21st-Century Yokel

is why we invented Christmas, but Christmas has its limitations as an anti-depressant. I am fond enough of the day itself but am not a fan of forced jollity or environmentally harmful gluttony, which doesn’t make me especially well disposed to the build-up to it. Once New Year arrives my spirits begin to turn gradually in a better direction, all the way to April and May, by which point I’m so giddy in the sweet humming air that I want to climb every tree and kiss every bumblebee I lay eyes upon. I’ve been the same all my adult life, although it took me a while to properly recognise it. I was perhaps more aware than ever of the darkness approaching this year, more conscious of my need to look after myself at the end of a tough year. I’d not been doing too badly until Roscoe was attacked, but the incident spun and tumbled into my recent past and knocked loose a few other bits of pain that I’d tightened up. It is at times like this that you realise just how precarious you are in the depth of winter. What if several other awful incidents happened too? Who was to say they wouldn’t? How do people survive through that?

At the end of autumn when these dark wet days were first flexing their limbs I’d visited a pub on Dartmoor with a friend and, apropos of nothing, a man had inflicted upon us an offensive impromptu lecture about the UK’s current terrorist threat. We listened to his tiny misinformed viewpoint about the Muslim faith and what he repeatedly referred to as his ‘Christian Country’ and did our best to change the subject, realising that saying what we actually thought – that he was a dicksplash of medium-large proportions, for instance – would change nothing for the better. I wondered what had made the man obsess about Muslim terrorists on one of the highest parts of the South West Peninsula, surrounded almost entirely by sheep, ponies and moss. Was it those Muslim terrorists you often witnessed sitting about looking shifty in the Bronze Age hut circles at Grimspound, plotting the downfall of Western civilisation? Or perhaps it was the Muslim terrorists you constantly saw paddling down the River Dart these days, in their terrorist canoes, from the river’s hard-to-locate source at Cranmere Pool? It was clear that it was the man’s very insulation and separation from terrorist attacks that had made him so irrational and fearful. I could not relate specifically to this, but I could in the sole sense that I do often fear winter more irrationally when I’m slightly insulated from it. When I’m at home, protected from winter by a roof and central heating, it seems much more frightening, plays on my mind far more malevolently. This is part of why my method of conquering it is to face it head on. I walk through its gaping jaws, voluntarily, spontaneously, when I should be doing other stuff. When I do, the rain and wind somehow don’t seem as scary as they do when they’re hammering on my bedroom window at night.

Some might argue that today I had chosen to look winter a little too squarely in the face. Leaving farmland behind and approaching the Beacon, what I saw ahead of me was a dreary, drenched otherwordly landscape of gradually fading visibility. This was by no means the highest, most remote bit of Dartmoor, but when hard-bitten veterans of the national park told me that there was a certain kind of weather you shouldn’t be out on your own up here in without an experienced companion and a compass, the scene ahead of me was pretty much what they were talking about. I knew that visibility would only reduce as I climbed, and the already somewhat nebulous paths would become less defined still. You couldn’t even call the moisture whipping diagonal lines across my face rain any more; I was walking through the middle of that occult cloud I’d seen earlier. It turned out it was even more occult when you were inside it. In three miles I had not yet seen another human, but ahead of me I spotted two black dogs near a dead tree. Before I got closer and made them out for what they actually were – sheep – my heart skipped a beat; not because I believed they were the Devil’s wisht hounds of Dartmoor legend, but because since the attack on Roscoe the sight of any dog had triggered a new unease in me. I could easily have brought Billy out with me today but had chosen not to. With every step of the way I felt more helpless, more angry towards the owner of the dog who’d mauled Roscoe, whose guilt – unless his conscience got the better of him – I would never be able to prove. I hated to think of Roscoe alone, in pain, not knowing why she was where she was. As I pressed on through the mist I was gripped by the conviction that I was walking purely for her. Yes, it might be safer for me to turn back in view of the weather, but this was not about me.

TV’s ALF

With each step the cloud around me was getting thicker. Another even more indomitable wisht hound moved across the path ahead of me: a horse this time. That’s if it was still the path? At this stage I had only the trickle of water running down it as a guide. I was aiming for Squirrel Cross, surely one of the most sarcastic names on the moor, since there could be few less squirrely places in rural Britain than this. I gave thanks for the compass my parents had bought me last Christmas to aid my moorland walks. That brilliant useful compass, sitting back on my desk at home. The cross loomed out of the gloom like an alien totem: half a cross, really, at