"It's cool", said my trainee.
"No it's not," I said, "It's extremely hot, heavy, sweaty, far-from-cool. Who's walked off with them?"
It was security. I was not supposed to put up personal items in my cube. I sat there facing the blank wall of lockers where I had posed for the security pass photo, and asked why other cubes had photos up.
"They've been here long enough for us to get to know them," was the reply.
"And in my short time here I've only been called to security four times. What do I have to do to get you to know me well enough?"
"Not what you've been doing so far. We're keeping an eye on you."

But someone else in the department had spoken up for me, and I was allowed to put my photos back up. Over the next few weeks I rotated them every other day, and was secretly cheered to see how many people would stop by our cube just to see what the changes where. But despite that, I was not fitting in to this enormous Happy-Time as well as I had hoped I would; it was turning out to be all the worst parts of Dead Like Me without any of the humour. As the weeks reached out towards the end of my contract I began to look for a way out.

Coincidentally, a large crow or raven on the outside of the building began looking for a way in. I first spotted him launching himself from the spiral fire escape and cannoning into the plate glass floor-to-ceiling windows. I walked over to the adjacent pane and looked through it at him, wondering if he was affected by radio waves or disturbed by a reflection. He stopped doing it when I watched him, but when I went back to my cube he started doing it again. A day later, he changed tactics, and was walking along the gravel at the foot of the glass, pecking at the the flashing that covered the junction of the glass and the concrete base. I phoned security and told them that a large bird was trying to find a way into the building.
"Who's calling?" they asked.
I told them. There was a pause, and a heavy sigh.
"Would you please only call us for genuine security issues".

I got my way out after a lucky conversation, returning to an old client at the end of my contract period. In one of my last few lunch half-hours, I walked around the outside of the building and put some bread down by the fire escape for the bird. On my last day, as I cleared out the locker and un-pinned my photos from the cube wall, the phone rang. It was security.
"You've been observed feeding birds outside the building."
"It was only one bird, it was the one I reported to you for trying to find a way into the building."
"Putting down bread is a security violation, it encourages rats and vermin. You must stop doing it."
"And if I can't control myself?"
"Then we'll cancel the access rights on your card".
"Has anybody told you that I'm leaving?"
The voice at the other end sounded almost sad. Perhaps I had been the one bright spark in their otherwise boring existence.

The limits of my Geekiness are almost miniscule

I'm a gadget-fanatic, trapped in the body of a ham-fisted Luddite who hates having to throw away his old routines and learn new ones. Except when pushed, either hard, or in the right direction. This post is a bit of a lament for a lost toy, because I broke it at the beginning of this week, and although I've now got a new gadget, it's different from the old one, and I'm still missing the comfortable ways of doing things I had learnt.

I spend my life doing something new every 18 months, on average. This means that I have to have a strong set of routines to guide me through the shocks and upsets of each new contract. It is a paradox that this regular change in work means I have become a creature of very strong habits, which I cling to like the contents of a life-raft survival pack. I sometimes hold a muster to make sure that they're all still there and in good working order, and I won't let friends borrow them, not even for an afternoon. I'd rather they took my tools. I change my habits when they've got so worn that I can no longer keep myself from falling through the holes in them. (I've just checked to be sure that I haven't confused my habits with my socks and pants).

But sometimes something new comes along that just screams to be taken on board, even though the life-raft is almost awash. A shirt-pocket computer? That just *has* to be in my survival kit, doesn't it?

This started a few months ago when I had to give my mobile to my partner because she had just given her mobile to her daughter who had given her mobile to someone she had met in a club and for some reason hadn't been able to give herself to in order to get it back. I didn't use the mobile all that much anyway, all I seemed to do was say to it "I'm sorry, I'm driving at the moment, can I call you back?"

I was due a replacement phone on the terms of the contract I had, and was getting tired of the standard type of small screen and teeny button layout. So I got something that a couple of friends had already got; a palm-sized computer that happened to have a phone built in.



It also happened to have an excellent camera, took videos, recorded sound, and played music files. The screen was the size of a credit card and it had a slide-out keyboard. It could connect to the mobile phone network, to another computer by an infra-red port, and to any WiFi networks we wandered into that didn't have a password set. What more could I need? (A password-cracking program possibly).



It ran a version of Windows, which could be a good thing, or not. It didn't have to boot, and just to reassure me that it was as good as the real Windows, it locked up and needed a reset within a day of my getting it. It had Outlook, Pocket Excel, and Pocket Word, which meant I could write things on it at odd moments. Also, it had a notes feature that allowed me to scribble onto the screen and challenge it to translate my handwriting into characters. So far I've won every single game.



