Pitstone Redundant Church to Ivinghoe Church in the snow

In which I adhere to the phrase 'there's no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes', wrap the Chap in fifteen layers of clothing, and enjoy the winter wonderland.

Ordnance Survey: Explorer 182
Distance: 1 miles approx
Time: 30mins

Rating: Easy-Moderate Walk (would be easy if there was no snow!)

True to the weather forecast, we woke up this morning to a festive dusting of snow. This is something about the British - we get really excited by weather. The sort of snow that the Canadians - or even the Germans, or other central-European types - would laugh at, the British work ourselves up into apoplexy over. This is probably because whatever weather we get, it will usually only last a maximum of a week before it'll all change again.

Today's short stroll (it was cold, after all) started at Pitstone Redundant Church. After admiring it being all snowy, you retreat down Church Road until you can turn left onto Vicarage Road. Maybe 50 metres down this road you will see a sign pointing through a hedge declaring that Ivinghoe is 3/4 of a mile away. Cross the road and follow the sign through the metal kissing gate and across the fields.



A festive post box



I want to talk to you about something. Something serious. Something that is currently on the minds of many parents across the country (or, at least,the ones I've been speaking to). Should you have it in the house? Is it better to introduce these things gently to your children at home, responsibly? If you don't have it at home, will your child run amok when they discover them outside your house? Or should you conclude - to directly quote from a Facebook comment - that  "If you hide these things, they only go and do it somewhere else!".

Of course, I'm talking about that most contentious of issues for the parents of toddlers and cruising babies - the Christmas tree.



Our Christmas tree for 2011.



It being that time of year, our minds have turned to decorations, and indeed, have promoted something of a Great Christmas Tree Debate. If you have very small children, do you have a Christmas tree or not? We have opted for the 'not' this year. We have a tree, but it's a little fake one and roosting safely on a bookshelf, away from grasping little fingers. Indeed.as the ChapDad observed, we have a tideline of Christmas - we have decorations, but they're all above the height to which one small, cruising child can reach.

However, mention a Christmas tree to parents of toddlers and pre-toddlers, and suddenly the conversation turns as if we're discussing drugs or alcohol. And we're all wildly justifying our choices, again as if the issue was more serious than just a tree. I assert the Chap is only just beginning to grasp the concept of 'No', and I don't want to spend all day every day directing him away from the electric-lighted, glass baubled spiky thing. Others declare this sort of behaviour unnecessarily fussy (and why, they may do so. If they also want to come round my house and spend their days directing my son away from the tree, then why, they may do that also and I shall get on with the stuff I need to be doing). Another friend gave me a long and heartfelt explanation of how they decided to have a tree because the rest of their house was so well child-proofed that they thought a small period of intoning "NO touch!" as their child heads for the baubles would be good for their child to realise some things are out of bounds.



The Chap peers at the snow



But the conversation is so contentious, so liable to prompt debate and counter debate (particularly on social media), and earnest reasoning behind the choices that have been made, it suggests to me that while on the surface we're talking about trees, underneath we're talking about something else. What is the conversation we're all really having here? Is it discipline? Is it about giving your child boundaries? Is it about child safety? ChapDad found an interesting article earlier this week in the Washington Post about parenting choices :

"Have you buckled a child into any kiddie gear lately? Here’s what you see when you do: WARNING: DEATH or SERIOUS INJURY CAN OCCUR.

Thanks! I hadn’t fully appreciated human mortality until I became the whole world to this helpless creature I love to an aching degree, and now vivid images of his death fill my mind every time I dutifully employ the safety equipment that now constitutes the baseline obligation for responsible parents but that didn’t even exist in my parents’ day!

Fulfillment is impossible unless people filter these worst-case scenarios from daily life, and most parents do override the sense that harm to children is epidemic.



I can haz camera?



But that takes willpower when California’s missing child makes headlines in Rhode Island, and when your gentle days with your newborn are punctuated by dozens of encounters with



WARNING: DEATH

WARNING: DEATH

WARNING: DEATH "

(Read the full article here.).

