Night Blood

How strange. Midsummer has passed and the stealthy elongation of the night is oddly welcome - for now. Under the dark of the moon there are sparkling motes of sound which make up the blood of the night: the hot silence between the rustling gusts of wind, the silver sparkle of the songs of owls, the sharp calls of the deer, the blood-song barking of foxes, and the soft and fickle ticking of water all around, still creeping under the ground unbowed by the heat. Under that strange blanket the year turns: the water hugs the clay under the shallow earth while the sun rages, just as the life of the earth will sleep in that same layer when the ice and storms return.

Awake. For now.

One morning last July, I counted seventeen species of butterfly and dragonfly in less than an hour. Summer may have arrived earlier this year, or perhaps I missed the first wave last year. In one walk I spotted two new species of chasers, one so large it couldn't find a stalk strong enough to rest on and dry its wings. A little further on I saw a small copper, the first I've seen - alive - on the river. Looking up, I saw a kingfisher crossing the meadow, faster than a hawk, low and straight like a tiny bar of blue-green missile on some secret mission. Today, I found two new songs, one from 1968 and another from 2014, both stopped me in my tracks and then I discovered a new coffee shop.

I think I am awake. For now.

Co-dependence

The earth and the rain have been fighting for months. The banks emerge from the middle of the drains like swollen lips in a bruised and beaten face. The grey blood of winter has drained from the greens and they have started to move toward verdancy.  Now that there is an evening to speak of, the water shines like infant brass not yet cool from the mould. Like two lovers who love the fight as much as each other, the earth and the water lie coing in each others arms as the temperature soars and the winter stillness has become a spring calm.

The Willow That Will Not Weep

Grey green water fills the ditch at the foot of the garden to its brim. The great drains are tediously full to the tops of their banks. The Ouse overflows onto the road and now the groundwater seeps up out of the fen like a woken beast spilling into the world. It will not take much, now, to turn the fen into a grey lake.

The mighty Willow that we call the Admiral which stands guard at the foot of the fen is waiting to drink that rising earth-blood. The wind has battered it for weeks, constant gusts of thirty mile an hour winds, hour after hour, day after day. Not killer punches, but a relentless stream of body-blows that just will not stop. Its bark shows its flesh. Its thin stems beat in constant insensate whirls. Like a boxer beaten so sensless he no longer knows how to fall, the Admiral stands and glowers at this relentless winter and will not be beaten. Come the spring, it will turn gold and drink the Earth dry of the flood.

Sodium Light

Why is sodium light so cold?

There is an awful moment when you realise that the familiar scene that you are watching through your window should be behind a TV screen. I once saw a man lurch across an empty parking lot in Baltimore and realised, with a near electric shock, that he reminded me of Bubbles from The Wire, from scenes shot perhaps a mile away and the unreal leaked out of its frame into the real.

So when we looked out of our window in our sleepy fenland home and saw a man in a balaclava run from the building next door in the glow of a sodium gorilla lamp, I had time to laugh before the shock hit me.