Miles to Go - Day Five

Monday 5^th July

Monday to Wednesday this week were all forecast as days when it was likely to rain, so I had mentally set all of them (particularly Wednesday) aside as days when I might want to book a session at the gym instead of going for a walk outside.  In any case, on Monday evening I was planning to meet my Dungeons & Dragons friends at the Horseshoe Inn in Shepton Mallet for board games, so it made sense to go to the gym and then on to the pub afterwards.

I spent the early part of Monday morning feeling depressed, partly from a despondent mood lingering from Sunday, and partly because I had run out of milk and couldn’t have a cup of tea.  I walked to Gurney Slade to buy milk, which helped with the second problem, and called in on my friend Doom Metal Singer on the way back and spent an hour in her caravan drinking tea and listening to Circulus, which helped a little with the first, too.

By midday, it was clear that if anything was going to cheer me up, or at least give my partner a break from me, it was a decent-length walk in unfamiliar territory, where I would have to concentrate on the route instead of my angst.  It wasn’t more than moderately showery, and I wanted something more interesting than going to the gym.

I set off at 2 in the afternoon, deciding to see how far I could get on a roundabout walk into Shepton and still be at the Horseshoe by 7.30.  I decided to start through Harridge Wood and follow the Fosse Way, which is a route that PDB11 and I sometimes take when going shopping, but that, instead of turning south-east across the fields and into Shepton, I would follow the Fosse Way until it became a main road, and follow south along Frog Lane until I climbed Whitstone Hill, until the clock told me it was time to turn back.

Finding my way to the top of Whitstone Hill wasn’t difficult, and I made better time than I had expected, so I decided to explore a bit further.  Finding my way out of the field containing Whitstone Hill was a bit harder (there are a couple of old gates tied in place as part of a fence, while the actual stile leading out is well concealed by nettles). 

I paused to eat the sandwiches I had brought for supper (after all, I could hardly eat my own provisions in the pub later!), then set about exploring the fields and wooded paths to the south of Shepton Mallet, getting mildly lost and muddy, before I set off north to Shepton to find the Horseshoe.

This last bit should have been the simplest, as I was going to a place I knew.  I knew it was in Bowlish – but where in Bowlish exactly?  I hadn’t approached it on foot very often, and never from this direction, and I wasn’t carrying a street map, only an Ordnance Survey map.

I love OS maps, with their colourful symbols: a blue beer mug for a pub, blue triangular tent for a campsite, and blue duck for a nature reserve.  Sometimes I fantasise about going out and digging a beer-mug shaped pond in every pub garden, a duck-shaped pond in every nature reserve, and a square grid of drainage ditches one kilometre apart across the whole of the country, just to make it look the way it does on the map – yeah, okay, I know I’m weird.

However, the beer-mug symbol only denotes rural pubs and restaurants, offering a welcome break on a weary road.  In a town, there would simply be too many of them to display.  Instead, I just planned to ask someone who lived nearby.

The first people I asked were a group of teenagers, including a couple of girls with multi-coloured dyed hair, who didn’t know, but were very helpful at looking it up on their smartphones.  I wasn’t quite sure whether the directions they were giving me were the right ones, or whether I’d fully understood their explanation, but decided to give it a try. 

I walked on in the rain until I came to a pub that plainly wasn’t the Horseshoe, and then asked another couple of passers-by, a man and woman.  They knew it, and the woman pointed me north to the place I should have headed for to start with.  The man frowned.  ‘But that’s miles away, and it’s raining!’ he exclaimed.

‘I’ll be fine,’ I said.  It was only half a mile to go, but I had to admit that, in the cold rain, it did feel like more.  By the time I arrived at the Horseshoe, I was cold and wet, even with my waterproof on, and in need of a hot drink. 

I asked the barman for a cup of tea – the Horseshoe has impressively revamped since I first started meeting friends there in early 2020, to the extent that it now has a luxurious hot drinks machine.  However, on this particular evening they had run out of milk. 

I ordered a mocha, as I badly needed something to warm me up, and sat down to read Neuromancer, which Kriv had lent me as preparation for the cyberpunk campaign which the Dungeon Master was considering running next.  I really wasn’t getting on with it.  The fantasy campaign we’ve been playing has gore, zombies and demonic possession, but, as the Dungeon Master says, at least fantasy allows a certain amount of mirth.  This just looked like a dystopian future that I really, really didn’t want to live in.

Rothgar, the Dungeon Master, Kos, and eventually Kriv turned up, I gave Kriv his book back, and we settled down to play Dinosaur Island.  The first time, I had been so frozen with anxiety that I hadn’t dared even try to learn to play it, but the next couple of weeks, I had caught on and managed to do fairly well (mostly by collecting small, herbivorous dinosaurs that the other players weren’t interested in).  Now, as the others had started borrowing this technique, they hammered me.  Last week the Dungeon Master had come last and I had won, but this week our positions were reversed, so honour was restored.

Miles walked today: 4 to Gurney Slade and back, 10 on Fosse Way walk

Total miles so far: 48.