All Misty-Eyed

As revealed yesterday we’ve just spent four days on Dartmoor. Sort of our summer holiday. Only a bit early.

And sort of not, as Beck went on a training course we only spent a couple of hours a day in each other’s company.

It was a training course in sound. Which, as near as I could tell, involved wandering around a forest with a myriad of recording equipment ranging from a large plastic satellite dish to a fluffy microphone and oversized headphones with an earnest look on your face.

I’d been planning to some hiking across the moors.

On Wednesday I was even becoming concerned about it being too hot and was rummaging around the house for extra water bottles and sun cream.

But, of course…

Four days of persistent drizzle that only let up for it rain properly, mist that gave you a maximum visibility of about forty metres and a minimum of your feet and a severe weather warning that forecast flash floods when we were right on top of the River Dart. All this rather dampened my dream of romping along deserted paths; just me and the hills, feeling the spring of grass under my boots. “Why hello, sheep,” I’d say with a wink.

I still went walking - it was either that or lurk around a youth hostel all day - and I could well have been finding the solitude I’d fantasised about. I could also have been meandering up the middle of Exeter High Street for all I could tell. Is that a cattle feed or a special offer display for Burtons? Who knows.

Especially if a herd of cows had crapped its way up the street about thirty minutes before which, given that this is Devon, is more than feasible.

Ah, I shouldn’t be so sarcastic. It’s a lovely part of the world.

I just couldn’t see any of it.

For example:

I crossed the lane and jumped over the style into a field. There’s a handy post with two path arrows. I check the map, decide which one I need and strain through the mist to see where it goes.

No luck.

So, I take a compass bearing off the map and set off into the murk.

Thirty minutes later and I’m thinking I should be reaching the top of the hill before long and suddenly a wall appears.

H’mm. Wasn’t expecting that. I walked up and down the wall for a few minutes trying to find a crossing point and avoid the barbed wire on the other side. Nothing. Not a gap, a ladder nor a style and I can’t see where it’s supposed to be on the map.

Thinking altitude might help I clambered onto the top of the wall, but then I couldn’t even see the ground, so I got back down.

A gauze bush attacks my face.

A sarcastic sheep baaas out of the mist.

After twenty minutes trying to work out where the fuck I am, where I go next and, indeed, which direction I came from I give up and started to romp towards the road might, possibly, be.

Five minutes later I came across a rather well marked path. Deciding that’s got to be better than walking the however-many miles around the hill, with the hostel just on the other side, I wander off down it.

It turns out that the path marked on my map had been moved several degrees to the right to allow walkers to pass by a couple of standing stones. An experience I was, obviously, oblivious to. So, thanks a lot, whoever sets where public foot paths go. That really helps.

As I stomped back down the other side of the hill it did occur to me that I’d just had a rather convenient metrological metaphor for, well, pretty much anything. There must have been dozens of ways I could have used it to cast opinions across various subjects, but I thought I right it straight instead.

Bit fed up of not being able to see clearly.