Dazzling

The road to the island is a string of red and white lights. We see them glowing from further down the coast, like the final scene in Field of Dreams: ‘if you build it, they will come’. It is 9.30pm and after sunset but the sky is still light. I had imagined a quiet quest to the lighthouse. On a small island, just off the coast, it is one of the darker places nearby. We have come in search of the Aurora Borealis. A solar storm is raging somewhere above us and we have been told that tonight the Aurora may be visible. Though we are in the north of England, it isn’t usual for them to be seen this far south. Stupidly, I hadn’t expected that so many others would have the same idea. We follow a slow trail of cars onto the island road. The car park nearest the lighthouse is already full, so we retreat to a smaller one further back down the road.

We walk up a lane bordered by wheat fields and wetlands. It is a rough, gravelled path with no lights. The sky is rich blue with an orange glow on the horizon. Smoky clouds hover motionless. A crescent moon, newly waxing, hangs beside a handful of stars. I hear the soft chitter of birds hidden somewhere in the hedgerow. A dark shape flits through the darkness, perhaps a bat. We can hear voices, laughing somewhere up the path. The lighthouse appears, floodlit in amber, through a gap in the trees. But it is still too light for the Aurora, so we return to the sea.

Far out, the sea is an impenetrable indigo. Closer to shore, patches of water suspended between black reefs shine with trails of coloured lights from the town. The town is a blur of illumination. Each wind turbine bears its own beacon. This morning when we passed here, the sea was like glass. Horizon bled into water so that the ships out there appeared to be floating. Tonight, those same ships bedazzle the dark sea with a plethora of lights. They have clustered together, as though for comfort in the night. On the beach, a small fire flickers orange. It is already a night of many colours.

We wait. I watch the moon sink lower. It is after eleven now. Neither of us has seen the Northern Lights before and we’re sceptical we will see them tonight. It is our first attempt and we can’t imagine we will be so lucky. A steady stream of cars comes and goes. They disgorge people: adults, teenagers, children in their pyjamas. All of us waiting.

Until what appears to be a skein of white cloud appears. My wife points it out, convinced it is something other. Then, rays of light, like sunlight through a cloud. There is suddenly a cerise tinge to the skein of cloud. Next, the rays become green and pink. The Aurora is right above us. It is like a starburst in the sky, sending down fingers of colour. Stars and clouds sit behind it. There is no apparent movement, yet it does keep changing, in colour and intensity. The lights move us, but mostly, there is joy. We watch until after midnight, when the colours become less vivid. We’re still smiling as we follow the slow snake of traffic away from the lighthouse. The Aurora vanish in the glare of the town lights, as if there is no storm above, but we still carry them inside us.

Tooth of the lion

It is dandelion season. They cluster along the edges of roadsides and take over patches of waste ground. They push up from cracks in the pavement and squat in gutters. While the daffodils are withered and brown and the white dead nettle too subtle to compete, it is the dandelions, with their extrovert yellow, that steal the glory.

It was in the 1500s that they became associated with the lion, their jagged leaves giving them the name of lion’s tooth, or dent-de-lion. But their rich colour is also reminiscent of the sun, ruler of Leo, the astrological lion. Today, they have lost any regal associations and are seen as nothing but a weed, inconvenient or despised, depending on your point of view. Yet a field of dandelions is easily as beautiful as one of more well-regarded wildflowers.

When you live in a town, you find the wild where you can. Not just in the obvious parks and squares, but in the edges, the forgotten corners and in the overlooked plants. Since lockdown, when the weeds were given free rein to grow where they might, there seem to be more of them. Weeds have always found enterprising spaces, but they have had a little freedom and are taking advantage of it.

I delight in the dandelions’ beauty in the urban wild, but in the yard, I give them no mercy, pulling them from pots to allow other flowers to flourish. As anyone knows who has tried to dislodge a dandelion, they cling to the soil with a lion’s strength. And they are resilient. Only a few days after the grass mower in the park destroys any flower that has dared to grow, dandelions appear again, pushing up through the grass clippings. They will be with us all through the summer, when we’re distracted by other blooms, and through the turn of another season into autumn, reminding us that beauty is always there in the humblest package.

