It used to be my playground.
It used to bring me joys.
It used to feel like freedom.
Now it just annoys.
I guess there will be some people who will look at the bars of what has become my cage and tell me to shut up and be grateful for what I’ve got.
I’m not grateful.
It sucks.
I believed myself to be a free man lucky enough to be born into a free country in the free world.
Not everyone is so fortunate. I spare a thought for them.
My freedom, and many of yours, has been chipped away. Laws passed covertly in the guise of emergency powers to deal with COVID-19 will remain long after nobody cares about COVID anymore. If BJ and his gang have their way, you’ll not be able to protest in the name of winning back your freedom either. Of particular concern to me, as someone who enjoys the countryside (having been brought up in it in a state of poverty nobody believes exists outside of cities and towns) are the clauses related to trespass in that particular bill.
What was earned after a long legal battle following the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass of 1932, is about to be stolen back away.
In Scotland, the rights of the land user (walkers for example) supersede the rights of the landowner - the guiding principle is like that of the Aborigines of Australia or the Māori of New Zealand, we belong to the land, it does not belong to us.
South of Hadrian’s wall, things couldn’t be more opposite. Land ownership is everything, and the push to make it the exclusive asset of the already rich makes itself more noticeable every day.
Houses are selling at record speed. Who do you think is buying up all this property at a time when unemployment, and consequent inability to secure a mortgage on an average house price that outstrips the average wage by a ratio of 8.4: 1?
In England, you better hope and pray you are already set financially - because if not, you are on a trend, whether you recognise it or not, that will see you joining the queue at the food bank along with everyone else - hoping that the charity of a disappearing middle class is by some miracle going to feed you.
BJ and his gang are taking everything for themselves. The shares, the money, the property they are sweeping up; its not going to be enough.
This is what goes round and round in my head as I jog round and round the lake. It looks nice. But it is not.
Since lockdown, everyone and their dog seems to have bought another dog. Nobody seems to have given a thought to training them.
The ducklings on the lake and the little baby coots vanish one by one into the jaws of uncontrollable lurchers, spaniels, beagles, collies and terriers that have also been spotted trying to rip the throat out of a nearby sheep. The owners even have the audacity to say things like “don’t have a go at me, it’s not my fault” when more responsible and socially conscious people challenge their behaviour.
They bag up their shit, some of them, but then leave it on the path. The whole picture of dog ownership meaning not a jot to them. They just saw, it, wanted it, bought it, ruined it. Now thousands of these ill-considered purchases are up for sale on t’internet “through no fault of its own”, at extortionate prices because that’s what their idiot owners paid the puppy farmers in the first place. I say with confidence the dogs are farmed, the collies are all the same age, and the beagles, and the spaniels...
I jog on in glorious sunshine across the nice grassy bit between the lakes and woodland paths at our end of the Moss towards the refuge of the golf course.
There are public paths that cross the fairways and a fun little loop around the tree lined edges where it feels more like a dance with the silver birches than anything resembling a run. Not many people bother to walk down here.
It offers no shelter from the idiots today. My nice run around the golf course ruined by the presence of, well, golfers; the deluded aspirational knocking tiny balls around an extended lawn and thinking that somehow doing that will gain them access to the riches of BJ’s club. I’m not judging all golfers, just the ones I saw at Moss Valley today. Why bother with the gym (clearly) if you can’t be arsed to walk from tee to green?
Young, muscular, fit looking lads, with legs apparently too weak to move between the bunkers without the aid of a golf cart. Of course, I know it’s not about the legs. There are plenty of older players walking. It is more about the need to demonstrate their social status by showing everyone they have the means to afford to hire a cart that neither of them needs.
Boris isn’t looking lads, if he was, he wouldn’t care. You can’t afford a caddy to carry your clubs for you. Access to the gang denied.
Out onto the roads I go, the only way I can go now because the footpath at the end of the golf course still hasn’t been cleared. Between the hedges my sense of entrapment is at its peak. There is not a soul around me, not a single car passes me as I trot on down this quiet country lane, yet I feel their presence constantly. I feel the threat of them. Constantly I check over my shoulder, timing to perfection my switch from left to right and back again, matching the meanderings of the bends to my minimum risk of getting killed by drivers who’ve become accustomed to there being nobody on the lanes.
