Pretty much all of the last week we’ve been doing two things—working (like everybody else) and following the changing forecast for East Anglia in general and Cambridge in particular: deep down in our minds we held an idea that, given the victorious combination of a shitty bingo “lack of petrol/diesel in different parts of the country — an absence of essential supplies in the shops — doom & gloom in media sprinkled with more or less dainty scaremongering” at least the weather has to be a winner.
We were mistaken: it wasn’t. Many days we observed the same greyish gloomy view from the window: either drizzle or showers with gales that were eventually becoming “a bit too much” even for such a misanthrope as yours sincerely. Ah well; on the other hand, the surrounding landscapes recreated the Jamesean mood easily: “Bleak and solemn was the view on which he took a last look before starting homeward.”
But everything suddenly changed on Sunday morning: my forecast didn’t predict anything which can be remotely described as nice yet L.’s was, in contrast to mine, fairly optimistic (even a bit bravura, I’d say)—sunny, warm, pleasant etc. Usually mine was the truer one: not this time. The weather indeed looked wonderful, so we didn’t hesitate, got on a bus and in 10 minutes arrived at the beginning of the ancient tracks of Wandlebury.
Last time we were here in April, and the mossy meadows were covered in daffodils: now everything still remained freshly green and opulent, and had you forgotten which season is now, you would’ve mistaken it for late August.
There were plenty of jolly folks everywhere—with similarly jolly doggos (one of them, a Shar Pei girl, carefully sniffed our garments just in case we had a juicy bone somewhere underneath), and having a cup of excellent black coffee in a crappy cardboard cup paired with delicious fruit cake felt like the most refined al fresco experience we’ve had in a long time.
And then, there was the walk itself: according to all our gadgets, we made around 9 km today (including the way back home), which isn’t bad I guess. We spotted Ely (we both decided that it was Ely, as one of the maps had promised before) behind the hills (and annoyed golf players, who meticulously prepared every step of their super-precise game), we observed old Highland cattle, which had a rest in the middle of the bright yellow field, and we walked, and walked, and walked, following the sound of the whistle of a brisk Indian summer.
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