Down the Track

Everyone had cancelled, again, so I went for a walk. Night wasn’t far off, and rain kept flushing from the uneven clouds. I didn’t take a map, I didn’t really have a plan – I just wanted to walk. I know much of Oxford too well to wander completely aimlessly – but after a few familiar roads dusted with the smell of cow parsley and privet flowers, my walk changed character, became closer to a London exploration, where I follow my whims.

I crossed Cowley Road just where suburbia propert begins, heading towards the irregular tops of hawthorn trees, my nose already anticipating the thick sweetness of their scent. I was sure there’d be a path of some kind out from an otherwise dead-end residential street – I was right: a broad cycle track stretched out either side.

Cow parsley and campion stood motionless in the green light of the overhanging trees. A blackbird made a momentary silhouette on the sunlit track, but otherwise the route was deserted. I set off east.

When the wind blew, it scattered a few blossom petals past my feet. I saw and heard instants of robins, wrens, sparrows. Over the sports field I soon reached, swallows were arcing down and rising, busy with their twittering calls. Two wide men jogged heavily on the long grass.

I went quickly, but trying to take in all the details. Trees thick on my left were threaded through with nettles, and beyond them a flank of cut grass rose up past the leaf canopy. On my right were the roofs of east Oxford: terraces, semis, new-builds like a child’s plastic bricks, industrial chimneys here and there, tower blocks far off. I could hear the city like a faint murmur, an unclear sound. The birds and the tree branches, and the sound of my feet, were much closer.

Early on, the path crossed a little stream that bounced down the slope, under me and out, tree-lined, on the other side. One of the many waterways that flow through the city, it had attracted a robin to its steep, muddy banks. It sipped, tipping its whole body forward, then saw me and flew. I wondered if the cycle track would take me right to the edge of the ring road, leave me teetering on the brink of the traffic flow. (If I fell in, survived, how far would I go before reaching land again?)

The track stretched on, between trees. I knew I was surrounded by city, but I saw no one, only the roofs in the distance. I could imagine the suburbs like a subducting tectonic plate, gradually sinking under this evening-lit strip of green.

I surfaced on the tarmac of Barracks Lane, beside semidetached houses. To my left the trees continued, but when I followed a path between them I found myself on the bank of that stream I’d seen before. Facing me on the other side was a sign warning me off the private land of the golf course.

The neatly mown grass rose up the hill towards Headington, while a robin sat on the overhanging branch of a chestnut with a territorial air. Headington was where I, too, was going now, but I had to go along the road, up towards where the traffic sluggishly rolled among the houses. Still, there was more walking yet, and the streetlights had only just come on.