Rushes & Reeds

Ideas have fetches. As with a wave, an idea breaks upon the brain like a wave train. It washes across ribbed sand spits and provokes thoughts where it sinks into the wet dunes. Which is why I migrate towards water - preferably running, noisy water - when I need to think.

I am sitting at the bend in my river. I have no formal ownership of this section of the river – no paperwork, signatures, documents, legislation – and it’s hardly a river, more a thread of torpid water that glazes the valley-bottom, like a blue ribbon measured out across green cloth, or as, the parish’s ruddy-cheeked local priest puts it, “like a spilt pint across the baize of a pool-table”, which I imagine is partly poetic expression, and partly experience.

The canal, for that is what is, doesn’t wind elegantly, or rush in excitable torrents. It instead runs straight as a die through bulrushes and watermint and pondweed, suctioning damply at the mud banks like a tongue probing for a lost tooth. It is, in its way, a profoundly uninteresting section of water. But it is mine, and I can sit by it in summer and winter and find hidden things and be rewarded by the flash of colour in the dun, and by the blur of movement in the still.

Kingfishers live in the spinney. I’m not sure where exactly – the banks do not seem high enough to accommodate their warrens, and the winter floods would drown anything lower than the high woods on the ridge-line – but I’ve seen them in summer, if you can call glimpsing a blurred shard of blue-and-orange 'seeing'. They peep and pipe throughout Spring, and as with most hidden things, are easier to hear than see. I have heard a Bittern, once, and it’s harsh, irritable, “crak”, with the middle ‘a’ accentuated (á) to create the, “arr” sound, is an annual rite of passage. But I’ve never seen it, largely because Bitterns are secretive, shy, and a dull, flecked brown.

Nevertheless, for what it’s worth, this is my bit of the river. The anglers don’t agree, and perch over the water, spindly carbon-fibre rods dangling over the stream like the legs of a Cranefly, twitching as in a breeze with the nibblings of Ten-Spined Sticklebacks. Ten-Spined Sticklebacks are apparently quite rare, but no-one told the ones in this section of the Brede River, which breed with gusto and provide vital fuel in the summer for lots of birds that live in or around the main spinney.

Sometimes I lie flat on my back on a natural bank, raised at a slight incline, and look at the clouds scudding by. I like to look at clouds, but today I am looking for a Buzzard.

Buzzards are the birds which make the lonely, mewling cries in wilderness scenes in films. People assume the cries are Eagles of some kind, because Buzzards are a bit lowly and common to be the guardians of the wilderness. Buzzards are, for me at least, as much a sign of solitude and wild land as the howls of wolves or coyotes. They are one of the most evocative sounds I can think of, largely, it must be said, due to half my family being Canadian - along with the lowing of a freight-train in North America, the two-tone warble of the Great Northern Diver, the plash of a car wheels in heavy rain, and the winter hub-bub of conversation in a busy pub, they're an inclusive part of my make-up. Buzzards wheeling overhead and piercing the sky with spearing cries are as much part of winter for me as caramelising apple-wood in a bonfire, or the deadening lull of snow-fall, or the searing rush of whisky down my throat in The Anchor, with friends, on Christmas Eve.