That’s what happened to this blog over the last few months – and it lived on only as half-started posts in my notebook, good intentions and a ghostly on screen presence… the spirit of Bookish Nature Past…

Miss Havisham-like, I still feel a bit frozen and stuck, my blog all cobwebby and neglected. The clocks all stopped. But, on Sunday, some bookish progress was afoot, when I finished reading The Mystery of Edwin Drood – in the nick of time, ahead of the BBC’s adaptation to be screened… tonight!

To be precise, it was back in August when I finished reading The Mystery of Edwin Drood as it was left to us by Charles Dickens – forever suspended at the end of Chapter 23 which, so poignantly, he penned just the day before he died. Since then, I’ve been trying to unfreeze my literary critical faculties enough to write something here about Dickens’s unfinished novel, before embarking on reading Leon Garfield’s interpretation of a possible ending. The plan was to write my impressions of Dickens’s last novel and my take on where it may have been going – then to read Leon Garfield’s completion of the tale, write a separate post on that – and then conclude with a post about the BBC adaptation and how each compares… However, still being stuck in my Bookish Nature version of Satis House, that plan has remained as cobwebbed over as Miss H’s wedding cake!

But, at least now… at the eleventh hour… I’m blowing away the dust and trying to resurrect the poor neglected thing (though I doubt I’ll get my Edwin Drood posts finished in time to coincide with the screening of the television mini-series; will this blog ever be topical??? I always seem to be dozens of steps behind the signs of the times!) With an attempt to stay vaguely on track, I leapt in ahead of the BBC adaptation’s imminent arrival, and read Leon Garfield’s ending of the novel over the weekend – so this resurrected creature of a plan won’t be quite the same thing as was originally intended. But, hey, it just may well morph into something more meaningful…or meandering…or both… and go down all sorts of unexpected ways, maybe following all those probing and mysterious beams of light which, through Dickens’s (and Garfield’s) imagery, follow the novel’s brittle, edgy darkness and prise it open, pestering a reminder of truths to keep the shadows in perpetual tension; a play of light and dark upon the wall – with struggling gleams of possible resurrection and redemption being, I think, what Dickens may have most wanted the reader to keep their eye on…

So, I suppose that’s a very good note on which to also resurrect this blog. I tried in vain to write a detailed post about Edwin Drood yesterday morning and ended up still going down a thousand ways and getting nowhere (I keep hitting this problem of too much in my head, and not enough idea how to deal with it all!) I was feeling a little despondent that I’ll never get back the blogging habit. But, over the next few days (or most probably weeks…) I will attempt to bludgeon into shape all my notes and we shall try to begin again… At least I’ve managed to cobble together this post today, which is a start and makes things seem a little less daunting! And there are some nature oriented posts lurking half prepared in my notebook to knock into shape too…

Add to that the fact that the BBC’s very interesting adaptation of Great Expectations has left me longing to return to the real thing… plus the very tempting group read of Our Mutual Friend (one of my absolute favourite novels of all time) coming soon over at The Argumentative Old Git – I’d better get started on dusting off those cobwebs! See you back here soon for, hopefully, some resulting shiny new posts over the coming weeks…

I started writing the following post yesterday, with every intention of posting it on the actual ‘Big Day’ - but… time and events had other ideas… So, here’s the finished article; a day late – but hopefully still topical (may whichever day you happen across this post, be a bookish celebration wherever you are in the world!)

Here’s what I wrote on 3rd March 2011:

My son has gone into school today dressed as Harry Potter, his wheelchair wheels sprinkled with wizardly magic (how he would love to be able to fly that NHS wheelchair, broomstick fashion, at Nimbus 2000 speeds! There would be no stopping him; he’d be airborne faster than you could say ‘snitch!’)

As I write this, my daughter will be paying homage beside Shakespeare’s grave. I hope she is passing on to Will a special moment of remembrance from her mum…

Later, she will spend a couple of hours at a workshop with the RSC – followed by a trip to the recently re-opened Royal Shakespeare Theatre, to see Rupert Goold’s production of Romeo and Juliet; a school trip beyond the wildest dreams of my own teenage years!

She’s beaten me to it as first member of the family to experience the new theatre at Stratford upon Avon. For the past few years, I’ve periodically watched its gradual rebirth, gazing across the River Avon at the original red brick façade, imagining the ghosts in its walls stirring, gathering up the memories and poetry of the soul of the theatre as it settles around the new stage and waits for new magic to happen.

My September 2008 trip to see the RSC’s truly riveting, unforgettable Hamlet (David Tennant, Patrick Stewart, Penny Downie – directed by Gregory Doran) saw the RST redevelopment looking like this:

My birthday treat in February 2009 (to see Antony Sher and John Kani in a deeply moving production of The Tempest – its African heartbeat throbbing with the strange magic of the play) - took place in a mysterious, mythological world parallel to these scenes:

And, in June 2009 – another trip to Stratford upon Avon revealed these changes in the theatre:

…all bound up with memories of the truly visceral drama of the assassination scene in Julius Caesar, which I watched through tears of shock and pity, my emotions wrung by the electric, skilful interplay of confusion, betrayal and human frailty moving like a lonely, cornered animal amongst the characters on the stage.

In August 2009, my daughter and I were gifted a very different mood of fun, frolics and superbly handled mayhem in the Young People’s Shakespeare production of A Comedy of Errors – and in June 2010, my friend and I were back in ancient Rome, following Darrell de Silva to Egypt, as he and Kathryn Hunter sparked and sparred in a crackling production of Antony and Cleopatra.

