I’ve realised it’s a little while since I posted a run-down of recent adventures and discoveries, so here’s a quick update on the last couple of months.

Roaming

In March I managed to get away on a multi-day walk for the first time in ages, in the form of St Aelred’s Pilgrim Trail.

It’s a relatively new pilgrim route (launched in 2024), covering 41 miles around Helmsley and Upper Ryedale. They have an alternative route for cyclists, and you can also do it as a series of circular ‘petal walks’ to make the logistics easier. It’s beautifully curated, taking in some wonderful decrepit little rural churches and lesser-trodden paths (also visiting the majestic Rievaulx Abbey, where I stopped at the English Heritage café and felt like rather a blot on the landscape among the cruisewear and cockapoos).

I took my mercurial toy poodle, Mouse, and we camped the first evening at the Buck Inn in Chop Gate – an unexpected little outpost of Germany deep in Bilsdale. It’s one of the quietest dales in the North York Moors, and I was surprised to finish my day there with a mug of supercharged dunkelbier and a delicious hunter’s schnitzel with homemade spaetzle, but there you go.

The second night, I put up my tent at a sheep farm near Old Byland. The friendly owners were blood-spattered and sleep-deprived, flat-out with lambing, and the site was only just open for the season. The only other camper was a rural contractor in a caravan, complete with a flat cap, a permanent roll-up and a white van. Helen turned up after work with a Tupperware pot of spicy stew, a bottle of beer, and my old lurcher, Porridge (who’s getting a bit old for back-to-back walking days and cold nights).

With a bit of route-tweaking, I managed to get back to Helen’s on the third night, so the old boy could join for the last misty day in the hinterland south of Ampleforth.

Apart from that, we managed a week away in Cyprus with Helen’s boys. I haven’t been there since I was a child myself, so it was lovely to revisit some old memories and make some new ones. Our visit fell over Easter, and it was the first time in years that I haven’t watched Easter Sunday sunrise from the dawn service at Sandsend beach. Instead, I took myself to the Anglican church of Agia Kyriaki, next to St Paul’s Pillar in Paphos. Living where I do, we always have visitors at our Easter or Christmas services, so it was fun to be the tourist for a change.

Reading

Consumption of Sherlock Holmes has continued apace (I really must get that bookazine flatplanned this month), but apart from that, my literary diet remains varied. Other highlights included Asako Yuzuki’s Butter (I know, I know, everyone is reading it…) and Max Brooks’s Zombie Survival Guide. Both quite instructive in their own way. From Yuzuki, I have learned the comfort-food pleasure of rice with lots of butter and soy sauce, and from Brooks that I should keep my bicycle maintained and my crowbar handy.

Writing

My favourite piece of writing to go up lately was an article about walking the Berwickshire Coastal Path last summer. The route is only a few days long, but you get an awful lot of the proverbial bang for buck (plus it’s almost all in Scotland, so you can camp more easily along the way). It was my first multi-day walking and camping trip with Helen, so it was nice to share a hobby that I liked and to discover a new route together.

Special shout-out to my excellent friend Ellie – and the Mammut Women’s -10C sleeping bag that she sent us in the post. These are the things that make all the difference.

Wearing

Spring is flat cap season, and my favourite for the past couple of years has been a patchwork tweed one from Borges and Scott. It’s more ‘rural character’ than ‘country gent’, but honestly that seems to be the way my life is going these days.

Using

Apparently, my analogue childhood makes me an ‘elder millennial’. While I do use tech all the time (and like it), I still often feel like much of the technology in my life is making it more complicated and reducing my quality of life, when the effect is supposed to be the opposite.

Of course, there are lots of positives too, including some genuinely useful apps. One that has made a big difference for me is Todoist. As a man who previously kept sprawling paper to-do lists that expanded over multiple sheets of A4 and needed constant revision, it’s the best way I’ve found of organising my time. It’s not too prescriptive (I hated those productivity apps where you were supposed to divide your time into blocks and work without distractions, as if that was ever going to happen), but it helps me keep a grip on all my jobs, projects, goals, rabbit-holes, reading lists, drudgery, admin, correspondence and everything else.

There’s a free version, but the paid one isn’t expensive, and I’d really recommend it.  

Learning

A crony of mine once told me, ‘There are only two kinds of people: those who believe in UFOs, and those who haven’t done enough research.’ By that logic, I must fall into the second category, but I would say I’ve still done more research than most.

For seven or eight years now, my brother and I – together with two friends – have greatly enjoyed attending paranormal conferences. Before you roll your eyes too far back in your head, I’m not a believer. Or rather, I have yet to be convinced any of it is true – which I suppose represents a small but significant shift since I started going.

Some of the talks can be a bit hit-and-miss, but for every ufologist in a fishing vest flicking through an hour-long slideshow of blurred birds and lens flares, there’s a genuinely interesting speaker to balance the books. Often they’re academics studying folklore, archaeology or some other specialism, or sometimes they’re amateurs who have investigated intriguing unexplained events. Cryptids, hauntings, aliens, conspiracies, witchcraft… it’s all there.

This time around, highlights included a dapper Irishman researching fairy music, and a very teehee talk about the shameless charlatanism of seances with deceased celebrities. One of my favourite ever talks was on paranormal linguistics and invented languages; another was on the psychogeography of central Manchester. You just never know what you’ll get.

A prevalent (but not universal) principle in this Fortean world is the inverse of Occam’s Razor – a general suspicion that the most obvious solution is rarely the right one. For example, if you are in a forest and a pinecone falls on your head, it is almost certain that a pixie has thrown it.

I should say that, while the people watching is of course excellent, we’re not there to take the piss. I go to church most weeks, so I am hardly one to be throwing stones on that score. Occasionally there is an uncomfortable talk where someone is clearly mentally ill and delusional, but in general, I think the eccentricity is mostly harmless and often interesting.

Anyway, perhaps I’ll write about it all at greater length one day, but in the meantime I can highly recommend a little dabble in the world of the weird.