Can Tom Hack It?

Sunday morning is the time for a good hack. No: even the Royal Oak is smoke-free nowadays. Hacking is about working a horse on our hills and tracks between the Cheshire plain and the Derbyshire peaks.

In ones and twos, the beasts set out from Tarden, Townscliffe, Lower Dale and Hill Top Farm. But I prefer to exercise on my two flat feet, and friend Karen accepts my company for her Sunday morning “long run”.

Unfortunately Karen is in the prime of both her running career and professional life with one of Manchester’s great paper-mills. And though I am a hand taller than her, she carries a hundredweight less. So, as I labour up the hill to St Thomas’s, I have plenty of time to contemplate my sins of commission (McVitie’s HobNobs) and omission (hacking up hills).

We Mandalls are built for endurance, or at least for comfort, more than speed. Hard head on sloping shoulders, a barely defined waist and a damned good bottom. Good bottom, I expect, is what got my forebears, Cumberland farmers, through lean winters. And Cumberland sausage, I expect, too.

In the long run, there is nothing wrong with a damned good bottom. Provided the long run is on the flat.

The other thing about running is that you can’t afford to digress. But the thing about me is that I do little else. So, before I know it, I have slowed to nothing, and am contemplating my shoelaces. Or, worse, this column.

“Can Tom hack it?” I chant to myself, as I pick up my pace again. What on earth made me say I would write this column every Friday? My correspondent, Amanda, has emailed me the stern warning: “I can’t stand irregular blogs”. Thank you, Amanda. I won’t let you down.

“Can Tom hack it?” “Yes, he can!” I reply to myself, like a fan of Bob the Builder.

By Hill Top Farm, we turn onto a high wide track, straight as an autobahn, built between stone walls to enclose new fields for eighteenth century Mellor freeholders. Karen dances over the ridges between half frozen puddles, but my feet sink as deep as carthorse hooves.

I engage Four Paw Drive to clamber up from the ford at Rowarth. My mind drifts into dangerous waters: I compose a letter to the High Peak Council Footpaths Officer about how the exposed bedrock represents a serious trip hazard.

Consciousness returns on the Sitch, a lump of hill above Hayfield. I long for the gentle gradient of the disused railway line that brought undyed calico cloth the last leg from Kerala to Hayfield for printing. And Arthur Lowe home for tea.

But when we finally join the line Karen notches up to full steam. It’s exhilarating for the first fifty yards, but by the time we’ve pulled into New Mills, I’m about to bust my boiler.

Karen of course is ready for more. It must have been oxygen deprivation that made me suggest the blasted cross, so up we go again. Hack. Hack.

The walled track over Mellor Moor has clearly been used for NATO tank manoeuvres (letter to Secretary of State). My reeling salt-stung eyes discern two handsome beasts, and a printed message on their riders’ high-vis jackets.

PASS WIDE AND SLOW

No problem there. Can Tom hack it? Yes, he can.

Holiday Time

No sooner has the Christmas pudding settled into a warm bump on my tummy, than the family starts mithering me about summer holidays.

I hide the Radio Times (Mrs M always insists we get the bumper Christmas edition). I just don’t want to see the adverts for timeshares and city breaks, Squeezyjets and Caribbean cruises.

I try to avoid the ads on telly too. Even ad-free BBC has its risks, what with the Royle Family off to a static caravan in Prestatyn.

The first problem about planning holidays is that the boys’ school, now re-badged a Specialist Language College, always gets in first, at the start of the autumn term. Barely have I reclaimed my (ha!) study from the kids’ junk, and purged my computer of piratical download software, than they are back home from school, trailing consent forms for Madrid, Iceland and Antarctica.

Mrs M and I sigh. We know that lager works the same in any language, leaving them less than receptive at the Prado, the hot springs or the South Pole. Could not our Specialist Travel College achieve the same effect without contributing quite so much to global warming? (I am now ranting at Mrs M, who as usual says nothing).

I recall those happy days when our primary head teacher showed us snaps of Year Sixers licking ninety-nines on windy northern beaches, and when our “contribution” was measured in tens of pounds not hundreds of Euros.

So, as 2010 dawns, even an off-peak mid-week break at Center Parcs looks pricey for our summer hols. I know better than to suggest a week in my favourite holiday cottage at the unfashionable end of the Lake District. The risk of a wet muddy week in a cold damp spidery house is just well, too like home. My work often takes me abroad: it’s all very well for you, they clamour, off to sunnier climes for what you call work (ha ha), but for those of us whose journeys end in Piccadilly and Offerton, a beach and a pool are basic Human Rights.

Cabin Fever is setting in at Number 72. Any minute now they will bring up last year’s cancelled holiday in Antigua, where Mrs M and the boys were meant to join me at the end of my contract. Sometimes clients cancel: it’s just one of those things, but you can’t expect the family to see it that way.

I seize the high moral ground by asserting basic Canine Rights: Bono’s lead must be somewhere. I shall take him up past Red Row, a terrace of brick weavers’ cottages by the Royal Oak in Mellor. I’ve always liked the way “Red Row” as written looks like a full-on family blazer, but when you get there, the soft red bricks are as warm and kind as the people inside. I might even get a cup of tea if Bono promises to behave.

On the way I shall compose a letter in my head to the head of a certain Specialist Impoverishment College, and by the time I am home, I’ll feel better.