Mellow at Enton Mill

Usually I prefer walks to have some specific thing or feature to aim at, but despite the degree of inertia one needs to overcome, it's always worth while to change your surroundings, even if not by very  much, and even if there's nothing very remarkable at the end. The mere variation has good mental effects and therefore physical ones. Today my destination was Enton Mill, an extraordinarily picturesque range of buildings which Pevsner managed to overlook completely - a 17th-century mill Tudorified in the early 1900s and augmented with a cottage or two. You can't get near the pools (well, not legitimately), but you can sit beneath the footpath sign by the side of the lane and eat your lunch if you happen to have one. And that was the focus of my walk today. The photo includes my tea perched on my knee, in honour of Dr Bones who inherited the ability to balance teacups (sometimes adding the saucer) in that position from her clergyman father. It was very unstable and I removed it as soon as the image was achieved.

As I sat munching my lovely sandwich prepared by John at the Swanvale Halt railway station kiosk I could see the brim of my hat bobbing up and down and it struck me how funny I must look, a middle-aged man all alone sat snacking on a bank, and also that I didn't mind this. I had a vague memory of what must be a cartoon I have seen in which a character sits in a park or something, doing the same thing, and of having felt affection for that character, a reaction which must have had something to do with the story, whatever it was. I could see myself as childlike, oddly.

If we are lucky, perhaps we become more childlike as we grow old, but it's a childlikeness which incorporates a sort of awareness children themselves can't have. We are indulgent and forgiving towards children, and if we can glimpse the childlikeness in ourselves we might also be tender towards our silliness. From that it's an easy step to discovering the same tenderness for others too.