In beautiful August evening sunshine, 2010 – after my daughter and I had been treated to a wonderful Young People’s Shakespeare production of Hamlet - in which Debbie Korley delivered one of the best, most heartbreaking Ophelias I’ve ever seen - I took these pictures of a near complete new RST:

…And also took these commemorative pictures of the Courtyard Theatre, the RSC’s temporary performance space (and template for the auditorium of the RST rebuild) with sad, fond nostalgia in my heart. How I love that ‘big rusty shed.’ So full of memories…

But now, anticipation of my first visit to the transformed RST in June awaits new memories in the making. My tickets – little paper portals to actually be there when Jonathan Slinger, directed by Michael Boyd, inhabits the skin of Macbeth – are tucked away safely and at the ready. My excitement about this production is simmering at heart leaping levels already – it will be the first live performance I’ve seen of  ‘The Scottish Play’ since Peter O’Toole was beguiled by siren witches in the infamous Old Vic production of 1980!

Macbeth is special to me – the first Shakespeare play I ever read. I first opened its pages when I was about the age my daughter is now, and it awakened in me a passion for the Bard that has continued to deepen, grow and embed itself ever more firmly in the fabric of who I am. Now, I see the same process at work in my daughter…

For these reasons, and more, I can hardly wait to see Macbeth come alive on stage in what promises to be an electrifying production - and I can’t wait to get inside the new RST. Tonight though, the magic of the place will be brought home here in the sparkle of my daughter’s eyes, and in her tales of her experiences there. This World Book day, she is caught in those heady, early stages of falling in love – as I was when I first read Macbeth – with the book that truly belongs to all the world:

Just a few World Book Days ago, she too went into primary school dressed in the Gryffindor cloak my son wore today (she was Hermione – big hair included!)

Not long before I first read Macbeth, I was tucked up in bed riveted by Jill’s Gymkhana or avidly following Bilbo Baggins ‘there and back again’ (well, I still am sometimes…some things don’t change… )

From Ron Weasley to Romeo, from The Hobbit to Hamlet – there’s no telling where a journey through books will lead…

…We were on our way back from an hour long sojourn in Mirror World, still a little unsure as to which layer of reality we were actually moving through. For my daughter and me, Cornelia Funke’s presentation of her latest book, Reckless at the Bath Children’s Literature Festival, had served up more than a small dose of enchantment…

An hour before, under the Christmas tree dazzle of the Guildhall’s beautiful chandeliers, all eyes had turned to the ballroom doors, as Cornelia entered – like a high priestess of fairytale – resplendent in a the most amazing dress I’ve ever had the privilege to share a room with.

I wish I could describe Cornelia’s Reckless tour dress in a way that would give you a truly accurate picture of how dazzling it was. Even these photos on her fan website don’t do it justice. Cornelia introduced it to us (immediately, I find myself referring to it as a living thing…) as a ‘crazy’ dress, ‘made by witches,’ every detail of it hand made to create a work of fairy tale art. Designed by Oscar winning costume designer, Jenny Beavan, it was a dress straight out of an Arthur Rackham illustration. Made from luminous layers of fabric in shades of moss and woody green, it was like an organic thing grown from ancient oaks in hidden groves, festooned with cobwebs.

An upright semi circle of green and gold feathers adorned the collar and, as Cornelia moved, the feathers and fabric glittered with random pulses of multi-coloured sparkle – making the prosaic electric spotlights of our, familiar, world reflect back at us like tiny points of magic made visible. It was as if the world from the other side of the mirror was glimpsing back at us from the shine of our own world. And this, as Cornelia explained to us, is very much what Reckless is about.

Mirror world, she explained, is the fairytale world – a world that ‘wants to grow up’ and which uses our world, the world we perceive to be real, to do so – capturing people and technology from this world in order to progress. It is the land which protrudes through to our world in the faces of stone gargoyles and the grisly tales of folklore – a world populated by a shape shifter fox woman, a Dark Fairy, children stolen from our world and turned into stone, a sleeping beauty crumbling into the passing of time, her skin turning to ‘parchment’ like the dried rose petals falling from the thorns surrounding her castle.

Cornelia explained that the book is the result of a three-way collaboration between herself, Lionel Wigram (producer of Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes films) and her cousin Oliver Latsch. Lionel came up with the initial idea of the fairytale world that wants to grow up; together he and Cornelia wove from that a whole world of ideas and narrative turns and surprises; she did the writing – and her cousin Oliver translated her drafts, and numerous rewrites, from German into English.

In answer to one child’s question from the audience expressing surprise that, with such excellent spoken English, Cornelia doesn’t write in/ translate her work into English herself, Cornelia explained that she has to write in her native tongue because it is in German that she feels most able and free to play with language and grammar, to ‘break the rules’ to create the effects she is chasing. She told us that a native English speaker is better able to translate these effects into ways that sound natural to an English speaking ear. She told us too, with real relish, of her ‘passion for words’ and that she could happily play with one sentence, altering, polishing, chasing that exact desired effect for eight hours or more, and love every minute of it. Whereas, with her original role as book illustrator, before she took up writing as a career, drawing didn’t engender the same love of time spent perfecting.

During the event, Cornelia was in conversation with Damian Kelleher. He began the journey into the world of Reckless by asking Cornelia to read us the opening of the novel. This is a threshold moment – both within the book; and within the room. Cornelia reads, unfolding the moment when Jacob Reckless discovers, and passes through, the mirror. The pin-drop silence of the audience, the many absorbed minds concentrated on her words, suspends the whole room on a threshold – a hovering between this world and the world of the book; each one of us drawn in to our own personal reflection of the narrative.

Afterwards, Cornelia told us how, when she reads aloud, she loves the thought of so many interpretations of her book existing in the room simultaneously. Once a book is made into a film, this tends to reduce to one shared version, and that is a loss. She prefers the thought of her books remaining books, rather than being turned into films. She also talked about the importance of attaching fiction to reality for depth and meaning; of the importance of research and real detail to inspire, anchor and enrich the story and its world.

She spoke too about how important it is, as a writer, not isolate yourself too much in this very solitary profession – but to remain in the flow of everyday life – because life and its very ebb and flow is what fiction is all about – and what it needs to feed from for any sense of Truth.

