By: Blonde Two
I told you yesterday about our slight tussle with Wednesday evening’s Dartmoor weather. We were very nearly the only people out on the moor that night, but not quite. As we were preparing for our first navigation section away from the relative safety of the road and onto the moor, a couple of very familiar vehicles drove past. You might remember them (or some very like them) from the day our young leaders gave them a good clean.
Yep, the guys and girls from the Ashburton Dartmoor Search and Rescue team were out on their Wednesday training. They are a mysterious bunch so we will probably never know exactly where they were training but they will have been out much longer than us, been battered by more wind than us and got a lot wetter than us (although I didn’t think, at the time, that this was possible).
As I said yesterday, it was a very dark night and, although we were on very familiar territory it was, as ever, very reassuring to remember that there is, always, someone there to help if we get into trouble.
There’s a video here I would like you to watch. If you don’t live in Devon, this applies to your local Mountain Rescue team as well. All volunteers, no government funding, reliant on public donation.
So, whilst you are busy choosing your goose for your Christmas dinner, spare a thought for these guys. They would abandon their Christmas lunch to come and help you, on Dartmoor or off it… without hesitation…
So what are you up to now? My wife, VR, thinks I should get out more but since the diameter of my social circle has a negative value who would I get out with? Go it alone? Isn’t that what I presently do when I walk to the filling station to pick up the you-know-what publication.
Instead I get out vicariously by reading The Two Blondes. That way I don’t need to buy a puffer jacket (My dear, I don’t have the figure.) or a pair of rhapsodisable boots that always seem on the verge of inspiring an ode.
And it isn’t all passive, you know. I may read The Two Blondes via the prism of my own experience. I see in your first para you use the comparative form of the adjective “wet”. An echo sounds in my memory and I am transported to a small river in the environs of Harter Fell. Journalistic training denies me the use of platitudes and a sentence that includes “Lake District” and “rain” is sure to spawn one. Suffice it to say in those days I scorned the comparative adjective and opted directly for the superlative. There was a bridge but why, I asked myself, postpone the inevitable? Thus I walked not on but through the river and therefore qualified for the “-est” suffix.
You can see why I will always walk alone. Or vicariously.