W. has grown increasingly convinced that intellectual conversation itself is an affectation, he says, as we head out for our walk. At first, he had supposed it was bad manners to talk of abstract things at dinner. When you eat, eat, that's what he had thought, and save the abstract matters for later.
But now? Intellectual conversation – so-called intellectual conversation – is inappropriate at any time, W. says. It’s a ruse. An excuse. We have to plunge into concrete matters, W. says. Our conversation must be as concrete as our eating.
'This wood, for example. That field. And that – what is that?' A barrow, I tell him. An ancient burial mound. But W. says that it's only a refuse heap. A pile of rubbish abandoned among the trees.
He can imagine me as a boy, W. says, cycling out through the new housing estates, and through what remained of the woodland – muddy tracks along field-edges, fenced-in bridleways and overgrown footpaths. – 'You were looking for something', he says. 'You knew something was missing'.
He sees it in his mind's eye: I'm carrying my bike over the railway bridge. I'm cycling through glades of tree stumps in the forestry plantations. I'm following private roads past posh schools and riding academies. I'm looking for barrows and ley lines, W. says. I'm looking for Celtic gods and gods of any kind.
And what do I find as I wheel my bike across the golf course? What, in the carpark of an out of town retail park? What, on the bench outside the supermarket, eating my discounted sandwiches? The everyday, W. says, which is to say, the opposite of gods.
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