I don't really know what conversation we're all having. It seems a mixture to me- something about child safety and some sort of judgement about how helicoptery your parenting is. It's just no-one is saying anything overt. We're just all sitting about giving long and impassioned speeches explaining our Christmas tree choices. I hope to God no-one opens the star/angel/fairy can of worms - we'll here all night.

Pitstone Windmill

Ivinghoe

Ivinghoe High Street

The gate

Really, when everything gets snowed on it all looks fresh and clean and exciting and festive. As I reached the end of the field and was about to enter Ivinghoe, I was so excited I even took a picture of the gate.

 Go up Green Lane until you come to the High Street. Turn right, and in a little over a hundred metres or so you will be at the end of the walk at Ivinghoe Church. It is still covered in scaffolding, and not even the snow can make that pretty. Hey ho.

Things I learnt

• Wearing big woolly slipper socks inside your wellies is a top plan.
• The weather hood on the Ergo baby carrier is a really good idea. It did get a bit wet in the snow, but it dried out pretty quickly.
• I now feel super-festive!

St Mary's Church, Ivinghoe circular walk via Pitstone Windmill and the Grand Union Canal

In which I do a circular walk from Ivinghoe's Church, see a number of fungi which I fail to identify, and politely request that certain magazines get the ... Dickens... off my ... blinking... case.

Ordnance Survey number: Explorer 181
Distance: 5 miles approx
Time: 2 and a half hours (I was feeling lazy, ok?)

Rating: Moderate Walk - map reading and stile climbing required.
This is posting a bit late today, but I've been in a pickle because The Chap has been running a temperature for the past 24 hours, and I have been stuck playing Human Mattress because he refused to be put down.

St Mary The Virgin's Church, Ivinghoe was originally built at some point in the 13th Century, and at the time of writing is currently covered in some very modern scaffolding. There was originally some hope of the work being done by Christmas, but sadly it seems that it won't be finished until February.

Although I started the walk here, parking isn't amazing. There is some on a verge opposite the King's Head, but I'm not sure how legal or encouraged it is - might be better to park at the Pitstone Windmill area if you don't fancy risking it.

Turn your back on the church (how very Dawkins of you), and follow the High Street down the mild decline. Shortly after passing the library and post office, take the second left down Green Lane. This rapidly becomes unsuitable for cars and leads you through a gate and onto the footpath that takes you across the field past the Pitstone Windmill. Cross straight across this field and follow the path straight across the next one - you will pop out, via a metal kissing gate, onto Vicarage Road.

Turn right down Vicarage Road, and follow until you reach the roundabout shortly after passing Pitstone Memorial Hall. Go straight across the roundabout along Cheddington Road.

Just as you leave the village of Pitstone, and slightly before the National Speed Limit sign, cross the road and turn right through a metal kissing gate to head towards the Grand Union Canal.

Unidentified fungus #1

Usually October is the month for fungi, but I think all the warm weather we had might have put it off. Now it's getting colder, I was able to spot more types, although what most of the were I have no idea.

This is the sort of slightly woody path that I like best - the sort of place Freudians look at in fairy stories and nod and suck their teeth at. I just like it because it feels atmospheric.

Speaking of the atmosphere, there must be something in the air at the moment, because almost everyone I talk to appears to be doing some form of exercise or dieting or both. There's been a rash of exercise/weight loss status updates. There are two reasons for this, I think. 1) Christmas, that annual Excuse For Gluttony is coming, and 2) The Godmother is getting married the week on December 17th, leading to a frenzy of dress choosing and posing to be done.

There's something about weddings - particularly in the age of digital photography, where you know the first pictures will be plastered across Facebook within 24 hours, and then following in dribs and drabs for the rest of the week - that makes us all behave like we're going to walk the Red Carpet at the Oscars. I know I do it; the year before I had The Chap, I marked weight-loss by the three weddings I had to attend.

I remember The Godmother getting engaged distinctly, because her fellow proposed when The Chap was 5 days old. She texted everyone in excitement - it had been 10 years in coming - and I, in my heightened emotional state, burst into tears in the back of the car as the ChapDad was driving us to hospital for the 5 day check. "When are you getting married?" I asked her. "Will I have enough time to lose the baby weight?". When she announced that it would be in December, I laughed. Of course I'd have lost the weight by then! Easy.