Lockdown has ruined peoples driving skills. Of that I’m in no doubt. The indicator stick is there, but it’s function no longer known. Likewise the ability to know which lane to be in on a roundabout, or stop at a pedestrian crossing, or slow down for a speed bump, or even see a pedestrian in a supermarket car park. If ministers were to notice (they won’t) how terrible everyone’s driving has become, and I was forced to take my driving test again in a push to bring driving standards back, that is something I’d be happy to do. 40 to 50mph in a 30mph zone seems to be the norm now for (often) obese women in Nissan Jukes and Kia Sportages*, perhaps not everywhere, but certainly in Wrexham it’s a trend I can see leading to someone getting killed.
*Other completely inept drivers are also available.
A climb up through rough, unpretty, unkempt woods; nature’s claw-back of these once industrial lands is what I was seeking out today, a little bit of hill work to get the old legs strong again. Also the mind that is tasked with keeping those pistons moving when all they want to do is cave-in to the will of the gradient the lungs are struggling to get up.
This struggle is what will keep me safe from COVID-19.
I will not sit back, allowing my heart and lungs to weaken through my own choice not to exercise.
I will not sit back, allowing my waist to expand and my weight to increase to the point where my own choice not to exercise becomes a threat to my own health.
I will not sit back, allowing myself to sink into self-neglect and self-abuse then expecting the NHS to save me from the consequences of it.
I will not sit back, allowing myself to believe that a jab with long term consequences unknown can offer me more protection than the protection I give myself by staying mobile, eating well and keeping myself fit.
I can run up this ‘ere hill.
But I don’t like it.
Reaching the peak of it means returning to the madness of the Moss. Then work, to do a shift that starts at 2pm when I believed my time of working shifts was done.
LOCKDOWN ruined everything.
Not COVID!
My mind cannot move past the fact that COVID takes out only those that nature would take out anyway. Lions don’t attack the strongest zebra; they separate the weak. Birds don’t worry about feeding the runt, they focus on the strong; continuation of the species best left to those with the best chance of survival.
I am a heathen. I am a naturalist. I am a pagan. I make no excuses for what I say.
Globally, we have made entirely the wrong choice - putting everyone on lockdown to protect the elderly (who will soon die anyway) and those who have sat back - those who don’t run up the hill and who do nothing to protect themselves.
Out into the open fields. Space. Fresh air. Views. I can even see Hope Mountain and the memories it holds. My son is over there. I can see him too.
I used to like this place. Not anymore.
We used to say the best thing about running is how easy it is to do. No fuss, no kerfuffle, just put your trainers on and go.
But then... lockdown.
You forced to me to run and walk round this patch over and over and over again. You didn’t let me go anywhere else. You squeezed us all, hundreds of us, into the same 4 or 5 acres of ground and expected COVID not to spread – whilst completely empty hillsides sat little more than 20 minutes away.
We sacrificed our future to protect our past.
We neglected our children to protect our parents.
Are we ourselves still children? F.F.S. Are we adults still dependent on our folks?
Perhaps the choices our UK Government has made have nothing to do with our dependence on our parents, but their dependence on our parent’s vote?
We forgot completely, perhaps conveniently, the real crises in our world.
Overpopulation - we had the answer dropped into our hands and we didn’t go along with it.
Climate change - main cause; overpopulation - we had the answer in our hands.
Obesity - the NHS was straining under the weight of it (pun totally intended) - we had the answer in our hands; but we made them fear leaving the house and bombarded them with adverts for Just Eats.
Mental Health - we locked these people in their homes and left them to their own devices with their own thoughts.
I’d wager everything I own that there will not be the same effort to keep these people alive as we have made to save the fatties and the old.
LOCKDOWN.
The ultimate failure to look at everything as a whole.
All of our children’s lives will be worse than our own.
Because of this.
Was that what you wanted for them when you first held that little bundle of hope in your arms?
Yes, my run from my front door now has become my cage.
You (Mark Drakeford in particular) forced me to stay within the boundaries of this pathetically restrictive small distance from home.
This is what you’ve done to me.
I am trapped here in this open space with the endless noise of my own thoughts. I do not exaggerate, that’s exactly how my run now feels.
Trapped. Caged. Bound. Gagged.
Well, we’re not really supposed to talk about any of this stuff are we?
Its unfashionable and it is frowned upon these days to do anything so bold as to express an opinion of your own.
I might as well stay in the cage.