Mar 2018 – ARUNDHATI BASU

Granite and Gallurese

It is but providence that we winded up in the Gallura region. Parul and I had laid our hands upon one of those travel deals that threw in a four-day stay at a resort and the cheapest flight they could source with Ryan Air. The rider to the deal was that this resort was in Olbia, far away from the southern parts which we wanted to see, and Adi was thunderstruck by our impulsiveness at not checking anything before booking our island holiday. My friend and I were both non-drivers, you see. On an island where everything is dependent upon your own mode of conveyance, this was not a happy chance.

We were furiously making calls to Sardinia in the next few days, Parul and I, and overshot our initial budget by far when we had to fall upon the services of a tour guide. The reward was friendship. And a marvellous girly holiday we had not anticipated. It was on the first day in Orgosolo, when for a photo, Enza threw herself upon the rim of a large stone fireplace and decided to show the pudge on her waist to make good the claim that she needed to banish it — that I knew we had found gold. Her candour was refreshing. Her cousin Giampi was equally enthusiastic when it came to posing for photos, so we ended up with enough shots of us too. We needed us in our albums, they said.

The Gallura lives up to the meaning of its name which means stony area. Granite hills tower over you upon roads that twist and turn before find their way to a jagged coastline made up of islets and rock cliffs. Rocks which emerge in shapes that make you think of elephants, bears, witches and mushrooms, rocks which are shaped by the fury of the Mistral that blows throughout the year in Sardinia, but is an exhibitionist during spring and winter. We had caught the best of it.

With the wind in our hair on a miserably cold, foggy morning we set out for the hills. They were shrouded in a blanket of white that day, imparting the landscape with an other-worldly atmosphere. We stopped for croissant and coffee at an artists’ village surrounded by monolithic granite hills (which looked more like gigantic boulders) and emerald green woods.

San Pantaleo is a fetching village built around a piazzetta, surrounded by a church and a few oleander trees. It started life in the late 1800s. By the 1960s, artists had started making inroads into it, living in traditional low stone cottages lovingly restored. They set up galleries and they worked with folk traditions that centered around ceramics, woodwork and wrought iron. It is the kind of place where you expect locals to sell homemade batches of honey, cheese and jams and indulge in lengthy conversations because there lifestyle is laidback and elegant. Even though it is not too far away from the flashy haunt of the rich and famous, the Costa Smeralda.

Near this village is a nuragic archaeological site. Since I have been banging on about the presence of mysterious nuraghi around the island, I thought I should put in a few words about the Tomba dei Giganti (Tomb of the Giants). If you want to dip your feet into mystery and antiquity, it is an interesting visit. It made me reflect upon the very impermanence of everything, how we humans never stop to think about it in our arrogant assumption that things should not decay or change, that they should not make way for another civilisation.

Later, we did a short hike above the camping village of Capo d’Orso, climbing slimy rocks and gaping at the way the wind had carved and chiselled granite, like a master sculptor if you will, and the way the granite rocks punctured the incredibly green landscape, while jagged rocks spread their talons along the coastline. It was a peaceful moment that, rendered romantic by Enza pressing kisses upon her partner’s face and murmuring words of endearment into his ears. I can still hear them, those two words of affection, amore mio, uttered over and over with the wonderful cadence of an Italian.

It goes with the mood of today. It is the birthday of a being who once lit up my life with love and happiness, Tuktuk.

20150323_061308~2.jpg — Dawn when we left the Olbia Geovillage in the medieval town of Olbia

20150323_061254~2.jpg — Olbia Geovillage, a resort populated by plenty of old tourists who were there for breakfasts, R&R and games of tennis.

20150323_061421~2.jpg — The sprawling grounds of the resort

20150322_084742~2.jpg — The shrouded hills of Sardinia in that spring of 2015

20150322_085758~2~2.jpg — Granite hills and San Pantaleo

20150322_085830~2.jpg — Restored cottages in San Pantaleo

20150322_090803~2.jpg — San Pantaleo café

20150322_090944~2.jpg — Never one to ignore croissants

20150322_091002~2.jpg — A Native American with his elaborate headdress stands guard inside the café in San Pantaleo

Stuffed wild boar and unlabelled wine bottles make for strange partners

20150322_092634~2.jpg — Mushroom-shaped rocks protrude from hills of granite

20150322_103042~2.jpg — The Tomb of the Giants was not built for the giants eh. Just saying. It goes back to as far as 2000 BC. The 100-foot tall carved rock marks the entrance to the burial chamber.

