Walking: Wytham Woods

The car is now fixed*, so today we went for the walk in Wytham Woods we weren't able to go for last weekend.



It was another gloriously sunny, spring-like day; the trees may still have been bare, apart from the hazel catkins which were everywhere, green and gold, but beneath the trees the brown leaf-litter has given way to green shoots which will be bluebells in another few weeks. The last few snowdrops were giving way to the first few daffodils; we stopped to listen to a woodpecker and even saw a few yellow brimstone butterflies flapping around.

We walked a bit aimlessly, choosing paths at random, and ended up walking just under five miles with a fair bit of up and down. It also gave me a chance to try out my new walking trousers, bought because I suspected that the reason my old ones seemed to restrict movement on hills was that they're the kind that zip off into shorts, and I bought the wrong length (standard instead of short) and that meant that the zips hit too close to my knees. The new ones (short length and no zips) did seem to be an improvement, though the real test will be in the Lakes next month.

*in the end, as well as the new battery it turned out to need a new starter motor; annoyingly, it was two days too early for me to get the garage to do the service and MOT at the same time, so it'll have to go back next month.

Reading: The School on the Moor

The second Dorita Fairlie Bruce novel that antisoppist lent me, The School on the Moor was first published in 1931, much closer to Nancy at St Bride's than That Boarding School Girl, and I think that showed in more subtlety of characterisation, and a sense of place and landscape that was absent from That Boarding School Girl (although that may just have been due to the Dartmoor setting, rather than more humdrum Surrey).

I thought The School on the Moor was great fun, if frankly quite astoundingly silly in places; two key plotlines concern an escaped convict (and it strikes me as demonstrating quite breathtaking amounts of upper-middle-class privilege to assume that the obvious answer for a young man wrongfully convicted of fraud is for him to escape from prison and, with the collusion of a friend with a private plane, flee the country to take up farming in Africa - seriously, where to even start with that one?) and searching for the Ark of the Covenant on Dartmoor. There's also a friendship between the central character, Toby, and another girl which I simply could not read in any way other than through a queer lens, and while there were a couple of quite jarring examples of period-typical casual racism I generally liked it a lot.