I’ve not posted here for a while, and the reasons are many, but in the main… I’ve just not felt like it, not in the mood. Why? Well, the latter part of this year has been, ah, challenging on several fronts, some self-inflicted: let’s leave it at that. Why now? Well, this morning, as it increasingly does, a phrase dropped into my mind unbidden, and today it was “happy place”, which led me to reflecting on my happy places. They’re not exclusively locations – one such is just listening to good music, another is a good book – but mostly they are. So, where and why?
Perhaps curiously, my howntown of Farnham isn’t a happy place. Yes, I love it very much and it’s undeniably part of me, but I’ve lived here for over sixty-nine years and inevitably in that time, things have happened (and continue to do so) that were less than “happy”. Life, really.
Unquestionably my #1 happy place since 2014 has been Shropshire, specifically the south of the county, around Ludlow and Clun. I’ve nothing but wonderful memories there, although some of them are now decidedly bittersweet given the events of 2021. That said, I’d move there were it financially feasible. It’s a lovely landscape, Ludlow is a beautiful old town… it just feels comfortable. That it’s like stepping back some thirty, fourty years helps. And of course, the Clun Green Man Festival.
A close second would be the Malvern Hills, which I discovered that same year and thus have no echoes of past relationships, just the memories I’ve created by myself these past four years and a landscape to die for. Spending last Christmas there only enhanced my growing love of the place. It’ll probably never oust Shropshire from the top spot but I’ve fallen for its charms quickly and completely. Having such a delightful place to stay as I do is a big factor, as it is with Shropshire. Another would be New Alresford and the wonderful cottage I call home for a few days each year around Watercress Festival time. Given it’s only an hour or so and two pleasant bus rides away, I sometimes go for just a short while when my soul needs easing, and it never fails.
Rye used to be a happy place, and to some degree it still is, but sadly the many memories created there have been tainted by our last trip and, frankly, my own stupidity when a meal booking I made went awry. Not saying it was solely responsible for the ending of that relationship but it sure as hell didn’t help. This years bad weather in February didn’t help, but for all that, it’s still a lovely town and I’ll probably reinstate it soon.
I’ve got my holidays pretty much sorted for next year: the Malverns & Shropshire are of course a given, but I’m musing on somewhere new… well, new-ish, not been for over five years but again a quintessentially English landscape of towering antiquity. Gotta ring the changes now and then, if only mildly. 2026 will hopefully be a return to somewhere I’ve not been for over fifteen years. I’d like that, very much, but it’s not entirely up to me.
So, my happy places: small towns/villages in peculiarly English landscapes. That’s pretty much me summed up. To close, my favourite poem which I feel embodies so much about me.
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.(A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, Poem XL)