They remind us too, that nature is forever transforming itself. It isn’t long before the patches of yellow re-emerge as delicate globes, filagrees of seeds ready to be swept away by wind or breath. These spheres are much less robust than the flowers that came before them, those tiny seeds bearing no resemblance to what they will become. But that is the point. Their purpose is to travel: to float and to dance on the whim of the breeze, before finally coming to rest, perhaps far from where they began. The dandelion shifts from form to form effortlessly. As we move into the height of spring, we could learn from its bold journey of renewal.

Coasting

Early March and curlews forage in the stubbled wheat field. We follow the road round to the island, past meadows dried to straw. The horizon opens out into big, bold clouds. On the headland, someone has left flowers at Curry’s Point, where the murderer Michael Curry was hung in a gibbet in 1739 for murdering the landlord of a local inn. We struggle past, through the wind down to the causeway.

On rocks green with gut weed, a black backed gull stalks. She picks out a crab from a rock pool. A crow, dwarfed by her size, follows her every move, hoping for a morsel. The sea is streaks of blue and aqua, fraying to grey and white at the edges. Far out, there is a blue ship. Behind the lighthouse, the turbines rotate on the horizon.

The beach is strewn with patches of small pebbles, bladderwrack and stems of kelp. A pied wagtail pecks among the seaweed. Gulls soar above the cliffs, revelling in the lift of the wind. A red container ship leaves Blyth port, sounding its horn to announce its passage. Winston plays with his ball for a while but then we walk up to the cliffs.

All is dry and bare on the cliff top. Spring is hardly noticeable here. There are two small patches of daffodils. Shrubs with fiery branches and lichen covered bark. A single wizened hawthorn is still laden with berries. Its companions in the hedgerows all bow inwards, grown in the direction of the wind. Just before we leave, a rainbow reaches out of the waves to embrace the lighthouse.

Later in the month, we walk high above the river. The sun is bright behind clouds and the light is exquisite: pale, soft and blurred. As the sun moves, it lights up the water like bouncing diamonds. The tide is in and the waves are rough. White spume fans over the piers and the deadly black midden rocks.

I walk Winston down a path lined with Alexanders, lime flowers against fresh green leaves. Smoke from a garden bonfire scents the path. The sound of the sea crescendos as we walk, until we pass under a sylvan arch and the mouth of the river is laid out before us. The lighthouse on the south pier is open to the elements, its top having been blown off in a storm last year and never found. Herd Groyne lighthouse glows crimson in the harbour. On the beach behind it, there appears to be a sand storm, waves of sand rolling like mist. To our left, Lord Collingwood gazes forever out to sea, canons poised beneath him, gull perched on his head.

Easter weekend. The equinox has just passed and tomorrow the clocks will be wound forward for spring. We join people down at the fish quay for the traditional Good Friday fish and chips. We are early and the queues still small, but they will get much longer as the day goes on. Spring is still settling into balance – sun and showers today, snow forecast for next week. The hedgerows are full of blackthorn blossom and I have seen a parakeet in the park, but there will be more storms before the season fully turns.

Stirring

Strings of crocuses herald Candlemas. Butter yellow globes and eerie lilac spears in the plant pots in front of the house, in the park, and along the roadside. They are still buds, closed up tight but ready to burst, brave signals of the season to come. On the eve of Candlemas the sky is aflame: indigo and lilac clouds against an azure sky, pink and orange stripes across the horizon.

At dawn, all that remains of the colour is a thick orange band across the horizon. In a sky of two halves, white clouds scud against blue to the north and a mass of grey veils the south. There is a stillness within the whipping wind that accords with the deep energy of Candlemas. It isn’t yet spring, but spring is stirring. Deep within the earth, transformation is afoot. The shoots and the catkins and the baby leaves give something away, but for now the earth holds onto her mysteries.

The blossom tree that toppled in a storm two years ago is still alive, lying on its side. A small flock of wood pigeons forage on the grass before it. Another of the fallen has been denuded and bleached, but is a skeletal limb on the ground. The landscape seems to be a tangle of ivy, its berries mostly eaten.

