Three Men (Not) in a Boat by Timothy Finn

Author:Timothy Finn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General
Publisher: eBookPartnership.com
Published: 2011-12-19T16:00:00+00:00

8

Keeping it Up

Next morning we got a lift. It was Mr Elton-Willis’s idea—he was just setting out for his Saturday-morning jog when the three of us got downstairs. He said he had to go into Welshpool soon after nine to pick up the newspapers and it would be the easiest thing in the world to run us on to where the Dyke starts up again.

We discussed it briefly over our farmhouse breakfast of bran and yoghurt. I wasn’t in favour. It seemed to me that if we had walked off the right path we could walk back on to it again, but Fraser said with somebody like Henry as a guide that didn’t necessarily follow. Fraser said what was he going to tell his grandchildren in years to come when they asked him about Offa’s Dyke and all he’d done was to go round and round the same hillside for days on end.

Henry said: ‘If I were you I’d blame everyone else. You usually do.’ But, he said, Offa’s Dyke was the objective, and all in all he was for getting back on to it by the quickest possible means.

So I was outvoted, and Mr Elton-Willis kindly drove us through Welshpool in his little Lancia and across the Severn, which lies just beyond, and down through the hamlet of Buttington to the point where the Dyke begins. Mark you, we knew we were coming to it quite a bit before, because of the numbers of weekend-hikers all making for the same spot.

Oh how I hate them, those weekend-hikers. You can tell the weekend-hiker a mile off by his shiny knees and his silly bobble hat and the shrill excited pitch of his voice as he rediscovers long- forgotten novelties like grass and thistles. Normally he will have a wife in tow who seems, of all loony things, to be starting a collection of dead bracken - that at least is what she appears to be pulling out of the hedgerows and burdening the rest of the family with. Then, of course, there is the child. He, in terms of character, comes out of it as the best of the group. Surly, square, and with a marked tendency to lag behind, he can’t see why he’s been hauled out on this bloody walk in the first place. His day would have been much better spent squashing beetles behind the garage at home, which is exactly what he’d planned to do before they sprang this route march on him. But that’s adults all over. You just get yourself organised to do something really interesting, and bang, the next minute you find yourself attached to some labour-gang or other.

‘Darling!’ the husband will exclaim, pausing for breath after the first seventy yards or so and peering indeterminately into the hedge. ‘Darling, do you see what I see?’

‘What, darling, what?’ cries his wife gustily as she closes in on him. ‘Oh, do hurry up, Bobby, my pet,’ she urges the child behind her. ‘Come and see what Daddy’s seen.

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