Totternhoe Knolls via the Nature Reserve (Circular Walk)

In which I walk through the weird yellow-green nature reserve in Totternhoe Knolls, and inadvertently turn my son into a girl by putting the 'wrong' clothes on him.

Ordnance Survey: Explorer 192
Distance: 2.5 miles approx
Time: 60mins

Rating: Moderate (some steep up and downs - a faff when it's muddy)

Well, back at work this week, and after last week's worrying over the nursery I was then presented with a piece on Radio 4 about child starvation, followed by hearing about the shenanigans of alcoholic parents, followed by a trip on a bus which included a staggering display of generally poor interpersonal skills between a mother and toddler also travelling. In short, I was reminded that maybe putting your child in nursery is not the worst thing ever. We may yet survive. I will keep you posted.

Anyway, eager to get out after last week's snow, I enjoyed a wander over Totternhoe Knolls. Starting in the carpark as with the last walk, go up the steps, bear right at the top and then left. However, unlike last time when I went through the gate on the right, this time I continued forward along the path I was on.

The path takes you up a gentle rise, and the higher you go the better views you get of Totternhoe & the surrounding countryside through the hedge on your left. Had it been a nice day it would have been lovely indeed, but it was damp and misty and cold. On a nice day I'm sure it's lovely, however.

During the snow, there was one thing I did do aside from insist the Chap walked to the shed and back - I dragged our off-road pram 'The Beast' out from under the stairs and wheeled ol' Chap-chops off to toddler group (why no sling? It was sheet ice underfoot, and while I am happy babywearing in the snow, it was so slippy I decided a pram would be better for us that day). He marched up and down with a baby walker for a bit, and then we went over to play with the wooden puzzles. There was a lady there doing a magic roundabout puzzle while he grandson drove a pedal car around the floor, and we did the idle polite chat thing. The older they get the faster they move. The problems with molars. How the Chap is really only interested in a toy that includes wheels or is a ball. By this time, the Chap was showing interest in one of the easy wooden puzzles. He picked up the circle, bashes it on the table a bit, and then neatly slotted it back in place. "Hooray!" I cried, as you do when a small child makes a minor achievement (which the Chap has now learnt, and makes a noise like the Fonz every time something pleases him). "Ah!" said the woman opposite me, "Clever girl!".

And here's the thing- I'd been sitting there blathering about him and he and his and I'm sure I'd used his name too for a good 5 minutes, but something had been talking louder than I'd been. Really very vocal. It had had an awful lot to say. It had been this shirt:

Warning! This shirt will make your child a girl!

Continue along the path - for a good while it was quite unmuddied as there is a structured surface (ish) to it. The further you go along, however, the squelchier it becomes. A few paths can be seen going off this one, but ignore them and stay on this main path. Finally, you will reach a dogleg that takes the path down the hill. Undecided about which way to go, I stood and looked at the map. I was also struck by the weirdness of the landscape of the nature reserve to the left of the path. Mossy, damp, weird teletubby-esque lumps and bumps, like a mogul field without the snow. It's either what happened after some quarrying was left to go back to nature, or the result of some serious bombing.

You're not going into the nature reserve yet, however - stick to the path, which now became very clarty with mud and I proceeded with caution down the slope.

Follow the path down the hill. It will then curve to the left. To be honest, it's a pretty dull green lane - it may be more exciting in the spring/summer, but right now it's sticky with mud, grey and pretty tedious.





Not long after, however, after the path swings to the left you find a metal gate in the hedge to your left. Going through this takes you into the nature reserve and its odd landscape. I found it strangely menacing - the sort of place you are likely to either find or become a body, I thought. Joyfully, neither event happened - we just got a bit damp, but that was the mist.

Take the path bearing slightly to the right of straight ahead (after the gate you can either go hard right or this slightly right, much like the options our government seem to be fond of at the moment) and take the path in between two knolls.

