When winter is here and the wind is howling, when there’s snow in the air and we’re slipping over on the ice, when the wind is cutting and stinging our eyes and when we’re sheltering from storms as we wait for the train… that’s when I want to remember this scene.

Ten minutes later we found ourselves knee deep in nettles.

I knew we shouldn’t have worn our shorts.

Our exploration of the Essex Way continued this weekend as we strode out in Great Leighs.

Now it’s years since I’ve been through Great Leighs. Through, rather than to, you note. Before the fast road opened it was the best way from Chelmsford to Braintree, and in all honesty I’d probably been spending more time looking at the traffic ahead than I had the surroundings.

What a shame. Turns out Great Leighs is very nice. We parked up at the village hall and struck out across the fields, through some woods and a wood yard, along the backs of some cute smallholdings populated by chickens, bantams and guinea pigs and down to the river, which we followed for three or four miles.

We should have followed it further, unfortunately, but got ourselves mixed up (we were eating Creme Eggs at the time and it’s easy to be distracted) and turned right one road too soon, putting ourselves on a long loop up through the centre of our route.

In fairness that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing as we were starting to flag, and it means we can do the other half another time. We did find this dinky spring by the side of the road close to Great Leighs church, on Cole Lane. You can see where it is on Google Maps by following this link.

It’s a long, long time since I’ve been to Cressing. I went years ago, when I was a student and had no money on a day off college and turned around when I got to the barns and saw that you had to pay to get in.

Anyhow, today we headed back there. The sun was out for pretty much the first time since October and it felt like the first weekend of spring, so we dug out the walks book and opened on a random page. This is where it took us.

The walk, which started in White Notley, followed a short stretch of the Essex Way, an 80-odd mile footpath that stretches from Epping to Harwich through surprisingly unspoiled countryside.

White Notley itself is little more than a small town, with the dinkiest train station (one platform, one track, no car park) sat at the start of the walk. We quickly broke away from the road, past old farm buildings and across ploughed fields.

Eventually we found ourselves at the famed Templar barns, now coming up for 900 years old and in remarkable condition. If you’d told me they were replicas, build five years ago I could quite have believed you.

We didn’t go in. We got diverted by the tea shop and sat reading about what was inside them, but as soon as we discovered it was waxwork people and ‘display boards’ (yawn) we skipped the cultural bit and headed off across the fields again.

All in all, though, an excellent walk of four and a bit miles out in the middle of nowhere. Let’s hope this heralds the start of a good summer of walking. We could do with it after the winter we’ve just had.

A lucky escape. A bit of a grotty weekend and then an unexpected break in the clouds. Too good an opportunity to pass up, we jumped in the car and drove out to Ingatestone to walk.

There is a loop you can take, out past the end of the village, along the lanes towards Stock and then back on yourself past Ingatestone Hall, the setting for the BBC’s most recent adaptation of Bleak House, across the railway line and into the village to head back to your start point.

While we were walking it, keeping an eye on the fast-approaching rain clouds, I had the rather shocking realisation that it’s probably 18 years (or more) since I last walked it. That’s literally half a lifetime away, yet it feels so recent.

We did – just – make it back to the car as the first spots of rain began to fall, and as we slammed the doors and buckled up the heavens opened. That was our lucky escape. Despite the inclement weather, though, it’s reminded me how nice it is walking around there, and as soon as it’s held off long enough for the fields to dry out properly, I’d like to head back and rediscover some of the other walking routes of my youth.

Wow – that fortnight went in a flash. And now I’m back to work. Well, riding back to work, to be precise. I’m on the train, which is usually rammed, and I have three whole carriages to myself. Very strange. It’s even running on time.

So, Christmas and New Year. Christmas was the usual carnival of over-eating and feeling very fat in return. Rich and I were both getting over colds on the day itself, and I popped cough sweets as fast as everyone else did turkey. An excellent day, though: the morning spent sitting around drinking gin and eating olives; the afternoon spent playing games and quizzes. No TV apart from the news and the Queen, looking from the smock she was wearing like she was half way through painting the Sandringham ceilings.

Boxing day, we hot-footed it home to be greeted by a miowy cat and three very excited chickens who had got a taste for being out all night. They’ve been almost uncontrollable ever since and now when we try and close their door at night they block it. Gerry is particularly adept – she put a foot on the runner the other night and actually held it back as I tried to pull it across. The night after, she bit me.

