The Spring of Love

Wednesday 22 April

‘I think we should go out for the day,’ said Frog as we sat eating breakfast.

    ‘Ooh,’ I said. ‘What about my list?’

    My list was getting longer and longer as the lockdown stopped being a break and became the new reality: things to do in the veg garden, blog posts to write, people to ring, people to email, supplies to order online, possible cleaning jobs.

    ‘Bin it,’ said Frog. ‘It works for me.’

    ‘Ooh,’ I said.

    One of the most stressful things about the current situation as far as Frog and I were concerned was that we never had a day off, and we’d been wondering whether we could take a trip to Waitrose for our potatoes (see ‘A top of many colours’) and combine it with a walk. We live halfway between the Exeter Waitrose and the Sidmouth one so we could with a clear conscience go to either, and the Sidmouth one just happened to be 10 minutes’ drive from one of our favourite coastal walks. We wouldn’t of course be able to combine the walk with our usual lunch out, but I could make some sandwiches.

    I was unsure. It wasn’t clear whether you could or couldn’t drive somewhere for your daily exercise, and friends kept giving me dire warnings about how the police were stopping cars all over the place. More importantly however, was such a trip within the spirit of the new rules? But we knew we could park somewhere out of the way and that the paths were more than wide enough to allow for social distancing and we’d never found the walk that busy anyway.

    We were both becoming ill however – even list-free Frog. Neither of us was sleeping at all well and I had a permanent headache which sometimes dipped into migraine.

    I went upstairs to my room and studied my list. There was nothing that couldn’t be put off until the next day.

    I returned to Frog. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Let’s give it a try.’

As we drove through the back lanes, the sun shone clear as it had ever since the lockdown four weeks earlier and the cold north-easterly wind of the last few days had dropped. People were out walking, bicycling and jogging, far more of them than normal, all dressed as if for a holiday, with all ages, shapes and sizes in shorts and many of the men shirtless.

    We were listening to a ‘Frog Prog’, one of the music radio programmes that Frog has been compiling and presenting (on local and university radio) for 42 years – since around the time I met him. Originally he recorded these on reel-to-reel tape, but now he could record them digitally, transfer them to memory stick and replay them in our newish Hyundai. For me they were one of the treats of days out.

    The music today came from the late 1960s and early ’70s, in particular 1967, the ‘Summer of Love’, the zenith of the hippie movement.

    This movement, with its emphasis on love, peace and care for the natural environment, arose in America in response to the Vietnam War and the compulsory drafting of young men. Derided by many, it has nevertheless had a huge influence and we in the West are still working through its ideals today. Frog and I  were in our early teens at the time and so too young to fully enjoy it, but we certainly enjoy its music.

    As I listened to the beautiful songs and watched the happy people, I thought of the way countries and communities had come together in response the latest worldwide crisis and how that crisis might – just might – mean that eventually we would make a better world. Suddenly, I was filled with hope and joy. How amazing it was to be here with Frog now at this time.

    ‘It’s not so much the Summer of Love,’ I said to Frog, ‘as the Spring of Love.’

Few people were about as we parked and made our way to the coastal path. Some excited dogs splashed in the saltmarsh and a handful of humans wandered over the shingle beach.

On the cliffs, thrift bloomed . . .

. . . and it wasn’t long before we found a suitable place for our picnic.

A skylark trilled above us but Ellie, sadly, was in a tizz because a bird-scarer was firing at intervals in the distance.

We were able to christen our new stainless-steel water bottle, bought at Christmas for this year’s Greek holiday which I never booked (another piece of forethought of which I’m proud), after I left our old plastic one on the plane on the way to Greece last year (by mistake).

As we turned inland, stitchwort and bluebells gleamed in the verges.

We weren’t sure whether to take the river path back to the car as it’s very popular but for the dog’s sake we did. She needed a splash. I took her on to a gravel beach and threw sticks for her and she raced into the shallows scooping up mouthfuls of water like a basking shark. She doesn’t swim but she loves a paddle.

    Game over, she came out of the river and promptly sicked up not only all the water she’d drunk but also her breakfast. Oh dear.

    ‘That’s what you get,’ said Frog unsympathetically, ‘for drinking too quickly.’

    He talks to her as if she were human, using complicated concepts and posh words like 'remonstrate' and 'desist'. She usually gets the gist.

    The river was low and the water murky as a result of the drought . . .

. . . but in the trees on the opposite bank rooks were noisily nesting.

Back at the car, the parking spots were filling up, but only as normal for a weekday – neither more nor less we decided - with as many visitors as locals. (It’s easy to spot the difference. Visitors look more excited. By visitor I mean anyone who lives more than two miles away.)

We stopped at Waitrose on the way back. It was too hot to leave Ellie on her own in the car so Frog stayed with her, sitting on the edge of the boot with the hatchback wide open, while I did the shopping. The system was easy – even I could cope with it – and the atmosphere easygoing.

On the local news that evening we learnt that Devon and Cornwall police had been reprimanded for being too heavy handed with drivers. Had we been lucky, we wondered, choosing the one day to go out when the police were unlikely to be around. Indeed we’d not seen hide nor hair of them.

    The programme then had a long discussion about what one could and couldn’t do and someone (I can’t remember who) said that so long as your car journey was shorter than your walk you were within the rules. That’s all right, we said. We'd driven for ten minutes and walked for two hours.

    Nevertheless, we hadn’t relaxed quite as much as we normally do on days out. We knew there’d been no danger of us infecting anyone – we didn’t touch any gates, let alone come with 2 metres of anyone – but even so we felt uncomfortable and we weren’t sure whether we would do the same again.