Epping Forest

Subject: Epping Forest.

A couple of days ago I took a friend who had come down to visit me from Widdrington in Northumberland on a walk through Epping Forest. The forest is a delightful example of preserved woodland, towering trees, old gnarled trunks, weird shapes which seem to scream at you in a silent torment. The forest laying 25 miles outside the centre of London was the home of one of our most famous vagabonds, Dick Turpin the highwayman who held up the stagecoaches leaving London on their way to the towns and estates in the Midlands and the North. His exploits were romanticised in many Ballads, not least his fictionalised dash overnight from London to York on his famous horse Black Bess. 
The trees and the open forest ground has been made accessible for the general public by tracks and the continued maintenance of the forest floor so the vista through the trees is open and uncluttered. It just so happens that in 1998 we, the Wood family, arrived on a holiday from South Africa to be shown the damage done the previous year by a terrible storm in 1987 when many of the finest trees were uprooted by the wind. Huge 100 year old trees laying prone, branches plucked from the ones which survived, a scene of total chaos. Still to this day some of those giants remain felled by wind, a reminder of the inherent strength of mother nature.
Ian had come down by train from Northumbria a last bastion of land, the buffer between us and the Scott's, laying as it does North of  Hadrian Wall, the Roman fortification built to keep out those wild men of Scotland. Beautiful open country, peopled by folk who wouldn't give you 'two pence' to live in the south. Independent and fiercely rural Northumbria was a far cry from Epping Forest and it gave both of us time to reflect on our lives, full of incident and what ifs.  
Growing up in Yorkshire we learn the ways and the prejudice of the North. We valued our bloodyminded resilience from those people in the South particularly those dreadful Londoners and their  practices, the reliance of 'acquisitions' to promote a sense of worth, a lack of social camaraderie, clustered as they are, competing like rodents in a cage. We reminisce as if the years had not happened, years which make us old men, one with white hair, the other with no hair at all. Do you remember Billy, I wonder what became of Jim, Charlie's sister was a right old cracker. And so it went on as we walked and talked, off the beaten track, pressing on lost in our memories until we were, ourselves, lost. Lost, not in the sense of being lost in the Drakensberg Mountains, or even the jungle in Papua New Guinea but, for a moment, lost. Lost yet close to the suburban sprawl of what we claim is 'the norm'. Which way. Left or right. Just for a fraction of a second, a minute or two five or ten minutes, without sat nav, we were ground zero, and had to rely on instinct. 
Up that slope to the left, we should be able to see where we are but our legs which until now we had been unaware faithfully engrossed in conversation, now sang a different tune and the hope it wouldn't be too far to the top was compounded by the gasps of lungs unused to anything much more than climbing the stairs at home. 
Finding our bearings was one thing, finding our car was another since we had left it on the other side of the forest parked in a glade, thankfully with some local knowledge from off road bike riders we eventually broke free of the trees to see, waiting patiently, my old Volvo, a symbol of security and the passport home.