THE HILL

Every morning, before breakfast, I walk the hill. It slopes down past my farmhouse, then rises in a gentle serpentine to the far ridge. From there it wriggles across the fields to the village of Mastrontas, then past the Pero Pinheiro marble-cutting yards - great steel blades and water-sluices chewing through immense blocks of stone - and finally to Sintra, whose fantasy castle is silhouetted in the distance.

The Atlantic Ocean glitters on the horizon, my local village, Mafra Gare, sits, half mist-erased in the bottom of the valley, and Danish-made wind turbines are pinned on the surrounding hills.

My head is usually filled with the chaos of a night’s thoughts as I climb the hill and the walk lets me sort them out: What’s Portuguese for my DSL’s not working? How do I rewrite that character so she’s more rounded? Where the heck is that mouse Rockat brought in last night and whacked around the kitchen? And so it goes.

It seems a fresh thought rises with each step and the succeeding steps serve to resolve them. I have walked the hill worried about money, despondent at the mediocrity of my work and then just as equally exhilarated by its brilliance. Often my thoughts are of friends, about me( far too often), the world’s problems are regularly examined and resolved, while God and I are in constant discussion about his existence.

I walk home a different man, and scattered on the hill, invisible and decaying, are all the previous night's worries. Before me waits a brand-new day.

And a hungry cat.