I like these two days. Even though Sarah and I don’t do Christmas we don’t usually do anything else particularly special. Unless you count living quietly together, reading novels and doing nothing at all that looks like work. Which we definitely do count.
So these are days with space. To do the things we might not have otherwise remembered we like doing. Like, while I’m enjoying myself deciding how to introduce the photographs I’m about to show you, Sarah’s upstairs listening to an Archers Omnibus while she sews herself something new that’s probably been waiting for ages for it to be Boxing Day.
Boxing Day, when a few hours of reading and music ended with me leaving the house and walking off in the opposite direction to yesterday’s Christmas Morning walk. Meaning I’ve come home with enough photographs for a blog post showing what it looks like to leave the house, walk round to Church Road, pause at the graveyard, glimpse The Mystery, then turn left onto Wavertree High Street, criss-crossing the road sometimes. Then right again to Wellington Road. This walk being square-shaped where yesterday’s was more of a triangle. Wellington Road becoming Gainsborough without doing anything other than keeping going long enough to reach Smithdown, where I set off back towards The Mystery and home.
On the High Street now.
That’s about half way round now. Turning left at the Wellington pub into Wellington Road.
Smithdown, on the way home now.
Nearly home.
A neighbourhood unlike any other, because that’s true of all neighbourhoods. A mixture of ancient steps, old rural and newly trying to see if things might work like everywhere is, but in a mixture that’s only like itself. Put together by time, accident, design and subtly different every time I walk round it.
And not a walk I do every day this without even really calling it a walk, like yesterday’s. But just as close to home and only waiting for those few times each year, like this Boxing Day afternoon, when time, space and the curiosity that idleness brings took me off in the opposite direction to my usual. And brought me back with these pictures to show you, of Wavertree at the end of 2020.
One of a pair this with yesterday’s Christmas Morning Walk.
