A February walk

Look let’s not dress it up. February is sombre. Singularly so - the hardest month of the year. In January there is still the warm, faintly pleasurable hangover of Christmas keeping you sleepy, happy to cook and nest and spend the evenings watching hot logs spitting in the grate, cupping endless mugs of tea, watching Pachinko (if you haven't seen it, cancel all plans - it's on AppleTV).

But in February the dull ache for light and flowers is beginning to set in, a longing for bare ankles and forearms. Impatience to get out of the dark shadows of winter. But there is still waiting to be done, weeks to go. The days are milky, heavy with mist, fragmented by the jagged shapes of skeletal trees.

But there is beauty in this time of the year. Working seasonally - strictly seasonally - has taught us that. The key is to get moving, to get the body going again. Actually, and forgive the vulgarity, but the trick is just to sweat. You can do this by paying to go to an expensive yoga studio, or a gym. Or you can just go about your usual daily tasks, but at TOP SPEED. Jess and I are devotees of the latter method, having never really been keen on organised / group exercise. Some vigorous cleaning or gardening does the trick beautifully. Or a two to three hour walk - but it has to be rapid.

We both live in the same leafy suburb now on the western fringes of London where the river Thames snakes its meandering way out towards Oxford where it (at some point?) becomes the Isis. It is a good place for walking here. On a map we are sandwiched between the historic royal hunting parks, two huge daubs of green. There are a lot of ancient gnarled oak trees, woods, water meadows. It has a strong Dickensian character, being on the river and the river being tidal from Richmond - at low tide it falls to a little stream trickling through a great throat of brown mud, at high tide you can get cut off entirely. It has a boaty feel, people are always on the water, pootling about. There are happy, wet dogs, kids in wellingtons. It's a nice place to live, like somewhere in a children's book illustrated by Shirley Hughes.

Walking is a meditation, a way to intentionally switch off but also just to get into a rhythm and enjoy being in the world. Perhaps yoga does this for some people. But I don't know any other activity that is so reliably invigorating and mindful as walking. One day I lace up my boots and leave home in thick mist. It is murky, bleak, a bone-chilling day, and colourless. I walk for three hours.

The river is almost invisible but I can feel it alongside me, a dark artery of deep water, slow moving, carrying along its ancient secrets. I pass the pub we often frequent in the summer. The front runs down to the river's edge in a small beach of golden shingle, empty now. I think of those warm days drinking cold beer, the tide coming in as we sip and talk so that we are pushed higher and higher up the bank, across the road, up onto the pavement against the wall of the pub, the tide chasing us all the time until we are forced to abandon the evening and the crowd suddenly scatters indoors or home.

There is sorrel along the river bank, rising above the mess and tangle of dank overgrowth. In September this is thick with pale lilac asters. The sorrel husks are a dark, rusty maroon red threaded with dried clematis vine and tidy spiderwebs, glittering with dew. There are cormorants on the shadows of boats in the water, standing stoop-shouldered, their heads bowed. The trees and bushes are skeletal, some dribbly with catkins, grey Garrya, a weeping willow trailing her branches in the water like a Japanese etching. I pass gardens, some spick and swept, others clogged with soggy leaves that fell in the autumn. The closer you look the more there is to see - tiny flickers of colour, tiny buds. Quince tentatively breaking into blossom. Narcissus. Snowdrops. Aconites. Helleborus foetidus. An unknown variegated holly on wild, beckoning stems. The lilac crocuses are blooming under the trees, crowds of them, huddling in among the moss and roots and dead leaves with their bright saffron stigmas. Before the daffodils I always find their cheerfulness unexpected, as though they belong to later in the spring. 

When I am three streets from home - out of breath, thirsty, hungry, my calves and feet aching - the mist lifts on a perfect, perfect sunny day. I go in and eat leftover chicken Milanese with my fingers, standing up in the kitchen, looking out the window at the blue sky. Not a shred of mist in sight.

Later there's a twilight like someone has turned the dimmer down on the day and the colours are all pale and bleeding into one another. I rush out for another walk and call Jess. She answers with a distracted "I'm vlogging the sunset". "No way!", I say. "I'M vlogging the sunset too! I'm vlogging the sunset reflected in a window..."

Everyone's vlogging the sodding sunset. It's February. We're all desperate.

For more sunsets, speedy gardening and tentative flowers you might like to watch our February vlog, up over on YouTube.