A figure walks behind you
Shadow walks behind you
Figure walks behind you
Shadow walks behind you

We have a local lockdown where I live which means we can’t leave the county borough without good reason. Fortunately for me, as a person who loves walking, we have lots of interesting places to wander near to home. I find walking not just a pleasure, but a therapeutic essential.

The first lockdown was a very mixed experience for me. On the one hand I work from home anyway, so I had no great changes in that regard. On the other I struggled because I couldn’t see friends and loved ones and neither could I do my voluntary work.

Then I got ill with a heart rhythm problem and, for several weeks, I couldn’t do very much at all. What with the lockdown, worries about other family members  and my own health issues I found myself spiralling downwards into a trough of anxiety and depression over the Summer.

I’m much, much better now: almost as fit as before I became ill, though I haven’t started running again yet. A big part of the healing process, particularly for my mental health, has been walking. I try to get out and walk every day, whatever the weather. Yesterday’s walk was just a couple of miles away from my home in town, but a world away in terms of the landscape I wandered through.

I had a job in the mid-1990s which occasionally required me to visit farms and speak to farmers. One legacy of that time is that I no longer eat meat. Another is that I take an interest in what farmers are growing in their fields. In the 1990s maize for cattle fodder was quite an unusual crop in the UK. Now it is much more widespread, as evidenced on my walk yesterday.

Away from the maize fields, and seemingly within every thicket and stand of trees, I came across a pond. Some a glassy sheet of black, others a carpet of green weed. As I stood gazing at one such pond  some words came into my head, the embryo of a story, perhaps:

It’s not what you see in the pond that you need to worry about, but it’s what follows you home when you turn and leave.

I turned the words over in my mind as I walked and almost managed to spook myself: what kind of Lovecraftian creature had my imagination summoned up? Nonsense of course, but I still felt compelled to take the odd furtive glance behind me as I walked. A song came into my head: A Figure Walks by Mark E Smith and The Fall from their Dragnet album:

And now tales of terror
Which my father told me
They never scared me
But not only is it the blind who cannot see
That figure behind you

And, as Smith puts it in his sleeve notes for the album:

Fiction breaks away from fact at the end i.e. it didn’t catch me, obviously (?)

A Figure Walks lyrics © The Bicycle Music Company

The Soil Association is concerned about the spread of maize and refers to it as ‘subsidised soil destruction’.

Mind: Coronavirus and Your Wellbeing