The birds

I’ve been feeling ashamed of the previous post (‘Anger management’) and wanting to remove it, but Frog insists I keep it there. Instead therefore I’ve written this sequel.

The debris

On Monday I passed again the debris from the fencing business that’s piled on a nearby public footpath. I’ve been waiting recently to see if I could catch the man concerned and have a word with him, but I haven’t had so much as a glimpse of him, not even in one of the outsize vehicles of his that hurtle around the narrow lanes endangering Ellie and me as we walk. I’ve had enough, I thought. I’m going to report him to the council.

I decided to ring rather than filling out an online form as the behaviour didn’t fit into a ready-made category such as fly-tipping as the material's been there for ten years or so ever since the business arrived. I got through immediately. The woman I spoke to was utterly charming and professional. She took me seriously. She listened to everything I said and promised that the council would investigate, and as soon as I put the phone down I received an email acknowledgement of the call with an incident-report number.

I felt light-headed with relief. I was a real person after all. I did matter. I might even be able to have a small influence on the world. I didn't feel angry any more. I felt powerful.

The novel

It’s been a wonderful experience serialising my novel on the blog. I don’t know who you are, but I know you’re there in that I get a daily report on the number of page views and the posts that people read. Knowing that people – in quantity - are out there reading the novel has improved my writing a hundredfold and given purpose to my life. But I baulk at the thought of taking the novel further and publishing it as a book.

Do I really want to enter the commercial world? I’ve been there and I didn’t like it. I fear rejection and criticism. I don't want to be taken over by some publicity machine. I've seen (from my parents) how damaging success can be and I fear that success will spoil the life that Frog and I have together. I've seen the pressure that my sister, a successful children's novelist, is under, and I hate pressure of any kind with a vengeance. It makes me ill. (Yes, I know. I'm jumping forward a bit here.) 

But I have to take the novel further, I thought on Tuesday. I have something to say and, as yesterday’s experiences proved, I need to be heard. Or at least, for my own sanity and physical health, I need to try.

So I spent the morning preparing material for agents and sent some off. Then Frog and I went out in the car to do some errands (Frog to B&Q for wood, me to the sewing shop for thread and buttons). On the way home I started to feel sick. I thought it was Frog’s driving but when we got back the feeling didn’t go away. I had to sit down quietly for an hour or so and do the ‘trackword’ in our new Radio Times. ‘D’you think this is the result of contacting an agent?’ I asked Frog. ‘Very likely,’ he said.

The birds

The sun was setting and I hadn’t been out all day because it was the dog’s day at the dogminder. I wanted to take some photographs of the debris in case evidence was needed. In spite of how I felt I put my coat on and hurried up the field behind the house – pasture and vineyard, cared for organically.

Even the debris had its charm in the evening light.

And as I walked back down the field a huge flock of birds swished and swooped over the field in beautiful free-form waves. I wonder what they are, I thought. (I know about wildflowers, but birds are a bit of a mystery to me.) I didn’t photograph the waves: I didn’t think either my camera or I were up to it and I wanted to concentrate on watching. But then the birds went to roost in trees in the hedgerow and I managed to get some pictures. I’ll zoom in on these when I get home, I thought, and try and identify the birds.

Roosting birds. (Note the elm saplings. Soon the Dutch elm disease beetle will infect them and they'll die and resprout - like phoenixes.)

More roosting birds

The birds sat in the trees chattering. The noise was extraordinary and I had another of those moments of joy. Even in mid-winter and in spite of everything we’re doing to the environment, here was so much life.

The drain and the nature reserve

You might remember from the previous post how angry I was that the week before last Frog, Dog and I were barred from a nature reserve on the Somerset Levels that we’d hoped to visit. On that day however we did find a walk up a nearby ‘drain’ (drainage ditch) and it wasn’t at all bad.

It was a beautiful afternoon and we had the path almost to ourselves.

On the opposite bank we could see my favourite habitat, scrub.

We could even see some reserve-y bits (old peat-working pools) through the trees.

As we walked back along the road a woman stopped in a car to speak to us.

    ‘Are the starlings here tonight?’ she asked excitedly. ‘Only I do an online update, and for the last few nights they’ve been here, at the reserve.’

    We shook our heads. ‘We don’t know,’ we said. ‘We’re not allowed on the reserve.’

    Cars were piling up on the verges and crowds of people were filing through the gates of the reserve.

    I knew about the starlings on the Levels, about their breath-taking displays as they came in to roost at sunset. I knew people came from miles around to watch them and I’d always looked out for the flocks as we drove home after days out but had never seen any myself.

    ‘I wouldn’t have wanted to see the starlings like that anyway,’ I said to Frog as I stomped up the road towards the carpark. ‘I hate crowds and I never want to do what everyone else is doing. And, anyway, I don’t think we should have to drive to see nature. We shouldn't have to keep nature in 'reserves'. Nature should be there for all of us, all the time.’ (I was getting into one of my rewilding rants.)

The sign

Sitting at my computer after my walk up the field, I zoomed in on the birds and started to feel a trickle of excitement. Judging by their shape, size and colour as well as the 'murmuration' I'd heard, there was only one thing they could be.

We don’t normally see starlings where we live, but according the bird book I was reading huge flocks of foreign birds arrive from the east in winter. This was obviously what these were, brought perhaps by the cold weather. And it was only by chance that I was in the right place at the right time as normally, when I have the dog, I walk in the morning.

So I’d seen starlings after all. I’d had my own private display. 

It seemed like a sign, a reward.