Another Country Diary #5 —With aurora and other omens.
I started this country diary as an experiment, a way of keeping up my daily writing and turning it into something which might, over time, acquire a depth and weight to it. Here’s the fifth instalment.
9/10
As the academic term intensifies, and the days darken at either end, there is less time to be in nature, or even for small observations through the window. The day is a jumble of teaching, meetings, and emails. By the time I leave the office it is almost six and the sky is a smudge of peach and soot-coloured clouds. Jackdaws chatter above the car park.
It is fully dark by the time I’ve picked up my daughter from the city. We have to turn back from our usual B-Road route home because of an accident (we suppose) out of sight behind a queue of vehicles lighting the hedges amber with the blinking of their emergency lights. We route instead through a neighbouring village where a barn owl rises, wraith-like, on the periphery of the pooled light of my main beams. Just beyond the village there is a line of bright floodlights marking the route of one of the high voltage underground cables. The moon looks muddy behind broken cloud.
On the evening news I watch the progress of Hurricane Milton, graphics showing the predicted storm surge, satellite links with evacuees, talk of extreme weather as the new normal. ‘The rate of change is so much more than we anticipated’, says a city mayor in measured understatement.
10/10
It feels colder this morning and the trees are beginning to blaze unevenly with rust and gold. Through my study window I can see the horse in next door’s paddock immobile and coated, perhaps dozing, as I struggle to enter a video meeting. After the meeting I take a screen break. There is a frost forecast, so I cut the butternut squashes to put in the greenhouse and harvest any remaining courgettes. The leaves of the plants are whitening, greying at the edges, falling into decay. A fine cold rain begins to fall from the low fast-moving cumulus.
By the late afternoon the rock hard pears have started to fall, burying themselves into the layer of leaves that have dropped from their tree. I gather them into a large bowl.
It is dark by the time I drive to collect Ceci from work. We see a muntjac feeding on something growing on the verge in the lane from the B-Road and then, further on, a hunched animal crossing the road, a triangular flash of white as the badger turned to watch us pass. Later the northern skies begin to light in greens and reds as streams of electrons disturbed by a solar storm become ionized plasma in the magnetosphere1. We gather outside in the cold, turn our phones skyward to capture the moment, marvelling at how the digital eye sees so much more than the human, at the science and the mystery of it. The lights backlit the cloud as if in some Wellsian Martian arrival. I look again some hours later to see that the display has intensified, a red glow directly overhead, the light falling in a curtain of rays.
11/10
We wake to a frost, enough to have crusted over the windscreen of the car and turn the grass pale.
The sight of the northern lights for the second time this year has us talking, half jokingly, about omens and numerology over breakfast. Until this year I’d never seen them in England, though my mother had, in Kent, during the early 1950s. Now we’ve seen them twice. Although completely unrelated to climate change it feels like one more extreme event at a time of catastrophe. Perhaps we are hard wired at such times to seek omens, search the sky for signs, or consult seers like Odin in Völuspá—‘do you understand yet, or what more?’2 John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids begins with strange green meteors that turn everyone who witnesses them blind in a reversal of the principle of heavenly revelation, vision, expected in apocalyptic texts, but which fulfils the role of heavenly bodies acting as harbingers of catastrophe. Are we now subconsciously looking for such signs in anticipation of a worsening climate and nature crisis?
The Egyptian Geese are back. Before lunch I hear and then see them squabbling in and around the branches of an old ash tree behind a neighbour’s garden. Last winter I often saw them in twos and fours in the fields around the village. I think I read somewhere that they are more like a duck than a goose, an African relative to both, part of the same genus.
12/10
I drop my daughter at off at Whitlingham Broad and wait in the odd postmodern hyperspace of the Gridserve cafe where I look out over the fields that edge the distributor road and work on an essay. By the time I collect her, the sun has crested the parkland trees that surround the water making them glow amber.
17/10
I’ve spent the week as a COVID recluse, stuck in the living room and spare room of the cottage, my head swimming in waves of it. My family mask up to bring me rations. When I’m not lying down I’m trying to work, keeping pace with fast moving email discussions, prepping my teaching, or planning modules. I was supposed to be having the COVID vaccine today.