She told us about her ‘writing house’ in the garden of her home in Los Angeles. How she plasters the walls with pictures of things relevant to her current work, in order to immerse herself in the atmosphere those things conjure up. Hence, during writing Reckless, she covered her writing house walls with pictures of the nineteenth century; Romantic landscape paintings, the art of the pre-Raphaelites, pictures of nineteenth century industry and machinery, architecture etc.

She also talked about women’s roles in the nineteenth century, how her perceptions of those roles had been challenged by finding out more about individual women of the period who defied the passive ideal served up by those times. She linked this to the Victorian versions of fairytales – how girls in these versions are generally timid and passive; not at all like the feisty, independent characters to be found in the much scarier, pagan world of older versions – and in her fairytale world in Reckless.

Cornelia talked about modern and old worlds meeting and overlapping through her characters, Jake and Will (their names being part of the book’s general nod towards the Brothers Grimm) – brothers from the ‘younger’ ultra modern society of America, placed in the old world of Europe. She talked about how, as a frequent traveller herself, she is acutely aware of the existence and overlapping of different realities – the contrasts of place and shifts of thought as she might move from the snow, forests and lakes of Europe, to the heat of her garden in L.A. where hummingbirds feed outside the window of her writing house.

At the end of the event, Cornelia again read to us from the novel – this time from the scene where Sleeping Beauty still sleeps in a version of the tale where the Prince never turns up, and Will Reckless’s skin is slowly turning to jade. Again, the magic of the many mind-pictures at work within the room seemed to layer the moment with many realities and fictions; separate worlds of imagination, experience and vision all woven together and spellbound by the power of the edged, spare, tightly written prose of the novel. At one point, Damian Kelleher remarked on the tightness of the prose – and Cornelia said, in response, that very spare writing had been her aim, as she felt the fairytale nature of the story demanded that effect. She also spoke of the pleasure of this style, as a change from the very ‘Baroque’ nature of the language of the Ink World novels.

I made no notes whilst at the event, so this account is entirely from memory, and so may be full of blips and trips for which I apologise – and I’ve left out some details, simply for the sake of aiming for brevity (which I still don’t seem to have achieved!) For certain, this version will be a product of my own individual perception and interpretation. Another person’s version would offer an alternative reality; the other side of the mirror. What stays with me though, is a sense of ‘this world’ and ‘other-world’, hung on the balance of the language – the precision of words creating a suspension in a place of deep-seated familiarity; the familiarity of both the ‘real’ and the fairytale – a vital, formative mixture that enriches our lives as we, like Mirror World, continue to grow up.

And what stays with me also is that amazing dress – and I’m sure it will be a memory that will stay with my daughter too. Thank you, Cornelia for creating this living memory bound up with the world of books and story; the fictional made real – the book stepping into the room.

One such gem was a piece I heard on Woman’s Hour towards the end of last year. It was an interview with performance poet Hollie McNish. From the moment Hollie began to perform her poetry, I was stopped in my tracks, arrested by what I was hearing. I loved the sit-up-and-take-notice, spin-round-on-perspective style of her work. And I loved what she had to say, her desire to speak out against the trends; to open up a clearer picture of what matters beyond the rush and madness and surface.

In Fruit and Veg (the first poem Hollie performed on Woman’s Hour) and in Beautiful: Victoria Beckham or a Flower (which I’ve since heard on Hollie’s website), she confronts the sheer waste and emotional carnage of an appearance obsessed, media-led world where so many young women feel they need to wreck their own beautiful individuality to conform to an homogenised ‘ideal’ – and where celebrity and surface-focused culture blurs vision, thwarts potential and obscures so many riches and possibilities

Ms Nature, which Hollie McNish also performed on Woman’s Hour, is a poem about such riches – and, for me, to hear it was one of those diamond of the day moments.

If you’ve ever sat in a wood and felt its magic, or just had to escape to where nature reconnects you – to yourself and to life’s heart – this poem will speak to you…

You can hear Hollie McNish perform Ms Nature and other poems (including Fruit and Veg and Beautiful: Victoria Beckham or a Flower) here.

It’s 4th January – an opening chapter day in 2011 - and my husband and I are off to Westonbirt Arboretum. The Cotswold Hills today are a surprise. When we left home, the day was grey – not too cold, unremarkable. But, up here on the hills, the car is ascending to a hushed and crystallised world, the fields, hedge tops and walls hunched under a dusting of snow.

As we get out of the car at Westonbirt, we are met with a chill that catches our breath. I reach for my scarf and gloves, huddling inside my fleece and coat. Only then do I really take in the scene around me. What strikes me first is the quiet; the hunkered down feel to the day. The earth has its back turned to the chill, and the birds move, subdued and intent, nagging at it to give up some food.

Opposite the shop and Great Oak Hall, blackbirds and thrushes rush and hop, rush and hop, stabbing at the grass and flinging aside fallen leaves in search of invertebrates. Amongst them, we spot a flock of redwings, winter migrants from Scandinavia. Some are on the ground, others are gathered in the trees – and a pied wagtail is bobbing its way across the white-tangle turf.

The place feels almost deserted by humans this morning; only a scattering of people are about. Just the way we like it. All this space to ourselves! Our feet are already feeling like ice as we stop to bird watch, but the enchantment of the scene; the trees, the huddled ground under the sugar icing dusting of snow – the sheer quiet – is a lure that makes us forget the icy claw of the air. We enter the Old Arboretum and lose ourselves in a dome of green, flurried white. It is like stepping into one of those snow globes after someone has given it a shake, and all the glistening flakes are scattered thinly – the shapes of the scene quiet and resting after the mad whirl of white is over.

We are amongst the first humans to step on the ‘sugar icing’ – and we relish that sense of opening a freshly wrapped present as we start to explore. Many animals and birds have been busy here during the night and early hours of the morning. We find rabbit and deer tracks – and then suddenly, there are these perfect badger prints:

Badger (Meles meles) Paw Prints in the Snow

Later on, we walk round to one of the main setts, and find the snow around it marked by countless (very muddy!) badger paw prints of various sizes. Along one of their trails from the sett, there is a long, long churned up mark where the badgers have been busy dragging bedding from a leaf-filled ditch opposite. I imagine the brocks with those piles of dead leaves and vegetation tucked under their chins, waddling backwards as they aim their ample backsides at the mounds and entrances of their sett.

