At the beginning of March it was lovely to be able to chat to strangers as we enjoyed our walks before the world shifted into unfamiliar and surreal.

This is the tale of an encounter that happened on one of my local walks:

In the morning I waited in for a delivery that didn’t show up leading me to a window of opportunity after lunch for a local walk. I chose my direction and and one of my favourite benches was unusually vacant so I took my opportunity to sit and rest a while overlooking a pool watching the antics of the ducks and geese.

Just after I sat down I heard the exclamation ‘Oh! the bench is taken now’. A fisherman was walking along the path and settled his kit to the side of where I was perched on the bench.
I said I would move up so he could sit on the end of the bench. He protested but I moved anyway and he sat on the opposite end of the bench.

We got chatting and I asked if there were a lot of fish to be caught. He confirmed the were and some surprisingly big ones for a small pool. He showed me a picture (on his mobile phone) of him holding a large fish that he had caught recently.

As we were chatting the solitary white duck that frequents the pool was hovering around knowing that fishermen always have food. The fisherman fed the duck calling him Billy, My new found friend proceeded to tell me the story of how the duck arrived at the pool.

Apparently about 10 years ago a lady approached the pool with a shopping trolley from which she deposited three white ducks in the pool. Over the years two of the ducks met with unfortunate accidents (I will spare you the details) so now Billy was alone.

I was too busy chatting that I forgot to take photographs. The accompanying photographs are from walks that I took around the pool in 2019.

(written for a Country Walking #walk1000miles Challenge).