The sky was a flat, even grey when I set off, the sort that sits there all day and does nothing. I did not check anything. I put a fleece on, took a bottle of water, and went out of the door with the intention of doing the long loop and being home by five.
Forty minutes later I was standing in the middle of the biggest open field on the route with rain coming at me sideways, unable to see the far hedge, holding my hood on with one hand and genuinely unsure whether to go on or go back. That was maybe two years ago and I still think about it, mostly because nothing dramatic happened and it still rattled me.
It looked like nothing when I set out
The honest failure here is that I mistook flat grey for stable grey. In my head, bad weather looks like bad weather. Dark towering cloud, obvious trouble. What I had was uniform overcast, which I had learned to read as boring rather than dangerous.
I also did not look at a forecast, and I want to sit with that rather than skip past it. I did not look because I had done the loop dozens of times and it had become a thing I did rather than a thing I planned. That is the actual mechanism. Familiarity ate the two minutes of preparation.
The twenty minutes I should have used
There was a window. Looking back, there was a clear stretch of about twenty minutes where the light changed, the wind got up and switched direction, and the noise in the hedge changed before any rain arrived. I registered all three of those things and did nothing with them.
The wind switch was the big signal and I now treat it as the main one. On my ground the prevailing wind comes from one direction most of the time, and when it swings round and picks up, something is coming. The light change is harder to describe but easier to feel, a sort of flattening where colours go dull and the far hedge loses its detail.
The thing I should have done in those twenty minutes was simple. Not run, not panic. Just move myself to the part of the route with hedges and a gate onto a lane, so that whatever happened next I had options. Position is what you spend a warning on.
Open field is the worst place to make a decision
By the time it arrived I was in the worst spot on the whole loop, a big square field with a crop in it and a path across the middle, no hedge within a few hundred yards in any direction. That is a bad place to think.
You are wet, you are being pushed sideways, you cannot see far, and every option costs the same amount of exposure. Going back was the same distance as going on. So I stood there doing the arithmetic while getting steadily colder, which is the worst of both.
What I eventually did was carry on, because the far side had a lane and a wall, and that was right. What I should have done was decide within about five seconds and start moving. Standing still in the open while you weigh things up is the expensive option and I did it for nearly two minutes.
The one thing I did get right was staying off the highest ground and not sheltering under the single big tree in the corner, which was the obvious looking option and the one I actively avoided. I do not want to overstate the risk that day, but a lone tree in an open field is not shelter and I am glad my instinct held.
Getting cold is faster than you think in summer
This is the part that genuinely surprised me. It was July. The temperature was fine. I was in a fleece that had gone completely saturated inside about four minutes and was then acting as a cold wet layer against my skin with wind driving through it.
By the time I got to the lane I was shivering properly, hands stupid, struggling with a gate catch that I have opened hundreds of times. That is the bit that stayed with me. Not being uncomfortable, but the fine motor control going while the walk was still perfectly ordinary in every other respect. Wet plus wind does something that neither does alone, and a summer date on the calendar has nothing to do with it.
What was in my bag and what was not
What was in the bag: water, keys, phone, and half a cereal bar.
What was not: any waterproof layer at all, any dry spare layer, a hat, and any means of keeping the phone dry. The phone worked fine, but I remember pulling it out with wet hands and thinking, if I actually needed this now, would it work.
I am not going to turn this into a kit list, because the point is not gear. The point is that I had made an implicit judgement that a two hour walk from my own door is a low consequence activity, and that judgement was mostly right and occasionally wrong, and I had no margin for the occasionally.
The three habits I kept afterwards
First, a waterproof lives in the bag permanently, all year, and it does not get taken out to save weight. It is the only piece of kit I treat as non negotiable, because it is the one that stops wet plus wind from becoming a real problem.
Second, I look at the sky properly before I leave and I ask one specific question rather than a general one: which way is the wind coming from, and is that normal for here. That takes about ten seconds at the gate.
Third, and this is the one that has actually changed most walks, I know where my bail out points are. On my loop there are three places where I can be on a metalled lane within ten minutes, and I know roughly where I am relative to them at any time. It is not a plan so much as a background awareness, and it means that when something changes I am not standing in the middle of a field doing arithmetic.
I still walk that loop. I have been caught out since, twice, and both times it was fine, because I was wearing the right thing and I made the decision early. The weather was never really the problem.