I know it’s going to be a good day when I wake up before the alarm and I’m happy to be awake and out of bed. The day gets better when my morning salutation of Hello World! How are we today? is greeted with clear skies and bird song. These are the days when I take the coffee and journal outside, fill up the bird table and settle into my Morning Pages with a smile on my face.
These are the days when the Pages won’t be filled with the minutiae of life or the hugeness of aspirations, but with the simple beauty of the planet as it shows itself in my little corner of the world. These are the days when I leave what I think and how I feel in the background and simply write about what I see.
The black bird is waiting for me by the bird-table. Robin and dunnock follow. The pigeon / magpie stand-off continues, but pigeon has another consideration this morning. One of the neighbourhood cats, one of the black-&-white brothers, has settled on the fence, watching. Pigeon knows it is not within pounce distance so affects nonchalance.
A blue tit is finding food in the herb bed. She clings to the columbine to judge her landing angle, jumps, picks something up, and flies back to the nest box next door. Five or six similar visits ensue before she hops her bobbing flight away to the holly tree over the back. There is something in the top of the tree that I don’t recognise. An LBJ with a bandit black mask. Nuthatch? Common sparrow? I trawl the bird books but just confuse myself. I’m happy to have seen it, is all.
There are four blue & yellow iris and a single red poppy in the unmown grass patch. Closer inspection reveals vetch and white campion. Not enough of the latter for cutting though I would love to bring its night scent indoors again. Flowers are starting to form on the bramble.
The chives are in full bloom and I wonder if I should have let that happen, but then I discover that the flowers are also edible, so I can happily allow the bees their share.
~ / ~
There is a plan for today, but I’m early. There is time. Time for some Rope Flow. Time for some Tai Chi. Time to simply savour not being in a rush. Time to recognise that no matter how I try, I cannot escape clock-time. My destination is a village station, which is only served by every other train. There is no point my heading out earlier than planned.
I do anyway.
I sit for a while by the river near the station. I hear a small child say “It’s alright blackbird, we’ll be back,” and watch another one entranced by a swan opening its wings. I watch the willow shadows ripple in the water. I scribble a few notes for another writing project, and then I take myself and my current reading book to the end of Platform 5 to wait.
I cannot count how many hours of my life I have spent in railway stations and on country halt platforms with or without a book in my hand. Nor can I begin to explain what peculiar pleasure I derive from it. I’m not immune to the stress of “having to catch a train” – nor to the impatience of wishing the train would hurry up and arrive - but I also remember the times when I was able to surrender to the wait.
I have read fiction and philosophy. I have written poems and diaries and work reports. I have simply sat and waited, doing nothing at all – a skill in itself (thank you again Lee Child!). I have people watched, plant watched, bird-watched. I have played the three-second word game with car number plates when I was within sight of a road beyond the tracks. I have challenged myself not to look at the clock until I figured a certain length of time had elapsed. I have spent, wasted, killed, invested and enjoyed a lot of time waiting for trains. Today would add to the tally.
Today, I had a book that I was enjoying immensely, so I simply settled in to wait. I would do the same again later, waiting for the train home. And both of these hours felt pleasurable, well-spent. After all, what is not to like about sitting in the sun of a Saturday afternoon, eating strawberries, and trying to solve a fictitious, utterly frivolous, murder mystery?
The train took me to Worstead. This small village in the emptiness of Norfolk is where the cloth worsted gets its name. Norfolk was wool country, before the industrial revolution, and still celebrates that heritage. When I first came to this village back in the last century (1981 or ’82 to be imprecise) there were still sheep grazing the church yard. Not today, and I was vaguely disappointed by that.
However, the rest of the ramble lived up to expectations. Field paths and country lanes. Quaint cottages. A treasure hunt of small signs leading to a craft shop, appropriately named Tucked Away. Wild flowers and trees. Open skies. A skylark or two. Blue tits, robins. Butterflies. All of it gently going about its business and refusing to be awesome or amazing, except in the sense that the sheer fabulousness of life on planet earth always is. I’m all for the global perspective and diversity and unity, but at the same time…this country’s peculiarities, these little backwaters, the improbably large churches and the impossibly small schools, the history (for all its rights and wrongs), the cottages, the twisting lanes, the hedgerows that are centuries old, the footpaths…especially the footpaths… let me confess my love for these aspects of the country I was born into.
There is a theory that we only value what we know and love. To know the planet and its forgotten quiet spaces is to learn to love them (in all their historical context and imperfection). Love them for what they are now, not anguishing over how they came to be so, or fearing how / when they will cease to be. To love the spaces we walk through, to value them simply for being there, is also to value ourselves. It is to know that we are a part of the natural world. It is to know that we are a part of the continuance of the historical narrative and if we do not like the story-line so far, then we have immense power to nudge it into a different one for future generations.
Recognise that all of our landscape has either been affected by humans or has affected the humans. Probably both. Especially in this country. We are defined by our island limits, our shifting climate which, though now worse than for a very long time, is nothing new. I remember when the great fear was of the approach of the next Ice Age, now it looks far more likely that we’re going to burn. Is that what the story of the fires of hell relates to? If we are not ‘good’, we will burn?
Maybe the over-heating will result in catastrophic shifts on the surface, below the surface, of the planet which will then re-set the system. Maybe the heating will cause a cooling. I do not know. Maybe the human race will survive these episodes, maybe we won’t. I suspect it is going to be an uncomfortable ride either way.