This winter must have been very hard on the badgers. The ground has been like iron for so long – impossible for them to dig or to find sustenance in that frozen confection of their staple diet of worms and other invertebrates.

Over the past year, we’ve been certain that we have badgers visiting our suburban garden. We’ve seen the signs – the patches of earth dug up, a latrine full of badger poo, a vague Brock paw mark in the snow one morning…

Also, our next-door-neighbours told us a while back that briefly, one night in the summer, a badger got stuck under their gate whilst trying to squeeze into their back garden. Brock made so much noise, our neighbours got out of bed to investigate, opening their door in time to see the badger break free, and head straight towards their duck house to feast on Jemima & Co’s feed.

Our neighbours opposite have long had badgerly visits to their garden from the woods behind – and now, excitingly, our local brocks seem to have added our side of the road to their regular foraging routes. We’re not lawn proud, so we welcome the scrapes and mini craters appearing now and then amongst the tussocks and under our hedge. It’s a dream come true to play host to the badgers. Now, it is our ambition to glimpse them one bleary-eyed night, if we can manage the long, window-side vigil in the small hours.

Back in Westonbirt, the chilly magic of the day continues with the tiny chink and chime of flocks of tits and goldcrests in the trees – and down on the ground.

We watch, enchanted, as a goldcrest, tiniest of birds, feeds at the foot of a giant sequoia, just feet away – and others flit through the trees in a constant, vital search for food amongst the pine needles. A couple of coal tits are busy amongst the fallen leaves, concentrating their efforts on the richer pickings of ground left snowless beneath the shelter of spreading conifer branches.

As an experiment (my husband’s a scientist – bear with him…) we stand right up close to the giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum), stepping up onto the brown mound of springy needles gathered at its feet and leaning against its towering trunk. While my husband applies his curiosity and logic to the effect of the warm air trapped in the big old tree’s branches, I indulge in a bit of tree hugging. Giant sequoia bark is so spongy and warm, and leaning against it, it is easy to imagine the refuge and comfort the birds could find roosting in its embrace. Standing there, the rise in temperature within the sequoia’s own micro-climate seeps up into my frozen feet, and the placid hum of the life of that old Hagrid-tree seems to fold around us.

There’s a lovely ‘feel’ to giant sequoias – those awe-inspiring trees named in honour of Chief Sequoyah, creator of the Cherokee writing system. They emanate grandeur, but also a sense of welcome and friendly ease. They are the sort of tree you want to lean your back against, letting your mind wander through the forest – head tilted back, looking up, up, up that soaring trunk, feeling very small and connected to earth and sky. It’s a pipedream of mine to visit the sequoia groves in the Giant Sequoia National Monument one day… This Hagrid tree is just a baby in comparison to those ancient leviathans, fully fledged in their native soil of California.

Back in Gloucestershire however, we must leave behind our sequoia central heating system, and rejoin the snowy path. We meet a robin, sitting quietly puffed up in a sheltered conifer. Quietly, my husband manages to get this photo of it – but the focus is blurry; the robin moves on before he can snap a better one:

Breaking away from the path onto the grassy rides of the Old Arboretum, we come across a large flock of coal tits – more of them than I’ve ever seen gathered together – foraging on the ground amongst the leaf litter. In true coal tit style, once they have found food, they hop-fly with it to a suitable perch to get on with the business of eating. As we stand there, it is like watching a series of tiny jack-in-the-boxes – or paper-light puppets on strings – as they yo-yo in brief alternating dances, their flight paths criss-crossing down-up, up-down. Occasionally, one or two break away and cross the ride, landing in the bush right beside us – and then flit back to rejoin the others, creating patterns on the cold-heavy, winter-white air.

Despite the bitter chill, we don’t want to tear ourselves away from this mesmerising coal tit dance of survival…but time is wearing on. All around us, the day is warming (very slightly!) towards mid-day. Our ears are now filled with the sound of the ever-increasing drip, drip, drip of melting snow. Everywhere we look droplets of water hang, bulging with bright light, and fall musically from the branches. We look at our watches. We have to be back in time for the kids’ return from school fairly soon – and now our lunch-time is approaching.

After a very welcome hot meal in Westonbirt’s Maples Café, accompanied by the usual pied wagtail working the opportunities for leftover food-finds on the decking outside – and also by a view of a buzzard, wing-hunched low over the valley, being mobbed by crows – we slide down the steep hill of the Arboretum’s downs, and then up again into Silk Wood.

The day’s theme for this side of the arboretum seems to be blackbirds and nuthatches. The nuthatches are gathered in various conifers, and the tree tops bluster with the urgency of their piercing calls. We are able to watch several as they edge head first down the trunks, prise food from the crevices and break open nuts with resounding taps against the bark. They are such exquisite little birds. I love their muted mix of soft-sky blue grey and salmon-chestnut blush. They are one of the many beauty-treats of any walk in these woods.

The blackbirds are all vitally busy with turning over and tossing leaves in search for food – but we notice that most seem to be in male and female pairs – like the ones in our garden. At one point, we hear a male give its alarm call – but with a slight difference. Instead of the usual burst of alarm followed by a wing flapping quick-exit, this develops into a constant chink, chink, chinking – and we look up to see him perched on a branch, posing with tail cocked in territorial bravado…just a branch away from a rather bashfully admiring female.

Between the urgent need to feed, some early spring behaviour is the buzz of the day for many of the birds filling the woods here.

That zingy feeling on the air, created by birdsong – and by a quickening in the wood, already humming with the promise of awakening – turns my thoughts to days ahead…when, like wishes unfolding from this bronze sculpture:

… the Arboretum will soon, again, look like this:

POSTSCRIPT RE. GOVERNMENT SELL OFF OF PUBLICLY OWNED FORESTS IN ENGLAND:

The Government wishes to sell our Public Forest Estate, of which Westonbirt, the National Arboretum is a part. You can keep informed on all the issues and developments – and get involved with the campaigns against the Government’s plans to transfer all of England’s publicly owned woodlands out of state ownership at Save Our Woods and Save Our Forests.

