“Whaddaya mean ‘What reservoir?’”
As texts go, it sounded rather exasperated.
“Haven’t passed a reservoir anywhere,” I explained.
“Must have,” texted Pulley. “There’s no way of getting from where you were to where you say you are WITHOUT passing the reservoir...”
“No way!” she reiterated.
It always amazes me, at this point, when people make statements like that. Trust me when I tell you it’s perfectly possible to be self-involved enough to miss...anything. I’ve missed Big Ben before now.
“Have you walked over the Dam?” she asked.
Dam? What Dam??
The thing is, physics and geography, being their usual bastard selves, do rather concur with her. The route I took on what turned out to be rather a mammoth walk, should have seen me pass a reservoir...and Hell, probably even a viaduct. Should have walked over a Dam, apparently, but damned if I did.
I started out, as planned, on the ‘Taff Trail’...then...well I don’t really know what to tell you, I took one of those Turnings of mine that looked right...or at least looked North...and then I was heading along a road with a cemetery on either side (the Valley of the Shadow of Death?)...annnd then I was walking along the A470. For those who don’t know, of which I imagine there are now many, the A470 is the main road linking Cardiff and Merthyr, and then, as I discovered today, it buggers off all the way up to Brecon. (Brecon, likewise, is either an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, or a desolate hole, depending on your point of view. The SAS train there, and, when Doctor Who needed a place to depict somewhere called The Death Zone, they chose Brecon. Any questions?). Thing is, the A470 heading up to Brecon has no pavements, so, technically, I was walking into the path of oncoming traffic. Of course, the logical thing to do at that point would have been to turn the fuck around and come home. Which of course means what I did was to keep walking...and walking...and walking...hoping for a turn-off with pavements, leading to some sort of civilisation.
I ended up in a place called Cwm Cadlan. No idea, so don’t ask. All I now know about the place is it’s quite a way away from where I started out, and there’s apparently a freakin’ reservoir, inevitably, between me and it. Which I managed to miss.
Twice.
Because one thing that came muscle-strainingly into focus today is that London miles are not Merthyr miles. Quite apart from anything else, in London, you could walk five miles and then jump on a Tube to take you quickly where you needed to be.
No damn Tubes in Cwm Cadlam, I can tell you – no, you have to turn your ass around and walk the whole way back again...With the result that a couple of hours walking by city standards ends up taking, as it did me today, about five bloody hours.
So – this is how I go into the first Tuesday of 2012; my first weigh-in, and co-incidentally, the start of my career as a work-from-homer. Oh and incidentally, Pulley has also called into question the veracity of the Nazi Scales. Turns out she has exactly the same scales, and yesterday, they weighed her five pounds HEAVIER at the start of the day than they did at the end of the day. That simply doesn’t happen if your scales are right...
Hmm...Will treat mine nicely and deferentially in the morning (perhaps, possibly, not calling them Nazi Scales might be a start), and if they bitchslap me, I might just bitchslap them back right in their little digital teeth. Five pounds! I’m not putting on an entirely imaginary five pounds for any set of scales...I can miss reservoirs, but not that much of a discrepancy!
Oh, and my blood was 4.6 this morning.
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