The Elusive Chase

 Cannock Chase is big – something over 20 square miles of heathland, woods and plantations – and not very far from Lichfield. So you would have thought that by now I would have become a frequent visitor – or at the very least have managed to find it. You would be wrong on both counts: on my first attempt (last year, I think) I found what I took to be Cannock Chase and had a very pleasant walk, but on checking the OS map afterwords I discovered that it was not Cannock Chase I'd been walking on, after all. 
   Yesterday – a wonderfully warm and sunny day – I set out to try again, armed with rather more accurate information than I had had the last time. In mitigation, I should say at this point that I do not drive, so I usually (rashly) attempt these expeditions by bus – and no bus or any other form of public transport delivers you on to Cannock Chase itself. However, it was entirely my own fault that I started off by misreading my map and setting off on a wholly unnecessary detour – fairly brief, but made that annoying bit longer by some humorist having turned a footpath sign through 180 degrees. After a while, I arrived at a location I took to be the veritable gateway to Cannock Chase, but all I found was a spinney with a brook running through it, an uninviting view of fir trees, and no indication of which way was likely to take me on to the wide open spaces of the Chase. After a little (too little, as usual) thought, I changed my plan, having identified what looked like a good walk to another destination altogether – which, for a wonder, I reached without once going astray. Unfortunately, the walk was through a kind of landscape all too common in Staffordshire – sheep pasture and arable, with narrowly circumscribed footpaths and rather little in the way of (wild) flora and fauna. All rather dull, especially for one spoiled by having wandered too long on the Surrey hills and downs. Cannock Chase, I'm sure, has much more to offer – if I ever manage to penetrate its mysterious force field. Having re-examined the map, I now feel pretty sure that next time I'll make it... I'm probably wrong.
   Anyway, as I said, it was a warm and sunny day, and I was rewarded with my first orange-tips of the year, and my first blackcap, singing away lustily – a song 'full, sweet, deep, loud and wild,' as Gilbert White described it. And the blackthorn was in full bloom, and here and there larks were singing as they rose into the sky.
   The weather is even warmer and sunnier today, and, after visiting the dentist, I took a stroll around the wilder parts of St Michael's churchyard, where holly blues, orange-tips, speckled woods and the ubiquitous peacocks were flying (as they are in my garden). Yet again I failed to find the grave of Philip Larkin's parents: I know I found it once, and photographed it, but since then I have drawn a blank on every visit. After this, I had to shop at Tesco – a grim place, but with a superb view of the cathedral – and on the way out I glanced, as I always do, at the discarded books that satiated readers leave for others to pick up. Today I was startled to see the selected poems of the 15th-century Scottish 'makar' Robert Henryson (Carcanet paperback). I was not tempted: reading the English Chaucer at university was painful enough, the Scottish one still more so. Dostoevsky's The Devils was also on the shelf, but I passed on that one too. There is enough suffering in the world.