20150322_103141~2.jpg — The Nuraghe people clearly believed in another realm. They had a passageway for the spirits through that low doorway.

20150322_113029~2.jpg — The truncated cone of a stone fortress of sorts that is the Nuraghe, in and around which in huts the tribes must have lived.

Current inhabitants of Nuraghe la Prisgiona

20150322_122936~2.jpg — The hike above Capo D’orso

Blurred us, on the hike that was of moderate intensity

20150322_124015~2.jpg — Giampi, Enza, Enza’s fiance Claudio and Parul

20150322_123814~2.jpg — Palau and the coastline

Mar 30, 2018

Arundhati Basu38 Comments

Sardinia’s Wild Heart Beats in Barbagia

The isolated mien of the island of Sardinia is compounded by its insistence on keeping to itself and shying away from mainland Italy. The Sardinians do not repose faith in Rome. Their grouse is that they have been sidelined, rather monstrously. A politician who doubles up as a tour guide, the vivacious Enza, told us about the political climate of her country as she drove us in her trusty old car through the winding mountainous roads of Barbagia. I was enamoured of that dramatic landscape. Villages with their bevy of granite houses and terracotta roofs sat comfortably in valleys that seemed to have been scooped out of limestone mountains. Swathes of green pastures were dotted by ponies and prehistoric stone towers, herds of cows ambled along the roads as if they were out for a stroll, and often rows of wine and myrtle orchards showed up, standing upon modest patches of land. Myrtle, the aromatic berry that stains your fingers a deep purple if you squish it, and which the Sardinians use to make a fine liqueur called Mirto.

In this primitive part of the country that derives its name from Cicero — the Roman orator had dubbed it the ‘land of barbarians’ because the Romans had tough luck here — the mountain people cleave to the Sardinian language even while it is slowly being replaced by Italian elsewhere on the island. Here where they make their living from the land, where milk and sheep’s cheese are staple diet, where gnarled olive trees add character to the craggy surroundings, where bandits still rule strong in villages like Orgosolo, and where shepherds chant songs around fires, it is not unnatural that carnivals exist and that they are a window into times past when pagan rituals were a way of life.

Shepherded by Enza and her cousin Giampaola to a museum in the town of Nuoro, we were introduced to the traditional black ensemble of men and women. The Museum of Sardinian Life and Popular Traditions turned out to be a small affair but packed with details that transported us to another world. I was repulsed, and at the same time, strangely drawn in by the theatrics of the carnival costumes. People in older times surely knew how to work their imagination.

Men dressed in sheepskins, cow bells and ominous-looking masks, enacting the eternal battle between good and evil. In the agrarian culture of Barbagia, it made sense that the carnivals had their roots in Greek rites dedicated to Dionysus, the god of vegetation. They signified the end of winter, and invoked the gods to bless the land with fertility. People indulged in sacrifices and orgies. They dressed like animals and danced wildly after drinking plenty of wine.

Emerging from the confines of an old world recreated within the museum, we found the town of Nuoro to be quietly photogenic. It sat at the foot of Mount Ortobene. Atop it stood a statue of Christ the Redeemer, as if keeping a careful watch upon the life of the few thousand inhabitants of Nuoro who live around its narrow streets in traditional stone houses. Because it was furiously cold that March, the usual windy conditions on the island exacerbated by the northwest wind called the Mistral that blows in from France, we winded up in a small café in Nuoro. I look back upon that moment and smile at one of those apparently trivial memories. Nothing earth shattering. Just four girls chattering over a cup of coffee each and the beginnings of a lovely friendship.

