Today’s grid square was a rare outing to the far side of the river, to the very edge of the map itself. It felt like a new country. Over that next hill lay lands unknown, and maybe even dragons. I cycled up a stony bridleway through a wood, making sure to savour the greenness before the leaves fell for another year, to store away the memories as nourish- ment to get me through the winter. The year was winding round to its close, and I was going to miss these outings. They always cheered me up after tedious bouts of real life, such as queuing this morning to col- lect a parcel from the post office, which turned out to be in some other distant depot. Holly berries ripened in the dim woodland light. The path became a holloway, with beech trees arching overhead and their tangled roots exposed on the elevated track sides. A nuthatch scurried up and down a trunk, calling ‘dwip, dwip’ as it searched for food, then

hung upside down while it ate.

The gate’s clang startled a buzzard who lumbered off the ground and flew into the sanctuary of the trees. I stood still in the field, feeling myself beginning to slow down and unwind. I breathed in the smell of hay, blinked at the sunshine, and reminded myself that things couldn’t be too bad if I got to call this ‘work’.

Riding here had been a confusing maze of winding lanes and high hedges, so I hadn’t yet orientated myself with any other familiar grid squares nearby. The road had been too narrow for cars to pass my bike safely, so I’d had to stop and tuck in whenever a vehicle appeared. This allowed me the chance for a blackberry update, nibbling one or two while I waited for each car to pass. A few were ripe and swollen, but most were still small green nubbins.

A good old chunter about access rights, the right to roam, and Scandinavia's approach to allemansrätten.

My hopes were high. It was a perfect sunny day and the grid square looked enticing on paper. It was mostly woodland, with some contour lines, a small lake and the site of a Roman villa thrown in for luck. There was only one building on the whole square. A motorway and railway sliced through the middle, but a third of the area was a country park and all the rest was open countryside. I was looking forward to roving around a pleasant landscape dotted with enormous trees.

And yet...

And yet, it turned out that the solitary building was a historic manor house that owned most of the grid square and resolutely refused to share it with plebs like me. I was shunted away from the meadows and ancient trees by signs and fences, and ushered instead down an unattractive path squashed between the motorway and a metal fence. I hoped I could at least explore a small copse, but that turned out to belong to a golf course and was also off-limits. And the lake was ringed with forbidding notices from the fishing club that owned it.

So far, the most enjoyable part of the outing had been standing on the motorway bridge and watching the hypnotic traffic hurtle beneath me.