Another Country Diary
With apologies and dead snakes.
Probably the last thing Substack needs is another country newsletter. There seems to be a crowd of them here, an abundance of foragers and gardeners, rural psycho-geographers and folklorists, ecologists and herbalists, all of them brilliant at what they do. However, I’ve always had a soft spot for the country diary, that sub-genre of nature writing grounded in observation and reflection. It has been popularised by a certain newspaper making more than a century of space for it. It can be, at times, a bit like a commonplace book, revealing of the person who put it together and of the landscape they inhabit. The country diary can express a sort of local distinctiveness, explore a personal set of interactions with a landscape, and in doing so, almost accidentally, tease out the way the natural world is entwined with culture and politics. It can be a quietly radical and uncanny form, or sometimes just plain parochial. Urban dwellers should look away or touch concrete for luck for the curse of my country diary is upon you.
I plan to experiment by posting some irregular ‘diary entries’ to sit alongside my essays. I am, after all, a writer living in the country.
6/9
An evening walk. It’s good to take advantage of this time before the lengthening nights take over this corner of the day. We pick blackberries as we go and take note of the locations of rosehips for future foraging. The dogs at the old farmhouse bark at us.
It’s noticeable how few flies and wasps there are on the blackberries. Most summers we are in competition with them for the fruit, but this year seems to have been an apocalypse for flying insects. The warm wet summer and the cold wet spring have just done for them. I read somewhere that it was something to do with eggs going bad, though that might have been butterflies. In Norfolk we also suspect the pesticide they use on the Sugar Beet, a neonicotinoid, though none seems to be growing around our village at present.
The light is turning golden as we return along the lanes under the old oaks. There are about twenty young sheep in the old allotment field. They run when we stand at the gate.
7/9
We’ve accidentally grown butternut squash after getting the seeds confused with pumpkin seeds (we usually collect any seeds from shop bought squashes, but don’t always label them). They’ve never grown this well when we’ve planted them deliberately. I suspect the English autumn might not be sunny enough for them to yellow off.
8/9
A long walk up to ‘the top’ and around the bottom fields. Most of the fields that have been in the regenerative scheme for the past year or so are being returned to use, but there are still a couple of fields which haven’t been touched yet and which are full of seeds and some late blue flowers, possibly chicory. The rapeseed is almost silver in the sunlight. For a moment it looks as of everything has been touched with an early frost.
On our way back we discover two dead grass snakes –very small—on the tarmac of the lanes. I’m guessing they were picked up by birds –crows perhaps—and then abandoned. What else might go for them? Buzzards?
A military transport flies low overhead.
11/9
I struggle to write my novel and set off for a solitary pre-lunchtime walk to see if it solves anything. I see a plough left idle on the side of a field, no tractor in sight. I photograph the rapeseed. I see a small flock of linnets, little flashes of russet, darting from the hedgerows out over the field. I pass the man from the old farmhouse walking his dogs.
When I get back home something unblocks, and I write a thousand words.
12/9
A long circular walk. I’m really enjoying the big fields shorn of their crops, yet to be ploughed. They seem so full of potential, anticipatory of winter and the long wait for regrowth. We see a dead hare by the side of one of the bottom fields—perhaps a dog got it, but we can’t see any injuries. We see red kites circling the fields at ‘the top’.
16/9
There was a cold snap last week, a rush of arctic air that felt like an abrupt end to summer. The vegetable patch had been thriving before this. The bed of courgette plants, which went in rather late after the second early potatoes, were huge and pushing out several fruits a day, so much so that we have started to grate and freeze them to use over the winter. The runner beans were finally producing, and we have a strong row of beetroots ready to harvest. It felt, briefly, as if a Mediterranean sunshine had arrived to keep these crops sustained indefinitely.
The colder weather slows all growth. The tomatoes, still green on the vine, look as if they might stay that way. Thoughts turn to first frosts and of ripening the squashes under glass.
But there’s a last gasp of milder weather. Rain yesterday evening followed by a day of sunshine. The courgettes are swelling again. We might get another week or two of useful crops.
In the early evening, we walk out along the lanes, passing by a field of sweetcorn which seems to have been spoiled by the wet spring, the cobs all diminished and mouldy, and then onto the footpath up past the old farmhouse cresting at ‘the top’ before descending along the line of my favourite hedgerow. The rosehips are plentiful here, but the sloes are few. Something must have hit the blackthorn when it flowered – a late frost perhaps?
One of the bottom fields, the large one straddled by pylons, is being sliced in two by a tractor and plough when we get there. We watch the tractor slowly turn a 180 at the end of the field. One side of the field is the deep brown of turned soil, and the other is straw-coloured with stubble. The air fills with a rich earthy scent that carries far along our walk back. We see three deer on a field edge at a distance, possibly a female roe deer with her two fawns, and I’m reminded of the muntjac that gave birth in our garden in the spring.
We meet a nice small dog with a jangling bell like a reindeer’s.
Note: Readers should understand that ‘the top’ is only a giddy 52 metres above sea level. This is, after all, Norfolk.