Newly opened eyes

There’s nothing like a lockdown for sharpening you up. it’s strange to think, as I sit writing this at Christmas 2020, that a year ago I’d never heard the term ‘lockdown’, let alone ‘coronavirus’. I’ve learned a lot since then. And the lesson that stands out above all is a simple one: taste life to the full while it’s there.
 
In the early phase of the global coronavirus pandemic, people sickened and died all over the country. The airwaves were stiff with stern-faced scientists, with politicians exhorting and fumbling. Newspapers and social media rang with hysteria, pessimism and misinformation. Shops and pubs closed, neighbours got twitchy about social distancing (a clunky new concept). Gates and stiles, doorknobs and Amazon packaging were suspected of being deadly viral fomites (another new and sinister word). handwashing became a Lady Macbeth-like national neurosis.
 
Daily walks in spring, just about the only thing we were allowed to do outside the house, took on a magical and transcendent quality. No vans roared up the steep lane to the hills or censed the verges with grey diesel fumes. No aeroplane trails seamed the blue sky. No helicopters clattered above the woods. Not a sound drifted from the main road skirting the village. instead: birdsong, loud and sweet, everywhere at once. I was astonished to realise the extent to which extraneous mechanical noise had been swamping it.
 
When we ventured as far as the top of the hill from where we look down across the city, we had another shock. Where was the familiar smear of dirty lemon-coloured photochemical pollutants close above the houses? Gone with the absent cars and lorries. Down in the bowl where the city lies, we found we could breathe easy for the first time since we came to live there thirty years ago.
 
Back in the woods and fields around our village, every leaf and plant looked freshly cut and newly polished. The contrast between this timeless manifestation of nature resurgent and the ominous news – minute by minute, if you wanted it and could stand it, in one’s ear and brain like a spiritual tinnitus – was breathtaking. All the senses felt sharpened as the days and weeks followed one another, unbelievably clear and warm, the finest run of beautiful spring weather anyone could remember. We went out walking every day for several hours at a stretch, more walking than we’d ever continuously done, looking for Solomon’s seal and herb Paris in corners of wood-land never before explored, finding an old green-skinned pond forgotten in the crease of a field boundary, hiding at sunset beside another to watch blackbirds and blackcaps ecstatically bathing the day’s dust away.
 
The dipper came back to the roadside river, where I hadn’t seen him for decades. Chiffchaffs shouted triumphantly from the sunny woods. early purple orchids flooded the margins of coppices, large sweet violets sprouted in the treads of wooden steps. These things were not unique to this oddest of years, of course. The chiffchaff and the orchids had always returned with the spring. so why did they seem to grace this dislocated season so particularly? I thought about it and realised that I had got out of the habit, out of the way, of taking proper time to look and listen. Too many deadlines, too many projects. I had been yomping through my walks, barging through the landscape like a runner on a mission, notebook and pen and GPS in hand, scribbling like a maniac, missing so much and so much. What a hell of a realisation for someone who for most of his life had been writing about the slow rhythms of the countryside and the creatures that move and live and have their being there.
 
In my workroom is a case of shelves that holds about 450 notebooks. Almost every walk I’ve ever written up is annotated there in hasty spidery handwriting that only I can decipher. The pages are creased and stained with mud, blood, flattened insect corpses, beer glass rings, smears of plant juice and gallons of sweat. So many notes, so much researching and burrowing for facts – church dates, notable residents, quotes from rural writers, the names of fields, fourteen species of bats, forgotten medieval skirmishes, turn left at the oak tree, look for the yellow arrow by the barn. Why hadn’t I trusted more to luck and the day, let myself just go with the flow, as I was doing now during this Covid spring? What on earth had I been scribbling so copiously about?
 
In the enforced idleness of the pandemic restrictions, unable to travel further than Shanks’s pony could carry me, I took a good long look back. let’s see... Notebook 350, how about that? Ah yes, springtime in the north of Scotland, standing by the old icehouse at the mouth of the river Spey in full spate and watching an Atlantic salmon leaping through the waves. magical moment! All right, Notebook 205, the Goodwin sands. That had been a freakish afternoon in a long hot summer, an evening hovercraft ride out to the treacherous Kentish sandbank in the company of cricketers, potholers, seal fanciers and Jesus freaks – adventurers who had a precarious hour to perform whatever eccentric rituals they pleased before the rising tide turned the sands to soft sinking jelly once more. Another one, um, Notebook 193, that’ll do. November in the north, by the looks of it, all pages sodden and blurred by rain. Teesdale and High Force, Blanchland up in the Durham Dales. . . ah, here we are. Something that catches absolutely the essence of winter walking in the Yorkshire Dales. Eleven miles in a day-long downpour along the river Wharfe, drenched to the skin, mist curling in the bare tops of alders and silver birches, and the rain-swollen river hurling itself in angry strength through the rocky narrows of the strid, rumbling and shaking the ground. Respite further up the dale in the New Inn at Appletreewick, drying off my soaking rain gear, steaming by the fire and eyeing their exotic beer menu. Belgian cherry beer, Trappist ale, smoked beer; Samichlaus, the strongest beer in the world. Good God, how did I make it out of there alive?
 
Those hundreds of notebooks, their scribbles and stains, the dried leaf fragments that fall out of their pages, the quick sketches of umbellifers (‘goatsbeard?’) and birds (‘??? yellow breast, a few dark stripes, bouncy flight, pt-cheeew chip-chip!???’) were the seedbed in which this book grew. An account of walking the landscape through the seasons of forty years in every corner of these islands, the wildlife, the people, the shapes and colours of weather and hills, and the changing nature of the British countryside over the working lifetime of one walker. I hope you enjoy this armchair walking as much as I did during those curious months when every day seemed freighted with portentous significance, and all we could do about it was walk and look around with newly opened eyes.