I remember reading Somerest Maugham complaining about being a writer - that it meant that he wasn't able to look at a sunset without feeling constrained to capture it in descriptive prose. The fact is that you don't have to be a professional writer to suffer from an automatic compunction to chloroform the butterfly of living experience with words. It could be argued that human language has developed specifically in order to capture and pin down the fleeting and ineffable moment, responding to a deeply felt need to control and structure the apparently haphazard raw material of life. In other words, we screen our experience through vocabularly in order to have some sort of handle on reality. Name and rule. While this faculty is surely indispensable to our success as a species, in all likelihood its overuse cuts us from the possibility of that unmediated perception of Reality, which remains the preserve of mystics and saints.

All to say that I am prey to qualms as to the validity of belles-lettres in general and of this diary in particular. At the same time, short of communicating by ESP, we are rather stuck with the business of words, in which case we do well to seek to use them with clarity and elegance, in full knowledge of their inherent limitations. Hmm...

Subject to these reservations, I shall begin...

Saturday 6th May dawned a spectacular spring day. We'd made no particular plans and loitered in bed in that semi-awake state which is so exquisitely decadent and so corrupting of the capacity to actively engage the brain. By the time we'd finally surfaced and breakfasted, agreed to go to the country, driven Anna to her orchestra practice, downloaded our prospective walk, got our stuff together and got into the car, it was already10.30. Setting off down the Namur motorway we aimed for the town of Andenne on the Meuse and then headed up into the magnificent country to the south of the town - the Condroz. Our chosen expedition was named "The Deep Condroz", starting in the little village of Evelette. We parked the car rather self-consciously in one of only two parking spaces in front of the tiny church, packed our little rucksack and set off. The sun shone out of a perfect blue sky, with just a hint of a breeze to help maintain a near-ideal body temperature. To protect her hair from the sun, Carol put on a head scarf, tied up at the back in the Russian style - a fashion she had frequently affected when we first met in Copenhagen back in 1973. Instantly, the years fell away. I was in love again. No, not again. I'd always been in love, but due to some spell had somehow forgotten.

Finding our route, we set out across fields towards the village of Libois. We walked through a bucolic idyll, as through a painting by Constable. The dog, picking up on the mood, rushed excitedly to and fro through the young grass, leaping vertically up at us in the typical Jack Russel manner. We walked past a great thicket of hawthorns, assailed by the intoxicating scent of their blossom. Looking further on to Libois, its chateau-ferme revealed itself to us - a medieval construction of honey-grey limestone, complete with Rampunzel-style conical tourelles. We could have been in the Dordogne, hardly much more than an hour out of Brussels. In the village itself was the lovely little church. It contains a spectacular Louis XV interior, perfectly restored. Unfortunately it was locked and we didn't have the time to seek out the key. Nearby was a vast 19th century chateau, resplendent with its onion-dome roof, set in spectacular grounds of ancient horse-chestnuts and copper-beeches.

Pressing on, we headed up out of the village as our route took us up a long hill and on through forest to the village of Tahier. By now we were pleased to have the shade of the young May forest and proceeded through a light-play of oak and ash and an echoing trill of persistent bird-song. By now it was after one o'clock. We stopped in a clearing and ate our frugal lunch of an apple and a drink of water. So far we had not met another soul save people outside their doors or in their gardens. Emerging from the forest on our way down to Tahier we crossed our first fellow-walker possibly following the circuit in the opposite direction. We followed a farm track through open meadows thickly carpeted in yellow dandelions. I remember reading somewhere that dandelions do not in fact propagate by pollination at all - the flowers are just pure swank!
On down to the village and its own completely authentic stone-built chateau-ferme and up past outlying farm buildings and into forest again. We continued on through delicate snowstorms of falling blossom. Hawthorn-white and beech-red. Gnarled tangles of oak were followed by sedate beech glades, then ornamental redwood and firs, until the forest gave way to pasture and a little stone bridge across the extravagantly picturesque Ry d'Ossogne.

We climbed gently up the other side of the stream valley and, turning a corner, were suddenly confronted by the elegant chateau of La Fontaine, in French 18th century style, a windowed facade of classical harmony with a decorative ballustrade around the edge of the roof. Passing the chateau on our left, we continued down a small hill, turned a corner, forded the stream and entered the charming village of Ossogne. We climbed steeply up through the village's single street, past rows of absurdly pretty stone cottages with their beautifully tended gardens alive with flowers. Leaving the village, we walked up alongside yet another vast fortified farm, on through more forest until we finally made it back to Evelette and the car. The statistics: 16Ks of walking, taking a bit over three and a half hours and the gift of a renewed sense of the wonder of life.