Educating Rupert.

My walk today took in another part of the Shire to which my steps have been a stranger for the past year and a half – a little (and relatively little known) copse which has an enchanted pool in it. (To most people it would be seen as a depression in the ground which fills with water for most of the year, but it’s an enchanted pool to me because I haven’t yet stopped trying to live my life like Rupert Bear. I still entertain the suspicion that I would gain access to a mysterious other world if only I had the courage to jump into it.)

And therein I found another change from the good old days – two notices pinned to trees which say: Private Land. No public right of way. You wouldn’t think there’d be so many changes in a mere year and a half, would you? And all of them, so far, being deleterious.

But a little way further on – just as I was communing with my favourite copper beech tree in Church Lane – a woman walked past and engaged me in conversation. Noticing the slight hint of something vaguely Germanic in her accent, I asked her:

‘Where are you from? Are you German?’

‘No,’ she answered, ‘Nordic.’

‘From Norway?’ I continued (because in Britain we generally associate the adjective ‘Nordic’ with Norway, preferring ‘Scandinavian’ for the other parts.)

‘No, Sweden.’

‘So why Nordic and not Swedish?’

‘Because I’m part Swedish and part Finnish.’

Ah, right. So that led the conversation into the subject of Finland, and I mentioned a young Finnish woman I once met who was physically striking because of her near-white hair and extremely pale blue eyes.

‘She was probably Karelian,’ said the Nordic woman.

I pretended to understand, of course, because that’s what people who’ve never grown out of Rupert Bear do, but I didn’t really. My only experience of ‘Karelian’ came from the piece by Sibelius entitled The Karelia Suite. I didn’t even know it was a place. I looked it up when I got back and discovered that it’s a region in the north of the Northern Lands which stretches from Finland across Sweden to the north of Norway.

So there you are: walking can be educational as well as healthy. Point taken; lesson learned.

 

My mentor. He always managed to get home

in time for tea, a fact of which I greatly approve