Nuraghe, ancient towers belonging to the mysterious Nuragic civilisation

20150320_125724~2.jpg — Orchards around Barbagia

Processed with VSCO with c2 preset — The Museum of Sardinian Life and Popular Traditions

2018-03-26 10.58.51 1.jpg — Fragrant rosemary shrubs

Processed with VSCO with a5 preset — Traditional costumes of women in the villages of Sardinia

2018-03-26 10.58.55 3.jpg — Dolls in traditional gear

2018-03-26 10.58.54 3.jpg — A child’s garb

2018-03-26 10.58.50 3.jpg — *Mamuthones* (men in black) and *Issohadore* (fellow in red) from the village of Mamoiada. The origins of these masked figures are unknown. The *Mamuthones,* in their vests of dark sheep fur and copper bells and grotesque wooden masks with giant hooks for noses, command a spooky presence. It is almost as if they are checked by the presence of the *Issohadores* in their red tunic, embroidered shawl and black bandolier. They walk together in processions that end at bonfires in the village that has had the Mamuthones and Issohadores for as long as it can remember.

2018-03-26 10.58.50 2.jpg — *Boes* and *Merdules* from a carnival in the town of Ottana. The men in their white sheepskins, accessorised with plenty of cowbells, wear two kinds of masks. The *Boes* wear ox-like masks and the *Merdules* those of old, deformed men. These were part of rituals, meant to protect man against evil spirits. The *Merdule* served as reminders to man – to overcome his baser instincts and retain his human identity.

Processed with VSCO with f2 preset — The Mamuthone in profile

2018-03-26 10.58.46 2.jpg — Streets of Nuoro

Mar 28, 2018

Arundhati Basu59 Comments

The Classical Bandits of Sardinia

They live in Orgosolo, they say. But in the same breath they maintain that vendettas and violence have long vanished from the inland villages of Sardinia.

In the spring of 2015, around this time, a girl friend and I took a flight into Alghero. To land upon the island that sits in the middle of the Tyrrhenian Sea, surrounded by the Balearic islands, the Italian peninsula and Corsica, and yet is a world unto its own. A rugged land where the air is ripe with possibilities. Here there are no high-street chains for clothing and coffee stores, no concrete jungles to feel lost in, and certainly none of the big city lights. Pre-historic Nuraghi which are cylindrical stone towers dating back to the 1500 BC — preceding the Etruscan civilisation — show up instead upon miles and miles of green countryside framed by the limestone and bluish-green mountains of the Supramonte.

English novelist DH Lawrence described it as “belonging to nowhere, never having belonged to anywhere”. In this ancient part of the country, Barbagia, where the people lead rustic lives and shepherds make their living from tending to livestock in the wild interiors, the concept fits in with the precision and smoothness of say slipping your hands into the softest sheepskin gloves, that bandits should double up as heroes for the people in the villages. That the Codice Barbaricino, which is the Code of Barbagia, should be the mark of a life well lived, with honour. For, the right and the duty to preserve honour is everything here.

From Enza, who was in charge of shepherding us around the island, I heard about Graziano Mesina, a regular Robinhood kind of a figure in this part of the world. Mesina had decided to drop his former profession in favour of the tour-guide business. A bandit turned tour guide, heavens!

The next few words that issued from my mouth alarmed Enza and she decided that enough was enough. She would not have a pesky person broach difficult subjects. She said: “The people of Orgosolo eye all newcomers with askance. They do not talk about such matters at all. You see, they are protected by the bandits, and they in turn, protect them from curious eyes.” That screwed tight the lid upon the curiosity that welled up in this journalist old heart of mine. It takes a lifetime to wean yourself away from the only profession you have known all your adult life. And I was just starting to learn to keep my nose out of other people’s business.

In that village wrapped up in stories of bandits and vendettas — a local poet was shot in public as lately as 2007 as part of a vendetta — we sat in a large hall for a shepherd’s lunch. It was a rustic affair and one that was long–drawn, for whatever you do, do not under-estimate the appetite of the Italians. On rustic wooden boards, we were presented with fluffy rounds of pane, which is bread. We tore into the bread, pairing it with creamy ricotta cheese, pink slices of ham and pungent porcheddu (suckling pig roasted upon a spit). And sips of grappa, potent enough to make the nerves tingle and warm the insides with searing intensity.