So, some time after the initial 'clever girl' incident, we went for a pub lunch with my parents. I put the Chap in the shirt again because it's sort of a rugby-style shirt, and the first time my father met him he gave him a small talk on which was most likely to be his standing leg and which was most likely to be his kicking leg, so I thought it an appropriate piece of clothing to put on my son. The Chap enjoys walking in places that aren't our house, so holding onto my hand (he can't do it without yet) he marched across the floor with that slightly disturbing toddler goose-step. A grandparent-aged couple on a table nearby cooed at him. "Oooo, you're doing well, aren't you. How old is she?"
"He's a boy." I said. They did the usual polite blustering about being terribly sorry and I made the general polite noises about how no-one can tell when they're this age anyway.
"He was wearing pink, you see." They said.
"But it's a rugby shirt!" My father spluttered.

You pays your money and you takes your gendered choice, it seems.

Obviously, this whole gender segregation of colour thing is a marketing tool - if you have a girl and buy everything with pink & flowers, if you have a boy second you'll simply have to go and buy a whole new load of clothes because otherwise he will clearly grow up to be gay and that would be appalling (someone this week said to me after I'd mentioned how The Chap was very active and allover the place investigating how "Well, you'd rather that than them being all sissyish, really, wouldn't you?", which I'm afraid got a rather firm "He can do whatever he wants to do" intoned from me.). But it pervades everything. There's an American Korean (or Korean American) called JeongMee Yoon who has done a series of photos called The Pink and Blue Project, in which she takes pictures of children with their pink or blue toys. She says "The saccharine, confectionary pink objects that fill my images of little girls and their accessories reveal a pervasive and culturally manipulated expression of femininity” and a desire to be seen. To make these images, I arrange and display the cotton - candy colored belongings of several children in their rooms. When I began producing the pink images, I became aware of the fact that many boys have a lot of blue possessions. Customers are directed to buy blue items for boys and pink for girls. "

JeongMee Yoon's Jake and his Blue Things

It's pretty staggering after a while - go and have a look at the full project so far here.

I can understand this colour-coding for children, particularly babies when they all look the same. A friend of mine said she was grateful when she saw a colour-coded baby, because then you don't have to go through the awkward 'is that a boy? Girl? If I say 'aw, isn't she cute' am I going to really offend the parent when it turns out to be a boy?'. However, looking at Jake and his blue things, it spreads beyond clothes, and it reaches a point where it's really hard to buy clothes for a boy in shops that aren't black, blue, dark green or brown (there are occasional spurts of orange, to be fair. Also, have you ever tried to find a piece of clothing for a boy that has a cat on it? Best of luck to you - girls get pink and cats, boys get blue and dogs. No boy, evidently, has ever liked a cat, ever. My child is clearly some kind of masculine feline-fondness prodigy).

What gets my goat is the way this spreads and spread until activities become segregated and it becomes a major effort to find, say, some sort of 'playing house' toy that isn't bright pink (although the Early Learning Centre do a blue iron. It's rare enough that it's worth reporting). Construction toys, similarly, get heavily marketed towards boys whereas girls get the pink treatment again, as indicated in this video that ChapDad showed me this week.

So while I'm not totally anti colour-coding per se, it's when it starts to infringe upon the activities you may be choosing to do that vexes me. There are some 'girly' things that I suck at, and ChapDad does a lot better - ironing, for instance, and folding. Conversely, when it comes to catching the live mice that the cat brings in, the ChapDad retires quietly from the room while I do a larger version of the 'spider in a glass'  technique. I should stand on a chair and fear for it to climb my skirts, I know, but I don't. Such a failure....

Back in the nature reserve, you will come to a fork - take the left hand one and you will eventually be led down the hill and onto the road. Cross the road and turn left, continuing down it until you pass a farm on your right, then take the next bridleway leading up the hill on your left. When you reach the top, you rejoin the path you started on - turn right, and retrace your steps to the carpark.





