Interlude

This weekend I visited my parents, who live in Letchworth, the world’s first Garden City. I was reminded how refreshing it is to walk in different places, especially those which are familiar but changed. On Sunday morning we walked part of the Letchworth Greenway. It is a millennium project, put in place after I left home, so it’s not a walk I grew up with. The path is shared, mostly amicably, by walkers, runners and cyclists and is 13.6 miles long, encircling the whole town. One day I would like to walk it all, setting out early one morning in the dawn light, just for a sense of completeness. Dusty chalky soil crunches underfoot. Fields that I remember from my teenage years as being just another monoculture field of wheat or oilseed rape, are now set aside for wildlife, and the scrubland (which has an image problem, seen as scruffy, but provides vital habitat for a wide range of species) is dotted with hawthorn, blackthorn, and bramble. I half remember a quote about “the thorn is the guardian of the oak”. This land would revert to woodland if we let it. I hear a skylark, no need to rely on digital help to identify it, that urgent piping call is unmistakable. Skylarks nest on the ground, and have suffered much from loss of habitat as agriculture became increasingly mechanised. We don’t see the bird today, hovering high in the air, wings flapping frantically like an oversized hummingbird, just hear that call that promises spring and makes me think of that famous piece of music.

The night before I had met up in the pub with old friends from teenage years, who’ve been meeting up to chat nonsense since the 1990s. The pubs are considerably less dingy these days, better lit, exposed brick, a range of craft ales, no stale cigarette smoke in the air. My friends and I are greyer but otherwise mostly unchanged, apart from one of our number, discussed in absentia, who seems to have been radicalised by GB news, lost to online conspiracy theories and given to muttering darkly about immigrants. Statistically it was going to happen to one of us, in this confusing world of ‘alternative facts’. E, one of my oldest female friends, who I first met as a fresh-faced first year at secondary school tells me enthusiastically about Naomi Alderman’s recent book Don't Burn Anyone At The Stake Today, which tackles how we live through this age of the Information Crisis. I mentally add it to my lengthy TBR list. At this point, another friend asks what it is exactly that I write, “So are you working on a novel?” he asks. “Erm, I just write a bit about what I notice, nature stuff” I mutter in reply, slightly embarrassed. “Musings?” suggests E, maybe sensing my discomfort. Thinking about it now, I suppose it’s my way of remaining grounded in reality.

Back on the Sunday walk, we see a few dog walkers and many sweaty-faced runners clad head to toe in synthetic fabrics and carrying their special running backpacks. Their faces are serious, it’s hard work maintaining these fragile human forms. I don’t wish to run anymore, I used to, but it feels too hard on my body, various muscles tighten and I never seem to be able to stretch them out satisfactorily. Much better to walk at my parents pace on a hazy sunny morning in March, enjoying this rare time with them. It feels like time travelling to my twenties pre-children, when I would visit my parents after a week at work in Bristol, enjoying the security of reconnecting with a home that I had been desperate to leave a few years before. I had been so keen for my life to start, frustrated with what I saw as a sleepy and boring country town, where one of its claims to fame (I use the word loosely) is that it is home to the UK’s first traffic roundabout. As we walk we reminisce about other walks when my children were small, summer holidays visiting the grandparents, golden tinged as all good memories are, the trickier bits fade. We laugh about how a playful question from my mum to my then four year old son provoked an unexpected reaction. “I wonder if we’ll see any bears in the woods?” she said casually. D suddenly looked terrified, he stopped still and refused to take the path through some spindly birch saplings. A wealth of childhood stories had fed his young brain a little too well. The saplings are taller now, just like him. He’s at university a couple of hours away from home and is learning to walk other paths by the sea, finding his own wild ways.

When we return from our morning stroll, I spend time in the garden with my dad, relishing this uninterrupted time with him, and being grateful that my later flowering interest in gardening has given us so much to talk about. He is a compost pro, and was organic gardening on his London allotment back in the 1980s. He has a wealth of knowledge about vegetable and fruit growing, and I know he still misses the garden in the house we lived in when they first moved out of the city. His private fiefdom was beyond the beech hedge halfway down the garden, which hosted an abundance of food growing, fruit trees, rows of beans, a well-used greenhouse. This was the garden my brothers and I grew up in, and was a wonderful place to play. Around eight years ago my parents took the sensible option and downsized, and my dad has learnt to appreciate his new patch. He tells me that he doesn’t know so much about ornamental plants, so I show him my plant identification app and we investigate a plant that he is unsure of, it has heart-shaped leaves and is creeping across one of the beds. After some consideration we decide it must be some kind of violet. I’m more confident with the swathes of Avens in the front garden, “Definitely a weed dad” I declare, and we spend the remaining time before lunch carefully pulling it out from between more intentional planting. It’s physical work, and I find myself wishing, not for the first time, that I lived closer to my parents, so that I could help them out more with tasks like this. Then suddenly, there’s the sound of a handbell ringing inside the house, and we are summoned, dirty fingered, to wash our hands ready for lunch.

Photo shows some glorious willow catkins spotted on a walk in my home neighbourhood. So many different types of catkins to see at the moment, and I particularly enjoyed the contrasting yellows against the blue sky in this photo. I'm currently listening to The Good Son by You-jeong Jeong on Audible, it's for my book group and is slightly heavy going, being a first person account by an unreliable narrator who has murdered his mother (eek). I've also just picked up Silent Spring by Rachel Carson from the library, an ecological classic.