Meditation and Mindfulness

In a couple of months I’m going on retreat to Sharpham House in South Devon where I’m hoping to learn meditation and mindfulness, geared towards those who feel burnt out. Well, I’m certainly that. It’s now nearly four years since Frog died and discovering how to function without him has been non-stop on every level. As my sister said, I need a reset (not to mention a rest).

As you might have picked up if you’ve been reading this blog, it’s the ‘spiritual’ side of life that’s got me through so far. I don’t like the word spiritual as it sounds pretentious, but I don’t know how else to describe that part of me in a simple way. I also have trouble describing the quiet times I take while out walking the dog since I don’t actually meditate in an official way during them as I’ve never been taught how to do it properly. Hopefully the retreat will help with that.

The entire dog-walking period is a sort of meditation however, as even if my brain is whirring throughout I always feel better afterwards, and often the whirring is interrupted and I’m stopped short by the beauty around me. Which is astonishing, given that I’ve lived in my current house for 45 years and been walking the surroundings for most of that time. Every day, it seems, there’s something new to see. 

And here are some recent photographs of some of those moments.

On a misty murky early morning at the beginning of the month, as I wondered what point there was in me still being alive, I almost missed these two jewels under my feet. I’m so grateful I didn’t step on them.

Feather

Toadstool

Here is a corner I found recently for one of my quiet times. I’d never sat here before and I couldn’t understand why not. I’m under my favourite sort of tree, an oak (as you can see from the fallen leaves), there are no houses staring at me, I'm hidden by trees and bushes, I can see to the horizon, and there’s some wildness around in overgrown hedges. All the criteria I unconsciously look for. 

The perfect spot for a quiet sit-down. Ellie obviously likes it too.

I encountered this lovely and perfectly framed view for the first time as I walked home along a lane I use almost every day. My house is the furthest white blob in the middle of the picture.

 

A new view of my house (the furthest white blob in the middle)

Here is another route I’ve walked countless times. On the day of the photograph, in spite of mud and puddles, the approach of winter, indifferent weather and stupid worries that were wearing me out, I looked ahead and my heart was lifted.

Mud, puddles and Ellie

A Right to Roam?

First, a story. Perhaps an over-simplification, and there may be inaccuracies (history and facts are not my strong points), but this is how I see things.

Since the invasion of the Normans (in the eleventh century), we in this country have become separated from nature. Firstly, the Normans parcelled up huge chunks of land (like Cornwall) and divided them among themselves, concentrating land ownership in the hands of the few. Then in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, these few decided to take for their own the common land which ordinary people used for food and fuel. They fenced it off and instituted a more intensive form of agriculture which meant that many lost their homes and livelihoods. With the advent of the industrial revolution, these destitute country people moved to cities to look for work (where they lived in poverty and squalor and probably never saw even a blade of grass).

We are still suffering the effects of these events, to the extent that 1 per cent of the population of England owns half the country (Who Owns England? and The Lie of the Land by Guy Shrubsole, 2019 and 2024) and about 85 per cent of us are urban. We are excluded from 92 per cent of the land and 97 per cent of its waterways (The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes, 2020).

This is not healthy, either physically or spiritually. We need fresh air and exercise. We need nature for the world to make sense. We need the sense of freedom that wild nature brings. We need to know about nature so that we care for it and protect the planet.

The Lockdown emphasised this, as nature was all we had left. Many more people than before went out for walks in the country and, unfortunately, some farmers and landowners reacted badly to this, enclosing footpaths with wire fences and padlocking gates. Making the situation even worse.

I call this sort of footpath a gulag. The bridge is for animals.

Locked into the footpath and out of the countryside

Enter the Right to Roam , an organisation started in 2021 by Hayes and Shrubsole which campaigns for England and Wales to have the right that Scotland already does.

The Ramblers organisation is also campaigning for more access to the countryside. An Act of 2000 gave us the right to walk freely over mountain, moor, heath and downland. They want that expanded to cover woodland, watersides and more grassland. Woodland alone would more than double our freedom.

A right to roam wouldn’t mean that people can walk wherever they like without consideration, but it would mean that we might be able to enjoy more of our beautiful country – swimming in rivers, camping out under the night sky, exploring wild places, going off-piste.

A Duchy of Cornwall wood, with access barred by the sign above. So enticing.

An overgrown watermeadow, currently out of bounds. Is there anything more beautiful?

