Peaking

I climb a mountain before lunch today. I saw it yesterday and decide to climb it today. It is impossible not to feel philosophical when climbing a mountain. The small thought is squashed by the large one, like my boots squelching through the bog, drowning the smallest of weeds. Slowly, I size up the mountain, my eyes following the contour like pencil on paper, before deciding on the approach. The first thing to enter my mind is physical perspective. (That old chestnut.) Forget the large and small thought, there is me, in the physical dimension, so small and short-lived, and there is the mountain, so vast and ancient. The second thing to strike me is the light wind sweeping across the valley, like air from the lungs of one of those painted cherubs in Italian paintings. (A fly, I can hear a fly. Sheep. A frog? My shirt is sticking to my back.) The third thing is the ease of imagination when no one is around. I see some magic mushrooms for example and some I notice have been nibbled at. I imagine a council of sheep having eaten them and during their sheepish high imagine they are fanatical religious leaders, consumed by bad trips and in the end eating each other to death. I move on. I can hear the mgnui call of a buzzard in the sky and the gurgle of an underground stream. Years ago I had to climb mountains and always the man in front, ordered to ensure I never stepped on a mine, showed these bare calves. They were like polished teak. Come to think of it, it is impossible not to measure one's fitness now to one's fitness then. The body is not the same but the mind, amazingly enough, is more in tune. (The fearlessness of youth is not dissimilar to an absence of sense.) I think about the artist, how well she is. She is away in a nearby town with her mother and our children, buying a winter coat for our son. From the summit I can see where they are, ten or so miles away. I pass two very small caves, like shrunken versions of the caves I knew in the war zone, and feel proud of my family. I stand perfectly still and stare at the view. Alone. But not alone. The only thing I can hear is the very distant hum, miles away, of cars travelling along the dual-carriageway. ('I should be working,' whispers the artist later.) It is bliss.

Fly low, fly slow, know nothing and know you don't know

The artist worked on a larger piece today attached to the sitting room wall while the children prepared to join me for a walk. Hey, it's the weekend and we needed adventure – a user-friendly version - so we wished the artist well, gave a kind of wide but affectionate berth, and made our chatty way past the one-person double-locked travelling cars, the camera-pocked smile-shy buses, the impossibly hi-tech bicycles, and the slightly lopsided police van. We were headed for that mass of green in the middle of our urban romp. Anyway, the girl had a smile and the boy an old pair of binoculars, a rare leftover from my childhood. (I used to sit with the binoculars by the sea and watch the coasters running the feeder route and struggling through the water.) My son clearly enjoyed their maritime presence around his little shoulders as he stared from the bridge of his four small years. ‘Did you take them with you when you were little?’ asked our daughter. ‘When I was allowed,’ I smiled. We were surrounded by starlings, pigeons, sparrows, warblers, song thrushes, and woodpeckers, but I think the boy with the binoculars looked better suited for the gannets, guillemots, cormorants, and kittiwakes of his father's childhood. ‘Have you ever seen a plane crash?’ he asked, taking this flight thing a step further, or higher. ‘No,’ I said. (I had to think about it.) 'Not in person.' Anyway, we continued through the lines of sweet (Spanish) chestnut trees and time-honoured oaks and reached a secluded and vibrantly coloured flower garden and I was thinking that whenever I see bright colours it reminds me of the artist. ‘No!’ said my son. There was panic in his eyes. ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘I don’t want to go in there,’ he said. (Was that man, the so-called psychic, correct when he said our son had a talent for atmospheres?) I tried calming him and remembered somewhere in the ether hearing that the flower garden was used for anti-aircraft guns when years ago the city was bombed regularly from the air, and that some of the trees – for all I know those two over there - were cut back to ensure a good field of fire. Do you think that people had been blown out of the sky from here, or was he just a creature of habit who didn't like going a different route? Back home again, the artist was continuing her assault on the new large piece and we spread the financial and holiday sections of the newspaper across the plastic table outside and set about doing our own art. My son began with a landscape, while my daughter painted an imaginary person. Half an hour later, we were still at it. When we met up with the artist she said she was excited about the piece, and for one brief and beautiful moment we didn't know which piece she was talking about. Hers? Mine? His? Hers? There were so many.