Always for others

We live, as its says on the sidebar, halfway up a mountain in the Sunny South East.  Our lane is an important access point for the Blackstairs massif, rising from the county road at a 10% incline and pointing more or less straight at the telecoms masts on the top of Mt Leinster.  10% of a slope is good, it gets you the height without having to scramble using your hands and you can talk as you walk.  We know this is possible because every weekend if we're in the yard we hear snippets and fragments of conversation as hill-walkers go past.  Some fifteen years ago, when the girls were small they spent much of their lives out in the yard and in the trees on either side of the lane.  It was through them that we met Paddy Looney who was coming down from the hills in which he loved to ramble.  As a trained soldier he always took emergency rations when he was out on the hill - you never know when you're going to fall and you know that if such a thing happens you're not going to be found immediately.  But coming down from the hill and a few hundred meters from the car, his emergency rations were surplus to requirements.  So he asked if he could give his brace of chocolate bars to our gannets.  Whatever nonsense about not taking sweets from strange men, Paddy was instantly no longer a stranger.  Over the years my girls grew fat on his leavings!  When they weren't there, he'd ask after them and on the few occasions when his passing coincided with my presence outside he'd stop and chat.  I always felt happier for having met him again.

Now a straight-enough slope of 10% is great for walkers but it gives water a tremendous acceleration if enough of it gets into the road-bed.  Twice in 12 years the whole surface of the lane was torn up and delivered to the county road in a heap: data and calculations here.  I've re-engineered our lane over the years by scratching up little transverse berms so that any falling rain gets diverted off the lane before it starts to travel.  And many years ago I persuaded one of our farming neighbours to deliver a couple of tractor-buckets of roadstone up the mountain in a couple of key places to divert the mountain-water (of which there can be a helluva lot) off the roadway and into drains. A little of this maintenance keeps the lane car-accessible to us and the postman. It also makes a difference to the surface under foot and means that hill-walkers can do the first part of their trek without twisting an ankle.  Every year I take an azada (see right) and repair and rebuild these berms and shovel out the accumulated debris.  It has made sense to go further and further up the lane to turn off running-water problems before they start.

A couple of years ago, I met Paddy as he came down off the mountain. Instead of carrying a Mars-bar or a compass, he was toting a shovel.  He had spent the previous few weekends on his own up the mountain tricking about with the drains so that the water didn't destroy the lane. You can still benefit from the results of his care today.  I can see why I might do that, partly for my own good and partly from a sense of proprietorship.  But it's not so clear why Paddy who lived 40km away should make a special trip to make life easier and more enjoyable for other people.  Except if you knew Paddy!: because his open heart and generous hand were clear to all when you were in his presence.  I say "if you knew Paddy" because he died last Sunday - by all accounts of a heart-attack while clearing drains after the Darwinday storms.  I hardly knew the man but I still feel that a light has gone out in our lives.