Not with a bang but a whimper

With apologies to T.S. Eliot, who famously described the end of the world, this is apparently also the way redundancy ends. On my last day of a glorious, difficult and tumultous period in my life, that began after I was unexpectedly made redundant, I have sat down to write about my last walk in the healing process. For although there are more walks to do, and I have committed to doing them, they will inevitably be weekend walks of a different character.

Walk #13, my last walk, by pure chance was a non-event. It happens to be so much of a local walk for me that I actually walk out my back gate to join the path that goes round Iron Cove. Consequently, I have done it many times, in company and alone, meeting friends along the way, in sunshine and once, famously, in driving hail. So it needs no planning.

On this official occasion, I had been out all day, and got home at dusk. I was at a celebratory lunch for a friend's birthday, so had wisely chosen to walk to and from the venue. By the time I arrived home, I felt I had done my day's quota of walking. But the dog, who had been cooped up in the back garden all day, had other ideas. It was getting too dark to take her on our routine walk down to the off-leash park at Hawthorne Canal, so we set off on the Bay Run. It's a 7 km circuit, some of it attractive and some not. I join it at the end of Lilyfield Rd, and always walk clockwise. This gets rid of the unpleasant noisy, smelly part of the walk along the busy CityWest Link first, and leaves the last part of the walk back through the tranquility of Callan Park. Even at night, this is still a preferable direction.

So we walked in the dark, and did our 7 kms. It felt like nothing more than exercise for the sake of it, but it tired the dog out at least.

Back to work on Monday.