There would of course be responsibilities on both sides. We would need to respect crops and farm animals, and avoid damaging the countryside with, for example, litter and fires. There would be exclusion zones around places such as houses. Landowners on the other hand couldn’t needlessly obstruct access.

But, in the end, it could be of benefit to us all. The public would be better educated about what to do and not do when out and about. We could share guardianship of the countryside with farmers and landowners, which might help safeguard nature. Farmers could make friends with their communities and feel less isolated and misunderstood. We’d all be happier and healthier.

That is my dream.

And here are a couple of pictures of things going right, of farmers engaging with visitors – a taste, I hope, of things to come.

Devon, 2020

Kent, 2025

*I read elsewhere that in the UK as a whole 1 percent of the population owns 70 percent of the land, but I'm checking this figure.

A walk in the North Downs

Last week I stayed with family in Kent.

I was brought up in that county on a farm on the edge of a village with my two brothers and two sisters. My sisters have returned to live in the village, and the rest of us visit as often as we can.
 
Kent is known as the Garden of England because of its fruit orchards and I have vivid memories of my mother buying us lucky children a crate of cherries from a local grower and us working our way through them, having spitting competitions with the stones.
 
On Friday however when I went for a walk it looked more like the Mediterranean. I believe it has the hottest (in summer), driest climate in the country. My sister’s lawn was too parched and prickly to walk on with bare feet

My sister's lawn

and the view from the hill was more brown than green.
 

The view from the hill

 
The village lies in the North Downs, a chalk ridge designated a National Landscape  - what used to be called an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. I think I prefer that name. In the 1970s (after I'd left home) they wanted to drive the M25 through the village and a friend, whose mother was a leading protestor, wore a campaign t-shirt with Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty emblazoned across her chest.

Eventually, not because of the landscape but because of the artist Samuel Palmer who lived in the village and is known for his paintings of the area, they drove the M25 through the hills instead. You can hear the roar of motorway traffic everywhere.  Nevertheless, there are still multiple footpaths, swathes of trees, and loveliness round every corner.

Looking towards the hills and their beechwoods. The M25 is the other side of the first rise, in a dip.

Our farm – which I remember as being mostly grazed by cows whom we dodged in order to climb the trees that dotted the fields and who ate the underneath of the giant horse chestnut visible from the house and kept it neat - is now a vineyard.
 

Rows and rows of vines

 
The vineyard is open to the public and has a shop and restaurant – a vast glass edifice built over the concrete yard where I used to play hopscotch with a friend. The whole place, I'm told, is an extremely popular day out for people from nearby London. Fields have been turned into carparks, and neighbouring landowners put up boards explaining the farming business. (So much better than fences and 'keep out' signs.)
 

An overflow carpark

An information board

A stream flows through the village and I remember spending hours with my siblings and friends trying (and failing) to catch fish with twigs and string, paddling in it, falling in it and crawling through it under the road.
 
Chalk streams (I read) are globally rare, and important because they support so many species. They are fed by underground water which percolates up through the chalk. This is full of minerals, very pure and clear, and of a consistent temperature (cold!).
 
In a wood I pass some tributaries of the main river, a welcome feature on a broiling day and somewhere my sister’s spaniel spends as much time as she is allowed.
 

Welcome streams and shade

I skirt the cricket pitch where a brother and I used to take charge of the scoreboard, and I helped the ladies making the teas in the hope that I would be able to eat some of the delicious food. They were so deft with their knives, whipping up squishy butter from a large plastic tub and sweeping it over sliced white bread. I still think of them every time I make a sandwich.
 
From the cricket pitch there is a view of a cross cut into the chalk. This commemorates those killed in the First World War.
 

The cricket pitch and the cross

 
Finally, I make my way through the graveyard next to the church, where I pause at the newly filled grave of a sister-in-law’s brother, whose funeral was the reason for my visit to Kent. He was the same age as me and had lived in the village all his life.
 

This morning on my second day back at home, I realise that I need to commit to my life in Devon. I feel divided between Kent and Devon but I don’t want to go and live in Kent. I love it in Kent and I love it here, but I have a very big family and at times they overwhelm me. Here, on my own without Frog, is where I am at last finding myself.

Along the Grand Western Canal

Yesterday morning, while walking along the canal near where I live, I saw this beautiful wild plant for the first time.