At the creek, a group of long-tailed tits bounce over the path from one tree to another, calling softly. The burn is low and still. A robin sings from high up in the canopy. A pair of mallards float quietly on the small weed-choked pond. Six magpies squabble on the grass and a seagull soars on the wind high above. The reeds that line the burn have all been scythed, I think because they were being set on fire by local ruffians. A few marsh marigold flowers are vivid yellow splashes in the stream. 

Mahonia blooms at the edge of the pond. The daffodil shoots are out but there is no hint of any flowers yet. Mallards float languidly and a couple of black headed gulls swoop in. Moorhens flute softly from the reeds. A pair of mallards bob heads in unison. A heron is hunched on the edge of the reeds, back turned to the pond and head under his wing. 

It has been too long since I came to the dene, but the signs of the season are much as always, re-assuring me that some things don’t change. I am trying to re-set myself. After months lacking motivation, staying out of the world and not paying attention, I hope this walk will stir something in me, re-awaken the creative spirit. It is a quiet start, but an intentional one. In the coming days, I will watch the crocuses unfurl their tiny splendours, listen to a robin sing his heart out in a tree of catkins and spot my first ever redwing. The earth is awakening and so am I.

Melting

On the hottest day of the year, I take a morning walk through the forest. The chalk and gravel path is dusty and speaks of sun and heat to come. I wander a curved path through the meadow, bristling with the dark heads of old thistles and pale grasses. Most of the flowers are gone and it is the webs that offer adornment. Particularly at this time of the morning, when the sun is still on its golden climb and there is moisture left in the ground. Orbs as big as dinner plates and close knit triangles, like hammocks on the grass. When you notice one, you see them all.

I cross the bridge over a trickling stream. There is nobody else in the forest. I am accompanied by the soft songs of birds, the gentle buzz of bee and fly, the silent dance of butterflies across dappled light. Through plantations of conifers brooding over the path. Past familiar landmarks, like the gate that leads nowhere and the valley strung with telegraph poles and wires. Delicate heather is in flower, and I find a blooming of fungi, despite the dry conditions. A huge area of forest has been cleared, opening a shattered vista that is being colonised by new growth and more webs. I cross the stream again, past a rowan flaming with berries, back to the meadow. I’m tired and hot already. Back in the cabin, we close the heavy curtains and retreat indoors.

It is early September. We had hoped for autumn. Days cool for walking, nights chill enough to light the log burner. When we heard the forecasts, we assumed there would be a few hot days at the beginning of the week, before the season felt more like it should. But the heat hasn’t broken. Despite the shade of the forest, it has been too hot to walk. Winston manages a short wander before he is panting and wobbly. We stay close to the cabin, embraced by oak, pine, birch and ash. Ivy hugs the trunks of the trees. Pine needles flutter onto the deck. We’re visited by mobs of blue, great and coal tits, a shy and ragged robin, a few chaffinches, blackbirds and a nuthatch. A treecreeper spirals up and down the trees and a woodpecker taps softly on a nearby trunk. For the first time, I hear the mew of a buzzard. It reminds me of a score of movies in which a hawk’s cry is a symbol of the unforgiving desert. I watch as a pair glide over the canopy. It seems appropriate.

A grey squirrel is like a noisy delinquent: rustling foliage, cracking seeds, dropping things onto the metal roof. He feasts on acorns and blackberries, topped up by bird food he munches while defiantly watching us. This may or may not be Steve, rescued as a baby by the site manager and named before they knew he was a she. S/he seems content to spend the day leaping between the small cluster of trees that surround us. For an hour or so in the early afternoon, we cross to the site café to have a drink in air-conditioned comfort and watch a plethora of red admirals drink from the buddleia outside. As the sun sinks, the swallows and swifts appear, high up above the trees, dancing across the sky after the midges.

That night lightning darts across the sky. There is no thunder. No rain. Just the light. Flashes faint and bright, silhouetting the trees, as though a silent piece of music is being conducted across the sky. It is the following night when bass and percussion arrive. Rain batters the leaves, like the fall and rise of applause. Thunder booms and grumbles. For hours, we’re mesmerised by the storm. It is a gloriously rowdy end to the heatwave.

