Back to Nature

Far from the madding crowd....

Sunrise over the North Sea, streaming across the extraordinary poppy fields that this year have coated north Norfolk in waving fields of blood.  

A little while before sun rise I just caught the moon going down, a tiny bright pinprick in the sky:

And then here comes the sun, and I say, "It's alright...."

It all happens so fast.  Daylight like a rising flash, a lightning, I find it all hard to believe, so I ask a passing skylark to take my pic from above:

And then he takes a speckled stutter of spatters without me (can you trust anyone these days?):

And that was last week. 

Yes, life is racing by.  Only a few weeks ago the cowslips were like a delicately quilted coverlet spread across the countryside.  

 

Then they gradually faded, seeping into beige and pale lemony green.  And then we had the poppies, fields and fields of them, filling the air with a dozy haze in the evening air while we walked.

Today I walk from my home to the north coast, some eight and half miles along lanes and footpaths, and the poppies are pale and fringed with age, their petals bruised with the flapping winds we have had in the last few days.....

And now they are being succeeded, by hawkweeds, or hawkbits, or common cat's-ears (please excuse my inexactitude; life is too short....)

So anyway.  I've been in the city.  I've had some slightly startling speedy heartbeats, and I am glad to be back in the fresh air, walking comfortably above the ground, fluttered by butterflies:

Two ringlets exchanging greetings

I am just off the Peddars' Way, only sixteen miles north of Castle Acre,

The landscape tells human stories.  Here a dry cereal crop leads you down to a red stone farm which lies just by the old railway line from Hunstanton to Fakenham.....

Here a shady oak frames a bucolic fold of hills with, though you cannot see it, a red kite trawling for worms.....

Then we have the hedgerows and wildflowers, exchanging their bodily fluids with the insects of the air to enable life, of all sorts, to go on.  Without this, you should know, we are all doomed....  Insect sex is everything we need....

A white-tailed bumblebee on knapweed

A six-spot Burnet moth on Knapweed

A six-spot Burnet moth on field scabious

A small white butterfly on bramble flowers

John Clare wrote:

Though simple to some I delight in the sight

Of such objects that bring unto me

A picture of picturesque joy and delight

Where beauty and harmony be

Oh I love at my heart to be strolling along

Oer the heath a new impulse to find

While I hum to the wind in a ballad or song

Some fancy that starts in the mind

All seems so delightful and bring to the mind

Such quiet and beautiful joys

That the mind when its weary like hermits may find

A retreat from earths folly and noise

The Heath

John Clare

I walk on.  Every day is new.  The shift from yellow to red to brown and so on is all part of the rich weft of colour that our world, when undisturbed, offers to the wanderer.  Seasonal.  Transitional. Always changing; always developing.  I am just perplexed by the rapidity of these changes.  

Don't read anything into these musings.  I breast the hill leading down to the coast and see,  distantly but clearly, Lincolnshire to one side, and a wind farm to the other.  As far as I can see there is life.  And life only.  

The foreground is filled with asparagus ferns, from the young plants that need to mature before they are harvested.  This is where I live, now.  This is beautiful.  I am happy to share it with you.....

Time flies by

In the blink of an eye

When you get paid for having too much fun

Kicking out the foot lights

Living the night life

Like tomorrow ain't never going to come

Wouldn't change much of nothing

About this road we've been running

For of wild times, wild women, and a song

But we would've taken much better care of ourselves

If we would have known we would live this long

Live This Long

Willie Nelson 

Merle Haggard

Every Grain of Sand

She sells sea shells on the sea shore.....

In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need

When the pool of tears beneath my feet flood every newborn seed

There’s a dyin’ voice within me reaching out somewhere

Toiling in the danger and in the morals of despair

Bob Dylan

Every Grain of Sand

(1981)

December 12th, 2024. This would be my (Amanda's and my) fortieth wedding anniversary, but, hey!  Every day is something.  Every day is someone's birthday, someone's death day.  Time spins on, picking up fluff, leaving stuff behind.  

What you can do?

I set out from home, in Snettisham, and walk over Ken Hill, and across the marsh, filling now with wetness, becoming slowly impassable, to the shore of the Wash.

The sky is heavy, though clouds and azure vie for attention. The tide is well out and there is no one about. I head towards Hunstanton, a six and a half mile walk, to make the best of a winter's day.  

The recent storms have caused havoc amongst the inhabitants of the estuary, and there are hundreds of lost-life forms. Starfish, wrecked and lifeless abound in different configurations:

Their 'little' (what does that say?) lives drowned away by the whipping of the wind and the turmoil of the sea.  

Youthful flatfish, maybe dabs, or immature plaice (help me someone?) turn their right-sided eyes to the sky in premature oblivion:

Razor clams:

Whelks:

Their spent seed-cases:

Crabs:

And urchins:

All lie exhausted and empty on the beach, the impulses and instincts of life extinguished by the very nature that gave them being.

