Walk on a muggy day is a breath of fresh Airedale

IT’S the same distance back as it is there, and I’ve done it there.

So let’s try the mile and a bit walk back home from the allotment, along the road and through the fields.

It’s muggy, what my late mother would call close, the air still and the foliage hardly fluttering. This is still summer, whatever the leaf-shedding trees say.

The roadside flowers have all died off, leaving thick grass. Without a footpath, there is no refuge from speeding cars, which means all of them. The only vehicle to slow down is a giant tipper lorry on its way to add more tons of spoil to the Cononley Alps, as I call the hill being created by a local agricultural developer.

It is the worst eyesore for miles around, but the council appears powerless (or too lazy, it is going into liquidation) to do anything about it.

Still, it’s soon behind me, and despite recent rain the fields are bone dry. Sheep have grazed the grass almost to the ground, a savage green crew-cut.

Unnatural, feels the springy turf, dotted with manure from a muck-spreader.

But where there’s muck, there’s brass, as the Tyke saying goes.

It refers to factory dirt, the squalor of the industrial revolution that brought prosperity with the dark Satanic mills, but they’re long gone in Airedale. The big mill in Cononley is now luxury flats.

This is still the countryside, but only just. Every spare inch of land is being buried under housing.

But they can’t steal the fresh air, even on a sultry afternoon like today.

Andy the physio did urge “push yourself!” and I did it in 35 minutes, equal to timing before the big op.

Not bad, on these old legs.