Friends,
It’s been a very strange week for me. As someone whose detectable excitement levels never advance beyond the slight raising of one eyebrow I have to say it’s been a week when two eyebrows have risen. I may even have giggled. And I can’t tell you anything about what caused the excitement until next week. Embargoes, that sort of thing. So this is a short announcement to say that good news will be announced very soon.
In the meantime here is a new story about another exciting thing - the return of the migrant birds to the currently waterlogged and not quite welcoming hills around my home. My highlight of the week, more so even than the news mentioned above, was seeing a wheatear cross my path yesterday as I drove along the Aberystwyth mountain road. Spotting birds on this particular road is difficult as it is ridiculously narrow and has a sheer drop on one side down to sharp rocks and a fast running river. One mistake at the wheel and you become a major logistical problem for an air ambulance crew. But the wheatear was keen to be admired. It flitted right in front of us and perched on an overhanging rock almost at eye level. Summer is all to come . . .
Hope you like this week’s story. To read it in full you’ll need to be a paid subscriber, but an extract is available to free subscribers. Apologies to those people who would prefer to listen to these posts via audio. It’s a complicated process trying to record stories in the world’s creakiest and least sound insulated house with a battered field recorder which has things nesting in it (I’m trying not to disturb them). The good news is I’m going to be doing things in a more professional way soon. My voice coach says I’ll be almost intelligible with a little more practice, and my son, who is a sound whizz, has promised to set me up with kit which doesn’t fizz and smoke. I’m looking forward to being a little more 21st century. Until then, well, I’ve always loved the shape of words as much as the sound.
Blows are being traded between summer and winter.
A morning of squalls and rainbows. We walked across Bradnor Hill an hour after dawn when the sun, for the first time this year, felt warm and inviting. Fifteen minutes into the walk the first squall scudded across the common. Rain, sleet, a few pillowy flakes of snow. Then back to sun. Looking down at the line of Offa’s Dyke on Herrock Hill rainbows began to appear as if beamed out of the dyke itself. Sun spears striated through storm clouds, the hills glowed beneath stage lights, then the curtains were drawn again, everything going dark. The ground transformed from slate to emerald to slate. Golden plovers glittered against blue clouds. Skylarks rose and dived. There are more here than anywhere else I know, their songs continually resonating, even drowning out the low roar of jet engines.
Along the edge of the common is an old stone wall, half collapsed in places, thorn trees growing out of the foundations, barbed wire taught between posts trailing flags of dirty wool. Over the wall is a row of fields sloping down to the Offa’s Dyke path and the foot of Rushock Hill. The fields are usually full of ewes and their lambs at this time of year, but at the moment they’re empty, the farmer preferring to keep his stock in the less exposed fields in the valley bottom. Two crows flew east to west, dark as death against a silver curtain of rain. And then another dark shape, flitting low, turning and turning back. A swallow. I’ve never witnessed swallows this early in the year around here.
In the past few days I’ve seen the first insects start to emerge. A bumblebee snoozy in the woods, sleepwalking back to its hollow in a tree stump. And another in the ivy, also looking bewildered, as if this wasn’t the world it expected to wake up to. And now the gnats are beginning to swarm in the woods, clouds of them in the sheltered places, away from the eddying wind. Everything so wet - they’ll breed and breed. Still, I don’t know if there’s food enough yet for a swallow, emaciated after its 6000 mile migration. It’s arrived at the edge of the turning season, at the edge of the great migration out of Africa.
I have to admit to being conflicted about travel. I’ve been lucky enough to see some amazing places in my life, but for over a decade I’ve refused to fly. Now I’m a professional writer and artist, which means I own a car which can barely be relied upon to reach the end of our yard, never mind another country (and here is where I remind you that you can upgrade to a paid subscription with just a click). But the main reason for the inner conflict is the fact that most of the people I’ve met on my travels, the residents, rarely go more than a few miles from their birthplace. We westerners arrive in their homelands, breeze around like we own the place, then go home with our cameras and smart phones loaded with images to show at dinner parties or on our Instagram accounts. As far as I can tell all we contribute to the world while travelling is a small amount of foreign currency and a lot of carbon dioxide. As the thinker I value above most, Steven Jenkinson, says. “If you want to help these places, stay home.”
But some forms of travel are wonder projects. I remember the first time I visited Morocco, arriving in Marrakech late in the evening and walking into the Jemaa el-Fnaa. The smell of the desert. Kitchen fires and torchlight, acrobats, snake charmers, medicine men, crazed beggars. The next morning I watched the light come up over the Atlas Mountains, the rocky edge of the Sahara, their peaks snow covered. There are so many worlds folded into our world. I’d love to see them all.
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