The title makes it sound as if I own considerably more land than I do. I do not. There are gardens, fences and other people’s gardens between me and Sheldon Country Park, and depending on the time of year there is enough leaf cover to pretend the houses are not there at all.
I walked the usual loop this morning before work. Nothing much to report, which is generally when I remember why I started putting these notes online in the first place.
Most local history arrives after the interesting bit has already gone. Somebody produces a photograph of a row of shops that was demolished twenty years ago and everyone immediately wants to know what stood next to what. Nobody thought to photograph it when it was simply there.
The park has the same problem, only more slowly. A gap in a hedge closes. A path becomes the path because enough people ignore the official one. A tree comes down in a storm and within a year you stop expecting it to be there. None of it qualifies as an event.
There were aircraft going over while I walked, of course. You stop looking up when you live here. I can sometimes tell something is different from the sound before I consciously notice an aircraft has changed direction, but most of the time it is just part of the background with the road and the dogs and somebody using a mower before nine in the morning.
The grass was still wet along the shaded stretch today. There were two runners, one man with a spaniel that had no interest in the direction he wanted to go, and three teenagers on bikes who appeared to have developed a constitutional objection to using the same side of the path as everyone else.
I took six photographs and deleted four. One of the remaining two is below. There is nothing special in it: path, grass, trees, the backs of houses just visible beyond.
That is more or less the point.