Viewpoint

When I first started this blog it was meant as a repository for random pictures I took on my travels.  

However, no one seemed interested in that so I started putting words on it. 

But today as a break from my tedious points of view here is a picture of Viewpoint in Caterham as a counterpoint …

I took Ava Alexis up there yesterday and as we looked over the hills and the M25 I told her of how I used to have to go on cross country runs up and down the steep and winding road. 

Even in the snow.

“Why?” she said.   “Isn’t it exposed enough up here already without coming up here in shorts?”

I have no real idea why but I think that the problem may have been that while religiously Caterham School claimed to be affiliated to the United Reformed Church the actual religion of the school was sport - a vocation for which I had little inclination and nothing to offer but an embarrassing lack of physical coordination.

So although we were supposed to be running by the time we got to the top of the hill I was usually at the back walking with the stragglers.  Sometimes one would employ local knowledge to cut off odd corners.

When we got back to the pavilion the teacher would encourage us to run the last 200 yards to play along with the pretence that we hadn't just walked the rest of the route after we'd got out of his sight.

He would do this standing below the bank on the cricket pitch and one day a large boy responded to his encouragement by jumping off this bank and into a giant puddle at his feet.  This being a good 5 foot jump the teacher was completely drenched in freezing rainwater.

The same boy got suspended quite often.  One time when I was leaving late I found him in the school vestibule.  His parents were in the headmaster's study again and he was awaiting sentence for a crime I now forget.

"How's it going?" I said.

"Well, it was going okay," he said, "till Mr Smith said 'take a seat' and Mr Thorne [the deputy Headmaster] and I both tried to sit down in the same seat and fell on the floor."

I also told her also of how we went up the hill once from the school to play rugby on the field at the top of the hill even though it was snowing but it was so cold that even the teachers gave in and we had to go back again. 

On the way down the hill again some of us found a barrel of tar which was part of some road works that we could warm ourselves by… the toxic fumes weren’t as bad as the cold. 

I’d like to say I learned something from the experience but really I think we just got cold.

Still, I suppose I was lucky to grow up around such beautiful surroundings...

I think it was G K Chesterton said...

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,

The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.

A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,

And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;

A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread

The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head etc