I thought that was enough, till more appeared. Rosemary-flavoured sheep’s meat cooked with potatoes and pecorino cheese paired with pane carasau that was but a simple parchment of bread. Followed by refills of the local red wine. Our senses sufficiently doused in wine and grappa, we were treated to pretty desserts. They were fit for fairies to nibble on.

Suddenly the shepherds, four of them proceeded to a corner, huddling together with their backs to us. I was wondering about this strange sight when they broke into a song. The air rang with the resounding bass in their voices. The canto a tenore, a traditional shepherds’ song. The group of Germans behind us got up and danced in a while. The grappa and wine had done their job alright.

Now Orgosolo has more going for it than just its fame as home to the outlaws. Its hilly cobbled lanes are lined with old, dilapidated houses in pastel hues, their facades painted with political and Cubist-style frescoes. In the ‘70s, a Sienese school teacher and his students had sparked off a trend of painting political murals in remembrance of the Italian Resistance and Liberation from Nazism and Fascism. Now you can see these murales, telling stories in diverse styles. And if you have the time, why they will have a conversation with you.

Thus was I introduced to Sardinia. Through this small village that was once occupied by the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Byzantines and the Spanish. The village that has hospitality carved into its anti-authoritarian veins, where the bandits are shy despite their notoriety, where the men huddle together to sing songs that have been sung through the ages and where blood feuds are a cultural backdrop because this is where the people live and die, my darling, by an ancient code of honour.

2018-03-23 11.50.43 1.jpg — The road that winds past the Supramonte

2018-03-23 11.50.41 2.jpg — Villages in Barbagia

2018-03-23 01.34.02 1_1.jpg — Welcome to Orgosolo. I imagine he is a bandit.

2018-03-23 12.55.36 3.jpg — The shepherd’s lunch took place in a barn

2018-03-23 11.55.29 2.jpg — Shepherds with their suckling pig

2018-03-23 11.55.28 1.jpg — Where they carve up the pig

2018-03-23 11.55.30 2.jpg — Enza pours us grappa

2018-03-23 11.55.31 2.jpg — Makes me faint with greed

2018-03-23 11.55.28 2.jpg — *Pane Carasau*

2018-03-23 11.55.30 1.jpg — Bread with ricotta, ham and porcheddu

2018-03-23 11.55.31 3.jpg — *Pastissus.* Thin delicate pastries, glazed with sugar, and filled with almonds

2018-03-23 12.55.36 1.jpg — *Canto a tenore*

2018-03-23 11.50.40 2.jpg — Streets of Orgosolo

2018-03-23 01.01.59 3.jpg — Cross-eyed with thinking? We women do think too much.

2018-03-23 01.01.59 2.jpg — Rural women go about the business of life

2018-03-23 11.55.33 2.jpg — Aunt Elisabetta, the sibyl of Orgosolo

2018-03-23 12.55.31 2.jpg — Vittorio De Seta, the director of ‘Banditi a Orgosolo’

2018-03-23 12.55.30 3.jpg — Bums. That’s my darling Enza.

2018-03-23 12.55.33 1.jpg — ‘If the most difficult kids are lost, the school is no longer a school. It is a hospital that takes care of the healthy and rejects the sick.’ Lorenzo Milani, an Italian Roman Catholic priest and educator of children who nobody wanted to educate.

2018-03-23 11.50.39 1.jpg — Cubism. Accident at work.

2018-03-23 01.01.59 1.jpg — On the left are scenes depicting Gaza and massacres visited upon by the Palestinians by the Israeli army. The right-hand side mural states, ‘We are all illegal aliens’, acknowledging the desperation of people who arrive in Italy, stuffed into boats, in the vain hope of escaping poverty.

2018-03-23 11.50.40 1.jpg — *‘Felice il popolo che non ha bisogna di eroi’* — ‘Happy are the people who do not need heroes’.

Mar 24, 2018

Arundhati Basu48 Comments

The Darling Buds of March

They are here. The tiny buds with their fuzzy pale pink pouts. And I can feel the familiar itch again, on this first day of spring. The itch to travel. To catch the breeze as I set my eyes upon places old and new, meet people, listen to their stories, climb hills, cuddle a bear or two (if the old boys are up for it), and make new memories.