A once in every eighty thousand years comet comes and goes as I fester. Like John Wyndham’s hero I’m unable to witness the spectacle at first hand and so I watch people’s Instagrams of it blazing across the Norfolk horizon, another celestial sign to read. Nobody goes blind and the plants don’t rise up. Early religious apocalyptic narratives are full of such occurrences, such as the stars falling to earth in the Revelation of St John the Divine. The comet is symbolically ripe with superstitious and revelatory power. Don’t look up! In any case, I’m sad to have missed it. When Hale-Bopp came in 1997 I recall walking back from the pub with my dad in the Wiltshire village he was living in and being overwhelmed by the size and brightness of the spectacle of the double tailed comet hanging high and bright in the cold night sky. We stood for a long time marvelling at it in our beer overcoats, our malty breath pluming in the air. That 39 members of the of the Heaven’s Gate end-times cult took it upon themselves to end their lives in order, they believed, to transcend to a higher state of being and be transported by the same comet, speaks of the continued role these celestial objects play in our cultural imagination3. Our imaginary endings can be dangerous things.
All week Ceci has come back from walks and bike rides with reports of the changes I’m missing. The cornfield has been harvested and is full of crows pecking the remains. The archaeologists are churning up the ancient footpath with their 4x4s (the irony). I have remained more or less confined until today, when a half load of firewood was deposited on the drive. I chat at a distance with the woman who is delivering before spending my lunch break wheelbarrowing the logs and stacking them in the woodshed. I regret it as a COVID wave fells me in the afternoon and I lie on the sofa drifting in and out of sleep as fighter jets wheel noisily overhead. The logs are all stacked by the time the western sky turns violet and peach, hung with grey rags of cloud. I begin to feel like I’m on the mend.
18/10
I am not on the mend. COVID is so weird. I take a test in the morning expecting to be in the clear, but the line is stronger. I drive my daughter to school and mask up to stop at my office for a book. It’s 8 am and nobody is there yet. The oaks that line the carpark are vivid in the rising sun. There’s not much to love about a car park, but these trees, Turkey oaks I think, look spectacular in autumn, and in winter their bare limbs darken with agitated flocks of rooks and jackdaws as they assemble to roost. A pale mist rises off the woods and fields on the drive back to the village. By the time I get home my head is swimming and I feel worse than ever.
Mid-morning, I walk to to the post box with a card for my sister. The sky is a cloudless milky blue. Along the hedges, which were cut in late winter, young ash saplings have pushed up a meter or two of growth. It’s amazing how they yearn skyward, the energy of it is quite something—to be alive. I can hear rooks and robins, and a wren somewhere, tiny and persuasive. The air is cool but not cold. A jogger and a cyclist pass me, both nodding a hello. I find the cracked remains of a wing mirror on the verge, the glass of it like crazy paving, tessellating my reflection, and take it home for the recycling bin. I check in on the greenhouse where our butternut squashes are lined up on a shelf, slowly yellowing off in the warmth.
19/10
By late afternoon I feel well enough to go on a longer walk, through the lanes and up to ‘the top’. The field which had the corn in has already been harrowed. The last of the blackberries are in the hedges and we pass a woman with a small Tupperware making the most of the long season. The archaeologists have packed up and left, the only traces of them are a mess of deep tracks from their earthmovers and a flattened area of grass from their portacabin. Along the track to the old farmhouse they’ve cut the lower limbs of the ashes and oaks for vehicle access. It is the last hour of sunlight and the grey and black clouds are backlit by the sun as it slowly turns a deeper shade of fire. There is woodsmoke and birdsong in the air, the persistent call of a Red Kite. By the side of the footpath we discover the remains of a wasp nest in a neat circular hollow in the ground about a foot deep. It looks like it has been deliberately dug out and burned by somebody. A few wasps crawl pathetically about in the bottom of the pit. A fragment of their blackened nest lies on the ground nearby. Is this also an omen? Wasps are pollinators. The same high energy needs that cause them to fixate on a class of lager make them seek nectar and therefore transfer pollen. So pest or not, we need them around. I can understand the logic of removing the nest. I guess the landowner, or the council, thought it was dangerous to have a it so close to a public footpath, where a dog might dig and stir things up, where somebody with an allergy might be stung, but at this time of year, when the colony would have been on the verge of collapse anyway, it feels like a needless and dark action.
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, oddball in its specificity.
You can read the previous instalment here:
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This is probably an inaccurate description of the science. I did my best.
This is from ‘The Seeress’s Prophecy’ - the Seeress repeatedly asks Odin this as if to say, ‘you heard enough yet?’