Another day and another trip to pretty much the same place. There was something quite consistent going on here, I had been thinking. If nothing else, no one could accuse me of not being thorough enough. I was starting to get the feeling that I'd looked harder and more often at this place than a lot of other people had. The trouble was though, where was all this thoroughness getting me?

To introduce some sense of variation into the enterprise I decided to venture off along a side path. I'd already considered going this way before, but since it appeared on the map to be a dead end, I'd never bothered trying it out. But today I felt it was necessary. Today the prospect of being once again where I'd already been on a previous day proved repellent enough for me to veer off along this tangent. The map might turn out to be wrong in any case, I reasoned.

There were certainly more trees here.

Eventually, inevitably, I reached a point where it wasn't possible to go any further. It was strange that this route existed at all, I thought. It led nowhere, after all. I'd had to climb over a couple of locked gates on the way, which had led me to anticipate that something lay ahead of me. But this was all there was - a small area enclosed by trees situated at the end of a sort of peninsula created by the confluence of two small rivers either side. Why was there a path leading here? There wasn't, I admitted, anything wrong with here as a destination; here was perfectly okay. But I couldn't help wondering why it was that here had been deemed so much more worthy of getting to than anywhere else - so much so that it had its own means of access.

It wasn't my problem though, I decided, and headed back the way I'd come.

It was a very blustery day today. For a while I watched the way gusts of wind produced ever-changing patterns of ripples on the surface of the water.

I also watched how the trees swayed, and how the grass shimmered.

It would be rather easy here to say something full of serene wisdom like "sometimes even paths that lead nowhere are worth exploring". But really that wasn't how I felt. Mainly I felt windswept, and that somehow I'd been wasting my time.