WEBVTT

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A couple of summers
ago, I was hiking up

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through northern England.

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And just had a backpack
and would walk all day

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and spend the night at a
farmhouse or a little country

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club.

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It's much nicer to walk when you
can have a pub at the end of it

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instead of an empty
campsite or something.

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But I was hiking one day.

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I was climbing a mountain
called Great Shunner Fell.

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In northern England, the
mountains are called fells.

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They have a different
terminology.

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Mountains are fells, valleys
are dales, streams are becks.

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Until you get to Northumberland
and then they become burns.

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Lakes are tarns, until
you get to Northumberland

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and then they become
becks, no lochs.

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Anyway, I was
climbing this mountain

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and I stopped for lunch.

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And I was eating a piece
of cheese or something

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and I touched a
lump inside my cheek

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that hadn't been
there that morning.

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And my first thought was, will
I get home before it happens.

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Almost every poet I
know is a hypochondriac.

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I was in Peter Wild's
class yesterday

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and I was talking about
that and I asked him

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if he was a hypochondriac.

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He said, no no I'm not a
hypochondriac, very healthy.

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And then I talked about one of
my big hangups is my appendix.

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When I'm way out
in the wilderness,

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I'm going to have appendicitis.

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And all of a sudden he jumped
up and said, I have that too.

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Yes, my appendix does
that, it's mine too.

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Anyway, this poem was
written in a doctor's office

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in a little town in
Northern England.

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I'd been sitting
there all morning

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listening to all the stories.

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The people comparing this new
doctor with the old doctor

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and I was looking at the
cows outside the window.

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And I kind of-- all
the previous afternoon

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I kind of wept bravely to
myself going down the other side

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of the mountain, you know.

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"On Great Shunner Fell."

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My last summer and it's going.

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Past the longest day
and growing shorter.

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Her hair is yellow
and will be growing.

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Ravens here at night
and gulls by day.

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No surrogate to say goodbye.

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I will go home across the
northern sea this summer.

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Knowing that, an anodyne and
how the wind blows from the west

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and how her yellow hair.

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My last summer and it's going.

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The cotton flowers and
saxifrage where I am now.

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