We leave the forest before dawn. The paths are muddy and the landscape infused with fog. The woods appear sickly green in the headlights. A toad crawls across the road like an alien. As we leave the trees behind, the fields are spectral with mist. A sliver of moon and Venus are bright in a pastel sky. In my pocket is an acorn, a gift left on the deck by Steve or perhaps the tree itself, a reminder that the dark half of the year has arrived, but that it holds the promise of growth within it. On this enchanted morning I can believe in the possibility of autumn and all it will bring.

Soaked

After weeks of storm warnings that came to nothing, a good old-fashioned thunderstorm arrives. Gentle at first, the thunder builds to a loud grumble that doesn’t stop. It booms and bangs, cracks and rumbles. Rain pours, rattling against the windows, stotting off the pavements. The road is replaced by a river, drops of water bouncing off its surface like miniature silver spinning tops. Lightning comes in constant flashes. There is no gap between lightning and thunder that might hint at how long the storm will last. Everything is happening at once. Until suddenly it ends. I take Winston for his walk in a dripping world, but as we return, the rain is starting again and the sky moans once more.

A couple of days later, the storm is long gone, though the wind blows and the sky still stirs with moody clouds. The rain is distant, visible in dark stripes out at sea beyond the wind turbines. There is a clarity in the light that brings out the colours. The sea is blue and green and grey. The sky is a thick stripe of blue topped by blue grey swirls of clouds. It feels like there could be a storm, but it stays out at sea.

In the car park, starlings gather. The adults look at their best, with glossy, multi-coloured feathers and bright points of white. They look for titbits, swarming around cars, hopping onto the grass, or finding a random spot from which to observe us. The clifftops are crisp and straw-coloured, dried grasses woven with brighter patches of ragwort and lady’s bedstraw. Willowherb, cornflowers and knapweed offer accents of purple.

A reef stretches out from the headland, like a zig zag path to a red ship out at sea. The ship is bathed by the sun, as though surrounded by a circle of warm light. Then, the sunlight disappears and it is lost in streaks of rain on the horizon. It is low tide. Scores of seaweed-clad rocks are unveiled. A line of people walk across the causeway to the lighthouse. Children shout and run on the small beach. We walk down to the sand but it’s too hot for Winston to run around. Instead, we sit on one of the memorial benches that snake along the cliff top. Two starlings instantly appear. My wife gives them snacks, while Winston has a few treats of his own.

July has brought extreme heat and wildfires in Europe and elsewhere. It may prove to be the hottest on record. These extreme summers are already becoming the norm. But the jet stream has been keeping that unbearable heat away from us. Our July has been one of our wettest and I’m grateful for that. The month ends with a glowering sky, a day of rain and the promise of more to come.

Abundance

On a Sunday morning during a bank holiday weekend, the cemetery hums with life. There are no funerals today. The crematorium is locked and empty. Few people attend to graves. The atmosphere is light-hearted. Though the sky is grey, a warm breeze tickles my skin. Dogs frolic, families walk and ride bikes.

Cow parsley adds to the light atmosphere: an effervescent cloud of delicate white, accented by bluebells. Here and there buttercups offer a scattering of vibrant yellow, campion an accent of magenta. Graceful cuckoo flowers almost fade into the background. The horse chestnuts still bear cones of flowers and elder are just beginning to bloom, but it is the hawthorn that is heavy with blossom. An angel bears a fading bouquet, face shrouded with spiders’ webs.

The birds are busy with hidden tasks. I hear the blackbirds’ loud song and the cackle of crows. A crow swoops out of the trees and perches on top of a grave. A few wood pigeons quietly forage. A blackbird bursts out of the bushes with an alarm call. Eventually the sun comes out and the tiny creatures appear: a bumblebee drowses around a grave and flies polka-dot the air before me.

Later in the month, I wander the country park and the wagonway. Ox-eye daisies sway in the hedgerows and yellow flag are golden-tipped spears among the pond reeds. Buttercups and viper’s bugloss pepper the gravelly heathland. Winged creatures are a-flight. A small white butterfly settles on a sun-bathed leaf. Insects with gossamer wings dance over the pond. Damselflies are everywhere, the males electric blue darts. I peer into the reeds, trying to capture one on film, until a grumpy moorhen complains. There are probably chicks among the reeds, so I back off.

