Week 195: Last hill

First time putting in proper hilly miles since the op. Seven miles round trip to the cafe in the country park. And the sun shows up: last turn of summer as autumn rushes in. I’m sweating by the top of hill 1. There are five by the end. All the gulleys carved by centuries of streaming, meeting the weather of the channel. A buzzard joins me through the first hour of it, sporadically looping round, seeing what I flush out. I am not quiet. I huff with the walk and feel the muscles get to work. I’m not slow, but the thought of covering, say, 24 miles daunts me. That’s my longest, the final stretch of the South Downs. There’s simply no way this body could do that now. I also see a slow worm, the second of my life. The first was in a little park in Hastings Old Town. Rowan had spotted that one. At the crest of the last hill, by the radar tower, I look across the flatlands towards Rye. I can see, maybe for the first time, that’s it’s not so much land as silt. A stretch of ground made by…