Otherwise . . . on this occasion I was ‘dancing’ on the pedals up a long(ish) hill in one of the myriad narrow lanes in the South Hams when I was confronted by a French registered Mercedes with an elderly couple (presumably French – more elegantly dressed than their Brit counterparts) in the front seats (him driving). He stopped the car but made no effort to get ‘into the hedge’ like any local would; presumably expecting me not so much to dance but rather to fly over the monster Merc. To add to my dilemma It was one of those moments when it was a clear disadvantage to have my feet clipped in and I had no time to twist my foot out. So my choices were to hit the car or the hedge – I chose the nettle infested hedge and collapsed rather gently but not gracefully into it, extricated myself from the pedals and started gesticulating with some added colourful language; what I remember the sociologist, Basil Bernstein, called restricted code. They looked a mixture of bewildered and terrified – two frightened elands trapped in their luxury pen – and with my hand and arm and leg stinging and my pride dented it took me a while to see the funny side. What a pity there wasn’t a hidden film maker in the hedge to capture the moment so that it could be put on facebook. Why couldn’t the humour have got through to me sooner? Why couldn’t I have laid back in the softness of nature’s bounty and laughed and then said something witty and charming in French to those two who probably shouldn’t have been allowed down the narrow lanes.
Meanwhile back on the pampas . . .
I was reading a poem by Robin Robertson – Arsenio (after Montale), from The Wrecking Light (page 77):
The wind-devils stir up the dust
and swirl over the roof-tops, walzing
down the empty driveways
of all the grand hotels, where the horses
stand, hooded and stock still
by the blaze of windows,
noses to the ground.
You go down the promenade, facing the sea
on this day of rain, this day of fire,
when a fusillade of castanets
shakes out the stitches of this
tightly woven plot of hour on hour on hour.
(This is the first stanza of five. Montale – Nobel prize winning Italian poet Eugenio Montale 1896-1981)
A strange sense that although we may feel alone at times, we later discover that, no, there are others with the horses, in the wind and the dust, on the edges of unknown towns, waiting for the cinema to open.