The slide-out keyboard was too much of a challenge for me, so at least it won something. I found that the software keyboard, where you tap with the stylus away at a miniature keyboard at the bottom of the screen, was good, but slow. Strangely, the writing I did at such a slow pace was sometimes better than that carried out at full speed into a normal keyboard. It was reminiscent of the old tappity-tap of the typewriter where you struggled more on not making mistakes than on getting the words out faster than the brain could produce them.




But sometimes speed is good, so I bought an accessory for it, a folding keyboard that talks to the XDA2 by the infra red port. The keyboard ran on two small batteries that I expected to run out on a weekly basis, but I still haven't replaced them a year after unfolding the keyboard for the first time and typing "Hello Drongo".




Together, these two became a major source of solace to me during long boring days of testing software; I wrote as I waited for tasks to complete or machines to restart after having found yet another thing the developer hadn't anticipated the user would do to their program. I logged my hours into a spreadsheet on it, and generated invoices, which I then synchronised with my computer at home and mailed off for payment.

I ignored most of its other features; I rarely used it as a phone, I texted nobody, I didn't even use it for connecting to the net or emailing. I took videos and photos with it, including the wall with the inverted artist's works featured in a recent blog post.




Pressure is always a good thing, never mind worrying about stress and nervous tension, life begins with a scream and a wail and usually ends with a groan or a sigh, and between those two utterances there is a whole cacophony of noises running from pain to pleasure, (there is a difference, you know). Silence means indifference. I was pressured into trying to get some form of internet connection during the weeks because the weekends were just not long enough.

So I opened my wallet and paid for a monthly email capacity of 4Meg, (which I doubt will be enough but it was one of their standard options). Of course it isn't perfect for the task, but it even handled an attached picture sent to me to show just how much I was monopolising somebody's inbox. In return I sent a photo, taken with the XDA, to show just how boringly ugly I could be if I looked at a lens and tried to smile.

It isn't an ideal way to roam both the world and the net; for instance, I cannot read my blog. I can see the dark brown patterned background fill the screen, and then wait in vain for the beige centre panel to load with the text. The pocket version of Internet Explorer has decided that what I post is not what I ought to be looking at. And pocket Outlook emails do not seem to indent and properly mark the replies to replies to replies that seem to characterise the emails we need to exchange. Two of us are getting very confused and it is possible that we have inadvertently mixed up our minds with each other as a result of an intense week's communication.

But it's better than sitting dreaming alone.


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Loss of body, gain of soul

Six weeks ago I changed some of my habits. I was typically spending between 40 and 50 pounds in four nights in the pub on meals and a couple of beers each evening, after walking for an hour or two. I bought a mountain bike and necessary accessories for £180, and stopped going to the pub.

In six weeks I have therefore saved myself somewhere between 240 and 300 pounds, or between 60 and 120 after deducting the cost of the bike. I have managed to lose half a stone in those six weeks, that's just over a pound a week. I have rediscovered that part of me that won't give up when presented with difficulties.

I haven't lost any money alongside the weight loss. If I had been going to the gym each evening I would have been spending gym fees in return for the vanishing pounds. Put out the pounds, and then put out the pounds. But the bike is mine to keep, and as I have now recovered the cost of it, the further savings are also mine to keep.

I have bought one other piece of equipment to help me with my program of regeneration; it cost me 4.99, and is simple enough to be carried in a pocket and used anywhere there is enough space. A skipping rope, perfect for developing coordination, and generating a type of step aerobics without the need to find a flight of steps. Also, unlike the bike, which demands that all the senses are keenly alert to listen for cars and other cyclists coming up behind, I can wear headphones whilst skipping and hop to the beat.

I'm adding this piece about the skipping rope because a friend of mine is bemoaning the fact that she can't afford to go to the gym and get fit again. I could afford it, if I chose, but I prefer to use everyday objects for my training machinery; large gates and strong fences for upper-body exercises, and skipping ropes instead of a walking machine. How on earth has the human race developed from being able to keep fit by using the world around them into having to visit a hall full of specialised machinery? Are we growing fearfull of the natural world, afraid to visit the empty spaces around us? Have we become so addicted to machines that we find we cannot do anything now that doesn't involve cleaming chrome and softly-polished aluminium?

Of course I'm using machines myself, a bicycle, a skipping rope, boots, gates. But I can see there's a difference between those four pieces of equipment and the rows of specialised machines in the gym. There are drawbacks, of course. You don't get headwinds in the gym. You don't have insects fly with unerring accuracy into your eyes, or into your mouth; I'm undecided which is worse. And there is no-one else to smell your sweat. But I'm learning to live with these drawbacks.

