It turns out that although the village we're staying in is on the coast, and there is a lovely sandy beach, it's not that easy to get to as this is an area of serious coastal erosion and the roads that used to go to the beach now just end in ragged cliffs. There is a path down from the local ice-cream parlour, though, which leads along a valley to a gap in the cliffs where it's just a step down onto the beach.

I walked there yesterday, when the sea was grey.



And again today, when it was blue.



I had been planning to try swimming, but it would have been a long walk with my swimming kits, and as a freshwater swimmer I was a bit daunted by the waves; it looked like a long way to get out past the breakers, and a long way back in again, and in the end I settled for taking my boots and socks off and paddling instead.



(The ice-cream parlour was also very good.)

It's a year since I abandoned my attempt at Couch to 5k after falling over and spraining my wrist, and decided to go for walks before work instead. I haven't been for a walk every day since then: some days I've chosen to start work early so I can take time for a swim later on; a few times last summer I went for early swims at Port Meadow instead; there have been a few days when it has just been too wet; and for some of Michaelmas Term I was in the office a couple of days a week, and although I parked in Summertown and walked from there, commute-walking isn't the same as walk-walking. I have, however, tracked more than 200 walks in Runkeeper; last year I clocked up just over 500 miles and this year I've already done almost 250 in three and a half months.

There aren't a lot of options for 3-4 mile walks starting from my front door. Down the canal towpath to the nature reserve and back. Up the canal towpath to the Jolly Boatman, through the woods to Thrupp and back along the towpath. Across the fields or along the cycle path to Begbroke, along the bridleway and back via Yarnton; across the fields or along the cycle path to Begbroke, up to the top of the hill and back the way I didn't come; across the fields or along the cycle path to Begbroke, up to the top of the hill and down the other way and back via Yarnton (that is one of my favourites, and is the one where you can just see Oxford, but it's actually four and a half miles so needs a bit of extra time). Through the streets to the church and back via the fields and the canal towpath (you can go either side of the fields, and with a bit of extra time you can go across the meadows and through the woods instead); through the streets to the church and down to the river (though that's my least favourite, as you have to go back through the streets which tend to be getting busier by then, so I've only tended to do that one when it's meant I was walking towards a stunning sunrise rather than having my back to it). I must have done each of these dozens of times in the last twelve months, and yet I haven't got bored, because there's always something new to see.



I've learnt the lay of my few square miles of countryside in a way I never thought I would. I've been surprised to realise just how few walks there are where I can't see the church spire at all, or the Forest Hill transmitter. I've found the one spot where you can see the spires of the city centre, which I haven't seen from closer to since last March. I've watched the seasons move through a full cycle; I've learnt to recognise far more plants and trees than I could before, and I've seen wildlife both expected (deer, muntjacs, hares, skylarks, red kites) and unexpected (otters!). I've taken a lot of photos, and I think I've got much better at it.

Apparently it's the warmest March day in 53 years. While the constant beating of temperature records is clearly a bad thing, it is nice to have some sunshine and warmth after what has been a particularly dreary winter, thanks to COVID. Yesterday the rules in England were relaxed so that up to six people or two households can meet outside, so my swimming friends and I celebrated by swimming as a three for the first time since Christmas Day in glorious sunshine, and it was warm enough to stay in for half an hour.

Today I went for a walk and there were new leaves unfurling everywhere I looked.

I wandered down to the river and spent some time sitting on a fallen tree that overhung the water with my shoes and socks off, intermittently dabbling my feet in the water and enjoying the peace and the sunshine.

I thought I didn't enjoy spending holidays at home, but it strikes me that I've only previously spent holidays this much at home over Christmas, and it turns out having more daylight and warmth and no expectation of festivities or following traditions makes a big difference and I am really enjoying having a break and a chance to spend time outdoors or making things. I am not sure how I'm going to convince myself to go back to work next week, though.

Because some of you asked for more posts about canals, I thought I'd share these two photos of the lift bridge at Thrupp, taken just over two weeks apart.

11 February, with a thick frost and ice covering most of the surface of the water.



26 February, when it was still only just above freezing and there had been a thick frost on the fields I'd just walked through, but the water was ice-free and reflecting glorious sunshine.



Thrupp is about two miles from my house along the canal. It's a tiny place, basically a farm, a row of pretty cottages, a tearoom and a pub, but there's also a boatyard and a canoe hire place, as well as a wide stretch of canal with lots of residential moorings along both sides, so it's one of those places which is a familiar name to boaters despite its diminutive size. The lift bridge is one of many on the Oxford canal, though very few carry regular vehicle traffic as this one does.

I was going to walk through the woods to Thrupp this morning, but the squelchy bits of the woods turned out to be under deep enough water that walking through in walking boots didn't seem like a good idea.



