
Adapted from a Flickr description
In my first years I never knew mountains, hills, nor valleys. There were some hills in my home town, but they had been peeled, squashed, bored and worn down by hundreds of years of industry and necessity.

"Mound" might be a more appropriate word, if it wasn't the lairy and crude cousin of the upright, clinical, anatomical and xenogeographical "Mons". Milton Keynes was free of even these mere dimples.

The mountains I drew as a child were grey triangles capped with thick, fridge cold snow, the colour of paper. They were not obstacles, just ornaments, a they were in he backgrounds of Hanna & Barbera cartoons that Yogi bear ran past. Again and again and again.
My only valleys were the valleys Ivor passed through or Aslan created them from Nothingness population: 3 guinea pigs
Obviously Dwarves lived under mountains, beside Dragons sleeping on gold and hobbits that tricksed Gollums. and Sir Edmund Hillary conquered the biggest, tallest triangle of them all. Tin Tin saw Yeti’s on them and Asterix hit Romans on the chin in the forests below them.
I visited ‘downs’, but looked up, not down, because at that age, you always looked up, so much of the world seemed placed and arranged there, out of reach.

I saw another down mounted and conquered by rabbits, and listened to my teacher read stories about an owl called Plop who visited hillocks and their introverted sisters; hollows.
Then there was Snowdonia. Camping in its foothills. At an age when I could begin looking down I was forced to look up at the first time at real hills, youthful, round, soft, playful leering down at you, jiggling in valleys, pushing you, guiding you to the peak: Snowdonia.
Snowdonia was no grey triangle with jittery pencil strokes and internal angles adding up to 180º, it had infinite volume within finite space. It wasn’t capitated with sugar-paper white snow. Roads had the sweep around it, gorging on land until their flabby shapes no longer fit the line of best fit
Clouds, not present on children’s depictions; stroked ghostly fingers on old, fractal bedrock. There were triangles though, children get that right, but only in the same way there are grains on a beach or the grammatical treatment of ‘love’ as a single emotion. “Love are..”, it should be, not not “Love is..”
With puberty and dalliances with conspiracies part of that immature, ‘I know something you don’t’ phase, there came ‘Knoll’. If the word can hide a sneaky Dutch “K”, why couldn't it hide a second gunman?
School stressed 'mottes', 'summits', middens, and the reduction of rubbish dumps. It also offered river valleys, and flood plains, for consideration, but that’s a story for another photo.
And in Scotland those words I’d cherished, loved, stored in the woodenbox of my mind have to mix, meet and mingle with new words: Munoes and Bens.
Ahora tengo que usar y entender: ‘Sierra’, ‘Mesa’, y cumbres internacionales.
These words are old, daring to stake claims in meanings that offer little to modern world. Where as my grandparent’s generation would have needed such distinctions, today we need finely defined words for painted tarmac.
Come round my way, we’ll get in my car and pull out the cul-de-sacs of our loneliness. We'll head down the street, turn onto the wide boulevards and avenues that lead out of town. We’ll shunpike the ring-road, with its on and off ramps riveted to feeder lanes, and career down single carriageways until we’re in a secluded country lane. Perhaps we can lay down ourselves in a lay by off the thoroughfare, take the time to wander down each other’s memory lanes. Bypass nothing, take the scenic route.
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