Ha!

Of course I haven't. I am also still plugging away at Fat is a Feminist Issue, but I once heard Jo Brand announce that she got halfway through it and then ate it, which is sort of how I feel about it too, except it's on my Kindle and that would be expensive. It's just a bit ... worthy. The Female Eunuch is funny and filthy, but this is just a lot of handwringing. According to Orbach, I am fat allegedly because I am choosing to be so because it is doing something for me psychologically - probably something to do with me wanting to avoid sexual attention. I'm not convinced. In fact, it makes me go 'ppfffft' and reach for a chocolate brownie.

In due course, you pop out of the wooded path and onto the Grand Union Canal. Cross the bridge and turn right. The light was amazing by the water, and the canal was incredibly still and peaceful. I was still fairly ranty, however, but the light did make me stop and go 'oo' before I continued on my muttering way.
Because surely, to say that one gets fat in order to avoid sexual attraction suggests that no-one fancies fat girls (lest we forget, they're 'more grateful' and so 'make more of an effort'. The number of times some arsehat has announced that to me in a pub. To my face. ). I can plainly see the evidence for this, having never been kissed, or had a boyfriend, or been proposed to or got married. No no. Nothing to see here, I've just sat at home at pondered my navel. Which certainly isn't pierced. Fat girls don't do that. We're too busy feeling melancholy.

house by my own rage, I go and buy some form of trashy magazine. I bought one this week, and we shall call it - to pluck a name from the air - Nearer. It purports to contain information on such diverse subjects as fashion, celebrity and real life (albeit the type of real life that exists around the more extreme fringes and almost always seems to contain one story of rape a week. Why, one wonders...?). I know I shouldn't buy these magazines; my sister-in-law refers to them as 'A roll-call of social care referrals', which I think is pretty accurate.

This particular publication is especially poisonous, in my opinion. Because this one is endlessly mentioning somebody's weight, and, most worryingly, slyly implying that when they were thinner, they were happier. So there they are, printing their lead story about two examples of  standard self-destructive tabloid fodder 'ballooning' from drinking too much. Here's a picture of one in a tiny blue dress at some awards bash, with the caption 'looked a lot slimmer attending a launch party in May'. On the next page, here's some reality-show wazzock who 'looked slim and healthy before', whereas in the next picture 'The star looked a lot bigger at a party last week'. The implication is that if they're fatter, it's an indication of their internal misery. I'm not denying comfort eating, what I'm disliking is the broad, brush-stroke implication that if you're thin, you're happy.

Unidentified fungus #2

Continuing along the canal, I spotted another set of mysterious mushrooms - although these looked a little more toadstooly to me. And speaking of poisonous little toadstools, if this whole fat thing was mentioned once on that page and then never mentioned again, I think I'd be more inclined to go 'hm' and leave it. But as I flicked through it, all it seemed to be talking about was who was having babies and who had got back into their tiny jeans within six weeks after giving birth. Clearly I am the demographic for this atrocious tosh, and it filled me with rage. Of course, there's the obligatory page where some celebrity yo-yo dieter pops up half naked 'celebrating her curves' (oh, curves, you pernicious word. We all know you're a euphemism for fat), but for the rest of it... I'm the sort of person who likes statistics, so I did some counting. 34 pages of this magazine dealt with 'features', 13 of which had some snidey little comment about someone looking fatter/thinner. Less than half, but it means that every couple of pages or so, some poisonous toadstool pops up to go "You're fat! You're fat! You're fat, and you must be miserable!". It wears you down. There's better things we have to worry about as women than the fact we are still toting, say, and extra stone of baby weight (such as the contradictory advice of Health Visitors, or the crippling price of childcare, for example), but that's all these magazines want to make you focus on, because they market themselves as a solution, a break, a matey little bit of time for yourself, while it simultaneously grinds you down. It's a vicious little circle that makes them a lot of money, I'm sure.

Potentially identified fungus

I finally passed a fungus that I think I recognise. I'm pretty sure that this is a field mushroom. Had it had more friends, I would have picked them and taken them home for a spot of mushrooms on toast, but seeing as this one was there all on its lonesome, I left it where it was.

