There’s a Whole World Out There! … or … The Joy of Walking

Guest Author Uncategorized

Jaycee sent me this piece this afternoon, when I admitted to feeling more than a little blue about life in general. He told me, “This was written a few years ago when I was living in a different place…a different space…but the principles are still the same….” Thank you, Jaycee, for your sane reflection in an increasingly insane country – very much what I needed. I hope other denizens of The Pub will feel likewise.

(Image Credit: Shoot)

I now have no car.

That statement in itself may require an explanation in these self-commuting times, but I think I’ll leave that reason at a loose end …

And speaking of another thing that has ended … I feel I can state quite categorically (as an observant walker) and declare it official that the daisy bush has replaced the geranium as the stalwart mainstay of verdant flowering flora in the domestic front garden!

The long-lashed cheeky button flower of the daisy has edged the precocious petals of the geranium off centre-stage. I suppose in this age of “go-get-’em” attitude and “in-your-face” aggressiveness the battling geranium could hardly match the many blossomed. Fast growing daisy-bush ….. might, is now right!

I notice these small things on my walks into the town where I live. Hybrid roses too have muscled-in on a place next to the footpath, all bright and starry-eyed like the young starlets they are, their many-hued blooms huge and alluring to the passer-by ….. although I myself, religiously adhering to the adage: “Always take time to smell the roses”, find little delight in discovering so scant a scent in such wonderful blossoms. … and I feel a little cheated, like false advertising that encourages false expectations, for surely, if there is any flower that looks delicious enough to kiss. it is the rose …. and like any kiss, a fellah needs to take away with him an exotic, lingering scent of delight to caress and steel him against all the crassness of the outside world and…but I think I have made my disappointment plain..; the hybrid rose, without its scent, is as a romance without mystery!

(Image Credit: LA Times)

It is Summer where I live and the fruit trees are bearing bountifully. None more so than the cherry-plums along the railway track that I cut across on my way into town. For some reason these delicious trees are shunned by the public and much of the fruit is left to fall and rot on the ground. Bearing no such animosity to such bountiful harvest, I make feast on their berries!… These, and plums galore, accompany the walker on his journey and I make note the fruit of the nectarine tree leaning precariously over the corrugated iron fence of “Such and Such Ltd …. Motor Repairs” is deepening its crimson blush and fattening itself up for the picking!… .. not long now.

(Image Credit: Allotments and Gardens)

A Serbian I once worked with told me of his struggle against hunger in his youth after the war, and how he made it his business to note when every fruit tree, every vine in every backyard or lot in his village was ready to be raided … such are the necessities of survival. In Australia, where we take such things for granted, it is one more joy to be embraced on my walks.

Another thing I have noticed, although it has fallen out of fashion with the onset of “estate housing”, is the front fence. The front fence is one of the last and lasting expressions of individuality in a world of shrinking imaginations. In Australia – indeed, the world – the front fence, like certain hobbies, was open slather to any fetish of taste or tastelessness. I have seen them constructed of everything from shells to bits of ironmongery ….. “TAKE THAT!” was the creed for some of the monstrosities separating the incumbent from the innocents in the outside world. From bits of off-cut wood to animal bones and limestone rocks.

(Image Credit: Toothbrush Nomads)

And what was the flower that inevitably graced these icons and filled the gaps in the masonry? The geranium! Alas, it is gone now, as is that generation of front fence makers who, although predictable in all other mannerisms pertaining to urban life. could be counted upon to equal or maliciously outdo the neighbour in design or complexity, the Bastille like structure of the front fence. And gone, also, is the geranium … alas, alas!

(Image Credit: The Garden of Eden)

Windmills, simple in structure, were a regular feature of front gardens, but these too have been replaced by more complex “paddling duck” or “rowing men” and even by mass-produced “cupid” bird-baths. Some of the more bombastic citizens plant spread-winged eagles gargoyled on top of gate-pillars which gaze threateningly down on the walker as he moves past. I remember seeing a young woman innocently walk past a live wedge-tailed eagle perched on a fence at eye level next to the footpath. I was watching from a stopped train. As the woman drew abreast of the bird, she turned her head toward it (there is an impish spirit that provokes these actions!). I presume she didn’t expect to see such a large creature a foot or so from her face. The sudden leap to the centre of the road was Olympian to say the least! and when her knees buckled under her I thought she was going down for prayers on the bitumen! But no, she swiftly regained her composure and with only a few deft adjustments to her hair, promptly moved on. Against such nerves of steel, the male of the species has no chance …. though to this day I don’t know if it was the bird that screeched or the woman.

(Image Credit: Ozleworth Park)

I keep a small box at home in which I place all the “treasures” gleaned from the roads when I walk. There are shiny( they have to be shiny!) bolts and hose-clamps, a squash-ball, a portable phone, spanners and other miscellaneous objects, some unidentifiable but interesting …. what few coins I find I spend. The gutters and the shrubs are receptacles for all the detritus of mankind. Bits and pieces that fall off cars end up scarred and scraped into the kerbside gutters. Drink containers and waste paper end up stuffed, like bodies up chimneys, into any nook or kicked under bushes. At nesting time any excess chicks forced or pushed out of nests end up little mounds of fluff on the footpath or flattened on the roads. I can’t help but feel pity for these helpless chicks. who don’t even get a start in life before it is brutally taken from them. But then. what animal in the wild (even domestic) does not meet with a violent end? Though once, when a flock of starlings flew over me, I saw one fall, for no apparent reason, out of the flock. to my feet (almost) dead as a doornail ….. heart attack.? Old age? Who knows. But it was only once that I saw that.