Human intervention makes no difference:

The sky lowers. Drizzle blurs my vision. A flag shrugs in the distance:

Someone wanders into my sightline, another lonely figure in an empty seascape. It could be good to exchange thoughts, but there is some unspoken barrier between us, so I keep moving on:

I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea

Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me

I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man

Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand

Forty years ago today something wonderful came to pass, but now it is over and the world spins on. I am so grateful for the love we had, and for all that is still good in this world.

Don't have the inclination to look back on any mistake

Like Cain, I now behold this chain of events that I must break

In the fury of the moment I can see the Master’s hand

In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand

Bob Dylan

Every Grain of Sand

Copyright © 1981 by Special Rider Music

Now, please repeat after me, one of my paternal grandfather's favourite tongue twisters:

She sells sea shells on the sea shore......

On a Wing and a Prayer

Learning to fly

It is a beautiful morning, so fresh after the storms.  The early morning sun slices across the Norfolk landscape like a silver knife through a pat of warm butter.  It is cool, and the wind tugs at the long grass, shaking the bushes by the path.  The tide is out, and the waves splutter harmlessly some way away.  Above me a copper blue sky, which tinges down to a daub of stilton smeared across the horizon where there is a bank of clouds above the wind farm.

I stagger backwards up the beach, locked tight to Karl by the straps and carabiners in my harness, then, as the updraft fills the elliptical wing above us we charge left, my legs all over the place, and we leave the ground, silently rising close to the chalk cliffs of Old Hunstanton, then we are aloft - the beach, the sea, the grassy slopes falling rapidly away.

I thought I might be scared. In my youth I would get vertigo on a thick pile carpet, and, though nowadays I can steel myself to the top of tall buildings, looking down from the the Mole Antonelliana in Turin (at 167.5 metres still the world's tallest unreinforced brick building) and standing on the glass floor of the 170 metre Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth, I tremble half way up a ladder to clean my gutters.

But no.  There is no fear.  I suppose there's not much point. Karl is sitting on a reserve parachute, but we aren't high enough for it to open if we needed it, even though I guess we must be thirty of more metres above the ground by now.

How am I here, vying with the gulls in the chill air?  Well, I held a launch party for my new book (see below), and Karl should have been in Saudi Arabia flying for some sheik, but that was cancelled at the last minute, so he turned up at my house, and, after a few drinks, he suggested I might like a tandem flight at eight the next morning (as a contribution to charity).

I probably should not have drunk so much....  not because I wouldn't have accepted the generous offer, but because early in the morning I could actually have felt better.  Anyway, after a hurried breakfast of two cups of tea, two ginger biscuits and a pair of paracetamol, I stumble to the car park at Hunstanton cliffs, where several hardy types are already careering across the sky.  It's a brilliant morning, and they all seem to know each other, so there's immediately a tangible camaraderie.  One lends me gloves (I needed them!) others help us launch. 

Up above Hunstanton there are rights of way, as we sail along on the rising wind, passing by, or over, or under individuals who swing and veer through the air flaring on their Moustaches.

Below us pink people take part in a park run, walkers wave, and tiny people walk tiny dogs on the beach, our shadow sweeping after them across the sand.

It is calm.  Karl manoeuvres by pulling down the control line on one side and easing up on the other, so one side of the wing slows and we turn.  It all seems easy, but then he's been doing it for twenty-five years, all over the world.  I feel quite safe. It is thrilling, riding the rolling level.... striding high.... rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing.....

But then it is time to think about landing....

And the land is far below us.... And landing means the meeting of two bodies and all our gear attracted by the gravitational pull of the earth, with a forward speed of, say, ten miles an hour, all at the mercy of a gusting wind and the pull of a few strings..... As we approach the beach Karl calls to two of his mates for them to act as brakes (?) and we are suddenly in contact with the solid part of the planet. Ideally we should have hit the ground running. the trailing edge of the wing flopping behind us and the brakes (?) holding us by the risers and the carabiners (?) Unfortunately, on this particular occasion, the wind tips the leading edge of the wing over us and we collapse face forward at some speed, strapped tightly together, scrambling crablike across the uneven sand. Fortunately, no harm is done. My camera is shaken, not shattered, and it is only my dignity that is damaged.

Wow!  

Thank you, Karl!

Brothers in arms!

**********

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-

dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

The Windhover

Gerard Manley Hopkins

**********

And, in case you didn't know, my new book:

is now available to buy (all proceeds to charity).  It is almost as good as sliced bread, and if you don't believe me, read what others say about it:

Simply the finest book I have read about Norfolk this week.

Sir John Betjeman

Bloodsports Weekly

Your man Gibbs has a fine way with plagiarism - and the daguerreotypes are great!

George Bernard Shaw

The London Review of Books

I have nothing to declare but my genius - Oh?  You wanted something about that book?  Well, it's very nice.....

Oscar Wilde

Time Out

I say, Jeeves, what a spiffing book!

Bertie Wooster

Indeed, Sir?

Jeeves

I want the film rights.....

Sam Peckinpah

Just email me at richardpgibbs@aol.com