Given that it doesn't seem to be inclined to stop raining any time soon, and everything is utterly waterlogged, I had been wondering anyway if switching to wellies would be a better idea. The only problem with wellies is that my socks always disappear inside them, which is (a) uncomfortable and (b) chilly. (I can't wear socks that are long enough to fold over the tops of the wellies, because although they're very roomy on my feet and ankles they're too tight on my calves for that. Also, I only wear hand-knitted socks and knee socks would take forever to knit.)

However, I think I may have solved the problem, as I have now bought some velcro cable ties which are long enough to wrap round my ankles and wear as sock clips. (I'd been meaning to get some anyway, as last week in the snow my Yaktrax kept pinging off so I had to retrace my steps and retrieve them.) I shall find out if they work tomorrow.

(Also, I don't even want to know why Amazon thinks it's important to say that they will arrive by Valentine's Day. T just bought a new phone which said that, and I can see that people who celebrate Valentine's Day might by new phones for the people they celebrate it with, but I don't want to think too much about the implications of cable ties being a Valentine's Day purchase, thank you very much.)

I'm sure weekends used to be longer. This one barely seems to have started and it's already finished.

Still, in the last two days I have:

Been for a 10-minute swim in water that was somewhere between 3 and 4 degrees (we had two thermometers, which as always gave different answers, but at any rate both read about a degree lower than they did last weekend). It was bracing but utterly exhilarating. I find that cold water swimming gives me the kind of burst of endorphins I normally only otherwise get at the end of a really long walk, or maybe after climbing a mountain, but it does it after five minutes and not hours of slogging.

Been for a 4.5-mile walk down the canal to the nature reserve and back. Unsurprisingly, there was no sign of the otters (I think very early is the best time to see them, and we were there late morning when there were quite a lot of people around) although we did see a very sweet little fieldmouse on the towpath.

Cut my hair (9mm on the back and sides, 12mm on the top, and didn't touch the quiff). It's nearly a year since my last £50 haircut with my old hairdresser; after she left hairdressing to go and work as a teaching assistant I tried going to a barber and ended up with a cut that I liked just as much for less than half the price, but that was at the start of March and ever since then I've been cutting my own hair, having panic-bought a set of clippers online shortly after the start of lockdown. The first few tries were a bit hit and miss and I ended up with a longish all-over buzzcut a couple of times, and tried to leave the top longer once and ended up with it looking rather odd, but I've now settled on something that I'm pretty happy with, and I'm saving a small fortune compared to what I used to pay.

Cut out another set of underwear (Muna and Broad Banksia Bralette; and Waratah Undies). Underwear was my Christmas break sewing challenge, because my underwired bras were digging into my rib cage in a tedious manner and I thought how nice it would be to have fun, non-wired bras instead, and I thought I might as well do matching knickers while I was about it even though I have no complaint about my plain black M&S multipack midis. So far I've been using leftover jersey from making t-shirts, of which I had quite a lot, and in this case also the t-shirt itself, which was made from a free pattern and came out too cropped and too boxy for me; this will be my fourth bra, although the jersey I used for the second one turned out not to be stretchy enough, which meant that it felt more like a binder than a bra (which wasn't really a problem) and started ripping at the seams very quickly (which was), so I've had to bin it already, and third pair of knickers. I've found that cutting out small pieces in stretchy fabric is much easier with a rotary cutter than scissors, and got to use my new A1 size cutting board this weekend, which is much easier than the A3 one I had before which meant I had to keep repositioning things. I have also discovered, that in the absence of fancy pattern weights, the collection of brooches I used to wear when I wore jackets for work make a pretty good substitute. Though I may buy some actual pattern weights too at some point. Or make some from fabric scraps and rice, if we no longer have to horde rice against Brexit and panic buying. (I always swore by pinning, but weighting actually seems to be better for stretch fabric.)

I suppose that's a reasonable amount of things to have accomplished in two days.

For obvious reasons, I didn't get to do any of the kind of walking in 2020 that I'd normally do. We were due to go to the Yorkshire Dales on 20 March, but deferred the booking a couple of days before that, once it became clear that we were heading for a full lockdown, and even though restrictions were eased we didn't feel that it would be sensible to do the Birmingham-Worcester walk we'd been planning for early July, or to think about a long-distance walk in September. T and I even stopped going for local walks together in March, because the advice was to avoid towpaths where there were moored boats and all the other paths were too busy at the weekends, and never ended up starting again (at least partly because I found myself spending all of my weekends swimming and sewing).