Shortly after the possible field mushroom, I reached the point where you have to leave the canal path. At bridge 123, take the path up to the left onto the road.

Bridge 123

I was briefly concerned that this choice of path was deeply foolish, as it takes you across a single lane bridge with no footpath. That being said, it is quite easily done as long as you use your common sense with it and follow the traffic when the traffic light is green.

The traffic light is not green.

Continue along the right hand side of the road for a few hundred metres until you see a green footpath sign on the other side of the road. This leads you into Farm, and for a moment I thought I was going to have to turn around and go back the way I'd come, as there were large 'Disease Control' signs on the gate. I remember going for a walk with my father at the height of the 2001 Foot & Mouth Crisis, and having to phone to get my mum to pick us up from the middle of nowhere because we suddenly found that the paths we were supposed to go on had all been closed. However, as I approached the stile, I saw a large blue box on the other side, which upon further inspection, read:

All fine - feet dipped (easier said than done when you have a baby on your front and a knapsack on your back). Follow the path up the side of the field boundary until, just beyond the top right corner, you will find a gate and a bridge over a stream. I was really glad I was wearing boots here, because the mud was so churned up on the other side of the bridge that my trainers would have been ruined.Turn right and follow the field boundary again along the side of the Grove Farm pick-your-own patch. The strawberries were looking particularly sad.

The sun sets over the
pick-your-own ...

It as at this point I realised that I had misjudged the time of day, and the sun was going down. I hadn't really spotted that it is almost winter, and sunset does happen a lot earlier these days... At the corner of the field, follow the signposted path along the stream until you come to a wide pathway. Turn right, and walk alongside the chainlink fence next to the pick your own gooseberry bushes. A couple of hundred metres down here you will see a pathway sign off to the left. Cross the second stile and walk along a fenced corridor between two fields. When I was there, they had sheep in them, and I had to stop and ponder the following question:

Is it me, or does this sheep have a really small head
compared to the size of its body?
Is it the inverse Brian-from-Westlife of the sheep world?
His head is massive.  Just have a look.

When this path ends, turn right for a few hundred metres, and then left along a clearly signposted path before you wander into the farm.Walk down Maud Jane's Close, and when you reach Station Road, turn left and you will shortly find yourself back at the church where you began.

By which time, I am pleased to say, my internal monologue which had at certain points sounded reminiscent of an episode of The Thick of It, had quietened. I know the easiest thing for me would be to stop reading these magazines, but I know they're there. They look at me, with an expression of poorly disguised loathing, the way they look at all women. And I read them every now and again in the hope that I can find something to approve of, or if it's just going to be another guilty frisson of vicarious bullying as we all crow at how terrible some overpaid, undertalented miseryguts looks in a tacky dress. And that's the greatest problem of all, because you know that guilty frisson of vicarious bullying? I like it.

Hmpf.

Things I learnt

• The sun is going down a lot earlier. By the time I got home, it was dark and I felt like a dirty stop-out.
• The warm weather means mushrooms and other fungal fellows are out later this year.
• Certain types of magazines make me swear like a Billingsgate porter.

Pitstone Windmill to The Akeman, Tring.

In which I stomp out a quantity of residual anger, work up an appetite for a pain au chocolat, and think about nothing at all.

Ordnance Survey Number: Explorer 181
Distance: Somewhere between 3 & 4 miles. I think.
Time: 75 minutes ish

Rating: Easy  

I sort of did this walk by accident, as it was done as much on a whim as you can be when you have a baby to plan for. A number of factors led me to decide to walk and meet friends - firstly, it was a really lovely, sunny day (if a bit windy); secondly The Chap was being really awkward - tired, but refusing to sleep or feed, instead choosing to grizzle permanently; thirdly, I was very, very cross with my husband over something he had done that I'm not really going to go into here because it's Not Cricket to do so, but had led me to throw a sieve across the kitchen in  frustration the night before. Not at him; he wasn't in the room at the time, you understand. Full marks to John Lewis for crafting sieves that remain completely unscathed during marital disputes, however. And we're friends again now, so it's all water under the bridge.

Suffice to say, however - I was right.