Troubles with a Donkey

(or two)

I live in an area of designated outstanding natural beauty. It contains a decrepit industrial estate in what is left of an old dairy, a sewage works, Nissan huts left over from the last war full of reclaimed house parts, a yard full of derelict and dismantled tractors, and a good old-fashioned scrapyard. The scrapyard and I are old friends, I have visited it for years, even before I moved to the area. I used to traipse around it during visits to sister and brothers who lived in that area, wandering peacefully through lines of old cars and vans and other assorted bits of rusting metal interspersed with fascinating oddities such as the old glass-fibre speedboat that used to scream "Save me, Save me!" every time I passed it. Now it just whimpers quietly, it knows I don't have the time or money.

The scrapyard has been here almost as long as there were cars to rust, and it has passed from the father to his sons. I love to walk along the road beside it on my way up to the rolling fields and wooded hills that are home to the flowers and the deer that I have been photographing. I set out yesterday with my camera and a water bottle, intending to climb the steep hill and visit some lakes I had noticed on the map. I was almost at the turning to the owner’s house when I met the donkeys, ambling quietly along the road towards me.



Once in a while the donkeys make their way out from behind the electric fence and go for a stroll. I have twice gone out at half past six in the morning to set off for work and found them happily chewing the plants in the next door front garden. Now, as then, I called up the owner and said I was chatting with his donkeys and shouldn’t they have a road tax disc on them if they were going to be on the public highway? I herded the donkeys onto the grass verge, but as always, that was as far as they would be driven. We waited for the owner to come along.




The donkeys have been with the scrapyard for as long as I have known it. They originally belonged to Reg, the crane driver who loaded the piles of crushed metal onto lorries and lived in an old double-decker bus on the more overgrown side, close to the pleading speedboat. His woman and her daughter lived nearby in a caravan, preferring a more normal home. Reg had the largest beer belly I had ever seen, and made sure it was always kept full. He died while I was up in London, and I only heard about the funeral from my brother when I paid my next visit. A large number of people had turned up to see him off, and not just drinking friends. Reg had been a county-class cross-country runner in his younger days.

He left his double-decker bus to the scrapyard, from whence it had originally came, and he also left the donkeys. The owner decided he couldn’t see them go to a sanctuary or other place for pets who have lost their human companions, so he took them over. They were very effective guard animals, almost too effective, for they didn’t bark on approach as dogs would do, but would creep quietly up behind an intruder and then cough directly into their ear, or sometimes bray at the tops of their voices. Several would-be thieves suffered injuries dashing headlong into the darkness in fright. In those days thieves hadn’t learnt the art of suing for injuries received during commission of a crime, but as the modern age of litigation dawned the owner began to fear for claims against his business and put the donkeys out to pasture in the grassy common land around the outside of the blackthorn hedge that kept the cars from straying off on their own. Now at least 50 years old, they were slower and quieter than they had been in their heyday when they roamed the avenues between the mangled metal heaps.

The owner arrived as I finished taking a few photos of the donkeys, and we chatted for a while as he inspected the electric fence, which had been caught by a passing vehicle and dragged down. The donkeys had realised it was no longer live and blithely walked straight through it again and trotted off down the road.



“They’ve decided they’d rather go and eat my lawn,” he said, as we watched them waddle down the road.

“OI! Left, left!, he shouted, as they reached the turning to his drive. They stopped for a moment, looked left, looked at each other, and then carried on down the lane.

“I’ll have to get the car and herd them back,” he muttered, and walked off.

I carried on along my way, passing the hedge that last year had been neatly laid into a pleasant plaited shape, and was almost at the turning when I heard a screech of car tires. I also thought I had heard a thump, but couldn’t be certain if it was before or after the short skidding noise. Fearing for the donkeys in the narrow lane I started to run back. I got as far as the top of the road to the scrapyard, from where I could see the empty lane, and also the busy main road. Cars were still going down the hill, so I had to assume that the main road had not had yet another accident. I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing one or both of the donkeys dead in the road, and turned round to resume my walk, accepting the fact that in the evening I might be sitting down to write a requiem for a donkey. Later, as I heard sirens wailing, I began to hope that it had after all been a normal overtaking incident on the busy main road, and not someone being taken to hospital with whiplash injuries after meeting an unexpected animal in a quiet country lane.

With the stoppage, the brief run back, and the eventual visit to the muddy stretches of water that had flattered on the map, I was out for all of the afternoon. I walked back past the useless electric fence, the old horsebox body that served as their stables, and past the turning to the owner’s house, without seeing any sight of the donkeys, and mercifully saw no blood on the road or skid marks. When I set off a little later to go and get some computer parts I passed a crumpled car being winched onto a recovery vehicle, and saw the two sets of curving marks rushing towards each other, and the depression in the grassy swathe beside the tarmac where at least one car had ploughed through the waist-high tangle. It had been a people incident after all, and the fifty-year old donkeys would carry on grazing placidly on grass and front-garden flowers according to their fancy.