Flowering Rush

My Book says it’s Flowering Rush, rather uncommon, flowering from July – and there we were, Ellie and I, on our nearby canal in June, and it was dotted all along the bank.

Well, My Book is over 60 years old and it gets a lot of things wrong because so much of both countryside and climate has changed, but I love it because it was given to me by my parents on my eleventh birthday and it’s full of my annotations and observations over the years.

Needless to say, it’s falling apart now, and if you know of a good bookbinder who could repair it for me, do tell.

My ancient and  battered Oxford Book of Wildflowers

Next I saw this tall scruffy plant which I find rather menacing as it grows in gangs and looks like a Triffid (as in the 1981 TV adaptation of John Wyndham’s book). It’s called Hemp Agrimony, but is no relation to Cannabis (sadly) or Agrimony  - which is a small yellow spike of a flower, and one I also saw yesterday along the canal.

Hemp Agrimony

Hemp Agrimony

Agrimony

The next plant to catch my attention was this Meadow-sweet, so-called I presume for its scent – a weird almondy one. I like its confidence and its scatty prettiness and am trying to grow it round the pond in my garden.

Meadow-sweet

Sunny St John’s Wort was in flower for the first time this year. As you probably know, the word ‘wort’ means any plant that was used medicinally and St John’s Wort is still used to cure depression (but take advice as it can also be harmful or interact with conventional drugs).

St John's Wort

Lovely Scabious, which actually prefers dry places, was in evidence from time to time, well attended by insects like all flowers of the Daisy family to which it belongs.

Scabious and Hoverfly

Yesterday was a good day.

 

The Grand Western Canal near Tiverton in Devon is a Local Nature Reserve and well worth a visit at any time of year. Yesterday it was full of birdsong as well as wildflowers, and when I find out how to transfer audio and video clips from my phone to my computer I’ll share some of that with you as well.

The Greenfinch

Greenfinches used to flock to our bird table, especially when we put out sunflower seeds. Then, about twenty years ago, they vanished. They had apparently fallen prey to the parasitic disease Trichomonosis which they were thought to have caught from pigeons, and their numbers had crashed by 60 per cent. I added them to my list of birds I no longer see, like swallows, barn owls, thrushes and pied wagtails.

At the end of March I was staying with my brother D at his farm in West Sussex, most of which he is now leaving to nature. The birds were in full spring throat and in among the dizzy-making tangle of sounds I caught something new - an insistent but gentle chirring noise. I didn’t know what it was and neither did D – who is an expert on birds – but Merlin, the trusty smartphone app which identifies birdsong, told us it belonged to a greenfinch.

I started to hear the noise everywhere, in the garden at home, on my long rambles every day with Ellie (who is now 15 and not showing much sign of slowing up). The greenfinch became my bird of this glorious spring, my bird of the year.

If you’ve read previous posts, you might remember how important affirmations are to me, particularly since my husband Frog died, three and a half years ago. I recite them to myself every day and hope that one day they will stick. Some I make up myself, some come from that inspiring book You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay, 

and one – the queen of them all – comes from a medieval woman mystic whose name I’ve forgotten.

A few days ago I was dozing in the garden and the greenfinch was chirring as usual, and the sound was so beautiful and loving and warm that my half-asleep brain connected it with that queen affirmation. The greenfinch was chirring ‘All is well’. He was telling me that he and his species had come back from the brink, and so could I.

Crab-apple blossom (I think) in a hedgerow a few weeks ago

A winter's walk by the sea

I’ve been getting in a terrible tizz about my future – to move or not to move, whether it’s OK to sell some of Frog’s stuff (do I want to keep it as a memento or is it better to move on?), how long will it be before I’m too old to manage on my own and what will I do then, ?

So yesterday, the dog and I took off for a walk by the sea.

During the walk I met a lovely woman and we had a long talk that started with our dogs - what else? -  and went on to range from reincarnation to quantum mechanics, stopping off on the way at Tolkien and Philip Pullman. As Bilbo Baggins used to say, you never know what's going to happen when you step outside your front door.

The weather was perfect – bright but not too sunny, a light wind, moderate temperatures – and there weren’t many other people about. All my worries blew away and I wanted to keep going all day but I realised that I’d come out without any money and no map and had left my water bottle in the car. 

So after a couple of hours I took the sensible option and walked back to the car along a filthy farm track, my feet squelching in a mixture of animal excrement and mud. I was glad of my hefty boots and knee-high waterproof socks.

