WALKING BACK TO HAPPINESS
Amid the frosty winter riches, it’s time to ref lect... and burn off the festive dinner
The Boxing Day walk. It’s as much a part of the quintessential Christmas experience as the tin of Quality Street, the bowl of clementines and the return, for the day, of Morecambe and Wise.
More of a brisk march than a trudge, it gets you out of the house as we enter that strange no man’s land between Yule and New Year, when few are working, shops keep odd hours – or even shut altogether – and assorted kids are under your feet.
hopefully there will be some snow. Or, at least, a good vigorous frost that tingles your ears and makes your breath smoke in the air, and is a good excuse for pulling on some comfortable hat.
After all that dead fowl and ham and gravy, the roast potatoes and the mince pies and chocolates and nuts and marzipan fruits, your tightening and reproachful waistband wails for some exercise.
And, especially if you are the sort of unfortunate person who – not necessarily of your own choosing – must endure a festive gathering of extended and querulous family, the ritual walk is a welcome chance of escape. For an hour or two, you suspend the incessant consumption, and in the thinlit open air dine on winter itself.
The exuberant noise of summer is past; the drifts of autumn leaves that, only a few weeks ago, we were joyously kicking through are fast dissolving. Trees are bare and skeletal now, with few birds in song and many long gone to distant southern skies.
And, amid the stillness, stumping through the wood in comfortable wellies and if you are not burdened with girning children or a rumbustious dog, the elements of this clean, stripped down season are all the clearer.
YOU grasp that winter is crackle, as you crunch through frosted grass or a twig snaps underfoot or burst the iced puddles – as much crackle as the logs on your fire or excitedly tearing off gift wrap.
But winter is also clarity. You cherish light g at this time of year because e there is so little of it, and the low sun casts long shadows. The sky throws shades we do not normally see – eggshell blue, or rosy pink, or the sort of intense silvery cloud that foreruns snow.
Oh, yes, snow. These days it is more an occasional treat than the sort of protracted whiteout that shuts down the M8 or has hill farmers out in desperate search for their sheep.
There are actually three kinds of snow. One is sleet, which is soggy and demoralising; one is snow proper – the sort that falls soundlessly, in perfect hexagonal flakes of wondrous beauty, the snow of Christmas cards, sunset paintings and transformed, blanketed landscape.
And there is also graupel, which we quite often enjoy in the Outer hebrides – snow as tiny balls of ice, often falling after snow proper – and quietly feared by mountaineers, for graupel’s greater relative weight, atop a thick slope of snow, has launched many an avalanche. But you are not scaling K2; you are merely out for your walk.
At so monochrome a time, colour in the woods attracts your eye, be it the leathery green of the holly, the flash of assorted surviving berries – rosehips, hawthorn, ivy and hypericum, or the wild garlic and snowdrops sticking their first timid noses through the forest floor.
We think we smell more things, better, in the peace of winter. Actually, we do not. Cold reduces our ability to smell and there is less to smell anyway. But such aromas as there are seem much more vivid.
There is distant woodsmoke, pine needles in their glaucous blue and, of course, the delicious scents that will greet us on our return home, from yet more mince pies in the oven to the sharp sweetness of simmering cranberries.
Anyway, you slither down the hill through the birch trees, grabbing the occasional branch or trunk for support – down to the burn, perhaps, or the old curling pond, built for sport when winter in Scotland was protracted, serious and hard.
The sun has gone now, and dusk falls – violet, then grey, then black, and with increasing chill. Is that something moving in those trees? What was that distant snap? You make for the old avenue – lindens, chestnut trees, beech – and find your pace quickening.
Winter was a fearful time for our forebears and even today, with electric light and so many other comforts, winter – especially when we step away from bustling streets into lonely parks or still woodland – is scary for us, as days shorten and all energy and vitality seems to seep out of the world.
ONLY the other week, just after dusk, on my way back to my parents’ house with the messages, I took a shortcut through the local cemetery and rather lost my bearings. Our night vision fades as we age, and it takes our eyes longer to adjust to the dark after a brisk stroll by bright shopfronts.
So I struggled to find the path I wanted. I drifted to the left, trying to navigate amid vast Victorian headstones, old and sleeping trees, now and then dazzled by lights from distant residences.
It dawned on me that I was the only l i ving thing i n this 19th century hecatomb – and then I cleared a bank and there, silhouetted against a white washed wall, loomed a great pile of earth with a spade handle sticking up.
In a pure hammer house of horror moment, I realised I had reached a freshly opened grave.
It was safely covered, of course, and I did not exactly take to my heels in terror, but I did proceed with unusual haste after that and more than once wondered if I was being followed.
But you are only on your Boxing Day walk and it is unlikely you will choose to spend it amid the dear departed. Not that you are in any hurry to get home to rehashed turkey, so you take a wee suburban detour. Christmas lights this year seem to have been hung with abandon.
They drape hedges and door frames, hang from windows, are knitted about garden railings and adorn accessible trees.
We are apt at this time of year to leave curtains undrawn and shutters unpulled, so that we can share the sight of the Christmas tree proper with passers-by.
There is something rather lovely about that, and the little glimpses it affords into the living space of strangers, the flicker of a television you cannot quite see – blessed, domestic normality, at the close of a year of signal unpleasantness, inconvenience and dread.
But you are now home from the chill outdoor kiss of winter and the menace of those woods. If only you had a spear to put down and a mammoth to drag in – but you will settle for a chilled sherry.