Wait until next year

We recently moved house, and so now I have a new walk to the station. We haven’t moved far, so the station remains the same, I just approach it from a different angle. It is peculiar how even the most familiar places feel a little strange, uncanny even, when you see them from an alternative perspective.

My walk takes me past a long, tall retaining wall that keeps in place the back gardens above and stops them from spilling into the road below. A double-decker bus thunders by, creating the briefest of ravines as I make my way along the narrow pavement.

The wall is made up of a complex tessellation of stones. I walk too quickly to work out if there is a recurring design, or if the stones were placed according to need and circumstance.

Above the wall grows ivy, blackberry bushes, grass, wild flowers. The wild flowers have also seeded between the stones. Pretty little flowers punctuate the wall and bloom into my path. A reminder of when this was once all fields, a time now beyond living memory, I suspect.