On Wellies, Wilderness, and a View of the World.

Today was utterly boring apart from the fact that I wore my new wellies for the first time. It came at a price, of course, because new wellies – along with all new shoes – react with the ground differently and force you to move your legs in a slightly different way. And then your legs ache and you’ve still got two more miles to walk until you can take them off again. Perseverance becomes the watchword and life is about nothing if not trials.

And then I cleared the lane grids of leaves and other debris again. I kept encountering patches of crunchiness on the road surface where it was littered with acorns and beech mast and the winged seeds of ash and sycamore. It brought up that old dream of mine in which I’m twenty years old and in possession of a vast tract of farmland in the manicured lowlands of England. I would stop all human activity on it and let nature have free rein to do what it will. And then I would leave it alone for fifty years before returning to marvel at the wilderness.

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But I’m not here to talk about wellies and wildernesses. I’m here to talk about foreigners. I like them, you know; I really do. I think it’s because I was brought up in the English working class at a time when nobody I knew ever went abroad. I was considered posh among my classmates because my stepfather had an office job and so we went on holiday to Devon and Cornwall instead of Blackpool. The closest most of us got to a foreign trip was a sojourn to Rhyl in Wales on the office summer outing. Even Scotland was considered exotic, and Ireland was a truly mysterious place somewhere beyond the mist you could see hanging around Morecombe Bay. The Spanish Costas hadn’t yet been invented and we didn’t even know that Italians ate spaghetti which didn’t come out of a can.

And so all things foreign – including the people – held, for me, the promise of mystery and adventure. They still do, believe it or not, because some early impressions never completely leave you.

So now I want to broaden my horizons by meeting a foreigner, preferably a Swede, and even more preferably a pretty young lady Swede who exudes the fabled Swedish glumness from every pore and can talk for at least half an hour about the hidden symbolism of hard boiled eggs. If anyone feels inclined to apply for the position, I have to say that I’m in no position to offer pecuniary compensation. But I will freely undertake to engage my undivided attention until my perception of the hard boiled egg is educated to a level hitherto unknown.