RUNNING DOWN THE BEACON

                                                      by

                                        Martin Woodhouse

    Afternoon, and warm.      Though with a rising wind.      Jim Whalley, red in the face but as yet far from out of breath, making his way upwards, occasionally talking to nobody or to somebody.

    “Hang on a bit, Wal.   Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves, we’re none of us as young as we were and that includes you and me.”

    His black boots kicked puffs of dust from the rutted marl of the track that curls steeply up, between banks and hawthorn bushes and fox-holes, from the alley by the Post Office to the top of Hale’s Beacon.      He was eighty-five.   He didn’t know, at the moment, not really, why he was climbing.

“Running Down The Beacon”

(On the Lightbook, landscape mode)

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