The People Upstairs and the Green Belt

They must have wooden floors up there; no brown, one-millimeter-thick, industrial carpet softens the noise. It’s a couple living above us. The wife worked for Imelda Marcos and stole half her shoes: tap shoes, golf shoes, combat boots, a pair of cleats, steel-toed construction boots, ballet point slippers and some wooden clogs. At least I assume some such footwear magnifies the pounding of her feet. Her husband has two peg legs, obviously. They have nightly square dance lessons and step aerobics throughout the day. Some times they go to the store, buy a bag of apples and bring them home to drop, over and over again. There’s an awful lot of vacuuming too.

Chris and I went on a day hike through “Happy Valley”, along the North Downs Way and back up through another valley to the train station. The London green belt is in zone 6. This means you can swipe your tube card and take a commuter train out to a valley, where there are cows and birds and wide-open views. The walk was lovely, just long enough to tucker us out, but not so long as to make anyone (Chris!) grumpy (“I hate hiking!”). We had perfect weather, warm with long periods of sun. Chris got to pet a lot of dogs out on their walk, and he even got to pet three horses. We walked past a field and called the horses over. The enormous beasts eagerly trotted over and looked for apples in our hands. Chris held out his hand and let the horse’s big lips cover his whole fist. Chris didn’t have an apple. Then we pet them. I was nervous that the horse would bite Chris’s hand off, and then we’d have a problem. So I took pictures to distract the horse, and myself. They were sweeties though, and did not bite off Chris’s hand, or his face. They just waited patiently to be stroked. Horses are big.

Our guidebook was very detailed. “Walk one meter, turn left and walk fifteen meters, pass to the left of the cattle-guard. Walk 200 meters with the field to your right and a wood to your left”. Our guidebook was so detailed we got confused. We assumed that the cattle guard in front of our face must not be right, or else it wouldn’t require such precise directions. Soon though it turned the hike into a scavenger hunt! We eagerly sought out the table with two benches, or the metal cattle barrier, we knew what sort of landmarks waited for us up ahead. I suppose because we were just in the suburbs of London, the hike did not follow a single path, instead a trail was cobbled together from all of the green spaces. We passed through an old village and stopped at a church that was written in the Domesday Book. The parish was founded in 1076. America was founded seven hundred years later. Woah.