Another Country Diary #8
With the perpetual dusk of an English autumn.
6/11
Dark days. I’ve been ill again, a vomiting bug this time. The year begins to pitch towards winter. Colder days. Through the window I can see the oak that stands above our hen run, still holding onto its russet leaves. The air has been still all week. Cloudy, inert days. In the United States they’ve elected that thug, that felon, that liar, that cheat, that devil—and the rest of the world trembles in anticipation. I want to be well to take solace in the small things in the world. In the beauty that counts. In small actions. The hallowing of such moments.
By four in the afternoon it feels as if the light and colour has been wrung from the sky.
7/11
I’m feeling worse, physically and existentially—fatigued and feverish. I had planned to work today, but after a burst of administrative clicking and typing, I find myself exhausted, my thoughts tangled. I still have to drive Ceci to Norwich. The beeches on the route are magnificent, glowing amber despite the low light. The hedge oaks are all at different stages of autumnal change—some still green, others already loosening leaves.
When I get back there is a mob of long-tailed tits barrelling through the garden from shrub to shrub. In the vegetable beds some potatoes I missed when harvesting in June have pushed up plants, and with luck we’ll get a small December crop. From the kitchen, my daughters—also sick—spot the heron as it glides overhead. It lands to roost in the top of the old pear tree. It seems like a great gangly bird, elegant yet awkward.
Later, I’m driving to collect Ceci when I spot a young Roe hind moving along the verge, her eyes flashing in the dark. I slow the car into a roll and she moves across my path, spectrally pale in the headlights, her head turned towards me, finally jumping onto the opposite verge when I’m only five metres or so away. Even in the grips of illness and darkness such moments of wild can leap out unexpected. I think of Saint Eustace hunting in the forest. The Roman general encounters a white stag and is ready to kill it when he has a vision of Christ, setting him on a path to conversion and martyrdom. Russel Hoban draws on the story in his postapocalyptic novel Riddley Walker. In the far future society of the novel, the story of St Eustace has become fused with that of ‘the bad times’, particle physics, and the fall of man, so that the figure that appears for ‘Eusa’ is that of ‘the Littl Shynin Man the Addom’ who is split in two by Eusa in search of knowledge, resulting in the ‘one big one’. In this post-technological society, which is about to take its first step on the path back towards scientific knowledge, the encounter with the wild, with the ‘hart of the wud’ is atomically charged with symbolic energy. Indeed the ‘Hart of the Wood’ in the novel is also a story that describes a Promethean and Faustian act in which the magic of fire is exchanged for a baby, and which also describes the careful placement of alder wood to create a charcoal burning fire (one of the ingredients for gun powder).
I can understand why Saint Eustace’s encounter with the stag might have triggered a religious epiphany. In these brief moments of connection with the wild, with nature, it feels as if a veil between worlds briefly drops, or is transgressed, as if for a moment you breathe and sense and pulse in synchrony with the creature or landscape before you, time slowing and distorting and dilating. But the moment is always complicated by a simultaneous awareness of the multiple intrusions onto it, of its inevitable closure. Some might talk of glimpsing or sensing a certain energy, or life-force, in such moments, an animism in all things, or the presence of divinity, a unifying spirit-energy flowing and connecting, and it is difficult not to draw on religious language to describe such perceptions. For me these moments are miraculous in a secular way that is grounding and healing, a reminder of the larger genetic story of our species and that we are just one more skin to be soaked beneath the sky, a reminder that we share our habitat with multiple species, that whether we consciously register it or not, we are all caught in the same interdependent web of life.
9/11
The air is still slack, the sky drained of hues. The day feels like a perpetual dusk. In the lanes we see two buzzards flying low across the field to a wood, mewing to each other. Trailer loads of manure and freshly cut logs are pulled behind tractors along the narrow roads, scattering pig muck and bark. The sharp scent of the manure hangs in the air long after the tractor’s orange beacons are out of sight. Ceci shows me where she saw deer earlier in the week. Small birds, tits and sparrows and wrens, rustle in the hedges.
The leaves have usually been blown from the trees by now, but this static high pressure has allowed them to build up colour and intensity in the hedgerows and woods. If only there was sunshine bring some zest to them.
