Geography Lesson

Rutland Water, resting gently blue in its valley of soft greens and early golds, is completely man made. The triumph of creating something that looks so natural seems not just a feat of engineering, but a trompe-l’oeil that compels you to look ever more closely until you can find the artifice. On the Sunday afternoon, I drove to the dam: even right there, I couldn’t see it. Bounded by a ruler-straight edge of water, it was plain on the map; but from the road alongside, it appeared just another rolling slope of grass and trees amongst the others.

There was nothing to give a clue that this is an immense, carefully built structure of clay and stone, with underpinning and escape drains and tunnels and inner strengthening. This hillock, imperceptible in the landscape, dams back hundreds of thousands of tonnes of water yet sits calmly under the weight of the enormous pressure, holding back, holding back, holding back.

People are like this, by the time you get to our age. You can only guess at what they were like before they had created the complex structure of dams and berms and fences and boundaries that get them through. Traffic is re-routed to skirt areas which may not withstand incursion. After a while the raw scars settle down as a new landscape and then it is hard to tell how the original map might have been.

And as adults, we recognise the delicate structure of some else’s geography. We want to be close, but we want to do no harm, breach no carefully-woven hedgerows, burst through the walls of none of the lagoons where pain has been so carefully dammed up.

Delicate as dentists, we are able to keep - with oh such attentive care - to the narrow paths. We can talk, just talk, with no shouting or crying or reproaches or anger. We can find a way to read one another’s maps, to see the expert construction and landscaping skills that were needed to create a human being that can make it through the days, through the long dark winters. Gently guiding, hand-in-hand or arm around the shoulders: look here, but don’t go in. Don’t press here, it will hurt me. Steer away from there, it will hurt you. This is an old part, I’m so used to it now, I almost forget I made it. This a fresh wound, it needs to be left for the grass to grow over: not yet.

Quietly, carefully, we talk, we learn. We don’t expect, at this time of our lives to run free, to ride roughshod, over someone else’s inner landscape. And therefore we can afford to unfurl our maps a little, understanding this can make things simpler rather than more complicated.

We can cope, nowadays, with the contradiction, and the paradox, and the loose ends. We realise that life is untidy and ragged, and we can embrace its messiness. We can allow people the right be exactly the way they are, and gladly accept what is offered, and walk the path together for a while.