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The night before last I camped rough beside a fast-moving stream. We built a fire pit out of the rocks that had tumbled down the hill face  behind us, collected dry wood that had been dropped by the tree – we didn’t break a branch and still had enough for hours of warmth – and sat around playing cards, drinking some cheap acrid cider that C. had picked up from the shop as he left me in the tent catching the breeze, reading. Dinner was noodles, again, with smoky cheese from the factory and chorizo, ate as the bread for the morning toasted on sharpened sticks over the fire. We chatted about us, how we met, how silly we were, how It all happened, and how glad we were It did. The night before we’d lay with our heads sticking out of the tent door, wrapped in sleeping bags, and saw the Milky Way in an impossibly clear sky. I’d never seen so many stars – the longer I stared at a patch the more stars I could see, going back and back and back until there was more light than dark and I felt too dizzy to look any longer.C. taught me how to find North, and I taught him how to use the word diminutive properly. We’d skipped dinner that night, instead I ate biscuits and he drank whisky and him, his best friend and I chatted until we got turfed out of the hotel about neuroscience and politics and linguistics and other stuff.

One of the days of walking we did, we ended up in this tiny, weird pub where the Coke and the beer was warm and the barman looked like something from 1920s Cambridge and the door to their home kitchen with an Aga and a rocking chair and a book about birds or flowers or something was wide open. Later that day we waded through nettles and ferns with the National Trust people, one of whom had had a tic in his leg earlier I think: the blood was dribbling down his leg, but he didn’t mind at all.

And then yesterday, to come back to Birmingham on a warm, sweaty coach with a broken toilet to see groups of boys vaulting the wall into a car park, throwing bricks at a police van, to have the transport people hurrying people onto the buses out of town, even if it meant letting them on for free. As soon as the coach stopped, three police motorbikes whizzed past and I saw men and women in riot gear treading slowly down the main street, as two guys with scarves around their faces pointed out to each other the plan of where to hit next and a man with a van welded steel to the windows of the pricier places. I guess I was pretty scared. I don’t know when it’s going to be right again.