Wednesday 26 October 2011

Getting back into the outdoors


Over the last year I've rekindled my love of the wild, remote outdoors. I used to do that kinda thing a lot before the burdens of life started to weigh heavy on my shoulders and work and bills and mortgage payments took me away from the wilderness.
Luckily, thanks to my current circumstances I can and have spent some nights and days out in the familiar, unexplored landscape that passes us by in the hectic blurr of our day to day existence. I'm lucky in that I can be up on the moors and blue remembered hills, away from electricity, minor stress and traffic within an hour of putting one foot in front of the other and launching myself off the doorstep. I pack everything I need into a big rucksack - tent, sleeping bag, warmth, cooking stuff, food, even a few cold beers and just escape to the places that promise good sights that I might capture with my camera. If I'm lucky the atmosphere treats me to a clear, starry night where I can be a child again and lie, amazed and wondering about my significance and insignificance in the same moment. Above all, those treasured slices of time in that high void make me comfortably happy, sometimes blissfully so and I relive memories of times past, characters met and friends long gone. I have time to contemplate my place in life  and to value who I am luckily enough to share it with. As the dark closes in and I retreat into a microcosm of warm gaslamp light I hear Owls and creatures that shriek, sometimes too close for comfort  that might be attacked, attacking or just out to scare the giant in the glowing orange dome. In my worst fears I hear potential axe killers and maybe worse, having had some genuinely terrifying experiences while camping in my youth any strange noise can bring back my old friend Terry Fied...  but that's a different story.
Ultimately I'm not scared because I eventually let sleep take over, ushered in by a good book on UFOs, ghosts or strange beasties as more rational thoughts ease me into the gap we all fall into between one days end and the next days start....

6 comments:

  1. Owls, axe killers... what do you do when you need to pee?

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  2. LOL akh, I pee in the porch if I'm terrified (not happened yet) or I just pee outside with my knife in hand.

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  3. @ akh - we only need to fear our fear. Everything else is hoodies with more hoodies n knives - in which case.....run!

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  4. Nice post Phil. Tell us more about your terrifying experiences as a yoof. And also tell us about Mr. Slicey?

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  5. Terry's your worst or possibly most unsettling nightmare, or he was mine at one time. There were several times Terry came to visit.....TBC

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