Instead, after an abortive attempt at Couch to 5k, in April I started going for solitary walks before work. First thing in the morning it was quiet enough that it was easy to keep my distance from other people; I walked south along the canal to the nature reserve, or across the fields to the west and up the hill on the other side of the main road. Once restrictions eased a bit, I also walked north along the canal, or through the centre of the village to the church and then across the fields there to meet the canal north of the village and back home along the towpath. Until the clocks went back, I went out at about half-past six; after they changed, I started having a shower and breakfast first and going out around quarter past seven. By the start of December, the only walks I could still do were the ones that started with walking through the village to the church, as without that first twenty minutes on lit roads it was just too dark. My walks are normally around three and a half miles, and take a bit over an hour.

I've really enjoyed the walks. I love the peace and stillness of early mornings. I love being able to watch the seasons change and feel connected to nature in a way I wasn't when I was only walking in the Parks (lovely as they are). I've been able to draw on half-forgotten memories of my Flower Fairies books to try to identify flowers in the hedgerows. I've seen deer and hares and herons and even, on one incredible morning, two otters frolicking in the canal. And somehow, I managed to clock up 500 miles over the year, almost all of them within a three-mile radius of my front door.

The weather has finally turned bright and cold (the frost in our garden today still hasn't melted) rather than mild and wet, and while we had more heavy rain in the week and I knew that there was no chance things would have dried out a crisp, sunny Sunday is far too much of a treat to pass up the chance of even a very short walk, so I put on my wellies and we headed down the canal and through the nature reserve to buy dinner at Sainsbury's.



I was a bit unsure about the wellies, as they aren't nearly as comfortable as my walking boots, and as a lot of the mud along the towpath was frozen I found myself wondering whether walking boots would have been a better choice as I walked along feeling my socks slipping down inside the wellies and working their way off my feet. And then we crossed the canal into the nature reserve and discovered that the bit of path that was really squelchy last time, and which was the main reason I'd opted for wellies, was ankle-deep in water and the wellies really had been the best idea after all. (T had worn walking boots, and just managed to get through without the water going over the tops, but his boots are taller than mine and I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't have managed it. I'm not actually sure I'd even have tried.) I definitely wouldn't have wanted to walk more than two and a half miles in them, but it was good to get outside briefly at least.

I'd hoped to get a few walks in over the Christmas and New Year break, but the weather was mostly grey and dreary at best and often damp and drizzly (the few brighter days all turned out to be days when pre-existing plans meant that we couldn't go out for a walk), so walking didn't seem all that appealling. I did want to get at least a bit of fresh air and daylight before going back to work tomorrow, though, so we made the effort to go to Wytham for a walk round the woods, hoping the going wouldn't be too bad.



Sadly, although the main paths were OK, once we ventured off onto the side-paths the going became very muddy underfoot and quite slippery. After a difficult climb up a muddy slope to return to the path running from the car park to Eynsham we decided to head back rather than pressing on, so in the end we only walked just over three miles (and the fact that it took nearly an hour and a half to do that says at lot about just how hard the going was). It was good to get out, but I think I need to recalibrate my expectations for winter walks after last year's dry winter, which made it a lot easier to keep walking all winter than it's turning out to be this year.

No long walk this weekend, but I managed two shorter walks along the canal towpath.



T was out yesterday, and although the weather wasn't brilliant I thought it would do me good to get outside, so I decided to go for a walk along the canal to buy myself something for dinner. When I set off, I wasn't sure whether I wanted to walk to Sainsbury's in Kidlington or all the way to M&S in Summertown, but by the time I reached the bridge I'd need to cross to get into the nature reserve on the way to Sainsbury's I was enjoying walking far too much not to carry on to Summertown. The rain held off, and the gleams of sunshine filtering through the cloud cover and reflecting off the water gave everything a wonderfully moody, atmospheric look. Unfortunately, when I got to Wolvercote I discovered that the towpath was closed between there and Jericho for major works. It looked as though they were making it wider and flatter and gravelled, as it is nearer the centre of Oxford, rather than narrow and uneven and muddy as it is further north. I can see the point, as it is quite heavily used, by cyclists as well as walkers and runners, but the vegetation along the banks is so glorious in summer I hope they aren't planning to extend this any further north.

In any case, the closure meant that although I walked just under five miles, the last mile and a bit was on roads rather than towpath, and when it was sunny this morning I decided to go for another walk, to Sainsbury's this time.



The nature reserve was muddy but was rather lovely under blue skies. I bumped into my next-door neighbour bird-watching by the pond and she pointed out the heron I'd otherwise have mistaken for another tree-stump on the island in the middle, and told me all the different species of ducks she'd spotted through her binoculars. And I'm sure it's done me good to get a reasonable amount of time outdoors and mostly away from roads and houses this weekend.