OVER THE GOSPEL PASS (3/5)

I have to say, I have a bit of a thing about solitude. Or used to.

In the Buddhist faith, the ability to be alone with yourself is the mark of a fearless, elevated spirit. The work on yourself gets done, not so much on relationship but in isolation. Whether it’s on your meditation cushion or in your little retreat hut, you can’t truly know yourself if your focus is turned outwards towards the world and its people.

This view suited my monkish, writerly tendencies. I think the happiest moments of my life have all come when I’ve been alone. For me, solitude had a depth and richness to it that, over time, surfaces an in-dwelling spirit, the soul or whatever. Like a haiku of the mind.

For years, then I’d try to get away at least once a year to some remote spot where I could walk or idle, or in the words of Walt Whitman “loafe and invite my soul…at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.”

Thoreau was my hero. And Laurie Lee, too. And the summer house at the bottom of Alex’s garden, an Air BnB, on the English/Welsh border was my Walden pond.

Except that, over the last few years, I’ve started to enjoy more the Aga-side chats with Alex than the lonely walks along the fields that bordered his home, the shared bottle of Rioja more than marvelling at the sparrows darting out of the scratchy hedgerows. I wanted to hear more about his foray into the under-taking business (he recently collected a local corpse who turned out to be an old school bully, scythed down in his fifties, much to his quiet satisfaction) and his position in the local petanque team. I started to feel bereft when I’d farewell Alex and traipse back to the solitude of my stylishly Scandinavian summer house.

In short, solitude wasn’t doing it for me any more.

I found this disorientating. My one true refuge from the rigours of a hectic family life and the busy-ness of the city, that one day away when I could recharge at a deep level, wasn’t doing it for me anymore.

True to form though, I kept going back for more. Maybe this time, I’d taste that delicious unwinding that comes from having no agenda for the day and no phone signal.

But on each occasion, I felt less at ease on my own and more anxious.

So, when I discovered that Alex’s summer house was booked and came across the Grange, a Victorian house where an old friend worked over the border from Alex’s; a place brimming with old near-family acquaintances from 25 years before, at that was reached across the formidable Gospel Pass, I booked myself in for a night.

Perhaps it wasn’t solitude that I needed right now.

Perhaps it was family.

Any family.