000.a — People who get in our way

Tales of a really fancy dinner, and some pebbles in the river.

Photo by Simon Mumenthaler on Unsplash

People that get in our way are like pebbles in a river. They force us to alter course and, over time, crunch through an island or forge a new path through some scrub.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez says the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love. I would build this out slightly. The invincible power that moves the world is unrequited everything; not just unrequited love but unrequited dreams, unrealised plans and unfulfilled potential. And, sometimes, the people who get in our way.

Let me explain.

I am making this explanation from an otherwise unremarkable spot, north of Oxford where the River Evenlode is crossed by Akeman Street, the old east-west Roman road that transects the country and may have been built on an even earlier Celtic road.

Now it is a very quiet footpath that runs through some curvy overhanging beech and hazel trees — but still immediately recognisable as an obvious two-chariot wide dent in the landscape.

It’s a great place to escape a busy house during half-term to have a think.

I climb a little bluff above the Evenlode and survey the scene, trying to imagine Centurions marching down a paved road under me. Waving a thistle stalk like a wand as if it might transform the scene before my eyes. Mercifully, no badgers fly out of their setts into my face.

I’m thinking about a return visit I made to college recently.

By college I mean university. Not college in the secondary school way Brits sometimes mean when they say college — or even college in the way Americans use it to mean university. College in this case means a very specific college, in a very specific university, at the very specific place where cattle used to ford the river (probably since about the same time Akeman Street was bustling and Centurions were crossing the Evenlode beneath me).