The Patch (1)
Ever since my late Dad (who you'll certainly hear more about) took me for a mid-winter walk along the modest Oxfordshire footpath between Wantage and Letcombe Regis, and proceeded to repeat the next weekend, and the weekend after that, something clicked in my mind: I might have been young, but I was already fully on the local patch bus. The familiarity of certain, often random and sometimes unremarkable, places in an oft-visited area gave great pleasure, mainly in the knowing that almost certainly no-one else gained any pleasure in their existence. Apart from, clearly, my Dad. I christened the aforementioned area "the Brooks", and "the Brooks" had "the Patch" (ok, a Patch in a patch; I should have thought that through more...), a potentially absolutely brilliant area of dense shrubbery next to a reedbed. Later came Lark Hill, which on the face of it was the most faceless piece of arable farmland you could ever find - "the Dip" (which tur...