Things I Learnt

• There is something that feels a bit odd about Totternhoe Knolls. I've walked there twice and it's not that I don't like it, it just seems to have a bit of an atmosphere.
• In my opinion, you can't make children like something because it's a certain colour. You can influence a purchase, but it's the difference between me asking if something I want comes in red (which happens quite a lot), or me buying something simply because it is red (which doesn't really happen).
• I didn't like Lego as a child. I liked Playmobil. My favourite was the ghost. You could take his sheet off and move his beard up and down (such was the joy of the Playmobil beards) and attach the ball-and-chain to other characters you didn't like. His candelabra was also very useful for hosting banquets. And he glowed in the dark. Amazing! Would I have liked it better had it been pink? Don't be so silly - that's the wrong colour for ghosts to be....

Totternhoe Quarry (Circular Walk)

In which I admire the chalk landscape around the Totternhoe Knolls, see lots of pretty coloured berries and unburden myself of my fear of putting The Chap in nursery. Sorry for getting all maudlin. It happens now and again (indeed, it happened the other day, and my husband made me google pictures of Aidan Turner until I shut up. "Stop reading the interviews!" he cried. "Just look at the pictures of the hot man.". To my shame, I must confess I quickly became distracted from Mr Turner and we ended up watching videos on The Hobbit blog, which I think illustrates why my husband and I get along so well).

Ordnance Survey: Explorer 192
Distance: 3.5 miles approx (not sure yet as I've misplaced the map. Will get out a bit of string when I find it and will let you know).
Time: 90mins (still feeling a bit ill)

Rating: Easy-Moderate Walk (Bare minimum of map-reading!)

I should have been going to Occupy London this week, but from Monday - Tuesday I was so full of cold that it was all I could do to leave my bed, let alone traipse round London I was fine by Wednesday, but the thought of venturing into the capital while the strikes were on and risk being kettled with a baby did not appeal. Ideally, I wanted to avoid a conversation that would sound something like this:

"Let me go, Officer! I was just going for a walk!"
"Past Occupy London on the day of the strikes, madam? What's your job?"
"Well, I'm a teacher."
"Member of the Union, are you?"
"Well, yes, but honestly-"
 "Grumpy about your pension are you?"
"Well, yeah, I'm going to have to work until I die and frankly, I've seen the way 16 year olds treat all teachers over, say, 60, and I think the last 15 years of my career as I work up to 75 are going to be horrific."
"So, you're a teacher, a Union member, sympathising with the strikers and you just happened to be walking past Occupy London on the day of the greatest mass-Union action in your lifetime? And you're not involved? And this one's got bells on it, darlin'".

So instead I left the ChapDad heading off towards to picket line and went and hid in the Totternhoe Quarry/ Knolls. Actually, I'm doing a lot of hiding at the moment. I'm not sleeping well, and it's almost completely to do with the fact that, when I return to work, I am going to have to put The Chap in nursery. It makes me feel sick. It terrifies me. I have a barely-contained panic about it. In fact, when I think about it I find myself sort of... running in my head, looking for doors, looking for a way out. It stimulates my fight or flight, and it all happens in my head.

I parked in the Totternhoe Knolls car park (follow the brown signs from the B489), which also has some picnic tables. These must be appealing when it's not December.

Leave the car park from the back (through the gap in the brown fences) and climb the steps. As you come through the fence, turn right up the rise for a very short distance  When you reach the main path, turn left and then take the next right down a wide-ish byway that takes you in between a field on the right and part of the nature reserve on the left. Continue down this road for about a kilometre.

The ploughed field and a chalk cliff left from
quarrying, looking all lunar landscapey.