Anyhow, boxing day we were entertaining Bart, Sue and dad. We’d already cooked a lasagne as big as a bed and frozen it two days before, so baked that for lunch. Cheese and port then more games ensued and then we skipped dinner on account of our spacehopper waistlines.

By the start of this week, when everyone had gone home and things had calmed down again we were starting to crave fresh air, so we headed out to Thorndon Park where I haven’t been in a decade, most likely, but was a monthly weekend rendezvous for years as a kid. This time of year, of course, most of the leaves are off the trees, so it’s not nearly as beautiful as it is when the canopy is full and it feels like a big, dense forest.

No matter: we were there for geocaching, and the terracotta carpet we kicked through was as beautiful as anything you could hope for in winter. It was a successful outing – we found three caches, and although there was little in the way of treasure worth having, it made for a fun afternoon, and a welcome break in the cake eating.

We spent new year as we did last year – on a rug in the lounge with a bottle of champagne, a baguette, some camembert hot from the oven and the cat. Not long after midnight he started yowling that we should come to bed. By half past he was striding purposefully in and out of the room looking back over his shoulders. By 01h he was pawing at our jumpers and by 02h he had given up and flopped down on the rug on his side, no longer pulling up the edges in the search for monsters that might lurk beneath. We crept up at 02h30, leaving him where he was.

The cat wants to go to bed. Rich wants to watch Olivia Newton John.

It’s become a bit of a tradition that we should start the new year with a long walk, and so next afternoon – yesterday – we drove out to Highwood to find deer. There’s a circular route out there through the woods that we’ve walked many times before, and always seen one or two of them running through the trees. This time we hit jackpot and counted 46. We stepped out from the treeline and no more than 10 metres away the whole pack (herd / family / group / flock?) bounced across the field, almost silent as their feet sunk into the soft ground, squashing the sprouting crops into the mud.

An excellent start to the year.

And then today it was work. First day back, first day on a new season ticket, and a deserted train to boot. If things carry on like this, it could be a good year indeed.

On Saturday we went to Sizewell and walked down the beach to the bird reserve visitors’ centre. There were almost as many binocular-wielding twitchers as there were actual birds but it still made for a pleasant, interesting walk. We stopped for tea and picked up some leaflets; among them one for Rendlesham Forest.

So it was that we found ourselves driving out there on Sunday.

The forest is famous as the site of the most significant UFO encounter in Britain. In December 1980, airmen on the US airbase in the middle of the woods reported seeing strange lights in the sky. Three of them set out to investigate, but then radio communications started to break up, and so while one stayed back at the edge of the trees the other two ventured forward.

Eventually they came to a clearing where they saw three ‘mechanical’ lights that hovered just a few inches above the ground. The animals on a nearby farm were getting distressed and the airmen could hear the sound of women screaming. Eventually the lights shot off into the sky.

A couple of days later a tall pillar of light appeared in the sky, which when the airmen went back to investigate opened up at the top to reveal a large black eye. Radiation levels at the site were ten times the background norm when measured the following day, and the investigators found three indentations in the ground that could have been where the feet of a craft had come to rest.

Nothing has ever really been proven one way or the other about the sightings, and nobody has properly explained what caused them. However, the forest was extensively replanted after the storms of 1987, but no trees would ever grow in the clearings where the lights had apparently come to rest.

Now you can visit those clearings by following the UFO trail that leads you through the forest’s broad, open paths, and that’s just what we did.

We’ve driven through the forest loads of times but never broken off from the road and so didn’t know quite what to expect. As it turned out, it was very much like Thetford, with a lot of pine trees and some fern, but also camping areas and, on its edge, agricultural land.

Walking through it on our own was quite spooky. In places, where the canopy is thick, it can turn quite dark, and we were the only ones about. Now and then pine cones would drop down, and sometimes a whole branch would come crashing to the ground and make us jump. The biggest surprise, though, was the family of deer that ran out from the treeline and straight past us, not two metres away. We saw them again some minutes later standing in a clearing. We stopped; they stopped. We all looked at each other, wondering who would move first. Eventually we did, but not for the next five minutes, and all that time we stood watching each other – them just as curious as we were.

As for aliens – well, apart from the markings on the back of the trail signs, which show an alien head and some strange code that apparently appeared there last year, we saw none.

Probably for the best.