Strength and honour!

There are days when you appear to enter a film set, and today was one of them.

On the way home through the mist, mizzle and low cloud, I was cresting yet another summit of the the switchback track, before yet another plummet to the pot holes awaiting me in the trough, when I found myself in the mist of Gladiator! More exactly, I was in the midst of the blasted remains of that Germanic forest in the opening sequences.

Today, there was no sight of Russell Crowe riding along the line of disciplined Romans, calling out "Strength & honour!", a phrase I still use with pupils when it's time to do something tough requiring great courage, like going on stage at the nativity. Neither, fortunately, was there a sight of the animal skin wearing, woad painted, head severing barbarians. I do think the barbarians should hire a decent PR agent to get the record put right.

What there was could only be described as that sense of sadness you find in a once rich forest when it has been reduced to a stubble of tree stumps littered with those thin, lonely trees found wanting and left behind by the manly machines as inadequate.

And at the top of a small hill, a Roman circle of trees was left standing, unconquered: proud, defiant. And on their own in the mist.