I like walking. Walking is simple. It drowns out the noise in my head. You have the world, and you have a picture of the world on your map, and you look at the picture and see how the world matches it and then you go, step by step by step by step and it is all so beautifully simple. The fear is simple too, of course. I feel so panicked about having to leave the Chap in nursery that some days I fear I will start to scream and if I let that happen it will never stop. It's strange to try and explain it, because my work is part time, and what with the ChapDad sorting out his hours it looks like the Chap will only have to be in nursery for a day and a half. A day and a half! How ridiculous to get wound up about it! It's nothing! We went to a Bumps & Babes thing on Monday and within ten minutes he was on the other side of the room, as far away from me as possible and investigating something with wheels! Frankly, put us in a room with other babies and I may as well not be there - there are much more interesting people to be poking in the eye. But what it feels like is that there's something in me hardwired, something evolutionary in me that tells me this is all so wrong. My mother sat in a pub after dropping me off at University for the first time and cried into her half pint, and now I understand why. Because there's this thing, a voice in my head that when I start thinking about putting the Chap in nursery cries mybabymybabymybabymybaby. Something primeval in me is crawling up the walls and telling me that to leave my child is all wrong.

But there's no choice for us. The mortgage doesn't pay itself on the ChapDad's salary. Or at least, the mortgage does, but there's no heat or light or food or Counsel Tax or petrol or electricity or water or travel.

Pass by the wooded(ish) rise on your right an continue down the road until you reach a byway that heads off to your right. After doing this, you'll be on this road for quite some time, so you might as well settle down to plod, plod, plodding and enjoying the pretty berries standing out on the now leafless hedges.

The weird thing is, I panic over a day and a half of The Chap in nursery, but if I think about it, and I did have a choice, I think my choice would be to return to work. Money no object, I would happily tootle off to work and leave the Chap with a childminder/nanny and not have a second thought about it. It's the concept of nursery that frightens me. The more my life has continued, the more education has gone away from teaching people stuff for the joy of it and more standardised tests, more measurement, more institutionalisation. Every level of development is assessed and fretted over. And I feel sick that my child will have to go into that, particularly so young. Everyone's child goes into the machine and 4, and that I'm sort of prepared for. When we were thinking about having a baby, what we'd do with it when I had to go back to work wasn't something we even thought about, to be honest. It's fine! I thought. By one, he's won't even be a baby any more, he'll be a toddler! He can hold his own for a day. And yes, it's probably true. But the voice in my head cries mybabymybabymybaby, and it will cry that from the first time he goes to nursery, to his first day at school, to the day he leaves home. I never expected having a child to feel like this. I never thought it would be so... raw...

One grey view you pass by on
the long road around the knolls

Finally you leave the chalk grassland behind and start to head down a tarmaced path along the side of a green field, heading towards the outskirts of Dunstable. The path forms a dog-leg to the right, and shortly after this you come to a cross-roads from which you can see the Ivinghoe Beacon and the Chiltern's Gateway Centre.







At this crossroads, turn right and continue along this path. When you come to another crossroads, turn left heading towards the big white chalk cliff you first saw at the beginning of the walk, although now from this angle it looks like this.




When you reach the end of the field, turn right and climb up the rise that has had part of dug away to make the cliff, enjoying views of the plain in one direction and Dunstable and the Downs in the other. The rise isn't arduous, and we were soon at the top and on our way down. As you descend, you will recognise the path you met at the start of the walk. Turn left down the road you came up and pop back through the gap in the fence to descend the steps back to the car park.

Dunstable and the Downs.

Things I learnt

• Being a grown-up sucks. There's a lot of fretting about the world and the country and our situation in general to be done.
• The fact that my go-to name for this area is the 'Totternknoll Hos' and my husband's is 'The Rottentrolls' clearly indicates which one of us has spent more time in nightclubs, and which spent part of their youth painting the occasional Warhammer figurine.
• Chalk is grey, berries are pretty colours, and wandering around near both is a generally good distraction. Better than moping around at home, anyway. Although should Aidan Turner wish to come round and offer some distraction, I could see if I have a window in my schedule...