(Image Credit: Etsy)

Walking can be very educational, peaceful and fulfilling. One’s thoughts fall into the rhythm of the step and rare is the worry or problem that cannot be resolved in the space of a good long walk. The relaxing contrasts of sunlight and shade, water sprinkler and breeze, the chlorophyll odour of fresh-cut lawn near the lake, the idle paddling of the ducks mixed with the joyful cries of children at play, lend a certain visceral ambience to the atmosphere of the clinging world around us that we call life…

Oh the joy of walking!

779 thoughts on “There’s a Whole World Out There! … or … The Joy of Walking”

  1. jay “magpie” cee,

    Nice one.

    What say you of those “developed” roses that have no smell?

  3. Is anyone else getting annoying little ads that are attached to images? Or is it something that has been downloaded on to my system??????

  6. Yup! Tough cheddar, Joe:

  10. sorry got sidetracked there but they seemed to have gone of their own volition, thanks for the input folks.

  11. I have these geraniums/pelagonians
    Climbing pink
    Climbing mauve
    I have my eye on a climbing white, just waiting for a snip. 😉
    Bushy ones:
    Red grandiflora, the old boring ones.
    Red flat petal
    Really bright red
    White
    White that turns pink in sunlight.
    Coral pink
    Light pink
    Dark pink
    white with a little bit of pink in the middle
    red petals with a white edge
    Almost white-pink with a dark pink edge.
    Mauve with pink throat
    Rose scented
    Lemon scented
    Lime scented
    The scented kind that is supposed to repel mosquitoes

    I have only bought two, the lemon and lime scented ones. the rest were cuttings.

  13. “Ask for this great Deliverer now, and find him
    Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves,
    Himself in bonds under Philistian yoke.”
    Milton.
    Wherefor art thou O great leader?

  14. Dragon Empress, we are twin souls indeed. This evening, as we were returning to the car after dining out, I asked me mum to arrange to have a bit of a particularly vivid vermilion geranium fall off into her hand.

    Done in an instant.

    It’s now in a pot, working on its new roots as I type (I hope).

  15. CK
    I’ve been gettinbg those ads too, but not on every image, and not all the time. There’s a go-away button if one does pop up. I have ad blocker running and my security scans are up to date and OK. I think it might have something to do with the sources of the images.

  17. If people are getting ads with particular images, could you please email me / alert me through comments?

    Sometimes, if I have an odd feeling about an image, I subject it to alchemy and place it in The Pub’s media library in – with luck – pristine status. I don’t always get that odd feeling, however – and I’m also loathe to use up too much of the free space.

  18. Fiona
    White is such a slow-growing one, I find. The others are up and running while white takes its leisurely time. I want more of it to set off the others but the cuttings are so slow to grow.
    I also have the dark purple/almost black one.

  21. But…but….Sir Pository said workers who lost their jobs would be liberated from production lines and would find better jobs. Surely he wouldn’t lie.

  23. Why would we want to insult turnips? They are honest vegetables that have their uses, unlike the members of the Abbott government.

  24. This geranium collecting is getting a bit obsessive. If I see a colour I don’t have I want it. And if I buy it, like I did the lemon and lime ones, I feel I have let myself down, though I have the excuse they were on stall so that’s ok. Anyway, a few weeks later while walking to the carpark at Flinders Uni I saw dozens of the lemon ones lining a retaining wall, just at the right height for snipping… er pruning.

  29. Geez, these votes are bouncing around all over the place. Newspoll goes, down, Neilsen goes up. I think it’s safe to say that the ALP have a modest lead at the moment, between 51 and 52. Not bad considering Abbott’s having his nipples furiously rubbed by the MSM right now. And that the usual complainers are doing their usual complaining about ALP internal matters. This idea that an individual’s personality or an individual’s opinions can disrupt a party’s entire policy outlook is not one I ever find myself subscribing to. Vote for policies, not people. It’s not that hard.

    Also, logically, if Abbott is jettisoning election promises left, right and centre, then he’d have to acknowledge that his whole fiction of ‘real solutions’ is out the window too. The things he was promising were supposed to be his ‘real solutions’, weren’t they?

  32. Leone,
    The problem as I see it is that we cannot compare Blood Oaf and his gummint to anything, because all those potential things would be so grossly insulted.

    Maybe we should resort to qualifiers and – if necessary – quantifiers. Plus the odd non-animate noun, if needed (a last-minute addition, because I need one for my first suggestion).

    Okay, here goes:

    PM Blood Oaf’s government is a craven, despicable, and in all respects contemptible, embarrassment.

    Next?

  34. Abbott and nipple -rubbing – oh yuck! I think I need to go and take some Maxolon after reading that.

  35. Leone,

    Au contraire, we should enjoy

    Much better for our physical and psychological well-being.

  45. This blast from the recent past was on my Facebook page –
    Retired pollies fight for perks

    Former federal politicians have threatened to launch court action to prevent the federal government from reining in their taxpayer-funded travel entitlements and from blocking ”windfall” pension increases to retired MPs and senators.

    The Association of Former Members of the Parliament of Australia has attacked plans to impose new limits on the number of free air and rail journeys taken by former politicians and their spouses.

    http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/retired-pollies-fight-for-perks-20120221-1tm6h.html

    So, here’s the plan – all us pensioners get together and launch a class action sueing the government over Abbott’s plans to fiddle with pensions. Anyone know any good lawyers who would do it pro bono?

    This is the near future under the Abbott government –

  46. How can that latest Nielsen poll possibly be correct when for the last week all I’ve heard from the geniuses in the media is about the apparent parlous state of the ALP and that they are in disarray, unelectable, in turmoil etc.
    Sure, the result here in the west was bad but that poll only emphasizes just how badly Abbott and his fucked up govt must be doing in the rest of the country.

  48. Toddraff
    Shame on you for not following the media meme of Abbott The Invincible like a good little sheeple. Cleanse those independent thoughts.

Comments are closed.