But not today. Todayis a good day. Allow me the short-termism of enjoying it.
Today I walked along gentle paths where white flowers held sway. Cow parsley, Queen Anne’s lace, daisies (both ox-eye and common), hawthorn. I walked past the imposing church and wondered if I’d want to stay in the cottages attached to the White Lady pub, with whatever ghostly associations it has. I photographed the inn sign purely because I liked the art-work, and it brought to mind a long-forgotten project that never got off the ground. I wonder if I might rekindle it, though I will never have time now to finish it.
The village square presumably once held markets. Now it serves as a car park, and has a polite request from the Parish Council to remember to leave space on Tuesday (or was it Thursday?) afternoons for the Post Office van and the Fish & Chip van.
A "Warning: ducks in road" sign alerts me to the village pond. It is hidden behind railings and overgrowth. I might have missed it. The number of balls attests to its proximity to the local primary school.
In my junior school years "two-baller" was a thing. It was like juggling with two balls, but bouncing them off a vertical wall in front of you, with rhymes and tricks. Passing the ball behind the back. Throwing it from under a raised knee. Over-hand, under-hand, one-handed…
The prime territory was the stretch of single storey extension to the main school block. A lot of balls ended up on the roof. Every Friday, Jeff Riley was allowed / encouraged / required (?) to climb onto the roof and retrieve the balls. If we could identify our own, we could reclaim them. So the first thing you did with a new ball was to scrape away as much of the outer latex covering as possible to reveal a patch of plain rubber that you could write your name on.
I wonder if the Worstead C of E Primary school has a Jeff Riley. I suspect he's not allowed to plunge into the pond once a week to retrieve the balls.
There are ducks. Three mallard.
In the centre of the pond is an unexpected moor hen nest. At the sound of my approach mother hen scarpers and leaves her chicks to fend for themselves. A couple of the young ones know the drill and head instantly for the cover of the shadows of bank weeds. The other two paddle about uncertainly on the open water. I've often said that I don't want to come back as a female mallard duck. I'd like to add moorhen of any gender to the exclusion list.
Today I enjoy the sage green of the young wheat fields and the lime green of new oak leaves. I notice the difference between the one open field where the farmer has left a broad swathe along the line of the public footpath, still grassy and harbouring stray nettles and ragwort along its edges and dock and clover along its spine; there are butterflies and hover flies and other flies, scouting; I notice the difference between this and the potato field where even the Public Footpath sign seems to have been 'lost' or removed.
I take a chance that my guide book is right and start to tramp across the field towards the distant church. Norfolk clay isn't easy walking, even when it's dry, so my I'm looking down rather than ahead…and so a little way in, I spot that, two trenches over, there are footprints. Some-one has walked the route, reclaimed it. For all I know it may have been the man that ploughed the field and created the potato mounds.
Or it may have be others who care more about such paths. The path exists and will be more evident when the plants grow up and that little space remains bare and (hopefully) trampled.
Trample. There's a word we could reclaim in the service of preserving footpaths.
Sometimes the only sign of a path existing in law, is that it exists on the ground, that it is trampled. And the only sign we need to follow a route is to see the tramp of the feet who walked that way before us.
Walk the paths. Treasure them. It doesn't matter where they lead. It matters that they are there, and there are things along the way that we might not otherwise see.. There are 140,000 miles of public footpaths in England & Wales (Scotland has its own mapping system). That equates to about two & a half miles of footpath per square mile of land area.
Of course paths wibble about, and some of those 'mile squares' will be crossed by multiple paths. Even so, it does suggest that we have a love of the footpath. That means we have a need to walk them: a practical need, to ensure they remain walked and active and protected by law, and an emotional need to ensure that we remember why they are there and to encourage us to protect the land around them.
The figures relate to footpaths. Additionally there are bridleways, cycle ways, green lanes. They also matter.
We need to walk these routes to remind ourselves that they still matter – because they do. They are the scape and shape of our land. They are our history written upon the very ground. Church paths and by ways and village to village or farm to market ways. Our heritage writ small upon the map and upon the very earth if we go and look for it. Who walked this way and why? That's a thought I often carry with me across marked trails.
If I look around, I can normally come up with a guess: there's a church over there, or a stream down there, or a farm. It's a game I play. It's also learning the nature of human-land connection.
Walking the lanes and the field paths today I thought…about nothing very much at all to be honest. I looked at the flowers blooming, here, now, today. I listened to the birds singing. I said hello to the few walkers I passed and returned hand-greetings to the drivers who acknowledged my getting out of the road or who swerved out of my way. I walked along an old abandoned railway embankment, shaded by young oaks and other trees and under-storey umbellifers, and fully understood what Hockney was saying in his mosaic film pieces about how we experience landscape as we move through it: in disconnected fragments.
I walked alongside wide acres of green, without a poppy or a cornflower or a stray ragwort or rape plant – and so equally without a bee or a butterfly or a bird. And I knew this to be wrong.
I thought back to the field with the wide green path through its middle, and the straw cuttings lying on the furrows, and how much more life there had seemed to be there…and that only what I saw. I wondered if there were also much more life being sustained at soil surface level and deep below.
It was a gentle day, a good day, and I came home and let such thoughts settle upon me.
Like butterflies upon a flower. Touching, softly.