Next time, I'll go better prepared.

Probably.

It's hard when the way ahead is so unclear.

Wild Norway

I made it to Norway eventually and swept into a round of parties, meeting cousins of all shapes and sizes (my maternal grandmother having been Norwegian). The weather was atrocious – even worse than in the UK – but here are some pictures of the beautiful landscape.

 

On the first day I walked with my brother and sister-in-law and two English friends of my aunt to this lake, which Frog and I had found near the hotel five years earlier. In spite of non-stop rain, I thought the lake was prettier this time. Perhaps the heatwave on my previous visit had withered the greenery.

 Lake, jetty and granite

The jetty is for swimming. The Norwegians are very hearty and, even though the temperature was about 14, as we walked back two boys were leaping in and out of the water.

The rock in the foreground is not broken concrete but granite, which comes to the surface everywhere.

 

Here is the hotel garden on my last day, when of course the sun came out, and here is another lump of granite. How the trees manage to grow on it, I have no idea.

 

Hotel garden

As children, we spent our summer holidays by the sea in Norway and clambered over the rocks in bare feet, as this was the best way we found to grip them.

Also on my last day, I found this enticing path signed ‘Kyststien’ which I guessed meant coast path. I wished I’d found it earlier.

 Coast path

Most of the interior of the country (below the treeline) is forested with pines but here, by the coast, were some broadleaved trees – oak, silver birch, rowan. Also scrumptious wild raspberries, another feature of my childhood.

  

This is the beach in front of the hotel, but I didn’t brave the sea.

 

Hotel beach

On my penultimate day, I went for lunch with one of my aunt’s daughters. She lives on the outskirts of Kristiansand.

Here is her view.

The view from my cousin's house

 

And here is the path from her garden to forest and mountain.

The path from my cousin's garden

On my last morning, I walked round Kristiansand with my brother and sister-in-law. 

Here is the harbour, not what you’d expect next to a city.

 Kristiansand harbour

People were picnicking and swimming.

As you can see, nowhere in Norway is far from nature, although according to a cousin that is changing as the population expands.

That breaks my heart, as (in my experience) Norway is one of the last wild places left in this part of the world.

The lonely duck

Since Frog died just over a year ago, my life has been non-stop. A few days ago, however, I decided that I just had to step off the treadmill. I was exhausted. I’d had back and leg pain since November which stopped me sleeping. I couldn’t go on any longer. I would take March off.

On Saturday, I awoke after a good night’s sleep and decided that the dog and I would go out for the day, even though I had no one to go out with. Like rest, being on my own was part of the process, part of my experiment.

We arrived early. It was cloudy and still. There was hardly anyone else about.

Our first encounter was this cat, who taunted Ellie from the other side of the canal. She knew Ellie couldn’t get at her, and Ellie knew that too, but it didn’t stop barking at it for a good five minutes – as if that would encourage the cat to cross the canal and let Ellie attack it. (She does that with squirrels too, standing at the bottom of trees, and with rabbits, sticking her nose down the entrances to their warrens.)

 

Then we saw this duck. I think it’s a Muscovy, perhaps a young one as the pictures on Google showed black and white feathers not the grey and white ones here. The red cheek is very distinctive however, as are the flat flappy feet, the colour and texture of autumn leaves.

 

I felt sorry for it. It wasn’t frightened of me when I took a photograph and it seemed to be looking for company.

We passed this sign and I wondered if I should have one in my garden. It’s such a good excuse.

 

I walked on and because my mind was empty, because I’d ‘taken March off’, because this was a day out, not only did I notice things but ideas – mainly about writing – flooded in.

That’s the lovely thing about a canal. It’s hypnotic and soothing. You don’t have to negotiate ups and downs. You don’t have to worry about where you’re going. The path stretches out in front of you, unmistakable, as does the water.

After an hour so, we turned back and, with sun and wind now behind us, everything was different. A lovely view confronted me, a medley of soft greens, blues and pinks. For a moment, I thought I was in the Mediterranean.

 

Spot the dog

This mallard pair, almost invisible on the opposite bank, stood motionless above their reflections as Ellie and I walked by. I’ve seen them there before, on their log.

 

We came across the duck again, further up the canal, trying to make friends with another mallard pair. It looked so sad. I really hoped for the best for it. Maybe next time I visited the canal it would have found others of its kind.