The gently rising stony path

Looking better than a quarry

The Pitstone Windmill  is always a good starting place, and has a number of pretty views around it, so it made sense to start there again. Walking away from the windmill and across a field towards Vicarage Road in Pitstone, you pop out through a hedge for a brief turn left and then right down Church Road. When the road turns sharply left, you don't follow it but instead go straight on up a gently rising stony path. A hundred metres or so up this, you pop out into a really lovely chalk grassland meadow that is the attractive result of last century's chalk quarrying. Indeed, you can still see the sharp banks that result from the open-cast quarrying.

This meadow is very popular as a local dog-walking spot, and you are likely to receive a few friendly nods as you walk through it. The chalk grassland  is really very pretty and has all sorts of flowers on it throughout the year as well as affording some nice views of Pitstone Hill and surrounding countryside. Bear left (the path is quite well trodden)as you go through the main field, and you will find a small stony path that pops you out onto the Pitstone cycle paths. My cycling is rubbish, so cycle paths such as these do a lot to protect Buckinghamshire from my wobbling wheels.

Do you dare brave the stile for this view?
(Taken from the end of the path, looking down the
route I didn't take)

Turn left once on the cycle path, and you should be able to see a roundabout. Cross straight over this onto Northfield Road using the paths, and face your first decision. Do you wish to a) brave a stile, and enjoy a pleasantly wooded walk that protects you from the road for a bit, or b) avoid the stile and face walking up the road. I was feeling pretty lazy, to be honest, so I chose to walk up the road - it's not very far, although the road is quite well used as it's a main route to Tring station. The verge is just about wide enough for you to leap off the road should a car come up behind you (I chose to walk up the 'wrong' side of the road in the same direction of the cars, as the other side had more trees and was harder to get out of the way if a car was coming.).

Either way you choose, you will have to walk along part of Northfield Road, but a path along the verge does appear to protect you from traffic. It is not far along this that a green sign directs you to Public Restricted Byway 62 (where are the other 61, I wonder?)/Great Union Canal 1/2 mile/ Tring Town Centre 2 miles.

This is Marshcroft Lane, and for the next couple of miles you can switch your map reading brain off, because all you do is walk along here. It's good to just stomp away and pound out any rage you have - this is a place to work off all that 'helpful' baby advice about feeding/weaning/sleeping that you receive. While your brain is off, there are a number of things you can admire, among them:

Rolling countryside, of the sort the South of England does so well.

The London - Glasgow train line; terribly exciting if you're a certain type of person. I'm not that type.

The Grand Union canal

Those scabby-looking blackberries that either taste amazing
or render your face like that of a pig chewing a wasp.

Sloes. For gin.

You can also enjoy views of some really expensive houses - the sort of things that have balconies and gazebos. I didn't take pictures; they'd probably think I was weird, or a burglar.

In due course, you will pop out in Tring - turn left and follow Grove Road to its end, then turn right and follow Station Road until you reach Tring high street - a hop halfway up this will bring you to the crossroads. Turn left up Akeman Street and The Akeman is just beyond the Chinese Takeaway and Town Hall.

"Garcon! A little service here!"

Please allow me to recommend the mint tea (made with fresh mint leaves rather than a tired old bag) - I tend to decant a glug into The Chap's doidy cup for him to enjoy once it's been cooled. He's a bit of a mint fiend, it has transpired. It also means he has taken to brushing his teeth (all 4 of them, at current count) with quite some gusto. The Akeman is also very baby friendly and does some very naughty cakes. The food is also very good, if a bit pricey - nice for a treat

Tea and cake/patisserie done with, you can either be Virtuous and walk back to the Windmill, or do as I did and and take the number 61 bus (caught on the High Street opposite the Rose & Crown Hotel) back.

Things I Learnt

• Do not blog in a rage. Had I written this right after I had the done the walk, I fear I would have written all sorts of unpleasant things. I waited a bit, however, and things are now more in perspective. But, I hasten to add once again, I was right.
• Don't forget to put socks on your baby. You just end up holding their feet the whole time.
• Spread-and-splay type carriers may be very comfortable, but offer little protection if your child does an epic wee which leaks down your front. The charmer.

Pitstone Windmill To Down Farm (Circular Walk)

In which I enjoy views of the Ivinghoe Beacon, the Aylesbury Vale and some sheep, do some dodgy map-reading and think about the concept of Should.

