and thinly gleaned opinions and out-of-context sound bites and people reading hastily between the lines while forgetting the vital thing you also need to do when practising that skill is to read the lines themselves. The idea of getting to know an area of limited size extremely well works as an antidote to this, and even in a very small area there is always more to know. You can reduce your space right down – to one hedgerow or wall or flooded out-of-use tin mine – and there will never be enough time to know it all.
It could be argued that I have a particularly fertile area in which to do my local investigations, but I’ve done it in another very different place too: Norfolk. And when revisiting the places in the East Midlands where I grew up – rural areas, but localities defined not by hills and rivers and water lanes and creeks but by parks and chip shops and factories and railway cuttings – I’ve been drawn to do the same, to start looking behind the obvious in a way that never would have occurred to me in the distant past: at the thirty-mile view from the hill above your aunt’s old semi and the haunting tower at its hazy edge, at the lovingly designed pattress plates on an abandoned brewery or the stag beetles beneath some bark on an eerie broken oak in a copse behind a litter-strewn lay-by not far from the motorway junction people take if they want to go to IKEA.
This part of Devon isn’t perfect either. Just like other parts of the British countryside it has litter and barbed wire and and recklessly driven cars and motorbikes and horrendous fuckwads who put their dogs’ shit in plastic bags then leave the bags on tree stumps and in hedges. It contains people too, contrary to popular belief: quite a lot of them (I’m not counting the horrendous fuckwads who bag up and leave the dogshit as people). Without ever really intending to do so, on the walks I take nearer my house I regularly update an internal top three of regularly spotted walking strangers. As of May 2016, this read – and had read for several weeks – as follows:
1. Lycra Santa
2. Man Who Narrates Events To His Bulldog As They Occur
3. Woman Who Never Says Hello Back To Me And Smiles Like She Has A Little Secret
May is the time when the bluebells in the woods near my house take over from the primroses. In a path on Lustleigh Cleave redolent of old faery activity – the kind without gossamer wings or wands – I ate one of the last ones of the year, on Suzi’s urging, and it tasted not unpleasantly of flour and untart lemon. In Devon – less so than in the part of Norfolk where I used to live, where they are far thinner on the ground – I think of primroses as heralding spring, more than the daffodils that emerge in late January, which are often just early tester daffodils, sent out on suicide missions. In the folk song ‘The Blacksmith’, written at an unknown point by an unknown author, but brought into the modern age transcendentally by Planxty and the lesser-heard artistically bold initial incarnation of Steeleye Span during the early 1970s, the narrator sings of her lost metal-forger-love’s ‘good black billycock’ hat ‘crowned with primroses’, and I can see how such attire might be an extra bit of salt in the wound of losing him. She also sings that, were she with the blacksmith, she’d ‘live for ever’. Part of the magic of primroses is that you never see them die: in decline they are simply subsumed amid the growth spurts of lankier vegetation until one day it hits you that they’re no longer there.
Near a bank of them still fighting valiantly for space beside a fish-ladder tributary that makes a no-nonsense dash down to the Dart, I ran into my gardener friend Andy.
‘Oh, I was just thinking about you,’ Andy said.
‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Why was that?’
‘Someone’s nicked a shopping trolley and dumped it down there on the path. I thought to myself, If Tom’s heading down here today, he’s going to walk straight into that.’
I was touched that Andy would think about my welfare in such a way. His comment was also perhaps indicative of the fact that I had now lived in this part of Devon long enough for my rampant doziness to have become fairly common local knowledge. My status as someone who is a very observant person in some ways goes hand in hand with my status as someone who is a very unobservant person in lots of others. Combine this with my short-sightedness, and if I’m walking the paths at the edge of my local town, Totnes, at the same time as someone I know, there’s a high probability that they’ll see me before I see them. This can present a problem. I’m always worried about being perceived to be ignoring friends or acquaintances when in fact I’m just off in my own myopic dream universe. But I can overcompensate too. When a well-dressed woman in late middle age walked down the river path towards me one day last spring with her arms stretched out in greeting I readied myself to say hello. Was she a friend’s mum I had been introduced to at the pub a few weeks ago? The industrious widow I did stone-row conservation up on the moor with two winters ago? As she got within a few feet of my face I realised that the answer was an emphatic no to both questions. I had definitely never met this person before.
‘Can you tell me,’ she asked, arms still open, then paused, and I got my geographical head on, poised to offer succinct directions – perhaps to the castle, or the wharf, or the medieval hall a couple of miles up the river, ‘whether Nietzsche was Russian or German?’
‘German,’ I answered.
‘Well done!’ she said and walked briskly on.
A few weeks later, buying avocados at the greengrocer’s, I ran into the woman again. She didn’t appear to recognise me from our previous encounter but asked me why it said ‘Traffic’ on the T-shirt I was wearing. I told her that they were one of my favourite bands.
‘Do you go to Glastonbury to see them?’ she asked.
‘No, I haven’t been for years,’ I said. ‘And they split up in 1974.’
‘Is that your wife?’ she asked, pointing to a woman I’d never seen before, who was standing in the doorway, minding her own business.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t have one of those.’
‘And if you keep wearing T-shirts like that, you never will!’ she said, and walked off.
It has been claimed by some people reasonably close to me that I have a knack of attracting society’s uninhibited exiles and eccentrics while going about my business. I refute this allegation, just as I did when my girlfriend made it in 2012 on a Norfolk towpath, seconds before a stranger carrying a large fish ran excitedly up to us and said, ‘Please can you take a photo of me and my fish?’ to me. Spring does tend to have a giddiness which brings out a certain unsuppressed behaviour in many sections of the Devonshire population though, and I often find myself close witness to it. It was in spring that a dreadlocked lady in a smock approached me in the garden of my local pub and showed me a stain on the tray she was carrying which she claimed was the representation of her previous warrior self from untold centuries past. It was also in spring – this latest one, again – when Robert introduced himself on a sunken lane a few miles from my house.
The weather was bright, though cool, the day I met Robert, and a lot of people were out. I’d already passed Lycra Santa and Man Who Narrates Events To His Bulldog As They Occur by the time I curved up a long sunken lane leading away from the south side of Totnes. ‘It’s cold, isn’t it?’ I had overheard Man Who Narrates Events To His Bulldog As They Occur saying to his bulldog. ‘I bet you wish you had warm clothes. We’re going to the supermarket soon, then we’re going to John’s house. This tree just here is weird.’ But by the time I was in the long sunken lane I was very much alone, protected by its quiet green banks from the clanking of the industrial estate half a mile away and the slick gravelly zip of
