Encounters on the Phoenix Trail

It was the most spring-like day this year and the urge to be out in it without delay overcame lengthy consideration of where to go. I considered the Phoenix trail to be unfinished business (see post before last) because I hadn’t walked its full length. Still haven’t, as a matter of fact. But there are more pictures to share and tales to tell.

As the springboard for mystical flights of fancy, it’s rather a failure, for it’s not solitary enough. Even when there is no one in sight, you are benignly assailed by the flights of fancy and do-goodery of others who have been before: the sculptors and installation artists, the philanthropic institutions. Royal Bank of Scotland is one. It may have ruined our country’s banking system, if not the world’s, but it has donated a thousand mileposts to ensure I don’t think entirely badly of it, like the one in cast-iron I display below, bottom.

I met dog walkers, an elderly photographer, pony-riders, whole families of cyclists (it is school half-term holiday so children were out in force). The best encounter was on a bridge:

It is an ancient Bicyclist
And he stoppeth one of three …
‘By thy ruddy face and thy glittering eye
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?’

cf. The Ancient Mariner, Coleridge

He had stopped for his ‘elevenses’ and offered to share a small packet of biscuits, which I declined, quoting the dying Sir Philip Sidney on the battlefield: “Thy necessity is yet greater than mine”. In an opening gambit he skilfully offered a smorgasbord of topics, out of which I chose prostate operations and his son who’s doing well working overseas for a pharmaceutical company. We could have talked about the cycling achievements of his youth or the sculptural embellishments on French motorways which may have inspired those on this cycling trail. But my heart was gladdened by the topic of prostate operations because, dear reader, I am of the age and sex where this could conceivably happen to me, as it has happened to my cousin of the same age.

I feel perfectly well, I hasten to add. But so does the ancient bicyclist, weller than me indeed, with his ruddy face and his fresh operation scar (which he described rather than displayed) and his 75 years of fitness. The routine annual blood test said otherwise, for he had requested a PSA (prostate-specific antigen) as part of it, and the result was high. So the mysterious gland was excised, or the tumour removed, I’m not sure which.

My own contribution was the sagacious observation that we all have to die of something, and that I am not going to submit to the interference of doctors trying to prolong my life by curing what they can cure, whilst increasing the risk of my dying from something which they can’t cure, namely dementia. My cycling friend agreed, for we both felt it must be a kind of living death, best avoided, and worse for the person who must watch and tend what must seem like the living shadow of her loved one.

I guess that in the United States, as in third-world countries, it is easy to die without the interference of doctors. Unless invigorated by the sight of a patient’s valid health insurance or credit card, their professional interest will rapidly wane. Here in the United Kingdom, it is different. They cannot force you to go to the surgery, but if you do, they will lecture you unceasingly: not you in your status as unique individual but you as a unit of epidemiological statistics. It’s no good saying you feel well. Who are you but the patient? What can you know of evidence-based medicine? It is for your doctors to tell you whether or not you are well, and to prescribe pre-emptively. You must take pills of various types for the rest of your life, together with secondary pills to relieve the side-effects of the main ones, and so on ad infinitum.

I prefer Basho’s outlook on life:

“Days and months are travellers of eternity. So are the years that pass by. Those who steer a boat across the sea, or drive a horse over the earth till they succumb to the weight of years, spend every minute of their lives travelling. There are a great number of ancients, too, who died on the road. I myself have been tempted by the cloud-moving wind—filled with a strong desire to wander.”