The Kelpie & The Shadow Wolf

Bright blue skies today with fluffy white clouds, a picture postcard spring day in the Vale of the White Horse. At least it was through the dirty windows of my house, outside the warm shafts of sunlight through grubby glass were instantly replaced with a biting March wind that contracted the diaphragm in a breath shallowing hug. A momentary adjustment and I was able to shift my perception; now the wind is still cold and strong but as it plucks at my thin clothes and puckers my eyes it also blows away the musty indoor mindset, sweeps up the moribund, waiting for dissolution, scent of the sofa dweller and freshens me down to my suddenly alive centre.

Catie takes Jake's lead from me and leads him round to her side of the car. I go through my creaky daily athletics, switching body weight from stick supported leg to the weaker leg, my hand on the car roof controlling the half-fall into the driver seat while the stick is simultaneously swung up and stowed in its familiar place between seat and door pillar - a practiced but inelegant entry into the cockpit of the Millenium Falcon, cunningly camouflaged to appear to everyone else as a humble Nissan Note. While all this Y chromosome nerd fantasy is going on in the front of the car, in the rear Jake is delivering an Oscar worthy performance. He doesn't want to get in the car, he wants to go and sniff the messages left for him in the nearby field by the other local dogs - to see the concentration with which he sniffs the discoloured tree bark, sets his face into its most intellectual grooves, visibly thinks for a long, long moment and then writes his reply across the original, replying and cancelling it with one cock of a leg, you would suppose some intricate game of postal chess was being played between two masters. Maybe it is, I do catch him resting his head thoughtfully on my chess board from time to time when he has clambered onto my couch and snuggled behind my legs, he could be rehearsing his next move or it could just be he's checking for a repeat of the forgotten doughnut incident. Whatever the appeal of the field may be it is drawing him today. He has tried the dragging feet, the soul wrenching look of longing, the sustained pressure fieldward on the lead, none of it has worked, Catie has brought him to the open car door. All of this has just been the overture however, the last desperate act remains, the main event, his dramatic interpretation of "boneless, paralysed dog". As Catie encourages him up onto the seat he makes a struggling effort, low to the upholstery, paws scrabbling, his chin makes it into the car and then like a marionette with severed strings he collapses, folding into himself in a perfect crumple onto the Tarmac. From here, lying on his back, he looks up in supplication.....but the audience has seen this play before and so moments later he is hoisted into the car where his body strangely rediscovers the power to move.

Off we go! A drive across the sunlit plain of the bottom lands of the Vale; blossom on the trees, green shoots in the hedgerows, sunlight shimmering on the surface of the last of the flood waters lying in dips in the land, cut off from the river, shrinking slowly into mud patches. Birds hover low over these disappearing lakes, predator eyes watching for the splash of a stranded fish, the muddy struggle of a land locked frog. We drive past my "discovery" of the last few weeks - a medieval fish pond from the manor buildings at Sutton Courtney. Just ridges in the field now with a puddle at the muddy centre but a few weeks ago the floods swept over it and filled it to its ancient banks, as the river fell and the land drained the old banks held and there it stood, far from the river but full of water and trapped fish just as it was centuries ago when it fed the folk of this once Imperial manor, birthplace of the Empress Mathilda. And on we go. Past the house where Asquith signed the declaration of the Great War, past the old stone dog that sits on top of Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter's porch, past the little churchyard where George Orwell rests.

And into the traffic of the Easter weekend. Slow and smelly, blasting the downwardly mobile housing estates of South West Abingdon with blue clouds of diesel and bad temper. Somehow we chug through it; slow and stop, hesitant, wary....have to be nippy here! Out and clear into the countryside again. Squeeze past Marcham with its narrow, hair pin corner, dog leg through Frilford - an empty pub and an all night garage, pumping petrol where once Romano Britons screamed for human blood in the arena and spilled animal blood on the altars of their temple, all of it flowing down into the Ock and so into the Thames. Past the prep school where tomorrows insufferable sons of privilege are still just young, cute children, not yet spoiled.

And we arrive at our destination - Millets farm, or rather its car park. The No Man's Land half way between the houses of Catie's parents where I will hand her over for the weekend to her mother. For a few moments we're all in the same place again, old jokes get dusted off, old deaf Jake bounces around on his lead, happy to have his pack together if only briefly, and even accepts a pair of Easter Lamb ears. They're cute on him but he's still deaf. The prisoner is exchanged and a family goes off one way and Jake and I the other.

On the way home I stop and talk to Orwell. Others must come too I suppose but I never meet them. I occasionally see the things they leave; a flower, a photograph of him in Catalonia or a poem wrapped in plastic, sometimes one of his books....a strange thing to leave a dead writer really, I think he's read them.

It's cold, the sky is greying over, my neck hurts. Jake is bored but, used to my moods, has lain down beside the grave and watches quietly. Time to go home. Goodnight George.