The Great Mud Adventure! Bank Holidays! More face mask stuff.

Yesterday did not live up to its bright, sunny start but it did not deteriorate too significantly either. So the family decided to go adventuring.



We followed our usual route up towards Heights Church, passing fields full of Canada geese on our way. Why do Canada geese congregate in fields, by the way? It’s a phenomenon we have noticed on other occasions too.

Heights Church was not our destination however. We turned off at one point in the direction of Denshaw, thinking we might find the llama farm. We did not find it but we had some fine views of, for example, New Year’s Bridge reservoir. Why does it have that name? None of us knew.


At that point we had to come to a decision: turn round and retrace our steps or continue onto a track we had not followed before, although maybe Phil and I had done so but many years ago. We went into the relatively unknown. It has become a family joke that we do not like to retrace our steps. Just as in Game of Thrones “A Lannister always pays his debts”, so in our reality “An Adams never turns back”.

And so our country walk turned into the Great Mud Adventure”. Our daughter’s off-road buggy was getting its baptism of fire, or should that be mud? For what had been at one time a perfectly good farm track turned at times into a veritable quagmire, no doubt somewhat churned up by heavy tractors, quad bikes and trail bikes.


But we made it through, even though the buggy needed some careful manoeuvring at times. And nobody got cross or upset, even when the four-year-old’s wellies got a bit stuck in the mud. Not even when she managed to step out of one wellie and almost put her sock down in the mud, while her teenage sister managed to drop the wellie in a puddle! In fact we all saw the funny side of the whole affair.

And eventually we made it to Heights Church after all, stopping to talk to some affectionate horses just before we reached the church. There we stopped briefly in the churchyard for a sit down and some emergency chocolate, to give us the energy boost for the final downhill section back into the village where our daughter and offspring got into the car and left and Phil and I walked home through the village.

Another successful adventure!

Today is a bright and sunny August Bank Holiday but hardly a day for lounging on the beach, not if the temperature at the seaside is similar to the temperature here. I heard a weatherman say that last year’s was the hottest August Bank Holiday on record and that this year’s might be the coldest. So it goes!

The un-summery weather did not prevent people from organising raves in Wales or so I hear. My sister in law has been complaining about groups of 18 year olds on her local trains travelling without masks. What she does not realise is that they are young, invincible and immortal!

The Coronavirus crisis, like every crisis, throws up a new bit of vocabulary. Voting to leave Europe gave us Brexit, with the inevitable Brexiteers and the Remoaners. Coronavirus gives us “covidiots”. This was how a passenger returning on a flight to the UK from the Greek island of Xante described many of her fellow passengers and some of the crew. 16 people from the flight tested positive for Coronavirus. The passenger said that people sat with masks hanging round their necks and that few of the crew tried to insist on the proper wearing of face-coverings. Extreme Coronavirus fatigue! 

They’ve been talking about that case on the lunchtime radio news. The big question is not so much why it happened - cabin crew are not police after all - but why it has taken almost a week since the flight landed in Cardiff before any kind of investigation has taken place. And now they need to trace and isolate the passengers. What about those forms travellers are suppose to fill in? Hmm!

Meanwhile in Spain they have arrested a man who claims the Coronavirus pandemic is a hoax for inciting hatred and violence across several anonymous social media profiles. The 38-year-old claimed health professionals and the media were behind what he called the “Covid farce” and urged his followers to attack politicians and journalists, police said. “All this would be solved with a shot to the back of [Spanish prime minister] Pedro Sánchez’s head,” he wrote on one of his accounts.

Friends in Spain tell me that most people accept that wearing masks is the norm. There is, however, a small but vocal anti-mask movement which has been growing recently. (“Covidiotas’?) This group has been encpuraged, apparently, by the endorsement of Miguel Bosé, a 1980s pop star. Isn’t it odd how people take as gospel the word of famous but not necessarily scientifically expert people.

Hey ho! Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!