Green Hat

Do you only start appreciating walking once you get past the age of 30? Reading must have some of the best walking around it you could possibly get; in the gentle stroll in the gentle countryside sort of way. Not the rugged, risk-life-and-limb sort of way. I have just come back from a two-day walk along the Thames Path in South Oxfordshire. The weather was glowering and damp, and the Thames slow and fat. It is so Wind in the Willows in that part of the world, so Tales of the Riverbank. Willows hang aslant a stream all the way along, and there are beguiling glimpses of beautiful boathouses, locked up against the next time their, doubtless lovely, owners come for a weekend on the river. And narrowboats pootle up and down, and the beer is welcome and conscience-free, because, after all, you have just walked five miles. And wherever you go, you can always see Didcot power station.

I believe it is strangely reminiscent of the landscape in medieval England, when this part of Berkshire and Oxfordshire must have been dominated by abbeys and churches, from the huge Reading Abbey to Wallingford and Dorchester and Oxford, you would simply see the next abbey or cathedral on the horizon as you walked from one place to the next. Now it is an all-together different power that dominates.

Anyway enough of that tortured analogy. Why do walkers wear such silly clothes? You'll be wanting a Green Hat. I'll just get this goblet out of the freezer where I have been saving it nicely. See look how it mists up straight away; chuck in some nice chunky ice, one glug of gin, and then about same glug of creme de menthe, watch the green liquid spread slowly in the gin; stir it to help  it mix; top up with sparkling soda water; pop in a straw and enjoy.