I’ve been walking with a stick. You leap back in amazement, spilling your bag of Soor Plooms on the floor, as you cry out: “Can it be true? Have I read this a-right? You, a young man and lithe too, have been walking with … a stick?”
That is – broadly speaking – correct, sir. However, as ever, I should move quickly to qualify, correct, annotate and disown everything I have just said. That is to say, I did walk for about half an hour with a stick and, although there was a medical reason for this, the activity was arguably an affectation.
To put this controversial revelation in perspective, I’ve done something to my right knee or, more accurately, my right knee has done something to me. I can walk on it but, if I suddenly put a lot of weight on it, say when getting up from a chair or leaping majestically like a stag from crag to crag, then I get a stab of pain and my leg buckles under me.
Consultations with Dr Google suggest I must have injured it somewhere, though it might also have resulted from kneeling on wet stone when painting the base of the hoose. At any rate, it’s discombobulating and has probably put paid to my kung fu career (though, being better at talking myself out of tricky situations, I’m more of an expert in tongue fu).
But to the stick: one day, stepping gingerly through the woods by the shore, I latched onto the branch of a dead stump and it came away in my hands. Ingeniously, I conceived the idea that it might help me hirple along because I was trying to keep weight off the leg to help the knee heel.
The branch was two inches thick and a good height – up to my chin – with the top eight inches coming off at an angle, so that it was more like a staff than a stick. As I continued through the woods, I felt like yon Gandalf the wizard from The Lord of the Rings.
Also, I rather enjoyed walking with a stick. It felt practical and natural, and I think the trees liked it. They squeaked approvingly – actually the wind making their branches rub together up – so that, at first, I thought there was a cat or baby stuck up in the heights.
But then I realised that, seeing the branch like an organic part of me, the trees thought I was an Ent or tree-shepherd from The Rings and might even turn into a tree eventually, as many of these creatures did. Make sense?
Unusually, I came across two people in the forest, one jogger (I’m convinced that if you hied yourself oot to the Greenland tundra, you’d soon encounter one of these), and one young tourist out for a walk.
Their broad smiles spoke of beholding a man of great dignity carrying a staff and not, you know, some weird old guy in the woods with a big stick.
Back home, I snipped off the stick’s scraggy ends and sanded it down prior to varnishing and staining. I look forward now to the admiring glances that I’ll get as I stravaig up and also doon the supermarket aisles with my staff and the wizard’s hat that I’ve ordered.
Read more in this series:
The Last Word: A walk in the park just isn’t when you’re an amphibian
