part of Devon isn’t perfect either. Just like other parts of the British countryside it has litter and barbed wire and and recklessly driven cars and motorbikes and horrendous fuckwads who put their dogs’ shit in plastic bags then leave the bags on tree stumps and in hedges. It contains people too, contrary to popular belief: quite a lot of them (I’m not counting the horrendous fuckwads who bag up and leave the dogshit as people). Without ever really intending to do so, on the walks I take nearer my house I regularly update an internal top three of regularly spotted walking strangers. As of May 2016, this read – and had read for several weeks – as follows:
1. Lycra Santa
2. Man Who Narrates Events To His Bulldog As They Occur
3. Woman Who Never Says Hello Back To Me And Smiles Like She Has A Little Secret
May is the time when the bluebells in the woods near my house take over from the primroses. In a path on Lustleigh Cleave redolent of old faery activity – the kind without gossamer wings or wands – I ate one of the last ones of the year, on Suzi’s urging, and it tasted not unpleasantly of flour and untart lemon. In Devon – less so than in the part of Norfolk where I used to live, where they are far thinner on the ground – I think of primroses as heralding spring, more than the daffodils that emerge in late January, which are often just early tester daffodils, sent out on suicide missions. In the folk song ‘The Blacksmith’, written at an unknown point by an unknown author, but brought into the modern age transcendentally by Planxty and the lesser-heard artistically bold initial incarnation of Steeleye Span during the early 1970s, the narrator sings of her lost metal-forger-love’s ‘good black billycock’ hat ‘crowned with primroses’, and I can see how such attire might be an extra bit of salt in the wound of losing him. She also sings that, were she with the blacksmith, she’d ‘live for ever’. Part of the magic of primroses is that you never see them die: in decline they are simply subsumed amid the growth spurts of lankier vegetation until one day it hits you that they’re no longer there.
Near a bank of them still fighting valiantly for space beside a fish-ladder tributary that makes a no-nonsense dash down to the Dart, I ran into my gardener friend Andy.
‘Oh, I was just thinking about you,’ Andy said.
‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Why was that?’
‘Someone’s nicked a shopping trolley and dumped it down there on the path. I thought to myself, If Tom’s heading down here today, he’s going to walk straight into that.’
I was touched that Andy would think about my welfare in such a way. His comment was also perhaps indicative of the fact that I had now lived in this part of Devon long enough for my rampant doziness to have become fairly common local knowledge. My status as someone who is a very observant person in some ways goes hand in hand with my status as someone who is a very unobservant person in lots of others. Combine this with my short-sightedness, and if I’m walking the paths at the edge of my local town, Totnes, at the same time as someone I know, there’s a high probability that they’ll see me before I see them. This can present a problem. I’m always worried about being perceived to be ignoring friends or acquaintances when in fact I’m just off in my own myopic dream universe. But I can overcompensate too. When a well-dressed woman in late middle age walked down the river path towards me one day last spring with her arms stretched out in greeting I readied myself to say hello. Was she a friend’s mum I had been introduced to at the pub a few weeks ago? The industrious widow I did stone-row conservation up on the moor with two winters ago? As she got within a few feet of my face I realised that the answer was an emphatic no to both questions. I had definitely never met this person before.
‘Can you tell me,’ she asked, arms still open, then paused, and I got my geographical head on, poised to offer succinct directions – perhaps to the castle, or the wharf, or the medieval hall a couple of miles up the river, ‘whether Nietzsche was Russian or German?’
‘German,’ I answered.
‘Well done!’ she said and walked briskly on.
A few weeks later, buying avocados at the greengrocer’s, I ran into the woman again. She didn’t appear to recognise me from our previous encounter but asked me why it said ‘Traffic’ on the T-shirt I was wearing. I told her that they were one of my favourite bands.
‘Do you go to Glastonbury to see them?’ she asked.
‘No, I haven’t been for years,’ I said. ‘And they split up in 1974.’
‘Is that your wife?’ she asked, pointing to a woman I’d never seen before, who was standing in the doorway, minding her own business.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t have one of those.’
‘And if you keep wearing T-shirts like that, you never will!’ she said, and walked off.
It has been claimed by some people reasonably close to me that I have a knack of attracting society’s uninhibited exiles and eccentrics while going about my business. I refute this allegation, just as I did when my girlfriend made it in 2012 on a Norfolk towpath, seconds before a stranger carrying a large fish ran excitedly up to us and said, ‘Please can you take a photo of me and my fish?’ to me. Spring does tend to have a giddiness which brings out a certain unsuppressed behaviour in many sections of the Devonshire population though, and I often find myself close witness to it. It was in spring that a dreadlocked lady in a smock approached me in the garden of my local pub and showed me a stain on the tray she was carrying which she claimed was the representation of her previous warrior self from untold centuries past. It was also in spring – this latest one, again – when Robert introduced himself on a sunken lane a few miles from my house.
The weather was bright, though cool, the day I met Robert, and a lot of people were out. I’d already passed Lycra Santa and Man Who Narrates Events To His Bulldog As They Occur by the time I curved up a long sunken lane leading away from the south side of Totnes. ‘It’s cold, isn’t it?’ I had overheard Man Who Narrates Events To His Bulldog As They Occur saying to his bulldog. ‘I bet you wish you had warm clothes. We’re going to the supermarket soon, then we’re going to John’s house. This tree just here is weird.’ But by the time I was in the long sunken lane I was very much alone, protected by its quiet green banks from the clanking of the industrial estate half a mile away and the slick gravelly zip of traffic along the Newton Abbot road. I passed a tall ivy-fringed stone trough in the hedged bank that always looked like a risky promise of an alternate dimension, then made my way over the brow of the hill down to where the walls of the holloway get more rocky and subterranean and turn a dreamlike dark green. A man walking in the opposite direction stopped in my path, grinning. Seeing that there were fewer than eleven visible buildings nearby, I said hello and he returned my greeting. In my early days as a countryside rambler I’d be tentative about saying hello to strangers – I’d try to assess them first, see if they were ‘Hello!’ kind of people. Now I tend to say it to everyone as it makes life simpler and less angst-ridden. Most people will say it back, and if they don’t they’re probably a serial killer, and you’ll be dead soon anyway. The exception to this rule is if you’re in an area where there are more than eleven visible buildings nearby: the time in 2011, for example, when I walked past another lone man in his thirties on a walk on the outskirts of Long Stratton in Norfolk, and the two of us couldn’t quite work out if we were in a countryish enough area to say ‘Hello!’ so mumbled a half ‘Hi!’ to one another, then shambled off, saturated in an awkwardness that would probably still be with us, in some small but significant way, for the rest of our lives.
The man on the sunken lane, fiftyish and dressed in very colourful and expensive-looking branded outdoor clothing, seemed keen not only to say hello but to stop and chat. He introduced himself as Robert. ‘I saw you over on the other side of the river earlier,’ he told me. ‘I said to myself, He’s not a walker, dressed in that duffel coat, but . . . you are! Look at you.’
I followed his instructions and looked at me. I didn’t wear my duffel coat all that often while out on hikes but had never viewed it as a serious impediment to getting about in the countryside on foot. To Robert the fact that someone should be