Category Archives: The Lane

27 February

February, Uncategorized

Like any repeated action writing about and even walking the lane can get to seem tedious at times. I wake feeling listless after a disturbed night and find nothing to interest me this morning. On my return after lunch, however the world looks a different place. The flashiness of dawn has yielded to a more settled radiance. The air has had time to warm up a little. Even the rain get points for coming out of nowhere. On my approach to the junction with the B-road a cloud half-covers the sun and cars are reduced to vague, rushing shapes save for single points of brilliance on glass or chrome. Then the light changes again and everything is revealed in sumptuous detail: a Tesco van, a timber transport, a high-backed people-carrier with a wheelchair pope.

On my way back I blunder uninvited into a festival of sparrows. Attracted by feeders outside the cottage they tumble about the hedgerow emitting high-pitched cheeps, single notes that playfully slide and bend. Like the pigeon their reputation for being plain is quite undeserved, the richness belied by the adjective ‘brown’ made almost ornate by flecks of black and white. No peacock, certainly, but no strutting either.

Once back into the Spinney I am on naming business. Not the trees that puzzled me yesterday but the plant with the cleft leaf that I comically mistook for convolvulus. Found everywhere along the lane, it is maturing beyond the juvenile stage which deceived me, the leaves bigger, brasher and swarthy-green. Persuaded by these changes to try again I have another candidate to investigate. Arum maculatum (the second word derived from livid spots like birthmarks) is more commonly known as Lords and Ladies or Cuckoo Pint, the former on account of a fancied similarity between the flower and genitalia. That is something I look forward to seeing. The photographs are a good match; its habitat is wet places and although we are miles from a river everywhere is wet this year; and it occurs all over England and Wales, only thinning out towards the north like my scalp. This is good enough for me even if, unlike my prose, there are no purple patches.

1 January

January

Our division of the calendar is scoffed at by nature, the new year starting as the old one finished with wild and miserable weather. Never having been superstitious I regard this as disappointing rather than ill-omened and not without consolation. Later we will light a fire and enjoy the shelter and warmth as people have always done in mid-winter. First, however I must take my daily walk up the lane.

Turning right out of our drive I see the first part stretching before me like a tunnel with light at the end. I would have said this effect was achieved by the trees meeting overhead, and by the road’s antiquity causing it to sink below the land – a hollow way. But with starting this journal in mind I look more closely and find the canopy is formed less by the trees converging than by those on the right leaning inwards. Nor is the degree of sunkenness uniform, the bank rising more steeply on the opposite side. Here is my reason for keeping a record, such basic facts not registering until today. I need to pay more attention and writing makes me.

With the trees at my back the aspect becomes more open. There are houses to the left and an old orchard opposite. Then commercial apple growing takes over before, on one side, a large ploughed field. The lane finally opens onto a B-road, not busy but fast at this point so that cars flash across the opening like particles in a collider. Ahead rises a hill, cultivated on its lower slopes but wooded at the summit. New trees have recently been planted, the white posts resembling a war cemetery.

I shall have to describe of all this in more detail and monitor how things change over time. But for now an overview is all I have room for. This is because I have decided on a limit to how much I write, not quite arbitrary but linked to the number of days. Each entry will contain 365 words, no more, no less and already I am finding the discipline helpful. Any creative act needs constraints to work within. The picture defers to the frame.