Everyone had cancelled, again, so I went for a walk. Night wasn’t far off, and rain kept flushing from the uneven clouds. I didn’t take a map, I didn’t really have a plan – I just wanted to walk. I know much of Oxford too well to wander completely aimlessly – but after a few familiar roads dusted with the smell of cow parsley and privet flowers, my walk changed character, became closer to a London exploration, where I follow my whims.
I crossed Cowley Road just where suburbia propert begins, heading towards the irregular tops of hawthorn trees, my nose already anticipating the thick sweetness of their scent. I was sure there’d be a path of some kind out from an otherwise dead-end residential street – I was right: a broad cycle track stretched out either side.
Cow parsley and campion stood motionless in the green light of the overhanging trees. A blackbird made a momentary silhouette on the sunlit track, but otherwise the route was deserted. I set off east.
When the wind blew, it scattered a few blossom petals past my feet. I saw and heard instants of robins, wrens, sparrows. Over the sports field I soon reached, swallows were arcing down and rising, busy with their twittering calls. Two wide men jogged heavily on the long grass.
I went quickly, but trying to take in all the details. Trees thick on my left were threaded through with nettles, and beyond them a flank of cut grass rose up past the leaf canopy. On my right were the roofs of east Oxford: terraces, semis, new-builds like a child’s plastic bricks, industrial chimneys here and there, tower blocks far off. I could hear the city like a faint murmur, an unclear sound. The birds and the tree branches, and the sound of my feet, were much closer.
Early on, the path crossed a little stream that bounced down the slope, under me and out, tree-lined, on the other side. One of the many waterways that flow through the city, it had attracted a robin to its steep, muddy banks. It sipped, tipping its whole body forward, then saw me and flew. I wondered if the cycle track would take me right to the edge of the ring road, leave me teetering on the brink of the traffic flow. (If I fell in, survived, how far would I go before reaching land again?)
The track stretched on, between trees. I knew I was surrounded by city, but I saw no one, only the roofs in the distance. I could imagine the suburbs like a subducting tectonic plate, gradually sinking under this evening-lit strip of green.
I surfaced on the tarmac of Barracks Lane, beside semidetached houses. To my left the trees continued, but when I followed a path between them I found myself on the bank of that stream I’d seen before. Facing me on the other side was a sign warning me off the private land of the golf course.
The neatly mown grass rose up the hill towards Headington, while a robin sat on the overhanging branch of a chestnut with a territorial air. Headington was where I, too, was going now, but I had to go along the road, up towards where the traffic sluggishly rolled among the houses. Still, there was more walking yet, and the streetlights had only just come on.
Open Field 