New friends – obscure sights – the group divides – clear and present danger – an accident of geography – interest in bridges
2026 has not been an easy one so far. Work challenges, family challenges and my frickin’ house flooding have combined to make everything a bit overwhelming
and hard to cope with.
So when we got a sunny Sunday, on a weekend in late April when (thanks to having found a long-term rental) we didn’t have to move between short-term lets, I cajoled Dan
into once again acting as my support driver so I could walk some more of the Thames Path.
Dan and the smaller child joined me for the first couple of miles from Abingdon, which was nice.
…
My partner Ruth’s mission to walk the entire length of the Thames Path1
continued recently, and I still love “going on on” her journey – even the parts I wasn’t present for – through her blog posts.
If you too might enjoy blog-spectating this slowest-possible-walk along the length of the River Thames, you can catch-up on the
backlog and subscribe for the next one, whenever that happens!
Footnotes
1 She’s doing the walk in many, tiny, and disparate instalments. By her own estimates
she’s achieving about 50 metres per day, when averaged over her entire effort. This makes her only marginally faster than the 40 metres per day of the faster parts of the Greenland
Ice Sheet, which I guess means that her progress is literally glacial in its speed.
The dog complained that I wouldn’t let her go play with the lambs while I retrieved the cache – the playful pup can’t understand why I wouldn’t let her try to make friends with them!
In the second hiding place I tied, and the evidence suggests I’m not the first to make my mistake. I dipped into this series on release day from the other “side”; now I’ve returned
(with my geopup pal) to do more of the loop! TFTC.
It’s my final day in the cute garden office of the AirBnB we’re living in, this week, and every time I step through the door I catch a glimpse
of our small, sandy-coloured dog squatting in the garden.
Except the dog isn’t even here. My brain keeps getting tricked… by this statue of a pig:
It’s F-Day plus 35, and I’m spending a few hours working in the habitable part of our flood-damaged house while I’m “between” two AirBnBs.
The dog, who doesn’t normally get to come upstairs, is sitting with me on the landing. Except she also wants to keep an eye on what’s happening downstairs.
The result? Her back legs are sitting and her front legs are standing as she peers blepfully down the stairs.
My regular home office of the last six years sits stripped-down, with no flooring, skirting boards, or power (with the exception of the specialised circuit powering an industrial
dehumidifier).
And man, a home insurance claim seems to be… slow. For instance, we originally couldn’t even get anybody out to visit us until F-day plus 10 (later improved to F-day plus
7). The insurance company can’t promise that they’ll confirm that they’ll “accept liability” (agree to start paying for anything) until possibly as late as F-day plus 17. Nobody will
check for structural damage until F-day plus 191.
Right now, though, we’re spending two weeks in this holiday let about half an hour’s drive from our house. It’s pretty nice, except that we have to commute over the ever-congested
single-lane Burford Bridge to get the kids to and from school every day2.
Some days it feels like being stuck in a nowhere-place… but simultaneously still having to make the regular everyday stuff keep ticking over. Visiting the house- currently stripped of
anything damp and full of drying equipment – feels like stepping onto another planet… or like one of those dreams where you’re somewhere familiar except it’s wrong somehow.
But spending time away from it, “as if” on holiday except-not, is weird too: like we’re accepting the ambiguity; leaning-in to limbo. Especially while we’re waiting for the insurance
company to do their initial things, it feels like life is both on hold, and not-allowed to be on hold.
The dog gets it. I had to take her to the house for a while on Monday3 and she spent the whole time leaning against my feet for reassurance.
And I worry that by the time they’re committed to paying for us to stay somewhere else for at least half a year, they lose any incentive they might have to contract for speed. There’s
no hurry any more. We’re expected to just press pause on our home, but carry on with our lives regardless, pretending that everything’s normal.
So yeah, it’s a weird time.
Footnotes
1 I’m totally committed to this way of counting the progress, which I started on F-day plus 3. I get the feeling like it might be a worthwhile way of
keeping track of how long all of this takes.
2 Normally, the younger and older child are able to get to school on foot or via a bus
that stops virtually outside our house, each day, so an hour-plus round-trip to their schools and back up to twice a day is a bit of a drag! We’re managing to make it work with a
little creativity, but I wouldn’t want to make it a long-term plan!
3 And do some work from there, amidst the jet engine-like noise of the dehumidifiers!
Today was a long day. Between commuting (the kids to school from our distant flood-evacuation accommodation), work, childcare, insurance wrangling etc., I was pretty tired when I got
back “home”. So I came in and lay on the floor.
The dog’s walk needed extending to make sure she’s well worn-out and not too-excited for some guests we’re having over this evening, so she and I came and parked on Dry Lane
(ironically-named, it seems, as the road was flooded) and walked down to try to find this cache. Unfortunately we weren’t able to find it, this time, but we’ll try again next time we’re
in the vicinity.