Yesterday (2nd February) MPs met to debate and vote on the Labour motion against the forest sell off… Everything about the sell off proposals and the so-called ‘consultation’ (a document which already assumes that the public forests will be privatised, and consists of questions on how it should be done) makes my heart sink like a stone… but also fires it up to do something in response. I wrote to my MP to express all my concerns and my dismay. Today, I see he voted with the Government.  The motion was defeated by 310 to 260.

But, it’s good to see that there were three Tory rebels, four Lib Dem rebels and some abstentions… MPs have been deluged with emails and letters on this issue. The public outcry made this debate happen.

At the time of writing, the petition against the forest sales has gathered over 430,000 signatures. If you haven’t already done so, you can add your voice to the petition by signing it at the 38 Degrees Website.

Settling down in that long night to lose myself in Kathleen Jamie’s clear-seeing prose was a small, anticipatory celebration of that magical tipping point of darkness and light. A welcoming of the special qualities of both, at a time of year that is like a retreat and an embrace; a time to reflect, take stock, evaluate and wonder.

The winter light filling those days around the solstice was something to celebrate. It had brought gifts of form and clarity; a glow that held things close. It had had a sense of enclosure about it – as if, in each day, we were held in a tight, intense moment; our attention gathered near to watch intently those things closer to home. Those bitterly cold, but gleaming days were parcelled up in darkness, wrapped in shaded edges that defined their very qualities. Precious and brief, the light they cast entered windows with a muted whiteness that was like the telling of a secret tucked in its shadows.

One blue, bright morning…

… I had stood bathed in sunlight at the top of our stairs, and watched as its beams passed through a crystal ornament standing on the window sill, transforming the walls with bursts of vivid rainbows. Each was a perfect, intense spectrum; those huddling colours like a magic spell conjured out of the chill.

In Darkness and Light, Kathleen Jamie writes about these days around the winter solstice:

‘Mid-December, the still point of the turning year. It was eight in the morning and Venus was hanging like a wrecker’s light above Black Craig. The hill itself – seen from our kitchen window – was still in silhouette, though the sky was lightening into a pale yellow-grey. It was a weakling light, stealing into the world like a thief through a window someone forgot to close.’

‘I like the precise gestures of the sun……everything we imagine doing, this time of year, we imagine doing in the dark.’

At around 4 p.m. on the night of my re-read, my daughter had called me urgently to the dining room window. A flock (we counted eleven) of long-tailed tits had jinked through the dusk to cluster on our garden fat feeders, their tails overlapping in elegant criss-crossing lines, their white and black markings exaggerated in the gloom, and their pink blush washed to sepia, as if caught in the glow of an old two-tone photograph. After a few moments of peck, shift, peck, flit, they huddled and separated and clustered again in a purposeful communal fidget. With urgent, constant communication they finished their hasty meal, and headed towards the big old trees in the gardens behind ours. Darkness was falling rapidly, graining the sky grey. They needed to find their roost for the night. The cold air was closing like a tight fist. Lights were beaming from the windows, spilling in pools. The long-tails flew beyond the reach of the light, seeking the shadows.

‘I imagined travelling into the dark. Northward – so it got darker as I went. I’d a notion to sail at night, to enter into the dark for the love of its textures and wild intimacy. I had been asking around among literary people, readers of books, for instances of dark as natural phenomenon, rather than as a cover for all that’s wicked, but could find few. It seems to me that our cherished metaphor of darkness is wearing out…… Pity the dark: we’re so concerned to overcome and banish it, it’s crammed full of all that’s devilish, like some grim cupboard under the stair. But dark is good. We are conceived and carried in darkness are we not?’

- Kathleen Jamie, Findings (published by Sort Of Books, distributed by Penguin Group)

In her essay, Kathleen Jamie takes us with her on her travels to Maes Howe on Orkney. Her hope is to witness the setting winter solstice sun beam directly along the passageway of the Neolithic burial chamber, casting its light onto the tomb’s back wall. What she sees there is a connection between ancient and modern – between human ingenuity, and our relationships to darkness and light – played out in a surprising way.

Even in the very midst of Christmas parcel wrapping, I came across another pertinent exploration of the nature of the dark, in Luke Jennings’  Blood Knots – of Fathers, Friendship and Fishing, which I had bought for a friend who loves fishing. I’d heard great things about the lyrical beauty of the book and its nature writing – and, unable to resist dipping into the first couple of chapters before wrapping it, I was soon captivated by Luke Jennings’ description of urban fishing at night. Fishing itself doesn’t hold any attraction for me, but as an amateur naturalist, I recognise the sense of focus and fusion with landscape; the close, relished mystery of wild lives – the mystery of life itself – unseen around us:

‘My world has contracted to a box of darkness: to walls, the towpath and the black of the water. As always, there’s the temptation to wind in the bait a little, to check that it’s OK, but that way madness lies, because you’ll never really know what’s happening down there.

Nor would you want to, because in an over-illuminated world, a world whose dark corners are in constant retreat from the remorseless, banal march of progress, this not knowing is a thing to be valued and enjoyed.’

– From Blood Knots by Luke Jennings (Atlantic Books)

During the Yuletide lead-up, I watched Rick Stein’s Cornish Christmas programmes on BBC2. In one episode, he interviewed Tim Smit, CEO of the Eden Project, who mused on the rich pagan and Christian mix of our midwinter festival, and also on the lighting of candles at this time. He reflected how there is something about candlelight that encourages words – makes us want to talk, share intimate conversation. It’s just occurred to me now, writing this, that the intimate sense of enclosure candlelight creates, is the same intimacy which that brief, parcelled-up light of winter gives to what we see around us. That sense of focus and centre, depth and pause. It’s a light by which to huddle, and share stories.