Ordnance Survey Map: 181 (Chiltern Hills North)
Distance: Approx 5 miles
Time: A little under 2 hours

Rating: Moderate

Before you start walking - as well we all know once we have got halfway up a hill only to realise that these socks are really rubbing and maybe some plasters would have been good - you should prepare. Doubly so when you're choosing to lash a baby to your belly and march across some form of Down/Chiltern. So, at 9.30 with The Chap just planning to doze off for his morning nap, I decided what I needed was a knapsack. Oh yes; no backpacks or rucksacks here. It was going to be that sort of a walk today.

So, this was my plan - half a litre of water, 210ml baby milk, nappies, travel change mat, nappy sacks, baby wipes, charged mobile, house keys, umbrella (serious walkers will laugh at me here, but I'm sticking with the brolly; it served me well in the past, most memorably on a particularly ill-advised and wet jaunt up to Top Withens on the Yorkshire moors), camera, map.

The walk starts and ends at Pitstone Windmill, the oldest windmill in the British Isles, and being located in the incredible flatness of the Aylesbury Vale, I'm not surprised; the wind whips across here at quite a pace. If I had corn to grind I'd be whacking a windmill here, too.
What this picture doesn't show you is that round the back there's a rather jaunty cherry-red wheel that, when functioning, allowed millers to swing the whole of the top of the wooden structure around to face the wind. Out of this field you have to hop across the B488 onto the other side of the road and continue left until you reach a sign telling you that it's 1.3km/0.8miles up to the right to reach the Ridgeway national trail.

It was on this route towards the Ridgeway that I became aware that I was being gently poached, and, not to put too fine a point on it, overheating and sweating like a pig. It was at this point I hit a dilemma and started thinking:

Do I stop and take off the knapsack and the sling and the baby - who had just nodded off 5 minutes ago - to remove a layer of clothing (all right, I admit it, it was a fleece. Wandering up a hill with a baby on your front and a knapsack on your back is not a look I plan to rock at the next London Fashion Week), or do I continue up this hill in a state of sweaty discomfort? Whose needs do I put first - the need of the baby, who is sleeping, or my own need not to be roasting to death?

I'm afraid, gentle reader, I chose my own needs over that of the baby. Essentially, I thought about it and decided that, seeing as the baby had just gone to sleep, he would shortly go to sleep again. I, on the other hand, was just going to get hotter and hotter until dehydration, heat exhaustion or spontaneous combustion occured.
But this is, for me, a problem. Because I sort of feel - and I'm not entirely sure where I've got this idea from - that I should spend my entire time subsuming my every waking moment to his every whim, and to do anything else is a Terrible Thing. A mother, we are taught to expect, is Selfless in caring for her child. How dare I resent not being able to go to the opera any more! I should welcome the repetetive round of feeding and cleaning, and gleefully allow myself to roast to death in a fleece because it is all For The Good Of My Child. How dare I object?!

Carriers with sleep-hoods for the win, I say.

Well, pish. It was lovely without the fleece as I continued up the rise, the breeze blowing and a small, awake chap peering up at me from under his sleep hood.

His expression does not appear to suggest I am a terrible mother. However, if you want to see a baby looking really confused, you should remove them, sleeping, from your chest and lay them down on a leather knapsack in the middle of the field, only for them to peer up blearily at you. The last time I saw such an expression of disgust was when he tried to chew the cat.

As you head towards the Ridgeway, you do get some nice views of the Ivinghoe Beacon, and upon reaching the summit (ish) and joining the black signposted national trail, you can turn around and have a look at the flattened landscape that is the Aylesbury Vale. I'd put a windmill down there, if I was them.

I turned right, away from the Ivinghoe Beacon and continuing along the route which, if I went on long enough, would have had me pitching up in Avebury. Crossing a minor yellow road, I observed that someone had taken to the time and effort with a permanent marker to note that the tump coming up was  'Paul's Knob'. Whilst it certainly lacks the impressive stature of some kaarst landscapes which we walked through when we lived in China, if this wide knoll 202 feet above sea level is to scale, I'm awfully impressed.