What’s on your list this spring?

Mar 20, 2018

Arundhati Basu43 Comments

Dartmoor National Park: Into the Wild Landscape of Devon

A man with his riding crop sat astride a horse that trotted down the country roads and in his wake, a stream of cars crawled, waiting for the traffic in the opposite direction to ease before they could contemplate taking the jump and overtake the horse. Such are the sights that are common on the winding lanes and roads in the English countryside. It is remarkable by the very absence of any tooting of horns. You might waggle your head here, and remark in an offhand manner, tut, but it is the British politeness at work here. Or, it could be the rigorous driving tests that have felled many an able driver. Who knows, but there we were pootling along the roads that led from the Dartmoor Zoo into the national park within which it sits.

The Dartmoor National Park, at the very heart of the county of Devon, is sprawled over 368 sq. miles. Picture tracts of vast moorlands, honey gold in parts and russet with peat in others. Upon it, incongruously enough, a batch of evergreens show up, like they were planted overnight upon the moors for some purpose which escapes you. And then ancient woodlands, round-backed bridges, country lanes that are flanked by tall hedges and roll into gentle hills criss-crossed by pastures and thickets of trees stripped off their leaves. An inescapable part of the scenery in the park are strange granite outcrops known as tors. They look primeval, and from far away, they put you in mind of the nuraghe, stone structures that show up in the wilds of Sardinia.

The entire length of the drive was a reel, a reel of gentle shots that built upon each other, till you felt that the heart would burst with the beauty around you. First off, there is this Pantone green hue to Devon’s countryside. A fresh neon shade that seems to reflect off the landscape.

Then there are those familiar sights. Narrow B-roads, boxed in by meadows that are surprisingly lush in winter, meandered through tiny villages. Roads that threw up comforting sights. Square towers of medieval stone churches, chocolate-box cottages with their thatched roofs and pleasantly pastel personalities, dense networks of bare branches smothered with moss and lichen that reached across the roads to link their digits and made natural arches. The wild moor ponies, the sheep bundled up cosily in their winter wool, fingerposts that pointed their fingers at villages like Princetown known for its forbidding 19th-century prison and literary heritage — Arthur Conan Doyle had conceived the Hound of the Baskervilles around its boggy moorlands.

It is so damn easy to fall under this spell of the countryside in Britain, is it not? And echo Kazuo Ishiguro in The Remains of the Day as he notes: “…it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, of its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it out.”

Mar 14, 2018

Arundhati Basu65 Comments

Blood Orange Chocolate Brownies: Bring the Booty to Mamma

It has been freezing outside and the sun has been been a pale incarnation of itself ever since the snow storm swept through my part of the country. It started innocuously, with no hint the evening before of what was to come. Surely the manager at our condominium had sent out an e-mail warning us of a state of emergency declared by the governor. But you know what, in all my inexperience of East Coast weather warnings, I declared it bull. In the recent past, I have stayed back home with news of impending storms. Weather advisories showing up on the phone as orange beacons of alarm. Too frequently. But outside, it used to be just fine. I would just end up missing out on my regular runs. The coin dropped and those warnings tempted derision.

It was your regular miserable day when I woke up, and early on, nothing showed up except for tiny flakes of snow which wafted into the tar of the road outside. It did not stick. It shall stop soon, I figured. But those tiny flakes mushroomed into big flakes, the size of cornflakes, and by noon you could see them slowly coating the pavement, painting the park grounds and the road a stark white. The trees too had icing building up upon their boughs. That is how it turned into a squall of sorts, gusts of wind driving it horizontally. Now the important thing during such storms is that you be inside. Watch it from the comfort of your warm interiors. Bless these modern-day trappings, for how often I yearn for the old. This, I would not give up. Then a snow storm does start looking like a living fairy tale. As if you were caught in a giant snow globe, and someone was turning it upside down to churn snow. Fat puffs of it. Oh it had a magical quality to it, the snow. I suspect that had power been lost, that feeling would have been turned on its head. I will take this feeling though my jars of picked red chilli peppers are crying out for the sun.

