Whereas it is certainly true I said I was going to stop blogging, I did also add that I was stopping 'for the time being.' This loophole therefore allows me to begin again following a four-month sabbatical, this time intermittently and certainly not at the same volume as before. We shall see. But I will continue, for as long as I can.

SHORT HORIZONS

I didn't take up leisure walking until I was nearly 40, and even then it was an occasional business most often restricted to a particular week once a year. Even so, and accompanied by various intrepid companions, we usually managed ten or twelve miles a day carrying heavy rucksacks, and all the rest of the camping kit, or 23 or 24 miles a day travelling lightweight on things like the then annual Forest Walk, from West Stow to Didlington. Horizons seemed satisfyingly wide. Only hill-climbing seemed out of our physical reach. 
Such was the thrill of taking off into the countryside that we did it as often as possible, one of the greatest being the start of Day One of a new week's walk. Hauling on a rucksack and setting off. To what? Something different, that was for sure, even if we were planning to walk precisely the same route we had walked the previous year. No two expeditions were ever the same, each being an adventure in its own right.
In later years my leisure walking evolved into short-distant yomps with small groups; two groups, actually, both based on our workplace. We took it in turns to choose a route, arranged a date about once a month, and set off with the simple intention of walking four to six miles during the morning, eat our packed lunches somewhere along the track, and end at a pub for a pint before returning home to prepare for an evening or night shift at the Press office.

Then  a few years' ago I began to be affected by an ailment known as peripheral claudication, which meant that the arteries of both legs were clogging up. It was becoming painful to walk very far, and indeed, it was suggested by one of my companions that I was a walker with three speeds: slow, slower, and stop.
There were treatments, of course, such as a sort of Dyno-Rod job on the arteries. By and large, however, my 'glory' days were over. From a 25-mile yomp through the forest to a leisurely five-mile stroll, I was now restricted to a circuit of the main shops in town.
Shrewd readers will already have spotted a theme here. Shortening horizons. The boundaries of a world drawing forever inward. And that is the reason for this lament. No longer can I contemplate a day out with a rucksack. So there are many tracks and trees, fields and woodlands and landscape nooks and crannies I shall never see again, because my legs no longer work properly and energy levels have dipped.
More recently a fresh difficulty has emerged: low energy levels and a lung fibrosis problem which sometimes leaves me puffing more vigorously than a Poppyland Line locomotive. Now, a short, slow stroll from the car park to the main shopping area is about the limit before I have to stop and 'admire' the display in some shop window or other.
In other words, I've gone from 25 miles to about 75 yards, and if that isn't a case of shortening horizons I don't know what is. Mind you, at my age it is something I know I have to accept. But I tell you what. I don't half miss the walking. I miss it a lot.