4th January 2022

4th January 2022

I'm pottering, tutting at the crocuses' newly sprouted green shoots dug up ignominiously by the squirrel, sometimes I think I could love plants more than animals. Covering them back up, I wonder if perhaps I'm part plant because I do love soil. It's really one of the loveliest materials on this Earth. I remember how Ai Weiwei said his father had lived in a hole dug in the ground, but I can't start thinking about that now because the logistics of it will take me too far off at a tangent, so I'll just log that thought for later and go and get the vase with the Christmas flowers in.

As I tip the last of the withered roses, along with their water, over the fence onto the bank, I see that the Holly has spread much further along now and nearly made it to about a third of the way up which is amazing and wonderful, I hope. There's a lot of ivy and I suppose they go together. I don't think the elderberry or the oak will be troubled by their intrusion and the clematis is so huge and bushy it will surely survive. I think about nature journals and wonder about their usefulness. 

I think about small things adding up and the idea that if we could all do some small things regularly, they could have a cumulative effect, a sort of confederacy of virtue which may amount to a kind of effusion  and an appearance of miracles. 

The late afternoon sun draws attention to the hillside. How bright it must be in the rooms of the houses whose windows are glinting. Last night's smattering of snow has melted from the fields behind them, but further up, it's still laying on the tops. A robin lands on one of the electricity power lines which run up the lane and sings its evensong. How I've missed hearing birdsong. 

Looking up into the oak's bare canopy, I like to imagine I can feel its strength. Some of the small pieces which the wind pruned look wizened and completely covered in lichen. One had some ominous black substance oozing from it which I'll have to research. I hope there'll be some medicine if it's a sign of illness. 

Last year I stood here banging a pan for the NHS. Conflicted, I wanted to join in and show that I do appreciate people who choose to care for a living, but at the time, I couldn't shake the feeling that we were being softened up for something and that mere applause was not going to compensate for the sacrifices made. It's a terrible thing to feel at the mercy of something, especially when one's trust has been steadily eroded over time. 

Gazing at the outline of St Peter's against the sunset, I think about someone reading my words, which are, of course, my thoughts, and how, to some extent, that is why one might write, but that also, there is an alchemy at work in writing, in which words sometimes seem to arise from somewhere outside ourself. And I remember, as I go in, why I write.