Thomas hardy

Odysseus had to withstand the wrath of Poseidon, avoid the call of the Sirens and vanquish the terrifying Cyclops to get back to Ithaca. But he didn’t have to negotiate the 19.20 train out of Waterloo. It’s worth it though. I am returning home to walk another section of the magnificent Thomas Hardy Way, a trailway around Dorset covering some of the most beautiful landscapes that England has to offer. Hardy himself described the Blackmore Vale in the north of the county as that ‘fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields are never brown and the springs never dry’. Summer 2026 has rather tested that claim. We stay in a small cabin that a friend has built near a secluded wood, miles away from anywhere.

I thought, or anyway hoped, that once I’d finished the chemotherapy I would spring back to vitality. Seven weeks on and I’m still creeping about like a two-toed sloth. Now and then I study my face and head in the bathroom mirror for signs of rejuvenation. The narrow skull now boasts a light covering of baby fuzz. Sprouting from my upper lip are some widely spaced bristles. But no sign yet of any eyebrows. From their pouchy sockets the eyes look back at me uncertainly. Listening to In Our Time a few weeks ago, I heard Melvyn Bragg read aloud Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘I Look into My Glass’. The three short, deceptively simple stanzas, concluding with the phrase ‘throbbings of noontide’ undid him.

Harley Granville-Barker, actor, director, playwright, manager and critic, was a pasha of the Edwardian London stage. As a director, his Midsummer Night’s Dream of 1914 was a theatrical landmark. His own plays were provocative and controversial. The Secret Life, for example, was an analysis of the torpor of the British ruling classes. Waste, involving a married woman’s lethal abortion, was suppressed by the Lord Chamberlain. In 1916, aged 38, at the peak of his celebrity, the great Harley Granville-Barker volunteered for a walk-on part on the Western Front as a Red Cross auxiliary.

In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy has a running skit about the alehouse in his heroine’s home village where her father, and quite often mother too, disappear for hours at a time. People aren’t allowed to drink on the premises, so are strictly limited to ‘a little board about six inches wide and two yards long, fixed to the garden palings by pieces of wire’. But as the locals don’t like drinking while standing outside, they all head into the landlady’s bedroom and perch on her bed, chest of drawers and washstand while supping ale.

Staying in Britain for the summer has been, in many ways, entirely glorious. We have zigzagged from Shropshire through Derbyshire to the Northumberland coast, from Fife and Perthshire to Herefordshire and Devon. On the way, beautiful little towns and sweeping coastlines, not empty but not crammed either; excellent local food and plenty to keep us interested, from echoing cathedrals to buzzing bookshops. But it has also allowed me to see first hand just how desolate so many high streets are: not only the shops closed because of plague, but those shuttered, clearly from a long time back. Boarded up doors, bleached posters… If it wasn’t so wet, the tumbleweed would be blowing.