But the solstice also makes us look outwards on a whole planetary level – it can stretch our imagination far out to those huge workings of the Universe, the tilt and movement of the Earth, the progress of the seasons, the changes in our night skies…

In the November 2010 issue of the RSPB’s Birds magazine, there is a lovely article by Conor Jameson entitled Seasons to be Cheerful. In it he talks about the birds’ responses to the seasons – and about how many birds and other creatures ‘…make light of planetary distance and treat the globe as their home, and the galaxy as their sat nav.’

Conor Jameson goes on to say:

‘Each year, the Earth in a sense ‘breathes in’ from the autumn equinox to the spring equinox and ‘breathes out’ from the spring to the autumn. Time-lapsed footage of this really does make the planet look like it is breathing. Imagine then the world’s birds moving in response to that inhalation, that sheet of ice, snow and cold air easing them south in autumn, and drawing them back north again in the spring, at an estimated 5 mph, as it retreats.’

I love that idea – and the beautiful, all encompassing image it conjures…

This time of year brings many gifts – not least the thirteen redwings, blown in by the snow from the outlying fields, seeking food in our garden! On December 20th, they swept over our hedge and adorned our damson trees like elegant sentinels, their red-streaked sides in full blush against the white sky – causing both delight in our household, and ruffled feathers amongst the starling flock already perched on the branches! The redwings continued to fly round and round the gardens, tumbling into and out of our trees throughout the day – and on the winter solstice itself – adding more magic to that time. The winter before, the snow brought fieldfares to our garden. They stayed for a few days, ate the apples we put out for them, and enchanted us with their beauty:

As Conor Jameson goes on to say in his Birds magazine article:

‘A northern winter has much to cherish. Without it, there would be no fieldfares and redwings arriving in squadrons from Scandinavia, no geese from Greenland descending on our western shores, nor whooper swans on our eastern fields, magically, overnight. There would be fewer robins and blackbirds visiting our back gardens to see what we’ve got for them here in our temperate, ocean-insulated island group.’

On New Year’s Eve, I opened the front door at dusk, and was greeted by a calm mildness on the air that felt like an early out-breath from the Earth. On that breath, emerging from the deepening shadows, curled the leisurely, fluting song of a blackbird…

In those very last days of 2010, and in the earliest of 2011, the passing of the solstice and the slightly lengthening days awoke more and more birdsong. On January 2nd, I opened the bathroom window to let out some steam, and the room was instantly flooded by a cacophony of birds. And this week, I’ve noticed that the blackbirds in the garden have paired up, and the male is busy chasing off a rival (so, high drama on the lawn!) Two robins have also paired up, and are hanging around the garden together, and in February, frog spawn will adorn our neighbours’ ponds. Whatever the weather brings over these next few weeks, out of that bud of cold and darkness, spring is already unfolding…

Happy New Year!

The lilt of those opening lines to Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen acts like a lure, making me – on this chill November day in the here and now – want to follow that farmer and return to Alderley Edge. I’ve journeyed there before in the pages of Alan Garner’s mind-shifting novel Thursbitch – but, as yet, have not read The Weirdstone…

A copy is waiting on my bookshelves, promising magic; a treat to come. But I also feel regret that I didn’t discover it during my childhood; that time of wide open doors when its magic would have overlapped my world completely, and become my dreaming reality.

I have, however, been able to open up that experience to my daughter, and to happily watch her overtake me in her eagerness to follow Colin and Susan on their adventures. I first discovered Alan Garner in my twenties when, intrigued, I stumbled upon The Owl Service in the tiny village library just a magpie’s hop across the road from the house we were renting at the time.

We lived, back then, in a landscape of river and reed beds, where the wheezing beat of mute swan wings passed overhead – and a wood, just a field’s width away across the railway, bristled with the drama of tawny owls.

That wood, a fragment of ancient forest, was a gateway to a vivid, vital, timeless world. On darkening summer evenings, we would follow the needle gleam of glow worms along the paths – and in the margins of the day, when sunshine and time met in a suspended hush, we sometimes caught glimpses of fox cubs or common lizards basking in their own worlds.

On the other side of the village stretched a mosaic of wetland, where geese patterned the sky, the occasional kingfisher sparked blue fire on snow in winter, and on warm nights, Daubenton’s bats dashed under the river bridge, snapping up prey.

Like all landscapes tend to do, it settled into my mind, even when unseen and unnoticed, as a presence – a kind of cloak around the day. It was present in this way when, with dog nestled under one arm, I curled up in our back room, close to the window which faced the tawny owl wood, and opened the pages of The Owl Service for the first time…

What spilled from that slim volume was something ungraspable, like a jolting light that would not be contained; a jagged, edgy, searing, elemental…something… binding words to place in a way that was like a spell of losing and finding, a half glimpsing – an instinctual knowing.

My daughter read The Owl Service this year, enthralled, gripping it with white knuckled fingers. One evening, she glanced up at me and said, in awed tones, “I love this book… It really makes you think.” Her eyes shone with the relish of the challenge. I could almost hear those mental doors opening to even wider horizons of possibility, and I could see in her eyes a dawning realisation of what boundaries literature can stretch, what edgy places it can let in (or out!)

When reading Garner’s books, it’s as if that presence of the landscape – that cloak of the day – stops being outside our window, or benignly present in our minds, and suddenly enters our house, startles us, scratches at the ceiling and walls like those legend-living owls in The Owl Service, and permeates our living room, removes all veneer. Whilst we read, we move out of the ‘long ago of the world,’ still bound to the here and now, but with all the vital connections between the ancient and the present haunting our deepest awareness.

Those things are internal and external – and eternal. And, in The Owl Service they are, in part, the playing out of the eternal pattern of the journey from childhood to adulthood. A literal edginess of edges between experience, possibility, past and future; doorways between worlds. And that is what he speaks to, this craftsman of words that are bound to the ancient continuity of the land and to our heritage; he speaks to those deeper elements that are both within and without us. Not clear, but instinctive, both disturbing and vital; words that return us to ourselves, and connect us to the land and its (and our) stories. 

