Several-ish moons ago when I was a young teenager, I was often obliged to undertake a late night 5 mile walk that separated my village home from the small country town nearby.
There was a sparse sort-of bus service, (a single old coach), with a couple of runs during the day, but the 'late bus' back each evening was at about 5..30pm in the afternoon...so.
...if the essential attendance of the various social gatherings held by my young compatriots involving exploratory fumblings with alcohol and girls was to be accomplished, I had to resign myself to the fact that, following each evening soiree, whilst my friends were all quickly returned to their nearby urban homes, I was faced with an hour or so's solo trudge along a darkened country road.....
However....these frequent late night meanders gradually became a quietly enjoyed ending to my naively developing social life.
They became a time of rueful reflection on the evening's happenings as I walked along the silent, hedge-rowed lane wrapped in the starlit and moon-washed darkness.
Many thoughts were thought, many verbal exchanges mentally re-visited, and many liaisons re-lived.....a sort of extended precy of the recent chapters....
I often arrived home totally unaware of the physical walk being so engrossed in my cogitations....
Other times I became uber aware of every inch of my foot-stepped journey in the dark-softened night.
I heard the hoot of an Owl as I passed a patch of roadside wood, coupled with the cooing and fluttering of woodpigeon......
I was aware of the occasional body movement of maybe a fielded sheep, cow or horse....
I caught fleeting and maybe imagined darkened sight of a flighted.....what?....
Un-sighted wing-ruffle and twig-rustle in the hawthorn.....
An unforgettable surprise, for both of us, of a verge-side head on meeting with a scuttling hedgehog....
The sky-flitter of maybe a bat by the shadowed barn....
The warm awareness of the star encrusted canopy above me blending with the dimmed and sleeping countryside around me, as I stepped softly along in the muffled quiet of the night.
The whole thing ripped brutally apart by the rare (thankfully) assault of the blaze and scream of a passing vehicle momentarily blasting the scene away....and then the silence gradually and determinedly returning as the scything light and roaring noise recedes.......the timeless natural, all encompassing environment able to ignore and adjust...
I have very fond memories of these nocturnal walks... and more often than not, tipped into my bed after each one perhaps weary but definitely content...and major plus....my mind completely sobered from the effects of the cheap tinned beer consumed that evening
and my clothes freshly aired of the reek of the sneaked Players No 6....
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