Heaven and Home

The sun sank into the stifling, house-tall reeds. All the warming day I’d held my peace on the tarmac road until I fell at last to stop on the Somerset Levels. I was down in the outrageous south, in sight of Glastonbury Tor, struck and sickened with premature summer in the last week of April. Continue reading

Once you have decided to become a killer of things, method starts to matter. Any fool can pull the trigger on a pheasant as it batters noisily above your head, and the chances are that it will die or be missed. But what if neither comes to pass, and in the rush and fluster of Continue reading

I took photographs of curlew chicks through the mesh of a pen wall. They were curious and loud in the sunshine, but they preferred to stay back from us and maintained a wary distance. Sometimes one would dash forward to grab an insect which had risen from the grass, and there would be an audible Continue reading

When I asked if he would mind if I recorded him singing, he looked me in the eye and said “yes, I do mind”. It was an abrupt refusal and I was embarrassed by it. So I put my telephone away, feeling silly for having made the suggestion as Tero began to sing a verse Continue reading

“You survived”, he said. And for the first time in three and a half hundred days, we touched at the hands. The floods which had fallen upon us were going, and we compared his half-mile of flattened fence against a length of my lane which simply washed away. In order to be the first foot Continue reading

The first bird I saw sat tightly, then flushed like a grouse from the grass. I might’ve taken it for a grouse, but only because I find golden plover so unusual. I’m not ready to accept them as an option, and they don’t come come easily to hand on the spur of a moment. But Continue reading

Norwich cathedral was cold as barn in December. I shivered in the aisles, and gathered my coats around me. Every time the doors opened to admit new visitors, a bitter Scandinavian wind rushed in to gutter the candles and pull at the straw in the nativity scene. I found the things I went to see; Continue reading

It was cold and I was lonely on the day I went to Strata Florida, and I couldn’t believe it would take so long to get there. The visitor centre was shut for the winter, and mine was the only car parked by the entry to the ruins of the old cathedral. I got out, Continue reading

I walked on the hills above Trefenter in the morning, and the smell of fox was so outrageous that I had to stop and laugh. The smell stayed with me all day, even after three hours in the car and the full width of Wales placed behind me. Snow lay that evening in the graveyard Continue reading

I was looking for something to read on a clear, milky morning in early spring. I’m spoilt for choice when it comes to books – my office drowns in them, and when I move the heaps from place to place, I rediscover thoughts I had at the time of buying then; what I hoped to Continue reading