The wagonway is a vein of green. Lush foliage hasn’t yet produced blossom, except for the shock of the hawthorns. The butterburr flowers are long gone, making way for a primeval leaf-scape of huge, tough leaves. Nettles and brambles tangle in the undergrowth. Tadpoles gather in a pond that is little more than a puddle. I find a long stretch of strawberry plants in the middle of the path, all in flower, a bountiful larder for later in the summer.

The gabion baskets near the river, shoring up the embankment, burst with pink valerian, red poppies, blue viper’s bugloss and more. In the park, the wildflower meadow has exploded. The area is waist high and vibrant with flowers in red, white and blue. Nearby, a wall of ladybirds shed their orange and black larval skin.

But the landscape wilts in the face of a heatwave and a lack of rain. The weather is hotter than normal and uncomfortably humid. We wait for storms that don’t come. When they do, thunder only grumbles in the distance, but the rain gushes in heavy showers that feel like blessings. The summer solstice arrives amid all this abundance, a celebration of the sun as it’s power begins to subside. There is usually a point near midsummer, when I feel the faintest hint of autumn in the air. Perhaps it is a reaction to the now-diminishing light, perhaps something else, but it always gives me a leap of excitement, before I realise that the bulk of the summer is still to come. There is more abundance to be enjoyed. Whites and yellows will give way to purples, thistledown will cloud the air, foliage will become straggly and overblown as nature’s kaleidoscope continues.

Re-shaping

I stand under the wild cherry tree, hand resting on its shattered heart.  This is my portal tree.  Stand beneath it in spring and you are intoxicated by the froth of blossom and light.  In autumn, its gilded canopy bathes you in gold.  Stand there long enough and you feel that you are no longer in an urban park, but in another place altogether, shimmering between worlds.  But last year, a winter storm cleaved the trunk in two, shearing away a large bough and leaving the heart blasted open.  I count at least fifteen rings where the wood has shattered. The vulnerable heartwood is sticky with sap.  I wonder if it will survive another fifteen years. And yet blossom time arrived and it blossomed just as it always has. The branches are sparser now, but it is surviving, with small green cherries already visible among the leaves.

For months, I have been silent, with no words to offer to the world. The year turned through each season, from spring to spring again. We were seared by the hottest day on record, watched wildfires burn out of control and suffered from the lack of rain. The landscape visibly changed. Storms, floods and fire re-shaped the world and our neighbourhoods. After our human pandemic, thousands of crabs washed up dead on our local beaches and our coastal birds were decimated by bird flu. Businesses have closed and our town is full of empty shops. People worry about how they will pay their bills and use food banks so that they can eat. Our health service crumbles and there are strikes by doctors, nurses and others. At times, it seems like everything is broken. At times, it seems apocalyptic.

And as the world changed, I changed with it. I have been buffeted by the winds that felled the trees, baked by the scorching sun, felled by the virus, but more than that. I am feeling my age. There is a re-making, a re-shaping of myself afoot. I have moved into the third act of life and the crone is approaching. It is a time to measure with joy or regret. A time to grieve the things I will now never be or do and put to bed those imagined other lives. There are now things it is pointless to spend time on because the return won’t be worth it. Nor should I worry about a legacy when we are all forgotten in the end. It’s a time to consider how I want to spend my precious future. Rekindling my creativity seems urgent. Every Friday I think this will be the weekend I write, but I can’t quite translate thought into action.

On the morning after the winter solstice, when the sun was new once more, I stood under a sky streaked crimson and wondered how to make this year count. I hadn’t watched a sunrise for months. I’d lost that everyday connection to the natural world and I wanted it back again. I started with the basics: attention and curiosity. Each day I would spend at least five minutes paying full attention to the world: rain-washed pavements like polished jet, old stones gilded by the setting sun, a full moon turning the clouds sepia, a rainbow in a denim blue sky, gulls huddled on a frozen lake, waves like white horses with manes of spume.

In the park, scores of baby trees, planted by children, are surviving. Some grow crooked, some seem too fragile to persist, but they grow all the same. Wildflower seeds scattered last year have brought poppies, cornflowers and scorpion weed. The town square has been restored to its Georgian finery and a nearby street pedestrianised, in the hope of bringing people back. Birds proclaim from hedgerows clotted with hawthorn blossom. I see my first swallow and my first butterfly. The world may have changed, and us with it, but that is nothing new. Hope carries us forward until the season turns again.

