All that comes with it

As part of my preparations for The Long Walk I have started taking a daily constitutional. Of course in actual fact I intend to drop out of the walk on the morning we are due to set off, claiming I am suffering from a severe case of bubonic plague. But I need to at least keep up the pretense that I am intending to participate in order that the others don’t become disheartened.

I took my camera with me on Monday as my stroll took me past an old graveyard and I thought I’d have a go at taking some spooky atmospheric pictures for halloween. Unfortunately I failed dismally, although I did get some fairly reasonable shots of the cemetery railings:

The public aren’t actually allowed access to the graveyard, but the gate was open so I snuck in. If this were a movie I’d probably be infected with some hideous zombie virus by now. As it is I’ve just got a slight cold and a faint craving for cauliflower.

The whole place was incredibly overgrown and dilapidated. There were even some notices stuck to a few of the headstones declaring they were unstable and requesting the owners of the grave to get in contact with the church. Considering that the stones were all marking the resting places of people who died in the 1890’s I’d be surprised if any of the descendants even knew they were there let alone visited them on a regular basis. I’m not sure what I’d do if I were told that I had to assume responsibility for the restoration of my great great grandfather’s gravestone. Probably try to palm it off onto one of my siblings I imagine.

And as usual when visiting old graveyards I was surprised and saddened by how young everyone in there died. It reminded me how lucky we are to live in an age where medical developments have extended our life expectancy so dramatically. Not everyone welcomes these advances however. Part of my patch at work includes an area where there are a large percentage of new age hippy types. Occasionally we have trouble persuading some of them that taking medication might be the best course of action. “Isn’t there anything herbal?” they ask, “Why should we be pumping all these artificial chemicals into our bodies? Mankind has been using mother natures remedies since the days of the druids”. Yeah, well, mankind has been dying in his early thirties since the days of the druids too. Now put down your wind chimes and take the damn tablet.

But I digress. Since I had my camera with me I thought I’d spend the rest of the walk gathering documentary evidence of just how many people in our surrounding area keep chickens. This was purely in the name of academic research you understand. It was in no way a veiled attempt to continue to pressurize my wife into allowing me to keep them myself.

For the record I saw seven different households with chickens in their gardens on my hour and a half walk. I also happened to come across an estate agent on my travels and he told me that the presence of the chickens increased the value of properties by over 85%. Who’d have thought it.