Bring on the women!

 After lockdown#2 was announced, and we rushed back from our shortened holiday in Devon, I’ve tried to stay fit by going for walks. However my preferred fitness fun is swimming - if the water’s warm. But, as in the words of Basil Fawlty, that avenue has been closed off to me, and I’ll settle for walks around the outskirts of the city of Bath.

I’ve come to appreciate what a gender split there appears to be on our streets. Something in my sixty years I’d never much noticed. The walkers were, in the main, middle-aged women like me, or others of various ages and stages of motherhood, or even young couples. But everywhere I went I could not escape white-van-man.

I was using the walks as an opportunity to take photographs of our city in lockdown. But everywhere I went - it seemed - there was a parked white van populated by one or two men reading their papers or checking their phones. And there were others:- it appeared that every few yards a workman would jump out of his van carrying something heavy or another might merely pull up and park all the while blocking the pavement. If I tried to take a photograph of Prior Park or Bath Abbey from my preferred spot another white van would pull up and hamper my view.

All the evidence from my sojourns into the city make me feel there is plenty of work out there, for some. Whether it’s telecommunications, building repairs, house movings and exchanges or deliveries the work of the man-and-his van seems plentiful. But I felt surrounded by men in vans! 

I mention this as it’s so unlike lockdown#1 when the streets were empty. In those hot early days of April lockdown the tarmac was noticeable for its grey crumbliness or perfect smooth blackness - depending on how worn it was - and all the more noticeable as it was suddenly so underused by cars, vans and trucks.

This time the roads still seem busy. Not everyone can work from home. A builder can hardly fix a roof remotely from his MacBook. 

My next walks will be on quieter streets, I think, so that I can enjoy taking photographs without feeling surrounded by busy men or white-van-man reading the sports pages. And I won’t have to dance around these vans that necessarily, in our narrow streets, have to park on pavements.

But where are the women? Bring them on! It feels a bit one-sided out there.