So maybe it is the weather, or maybe it is this cake-deprived feeling lodged deep inside me, that yesterday I caved in. I wanted something decadent, okay? Something rich to make my senses whoosh with delight. No substitutes for anything therefore. Plain flour, butter, eggs, brown sugar, milk, a blood orange pureed and its fragrant zest. Then plenty of cocoa powder and an Icelandic chocolate bar broken up in chunks, so that they melted inside the brownie batter in perfect little pockets of oozing goodness.

3/4 cup softened butter
1 cup blood orange (I juiced it and retained the pulp, then heated it to reduce it to half a cup)
2 cups granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp Nescafe
3/4 cup cocoa powder
1/2 tsp salt
1-1/4 cup flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
The zest of the blood orange
1-1/2 cups of dark chocolate chunks

I whisked them in the order mentioned and popped them into the oven (at 177°C) for 40 minutes.

And when I let it cool for a while, but not long enough because I wanted the warmth of it, it turned up with a crisp crust. The brown sugar had caramelised its fudgy insides. A bite, hmm, and oozing blobs of dark chocolate enveloped me with lavish love, whispering, ‘come child, give in now’, and the bite of that blood orange zest, intense. Three big pieces and I had a halo around my head.

2018-03-09 06.53.45 1.jpg — The day it snowed like it would not stop

2018-03-09 06.53.45 2 (1).jpg — From the rooftop of the building

2018-03-09 06.53.44 1.jpg — The next day outside out the rooftop gym

2018-03-09 06.53.42 1.jpg — Red chilli pepper pickle sobbing for the sun

2018-03-09 06.53.40 1.jpg — Let’s not skimp

2018-03-10 12.51.24 2.jpg — So that we get this. A brownie that woos you in style, because nothing less will do.

Mar 10, 2018

Arundhati Basu55 Comments

How To Turn One of Britain’s Best Walks Into An Adventure

I sat at my writing desk yesterday, staring at the snow gathering fast and thick before the eyes, coating the world outside with a thick layer of icing, rather assiduously. But I found myself thinking of Malham Dales. We were there last year around this time. It is a powerful memory, the kinds that stick with every iota of detail lodged into the cells, for our walk there had gathered momentum, assumed a life of its own. Now, this is a walk that has recently been declared by ITV to be amongst the top three in its list of a hundred ‘rambles, scrambles and ambles’ in Britain and North Ireland. But we did not know then of its upcoming celebrity status as one of Britain’s best walks (do watch the link at the end of the post, it is loaded with the most scenic walks in the British countryside).

Malham is a quiet village in the Yorkshire Dales, dotted with stone cottages, warm country pubs and ancient stone bridges traversed by packhorses once. The road to Malham, for us, was paved by 10 random stops because I had decided to change my blog host from WordPress to Siteground. That was all in vain. I ended up making the change this year, and keeping in mind the association, I could not help slipping in that photo of the limestone pavement of Malham in my earlier post.

A strange lunar landscape and a solitary tree sticking out of it. That is the draw of Malham.

But I am not a woman of few words and to let you go just like that would be monstrously unfair on my partiality towards chattering more than I should. Adi bemoans that I take five lines where he makes do with one. Usually that word is ‘nice’. I have naturally developed an antipathy to ‘nice’.

We stopped for a spot of Sunday brunch at a country inn where to the tune of hoppy ale, roast meat and Yorkshire puds, we were subjected to friendly interjections from a bald guy in a leather jacket, his girlfriend, and their hound who sat underfoot, throwing a hissy fit when another of his kind invaded his territory. Adi clammed up as he does when he is feeling particularly unsocial, so it was left upon me to be the picture of amiability. Frequent smiles and aching jaws.

When we got out of that warm pub with its flagstone floors and roaring fireplace, we were greeted by a sharp wind. Cowering into our jackets we set off into the pastures, past the beck that tripped over stones and gurgled its way into pre-historic woodlands where ancient ash trees were sheathed in moss. Upon barbed wires of dry stone walls, fluttered clumps of fleece in the wind — the aftereffects of scabby sheep having enjoyed a real good scratch. *whispers – I have a bit of that wool tucked into my box of souvenirs. Past bee libraries (I am not on crack), which are book nests transformed into dwellings for solitary bees in ash trees, we came in view of a startling sight. Janet’s Foss. The waterfall of Janet, the fairy queen. She is said to dwell in a cave screened by a waterfall which gushes into a pool that glows the colour of magic.

