Barely a Meeting But . . .

On my way to buy milk at the corner shop this morning, I wait at the door as an elderly man negotiates the step on his way out, and I notice his Berghaus fleece and his aluminium stick.
Paying for the milk I hear something about Dougie, the man I had just met at the door, who is ninety four (I had thought, maybe eighty), who still grows his vegetables on an allotment and keeps it watered by fetching water from the river that runs by the allotments (a tricky procedure even for the somewhat younger) and goes for four hour, presumably gentle, rambles.