Blog

  • Nature Notes

    Song Thrush, Firebox. Away from everything, there is a profound quiet in these short, grey-white days that feels reflective and inward. The sun levers open the lid of a tin-coloured sky at dawn and dusk, to peer up at the underbelly of grey cloud before closing its eye. A fox has been using the field […]

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  • Nature Notes

    An Epiphany. The night after Twelfth Night, we take down the tree and all the decorations. We do so with as much ceremony, nostalgia and silliness, as when it went up. There is a kind of ritual that the family have learnt, seized upon and added too – and there is an underlying reverence for […]

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  • Nature Notes

    A Raven in Snow. Our house is an island in the mud. Our plank drawbridge to the lane falls short. And then, at last, it snows. We wake to a white and would-be silent world, were it not for the wind ghosting eerily through the house in its unsettling northiness. We rush out to feed […]

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  • Nature Notes

    Wild Writing. Three lovely women join me for a Wild Writing Workshop at BBOWT’s Thatcham Nature Discovery Centre. We discuss ‘the new nature writing’, its ancient roots and tradition; its resurgence and the reasons (and need) for it. And we try to define something that, in its wild essence, defies catagorisation. But we come up […]

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  • Nature Notes

    Earthstars and Peacocks. The belt of trees between the down and the arable field is protected from both the hedgecutter and spray drift by a wide, conservation strip. The grass is long and pale, full of spiders, beetles, bugs, moths, butterfly eggs, mice and voles and – as I walk its length – about a […]

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  • Nature Notes

    Red Ophelia, Part II. The days prior had been a kind of portent. Something in the wind. The weather got stranger, the clouds took on an unusual quality. The sepia air darkened. There were ‘rain gods’ walking the downs – those great, broad brushstrokes of cloudbursts that finger down from the sky, obliterating their portion […]

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  • Nature Notes

    Presentiment of a Red Sun. Part I. The wood is under a sepia spell. Everything tinged, foxed and coloured like an old map of itself. Mid-October, yet warm enough for July. The late harvest moon was spectacular when it rose, coloured like a honeysuckle bloom off the horizon. The atmosphere in the wood is strange. […]

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  • Nature Notes

    The Wild Other. ‘Between the laundry and fetching the kids from school, that’s how birds enter my life’. This quote from writer and poet Kathleen Jamie, orbits my more reflective, mindful moments. Especially when I find myself in, when I’d perhaps rather be out. It’s a wry reminder and a comfort that actually, this is […]

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  • Nature Notes

    A Common Playground. I did a lot of my growing up on Greenham Common. A place William Cobbett (farmer, journalist, champion of the rural poor) described in 1830 as ‘a villainous tract of rascally heath’; and Victor Bonham-Carter (farmer, author, publisher) as ‘a mighty wilderness … threaded by a single dust road’, seventy years later. […]

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  • Nature Notes

    Dust Devil, Raven Devil. A green woodpecker rolls and dips through the lower air like a paper plane folded from a page of colour supplement. His ‘yaffle’ laugh is slowed-down and languorous. He seem to wear spring’s colours in that season – all lime, lemon and sunlight-through-beech-leaves, but now, those same colours are of the […]

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