Continuing along the Ridgeway a few hundred metres, I thought about a conversation I had with my mother the other day in which I rang my hands about not doing all the things I feel I should be doing. Part of me feels I should have practically moved into the Children's Centre and should be spending all my time at Baby Bounce and Rhyme and Baby Signing and Baby Yoga and ooo, I don't know, Baby Introduction To Renaissance Verse 1509 - 1659 or whatever they're running at the moment. But I just don't want to. I take The Chap out to interact with my NCT people once a week (or sometimes once a fortnight), and I take him to see one of my Uni friends who has a baby 5 months older with about the same frequency, and that's pretty much it. I don't want to spend all my time being dictated to by the Tiny Emperor; I want to be able to go out or wander round or cook dinner or do the ironing when I want to. Frankly, when you have a small person whose needs must be catered to, doing anything when you want to is some sort of achievement that should be celebrated by at least a cake, or possibly champagne.  But I sort of feel that This Is Wrong. This Is Selfish. How will he ever be socialised? How do I ever expect him to hold down a job or a functioning relationship in the future if I haven't gritted my teeth through the tambourines and shakers of Baby's First Symphony Orchestra every week? How's he ever going to find anything to put on his UCAS form?

Down Farm farmers doing some ploughing.

I was distracted from these musing by a well-signposted footpath diverting to the left away from The Ridgeway. Going through the gate and crossing the field, you get a view of the route you will take back along a line of trees.

 I like Autumn. I like watching farmers plough up fields, I like all the apples, I can get virtually evangelical about pumpkins and other assorted squash.



Half of the field I was crossing at the time had been ploughed and half of it not, and was absolutely full of chalk and flint.I have a friend with a degree in geology who gets very excited about such views, and will leap gleefully around until he finds an appropriate piece of chalk and then lecture you on how it is the fossilised remains of a track left by a long dead prehistoric worm. Maybe his mother spent all her maternity leave in Baby Prehistory Soft Play - I hear a new one may shortly be opening somewhere near Wendover.

The track joins the field boundary and follows it in a curve until you reach the corner of the field and pop out onto the same yellow road crossed earlier. Turning left up this road for maybe 500 metres (?) you finally come to a right hand road that also comprises the footpath that leads you right through the middle of Down Farm and then continues sharply up a wooded path.

 It was at this point that my great 'skill' at map reading came to the fore. Two paths diverged in a wood, and I took the one that appeared to follow the field boundary as directed by my map. I discovered, as the path became more and more overgrown and finally ended in a barbed-wire-topped gate, that I had gone the wrong. Clearly this evidences the fact that my mother never took me to Baby Orienteering and so by the time I reached the Duke of Edinburgh's Award stage, that ship had sailed. Evidently I would never be able to, say, enjoy a little light rambling across a Chiltern modelling the latest baby-knapsack-tracksuit bottoms-fleece fashions to an unsuspecting Three Counties public. Anyway, a bit of scrambling up a bank (naughty) got me back onto the correct path; you are led left through the trees and out to finally rejoin the Ridgeway national trail at the point where you originally joined it. From then on it is a mere skip down the way that you came up, admiring sheep as you descend. I have never seen a sane looking sheep. They all look like they just paid a clever marketing person to create a big fuss about BSE so no-one would notice that they are, in fact, not the full toolkit.

I realised as I reached the Windmill again and ended the walk that I had been very scathing about baby based activities; more scathing than really I feel. If that works for you, go for it, go every day! My argument is not with people who love a Children's Centre based activity, it's with my own head. I have yet to find Children's centre/baby based group activity that I enjoy, but I feel I should be going to them For The Benefit Of The Baby. But, at the end of the day, I don't like it, and forcing myself to do it makes me miserable. So I won't.  

Things I Learnt

• I am not very good judging distances on an Ordance Survey map.
• I need to let go of the things I think I should be doing and just do the things I like. The Chap does need to see babies so it's not a massive shock when he goes to nursery in 2012, but I don't need to hare around organising him a huge social whirl now. He is not Oscar Wilde.
• Blueberry baby rice cakes are not an appropriate walking snack for a grown person. Some form of high-calorie munchie needs to come with me next time.