Edward Thomas Fellowship Walk

Accustomed as I am to walking fair distances, it's not so often these days up gradients like the Shoulder of Mutton or on surfaces of lesser integrity than Portsmouth pavements. They don't set a particularly high standard but downhill on stony uneven woodland paths it's best to minimize the risk.

One can't get to the most essential sites of interest with regard to Edward Thomas without making the effort, though, so home to Fratton station, Petersfield Station to Bedales School, the Fellowship walk advertised as strenuous in places, four and a half / five miles was all of that so I was glad of a lift back to Petersfield station before taking the home stretch from Fratton 'at my own pace'. That's at least 10 miles with hard bits. I was expecting more from the well-deserved first draught of Kronenbourg just now but the most memorable such thirst-assuaging moments have been provided by Amstel.

It was all worth it, though, and one doesn't spend time with quite such an erudite group of like-minded types as the Edward Thomas Fellowship very often. You can mention most C20th poets, poems and related things there and not need footnotes. But firstly, Good Lord, Bedales School. Sumptuous, of course, but you don't need to be an ardent Trotskyite to take one look at it and think it should be VAT-able. From there it's not far to the Steep war memorial with the name Edward Thomas on it. While I've been on most of the paths on today's route, I've not done them in the snaky pattern they were covered in today which took us to halfway up the Shoulder of Mutton's precipitous incline before a welcome sit down and some poems read out, many from somebody's obviously much-loved and much-used copy of Edna Longley's Annotated Collected Poems, using the Sarsen stone appropriately as a lectern.

There were three opportunities to consider views of the land he never saw before while hearing his language not to be betrayed which perhaps finished most evocatively at the Bee House, where Thomas lived before the Red House, by kind permission of its current incumbents of what is now a much extended and glorious place to live as long as you don't find you need to nip out for some milk and are happy to go everywhere by motor vehicle. The Bee House is, we were reliably, informed where Thomas was most impressed by birdsong. There are competing sounds over a hundred years later and not all days show it off in quite such conducive October summer days as he found himself up there when exposed to less clement elements. The season have redefined themselves since his day in a postmodern way that he might not have appreciated. Such idylls are hard won but the walk I did from the railway would have been his routine way home which sheds some light of the relative hardiness of him then and how easy some of us expect life to be now.

Of course, the poems but they are almost only the starting point of a gathering in which so many other discussions can spring from them. For those immersed in the subject on a daily basis maybe that all seems not unusual but I'm better off on the fringe of such society, if not most societies, and it comes to me as if I'm Alice through the looking glass or suddenly in Narnia via the wardrobe to find a world like that where those indigenous to it know exactly what they're doing and they're doing it very nicely thank you. It is great to see it going on and entirely my privilege to have been accommodated by them. It's hard to think of anywhere I'd rather have been, especially as I've got Sean O'Brien next week and Errollyn Wallen two weeks after that.

Busy month, with such special occasions on top of the musical 'day job' as I can by now call it. Thank you very much for being there, the Edward Thomas Fellowship.