Till then it was a walk, which by its very nature, is suggestive of a slow pace. It stretches your body gently, lets the mind wander as you saunter, coaxes cobwebs out and generally paves the way to a beatific state of mind. Why, it soothed Adi’s frown away.

Soon we found ourselves in the middle of a limestone amphitheatre, along with a herd of grazing sheep. The beck flowed by, a river of honey gold glinting in the soft light of the sun, for it had emerged at some point to dispel the gloom of the day. Our jaws dropped as we turned around and surveyed this sheer display of nature’s power over us, tiny humans. A limestone landscape fashioned by the relentlessness of ice and water during the last Ice Age. We turned a corner and there lay Gordale Scar, a cave system that had collapsed and gouged the cliffs to reveal a gorge, that was at once intimidating and deliciously alluring.

We mused. Should we risk a climb? This is the part where I admit that we were wearing plain old walking shoes. The boulders were slimy, and the water gushing down it did nothing to bolster our confidence. As we walked away from that gorge, I simultaneously started whinging about not doing the one thing I had set out to do: see the limestone pavement. It was up there, you see, above the cliffs.

So my darling boy decided he would take me up. Up cliffs that were fenced off. Vast stretches of the inclines were varnished with jagged, grey limestone. As a reward, at the outset, Adi’s trousers caught at a snag in the fence. They ripped *whispers — at the crotch. But this did not thwart him. Oh no. He carried on and convinced me to follow him.

‘This should be easy,’ I said to myself as we started climbing. I had bypassed Adi when he called me from behind. ‘Look at the view, Nessie,’ he said. I turned, clinging to the long grass. And I froze. ‘This is what it feels when you reach the point of no return then,’ I thought, and a strange form of gut-liquefying panic gripped me. The bed of rocks below taunted me.

I started climbing then, and boy, I did not stop except to ride out the rushes of wind that whipped the grass. Oh that wind, it did not susurrate, it keened. What would have been music to my ears in a field, threatened to make me wilt on the steep inclines. After that there was no stopping. I have never felt more like a nimble goat in my life as I did then.

At one point, I called out to Adi. There was no reply. I would not dare to look down. It was too steep for comfort. My heart beating, with the rat-a-tat of a thousand Hitchcockian birds clamouring against window panes. After a short interval, but what seemed like eternity at that point of time, I heard Adi say faintly from somewhere below, ‘I am trying to climb a boulder.’ My imagination, already ripe with horror, had a whole tableau playing out. Of us desperately waving to speck-like people below for help. Perchance, they would arrange for an air ambulance for the foolish people up there, or would they rather nod their heads in contempt, and opine, ‘Odd folks. What did they think the fence is for? Let them stay up there.’

The relief that washed over me when I spotted my husband’s head pop up. I started back on my single-minded scramble to reach the top, which looked deliciously near. A final heave – thank heavens for my loose pair of trousers – and I was up on the edge of the cliff. I lay there, eyes shut, arms unclenching from clinging on to the grass for dear life, heart beating, legs trembling like jelly, sweat gathering beneath my jacket, the tee shirt demanding a gulp of air. Even today, I cannot believe that we made it to the top. The cliffs had been fenced off for good reason. Later, much later, I read a news story about a father and daughter who were out on a hike in Scotland. They went rogue like us, climbing a fenced mountain. It was a chance loose footing, but the father never made it back.

By this point, you might ask me to bugger off, because hey, you do not want adventures of this kind, do ya? But well, some hare-brained schemes once acted upon lead to spectacular landscapes as limestone pavements, where you too can get your trousers ripped.

Before I quit gabbing, I wanted to leave a note about the other rewards for this harum-scarum deed: It lies in the winding lanes that descend sedately to reveal the surreal beauty of the British countryside, for surreal is what it is and nothing less; in a pint of chilled ale at The Buck Inn; and, in the innocent faces of a dozen calves with yellow ear tags, who come lumbering around the corner to catch a sight of loud humans with ripped trousers.