Of rain and cows and dinner

It might be strange that I started calling the year 2025 a year of community, considering that I spent 6 weeks walking alone, had no permanent job with the same colleagues, and that I moved to another country alone. But the thing is that community is everywhere. In the festivals I played in the summer, in my London house-share, on the hiking path, and especially there.

In the future I want to write about some of my favourite community moments from last year and this one, about some evenings I’ll cherish forever. And today I’ll start with the one on the path.

The first one of my favourite evenings starts with rain and stubborn cows, because, well, of course. It was my last week on the South West Coast Path in June, and after five weeks of walking mostly alone on that relentless roller coaster that is the long-distance path in Cornwall and Devon, I was exhausted. I had had some pain on my right knee, and putting more weight to my left foot because of it had manifested in a sharp pain in my left heel. I had rested for two days and walked very little on the previous day and on that day too. It had been raining on and off the whole day and I had been waiting for the worst showers to pass under trees multiple times. After drinking tea and eating cake in a drizzle I passed a man who was changing his wet socks to dry ones, with the hopefulness that there would be no more rain that day. But of course there was.

Exhausted, wet and miserable I carried on and about 45 minutes before the campsite the path was suddenly blocked by about 15 huge honey-coloured cows. They did not want to move, they just stared at me with a mild interest. It was a shrubby slope with thorny gorse plants and no other obvious paths, and I didn’t know what to do. I tried to talk to the cows and slowly move towards them, perhaps they would let me go past them, but they ignored my attempts while still staring at me, which is an interesting feeling. After about five minutes an older woman came behind me and I was relieved to share the struggle with her. We searched for alternative paths without finding any, and then the woman, Jenny, googled herding cows, and so the two of us started slowly but assertively moving towards them again, talking to them in a kind but assertive tone while making sure that our toes were never too close to theirs. For a while there was no movement, no interest, but I guess because we were blocking their way in the other direction they eventually started to move, slowly and in a very unorganised manner. Slowly we walked behind them, talking to them, in all actuality herding them forward. They didn’t seem to want to go off the path and we didn’t see when there would any kind of end to this, but we had no choice but to go on. After a while we saw a couple (of humans) in a fork of the path that cheered us on, told us that they never would have known what to do, and that there was a wide fielded area opening up very soon. We said we had no idea either, but that we were exhausted and staying on that slope was no option either. The cows started moving faster, chasing each other and in the end almost running on to the field. Jenny and I took a deep breath, congratulated ourselves and went our separate ways for a while with a plan to meet again at the campsite.

On the other side of the bay a man walking to the opposite direction told me he had witnessed our herding and asked me where the cows were now, if I thought it was safe to go on and what kind of cows they were, dairy cows surely? I had no answers for him, in that moment I realised that I knew absolutely nothing about cows, but I assured him that if we had made it past them he would too.

There were only four hikers’ tents at the campsite in the end, on a field so high up that you could see the sea on both sides of the peninsula. When I went for dinner in the campsite café, Jenny came to pick up hers and asked if she and another lady she knew could join me. The lady turned out to be Saskia, a dutch powerhouse in her 50s, who had been walking the path in yearly 2-week installments for the past couple of years and who I had met previously at a campsite in Lizard village. Jenny herself was in her 60s and attempting to hike the whole path, as she had travelled all the way from Australia. We ate our curries and pizzas when Jenny noticed a familiar face in the corner table and the rest of us made our acquaintance with Dan, the hiker with the dry socks, who was presently cursing his earlier optimism. He, too had started in Minehead weeks ago as I and Jenny, and was attempting a thru-hike. We invited him to have his after meal beer with us, and discovered that all of us were a bit miserable, home-sick and exhausted that day. So we ordered some more drinks and talked some more. About the highs and lows of the hike, about the campsites, about the rare occasions we had wild camped and how we didn’t like it as much as we thought we would. It was wonderful. I had cherished every short conversation I had had on the path, but there was never enough time, nor were most of the people out there hikers like us, crazy enough to stay in tents, carrying all our gear for weeks. We compared our experiences on the most rewarding and most difficult days on the path and our very different day schedules and eating habits. Dan had bought candy he said he no longer actually wanted, and a new deodorant he said he very much needed. Jenny said she only ate biscuits in the morning to be able to leave fast, I said I needed my porridge and coffee to get moving. We compared our stays in various campsites and other accommodations, and our experiences with some colourful figures we had come across.

Nothing truly of significance was probably said that evening, but I could tell it was exactly what all of us needed. The campsite café closed at ten, and we went all happily to sleep then. While doing my silly little embroidery in my tent I heard Dan next door talking on the phone with his wife, telling her he had had dinner with “some girls” he met, and I thought: what a group of girls we were, in our 30s, 50s and 60s, crazy enough to undertake a hike like this alone. Although, none of us were truly alone, were we?