It is fifty years since The Weirdstone of Brisingamen was first published, its golden anniversary falling, with an appropriate sense of magical portent, on 10/10/10. A special hardback gift edition (which I’ve only seen online so far, but am already feeling its lure!) has been published by Harper Collins to mark the book’s five decades of passage through so many young (and not so young!) lives, and a website linked to the anniversary celebrations explores its timeless, ever renewing appeal.

Legends, folklore, myths and stories draw us to the fireside. The mystery of landscape - and the words which express the bonds we feel with it - fit well the space provided by a pool of winter candlelight. There, the mystery flickers for us to examine it, whilst remaining as huge as the endless shadows that surround the flame.

As the winter solstice approaches, it’ll soon be time, I think, for me to link up with the long ago, set aside some winter hours before the year wears out – and follow that farmer to Alderley Edge…

Somehow, that more relaxed frame of mind opens up more time; unfolds it from previously hidden corners, and makes room for the savouring of small, important moments with the people we love. It pushes out and ignores those warring inner demands that so often distract and break in and shrink time to an awful paralysis. We can’t do everything – so we might as well just clear a space and let ourselves breathe.

Now, of course, with the arrival of autumn, with all its get-back-to-normal routines, the paddle is once more twitching with the turbulent pull of conflicting currents. But alongside that, back in the slow flow, I’m making a further investment in Time by embarking on a literary journey. It’s a momentous one, and a voyage that I can already feel tugging my mental sails out to a wide and satisfying ocean…

On the day the children went back to school, I lingered by my bookshelves, devoting some quiet moments to that delicious task of choosing my next read. When my mind is distracted, my thoughts scattered, the choice on my shelves can be perplexing; there are so many unread volumes and re-reads demanding attention. But, that day, the pull towards War and Peace was so strong, so insistent I knew that, for me, this was “Its Time.”

I took down that hefty tome; a treasure saved up for that “Perfect Moment” when life would not be too busy, my mind and attention not too fractured by inner tugs of war. But War and Peace is not a novel for that “Perfect Moment” (which, in truth, I know will never come). It’s a novel for Life; in all its variety and strife and happening and complexity. That insistent pull towards (at last!) beginning the novel was a liberating invitation to follow – come what may. So, ignoring the twitching paddle, I stepped into the flow, and started to read…

I’m now three hundred or so pages into Anthony Briggs’s (Penguin Classics) translation of Tolstoy’s masterpiece; deep in its heart beats, detail, scope and moment - and in the wide breathing space for the essential that this novel – and all great literature - gives us. A real getting somewhere.

Hopefully though, during that voyage, I’ll be able to pull a few rafts alongside the main ship and fill them up with blog posts about my slow-flow summer – a summer of shooting stars, curious seals, leaping dolphins, bookshops and Shakespeare…

It’s going to be a bit of a dodge around the months and across Britain – from June to the present, from Northumberland to Wales, from red squirrels to red kites…and, in truth, I’m beginning to panic at the thought of all that catching up…

But…no, I won’t succumb…out damn’d paddle! Let’s go with the flow!

Within a day of being back there, I had taken root again – physically as well as in spirit. Wherever I am, my roots reach out for the memory of Kent – but, being physically back there, everything realigns itself, my tap roots travel downward, and the shape of me rediscovers where it fits the puzzle.

And it is the trees of Kent that have a lot to do with that – the sheer number and variety and extent of them; the ancient woodlands that give the place its special spirit and make me feel I’m back in my ‘right’ habitat.

A book in which I can capture that feeling wherever I am, is my treasured copy of Elaine Franks’ The Undercliff, A Sketchbook of the Axmouth – Lyme Regis Nature Reserve (published by J.M. Dent & Sons):

Elaine Franks’ beautiful illustrations, so full of the life of an English wood, always transport me to that ‘right’ habitat – and the book’s foreword, written by John Fowles (of French Lieutenant’s Woman and The Magus fame), is a treat in itself. As well as being an extremely accomplished novelist, Fowles was a passionate lifelong naturalist, and in the book’s foreword he captures, for me, that sense of the ‘rightness’ of place; of the return to a wild world where the tuning realigns to ‘as it should be’; all the notes in perfect pitch with our own deepest nature. He writes that the Undercliff, the extraordinary nature reserve near where he lived in Dorset’s Lyme Regis is:

‘…quite simply one of those places one always thinks of as one does of a poem or piece of music; not quite of this world; or, of this world as it should be, but alas so largely isn’t.’

For me, Kent is a place full of such poem-places, made all the more potent through their connection to my most formative years. During our holiday exploring those small, and yet vast, places of childhood memory, the woodlands were always a framework, gently easing us in and out of the lilt and change of the landscape as we travelled.

Walking along the North Downs Way on a hot early June day, we explored the edges of different worlds – crossing the line where the open chalk downland emerges from the green shadows of yew and beech, like a blaze of white-green heat, sparking the blue of butterfly wings (holly and common blues) and the yellow-red flames of birdsfoot trefoil. Such places are a botanist’s dream; every square inch stuffed with plant delights, many so tiny it’s a must to get your nose near the earth and alter your world focus to the microscopic. Moving my mind beyond the edge of usual perspective, that tiny world seems to expand into a whole universe, and I become lost in a new shift of seeing; a perspective made of that simplicity and enormity held in the palm of the opening of William Blake’s poem, Auguries of Innocence:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.

My parameters of perception always play and shift in this way whenever I come across wild orchids – those jewels of the Kentish woods and downs. There is earth magic in these little shape-shifters. They are strange, exotic and yet so belonging to that ‘right’ familiarity of the world as it should be. They are full of character, beauty and attitude – alive like animate creatures in their mimicry of bees, flies; in their hallucinatory resemblances to imaginary ladies in crinolines, monkeys, soldiers and lizards; in the uncanny accident of botanical features grinning at us like impish faces, triggering fond sympathy in our brains. When you peer up close, focusing in on ‘the infinity’ in the texture of their petals, you can see that their surfaces are often like the wings of butterflies – iridescent, sparkling with the glitter of light. I am completely held by their spell – a total devotee.

