W. is a fan of local history, and a great reader of explanatory plaques. Whenever there’s a plaque, he stops to pore over it carefully. Tonight I’ve decided we’re to walk home. W. is whining. ‘It’s cold! It’s too far!’ But we’ve come across a plaque.
‘The Ouseburn Valley’, he reads aloud. ‘What do you know about the Ouseburn Valley?’, he asks me, ‘nothing, I would have thought’. He continues to read. ‘The river becomes a culvert. Do you know what a culvert is?’, he asks me. I don’t. He explains: ‘It’s like a pipe, going underground’. – ‘Ah’. – ‘Once there was a valley here, but it’s been filled in’, W. explains, after reading the plaque. ‘The river goes through a culvert. You know what that is now, don’t you? You’ve learnt something’.
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