Travelling

As we leave civilisation behind and move onto small winding roads, pools of white shimmer and multiply. It is early March and it is our first trip since the pandemic, more than three years since we packed up the car and left for elsewhere. Rain hits the windscreen in fat blotches, blurring the way ahead. We pass through lanes of green and brown: muddy edges and meandering curves, trickling burns and pasture. And everywhere the white of snowdrops; tufts and clumps and rivers of them, luminous against the sepia and grey background. I have never seen so many.

We stay in an old Gamekeeper’s cottage on the edge of a tiny hamlet. It is golden stone and sash windows, flagstone floors and chintz, vintage furniture and latched wooden doors. It is the crackle of coal and logs shifting in a stone fireplace. Lanes edged in copper beech. Dry stone walls cushioned by moss. Damp, muddy tracks and fallen pine needles. The muffled boom of artillery from the military ranges nearby. It is too dark that first night. I fear not being able to see anything around me so I leave a porch light on to relieve the darkness. But in the early hours I’m woken by a strange noise. The darkness is thick, with no friendly light to re-assure me. I get up, confused, using my phone for illumination, trying light switches. I can only conclude that it’s a power cut, but it seems somehow sinister on this our first night. I sleep fitfully.

The hill broods over the landscape. Flat-topped with a bite taken out of one side, it dominates the southern horizon. It is visible from every viewpoint. Sometimes it becomes lost in mist and cloud, but it is still there, ready to re-emerge, a dark shadow in the distance. Clad in heather and pines, mostly it is an ebony silhouette, sometimes a patchwork of mauve and green. This is a magic hill, a place of bronze age burial tombs, cairns and rock carvings; a home to fey folk and dwarves who lure unwary travellers to their death. We have approached its flanks before, seeking cup and ring marked boulders and the impression of ancient hill forts.

We fill up the empty bird feeders in the garden and the songbirds come. Robin, blackbird, chaffinch, goldfinch, tits. They flutter between the beech hedge and a rhododendron and empty the feeders in a few short hours. Copper beech leaves twirl and helicopter in the wind. A pair of thrushes scuttle in the leaf litter. Every evening, rooks fly over towards nearby rookeries, raucously calling. Every morning, they pass again at the start of their day. At dawn the sun glows above the hills. At night Orion shimmers in the darkness.

There are many paths to explore. We skirt the edge of a ploughed field, wander lanes between farm buildings and pasture. A small copse of pines leads us past a lake of snowdrops and a pink child’s dressing table discarded among the roots of a tree. We wander a grassed path bouncy with disuse. Sheep chuckle in the fields. Sometimes the wind follows us, rising to a roar that makes me think something is coming. We have struggled to settle here. Despite the welcoming cottage and quiet paths. Despite the pleasing landscape and the fluttering birds. We are glad to go at the end of the week and that makes me wonder if we will ever leave home again. On the way back, a hawk perched on the ground seems to look right at me and the rain starts to fall once more.

Two months later and white has retreated from the ground. We travel down the motorway for Winston’s hydrotherapy and yellow has taken over. Cowslips and primrose, as numerous as the snowdrops were, a few clumps of daffodil and shrubs of gorse. White has moved to the trees, trailing blossom.

March Moment

I almost miss it. It has been a hard and hectic week at work so I am still in my head, eyes down, not paying attention to the world. Cold, hard rain tips down, wetting me and my packages. I just want to get home. But something tells me to look up.

I notice the colour of the sky first, a rich denim blue befitting the rain it contains. Then there is the rainbow, a vibrant singing arc embracing the town. The colours are so bright that they seem to fizz out of their stripes. It has a companion, another complete arc, a little more faded than the first. And perhaps, there is just the suggestion of a third. I walk through the park, turning back regularly to see the rainbows span the houses, to watch them peek between bare branches.

A man stops to tell me he is admiring the rainbows’ beauty. Another stops his car at the edge of the park to take a picture of it, sharing his excitement at how vivid it is. So for a short time, it is a shared moment, bringing strangers together with its beauty. I get home minutes later and urge my wife to go outside and look, but it has already faded. The rain has stopped and the sky has returned to a dull grey, as if the moment never happened.