I have yet to read any of John Fowles’ novels (something I must rectify – and soon!) but ever since I discovered that he was a passionate naturalist, truly bitten by the wild orchid bug, I’ve felt a kindred spirit waits in his writing. Once you have been bitten by that bug, it is like a drug; the fascination must be fed. Kent is a treasure trove of orchids; famously the county of Darwin’s ‘Orchis Bank,’ where those inspirational plants, so like little worlds in themselves, played a huge part in the development of his theories of evolution and natural selection. Like many plant species, the orchids seemed to be flowering late this year after our heavy winter, so, having missed seeing any early purple orchids near where we live in the West Country, we hoped to see some still in flower in the South East.

With great good luck, our walk around some Kentish cobnut platts scattered that orchid magic our way on the very first day of our holiday. The cobnut platts were like a time portal to a bygone era of farming – like walking into the pages of an H.E. Bates novel – and beneath the cobnut trees, little groups of early purple orchids stood tall, and very much still in flower:

 along with the more greenly inconspicuous Common Twayblade:

Amongst the orchids were vetches and this Broomrape:

…The whole place alive with the freedom of an ancient habitat allowed to unfold its true rhythms over and over again…

Dormice apparently thrive here – and we could see the trails made by badgers. Interspersed between the cobnuts were big old orchard trees, lichen draped and insect busy – and in the nearby woodland, we were met by drifts of yellow archangel, vivid blue bugle, red campion,

many more twayblades:

the delicate stars of ramsons, filling the air with their wild garlic aroma…

…And, finding our way through the mix of vigorous growth and life-giving decay of fallen trees (casualties maybe from the 1987 Great Storm), we discovered yet more clusters of early purple orchids, one the shade of raspberry ripple ice cream:

Illustration of Early Purple Orchid from 'The Undercliff' by Elaine Franks

Amongst the moss and fungi and all the buzzing decay and pulse of unfolding life of this ancient wood, we walked along another edge of worlds – a ridge of a sharp fall-away into the valley below:

Such ridges are a familiar feature of these local woodlands, and this one had the characteristics of an ancient boundary – a faded hollow ditch, marked along by a line of coppiced trees – a mix of the cathedral skyward soar of beech and the crazy twist of hornbeam. These ancient woods are definitely poem-places; places to go to dream, to alter focus; to find ‘the world as it should be’.

One such place of past daily daydreams (and many a discovery of small-world infinities) was a tiny fragment of wildwood around the corner from my childhood home. On the final day of our holiday, my daughter (ace orchid spotter!) found more orchids in the grassy rides close by that wood – this time common spotted orchids; a selection of the usual pink:

 … and one pure white:

Returning through the wood itself, memories thronged. This is where my ever-ongoing journey to learning my wildflowers began, where I built camps with my brother and friends, fished for tiddlers in the nearby stream, where I walked my dog, long since gone with my childhood – and where I sat on a huge, fallen tree in chattering companionship with my best friend, each of us nursing the nettle stings on our legs and feeling happily lost in that ‘eternity’ of this small space of the wild.

Now, as we walked, each little landmark prompted another memory, a familiarity of sympathy and home. I reached out my hand and laid it against one of the big old oaks in silent recognition of an old friend. My rational side tells me this is a one-way greeting; that tree, that little wood, doesn’t care whether I’m there or not – has no sense of having seen me before. But, for a moment, it felt like some kind of pact between me and this place – a pact to always feel connected. My rational side tells me this pact is in my mind alone, but another part of me likes to believe in some spirit of a place in which there’s a mutual echo of recognition, and an acceptance of belonging.

I think maybe that’s what we all need – especially in this modern world where we wander and break away and have so little chance to settle; so little chance to find that world as it should be.

Each day, fledgling blue tits have hung around the seed feeders, finding their bearings in all the newness of the world, whilst tribes of adolescent starlings take a more head-on approach, dashing about in shows of anxious bravado. A pair of blackbirds has been busy with the job of nesting – the male singing and posing and posturing, fanning his tail to assert his territory between dash-grabs at worms, whilst the female intently gathers food.

Swifts, from time to time, circle in and out of the garden’s radar – and beneath them, our tiny patch of wildflower “meadow” is blooming, attracting all sorts of insects which in turn draw in the birds.

Last weekend, my own radar picked up the sound of very faint chirping from our roof – and within a day or so, it was obvious that a second brood of sparrow nestlings has hatched there. All week, the male and female have dashed in and out from under the roof tiles, bringing food to their increasingly vocal youngsters. And, yesterday, another house sparrow pair brought fledglings into the garden to hop about the patio, search for insects in the shrubs and to learn about the easy pickings from the seed feeders. 

I find it hard to convey just how brilliant seeing those fledglings has been for me… This spring and summer feels like a real sparrow-turning-point; not only are they back to take up their long missed place in our immediate birdscape, but they seem to be thriving here again – at long, long last! I feel I ought to put out some kind of celebratory banner! Fingers crossed that this may be an early sign of a reverse around here in the mystery decline of house sparrows. Maybe (fingers even more tightly crossed!) it could be good sign for their general future all around the country too? …Like the otters, are they making a comeback in Britain? I’m hoping, with the ever-onward spirit of nature conservation, that this will prove to be so… 

Meanwhile, with the sun blazing from a blue sky, a great tit has been sunbathing on the shed roof, wings spread wide to the light. A couple of days ago, the male blackbird brought a fledgling into the garden with him – and earlier this week the grey squirrel galumphed across our shed roof to land on our fence, his radar honed in on the bird feeders, planning raids.

I must try to get out in the garden at night for some bat watching soon – they usually pass over us just after dusk on the way from their roosts to the woods and river…

All I need now is radar to detect where on earth I’ve put the bat detector!