simple gifts

like pretty birds among the trees I will be all in motion
and skip and dance upon the breeze of love and sweet devotion
for lo it is a happy time, a time of making merry
of heavenly comfort all divine and very cheering, very

It's certainly true that wood-burning stoves are bad for your health. I cleaned ours out and prepared it for our New Year's Eve meal with friends and, somehow, by kneeling down and putting too much weight onto my right foot I managed to cause a hairline fracture of my metatarsal. At least that's what seems to have happened.

It took a day or two before the pain started but it's the only thing I can put this bizarre foot injury down to. I then spent all of January and most of February with a painful and swollen foot. I had a blood test and X-Ray but the Quack was unable to give me any definite answer to what had happened. The blood test was mainly for gout, which I haven't got, thankfully. The X-Ray didn't really show anything and I guess a scan would have been more useful.

So, we enter March. A beautiful Sunday and a chirpier feeling came over me so a walk was just what the doctor could have ordered. The longest walk I'd managed so far this year was a pleasant walk a week back during a short hiatus in the current Monsoon Season up the coast to the Ferry Boat Inn for a spot of lunch. Obviously a pint was called for to mop the solids up. This jaunt by the sea and by the famous Links golf course (as featured in the classic M. R. James story Oh Whistle And I'll Come To You, My Lad although called Burnham rather than Felixstowe) is about two miles away from my house.

On Sunday we decided that another gap between named storms required a walk to commune with Nature. The village of Melton stands just on the outskirts of Woodbridge. We used to walk there quite a lot when our kids were younger so it seemed a perfect easy walk to get me going again. When we used to walk around this area we would stay on the Woodbridge side so this time a wander along the other side of the road would be interesting. We wandered briefly along by the river where a couple of oystercatchers digging for lugworms piped to us to wish us well on our way.

Parking for free in the rather overcrowded Melton Riverside car park we set off across the Wilford Bridge and stumbled along through some reed beds coming out onto a quiet road towards a village called Bromewell. This seemed a little familiar and then I realised that this was a section of the Sandlings Walk. This is a walk that meanders from Ipswich to Southwold and takes in a range of Suffolk's heaths, woodland, farmland and estuaries for some sixty miles. I completed this walk a good few years ago when I was still a useful member of society. Dotted along the walk are various sculptures of nightjars. Incidentally, the only time I have ever seen nightjars in the wild was on the walk, which seems unlikely even now. One of the smaller sculptures resides here at a junction in the village. We took a little detour to check out the church which is named after the patron saint of Suffolk, St Edmund.  It's a nice little church with some fairly recent stained glass. Well I'm guessing they are recent as the WW1 soldier and sailor helping Jesus carry his cross would have raised Time Traveller stories or some von Daniken-type nonsense. We wandered on towards Ufford.

The walk to Ufford was only a one-divorce graded one - that is, there was only one short section of the walk where I misread the directions and we ended up walking around a field rather pointlessly as we needed to be about half a mile away in totally the other direction where we coud cross the train line safely. The grading comes from the amount of arguments such misreadings lead to. The line runs between Ipswich and Lowestoft. Good luck to any passengers as neither is exactly the best Suffolk has to offer. Much of this part of the walk follows the channel of the River Deben which was flowing very freely. In fact, there was an overflow area pumping out into a field where a grey wagtail was bobbing about in its inimitable jerky fashion. A lovely flash of yellow amongst the bushes and branches. This part of the walk seemed like a miniature Louisiana swamp and in the back of my mind I could hear the familiar twang of Ry Cooder's slide guitar. Very Southern Comfort. We don't have too many Cajuns wandering around Suffolk as far as I know but I kept an eye out just to be sure.

After crossing the pretty red-brick Ufford bridge with a natural pool beneath we turned left and were greeted with the sight of a village pub with its own microbrewery. Blimey! An unexpected bonus. As it was gone two o'clock and we were getting rather peckish having foolishly gone for walk on fairly empty stomachs, it seemed churlish not to pop in. The White Lion at Ufford is well-worth visiting. Obviously the first thing that happened was a friend of Mrs Dave's was sitting there having Sunday lunch* as she lives in the village. The place is full of cds and old vinyl and there's a Community Pub of the year award (a few years ago now but it has a nice ambience). I tried the local brew, Longship Bitter which, at 4.7%abv can't be considered a good driving beer by any standard, but was an excellent very bitter Bitter indeed. We ordered food - Cajun chicken curiously enough - but had a long wait. By the time I asked where the food was I had had another pint. It would seem the lad who took the order must have enjoyed the night before but wasn't quite so sure about today. The food was very good and they gave us a free bowl of chips as a way of apologising for the wait. It was time to move on.

We visited the church which has an unusual font cover - the second tallest in England evidently. Standing at eighteen feet it does seem rather unnecessary but it does help to remember that East Anglia was once a very wealthy county due to the wool industry. There is a set of stocks by the front gate but unlike places where they usually have old stocks, you can't use them as a photo opportunity, not that we did.

By now we were heading back towards Melton and were warned by some locals that the road was covered by a large puddle and we should use the golf course instead. We ignored them and put our Goretex boots to good use, as for "puddle" read "ford".  We passed yet another church but this one was a redundant church. Still well-kept but we couldn't enter it. As we passed through some woodland along a lengthy track we passed a large body of water with a pair of mute swans that watched us wander by. Evidently they are called mute because they are less vocal than other swans. Well, these were certainly mute on Sunday. We passed an unusual Nissen hut that had been converted into a cottage, named Nissen Cottage needless to say. It looked a bit like a place you might find an old crone from Hansel and Gretel but there were no obvious signs of breadcrumb trails. Mind you, the bird life was quite active and the many robins and chaffinches probably had them anyway.

Suddenly we were at the Wilford Bridge near the car park and the road was pretty busy. We crossed over and wandered back to the car. Among the trees I topped to jettison the two pints I'd taken on board. Whilst so engaged the call of a Curlew sounded close by, I looked up and it flew over as if to wish us a farewell, thanks for calling. And homeward we wended.

All in all, a great first decent walk for the year amongst the simple gifts that Mother Nature offers us; and we certainly had our moments of what the Japanese call shinrin-yoku (forest bathing) to set us up both psychologically and physiologically. Which is just as well given that every day seems to bring worse news than the one before.

* For some reason we seem to bump into people wherever we are in the World. I once bumped into someone who knew me whilst sitting outside a restaurant in the middle of absolutely Nowhere, Utah. It was someone who had worked in the same school as me a few years beforehand. I had just said to the family, "well, at least we won't bump into anyone we know here!"