At ‘the top’ we circle a small corner of a larger field. We find an animal track, probably badger, tunnelling into the collapsing stalks of the wild flowers in one of the regeneratively planted fields. Nearby, but unrelated, a small cloud of jay feathers, including two blue barred jewels. Not enough for a kill, but a narrow squeak, from a fox perhaps or cat, but we are far from any houses. All the way back to the house we hear the roars and whoops of the crowd at the Rugby club, the local team, the sound cutting miles through the still air.
10/11
Sun at last, the cloud thinning out to a pale blue sky.
By the time we go walking after lunch the cloud has returned, though it is thinner and more luminescent. We take a long circular route through the lanes, up the track to ‘the top’ and around the lower fields before returning the way we came. I feel disengaged from my surroundings, and by the time we are half way around my legs are starting to tire. Two bouts of illness in the last month have taken a toll.
Stop. For a moment. We listen. A buzzard mewing. The sound of gulls flapping about the recently seed sewn fields. Move on and there’s an old oak side by side a tall field maple, both dressed fully in gold like women in a Klimt painting. A fast small movement in a hedgerow just before the footbridge across the drainage ditch, a mouse-like dunnock darting around the understory of the dense hedge trees.
On the way back we pass a neighbour whose house and garden are the model of rural tidiness, a yin to the yang of our own. He is on top of a hired cherry picker wielding a chainsaw at the branches of the trees which ring his property. I realise that once again I’ve failed to use Sunday for any practical purpose, and that the garage doors are still awaiting their annual lick of wood preservative.
12/11
It has turned colder and breezier. Gold flakes begin to spin and flutter in drifts from the trees and hedgerows, sending them barer. Benji catches another young rat and leaves it under the garden furniture for me to dispose of. Later, I see a larger rat peering out at me from behind a brick in the hen run where it has been freeloading on layer pellets. I suspect we have a problem.
13/11
Before lunch I go for a quick ‘round-the-rural-block’ walk. It is the one I used to do with my youngest daughter during lockdown, and I know it used to take forty minutes with a nine-year-old, so I reckon on thirty minutes, followed by a twenty minute lunch, then a fifteen minute drive to my meeting.
There are ‘road closed’ signs on every way into our village, with the focal point on a T-junction. They have been there for three days, and everyone so far has ignored them, just driving around, some hesitantly, some at speed. There are no men working, despite the ‘men at work’ signs. I scan the QR code on the information sign and find out they are installing fibre broadband. From where? As far as I know the nearest fibre broadband is a clean mile away. We make do with rattly broadband over the copper telephone lines, which is just good enough for a couple of zoom meetings at the same time but not if the weather gets up.
I take a path alongside an overgrown orchard, then out onto the edge of a large field crossed by the metal legs of the high voltage towers, before following a hedge, out past the ugly backside of the village—a tractor shed piled with building materials and rubble, a field corner heaped with the tangled remains of grubbed up trees—then along the bridlepath towards brickyard woods. A robin keeps pace, looping from hedge shrub to hedge shrub just ahead me. Crows glide low over the crop, which I think is rye, the young shoots ruffling in the breeze. On the far side of the field three roe deer gaze over at me, assess that I am no threat, and return to their grazing. The sun is warm on my face, despite the cold air.
In brickyard woods a pheasant, all wing whirr and rattle, scares me as it bursts from its cover. I see another robin, thrushes. blackbirds—these common yearlong birds seem more visible now the leaves are stripping back. I follow the long lane out of the wood under great arms of orange leaf. In the bottom of the deep clay pit in the woods, which is currently dry, I see the scattered debris of fly-tipping—blue plastic oil containers mostly, a tarp, and a couple of old tires.
Later, after my meeting, I am walking across the edge of Earlham Park from one university building to another when I notice a crow jabbing at something in the long grass. I like crows, and go to have a look, and the crow hops away obligingly, takes to the wing and lands a good stone’s throw a way to be safe. The meal looks to be young rabbit. Most of the fur is gone, so that it resembles raw chicken. The crow has won a decent prize, so much protein, and I leave it to it, watching it return once I’m a safe enough distance away. I chat to it briefly, expecting no reply, asking about its meal, as one would to a cat or a dog, before realising that this might not be the sort of behaviour expected of me in this setting. I’ve heard of crows becoming friendly, and I quite like the idea.
In the evening, the black windows fill with the sound of rising fighter jets and hooting owls.
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 edition of ‘Another Country Diary’ here:
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