The other side of the world

I flew to the other side of the world, the day the first daffodils were opening their heads. I have hesitated to write this sentence, because flying to the other side of the world, is simply unsustainable, and I am not proud of it. For pretty intense personal reasons, I had to come now, and I had just three weeks to complete my trip. If I ever come to the other side of the world again, it will be by sea.

Enough excuses. Leaving England was hard. because Spring was poking its head out of the dark soil and blinking at the sky. And to make it worse, we were having those fresh, glassy, kite-flying days of heaven. After the reticent, delicate snowdrops had suggested rebirth a month before, the daffoldils had in their brazen hundreds, arrived to proclaim it unquestioningly and to blaze a path for the colouring of the earth. Since I have lived in close proximity to Nature  my connections to the seasons very much deeper, I look forward to the coming and going of the camellias, primroses, bluebells, frog chorus, brimstone butterflies, the unfurling ferns, party-coloured Nymphalidae and the gold and orange fall of Autumn.

And the Winters have become easier. When I lived in the city, Winter felt like a spell in a battery chicken farm. My nose was always sore from wiping and my shoulder's hunched. I ran wretched from one overheated inside space to another,. Now the long, protracted cold has its own beauty. The breath of farm animals, the hoare frosts on rosehips, and the redwings coming in to the cotoneaster trees when the fields are solid and inpenetrable to beak.

 Making a fire has become a ritual, bringing redemption from the bitter cold. Every single piece of wood, we chopped and stacked ourselves, a year or more before. This was our precious harvest, making life in the darkest months bearable. I do not mean to Romantise winter in the countryside. I have experienced deep loneliness and fear of the enveloping and abiding darkness. In 2010 I found a buzzard frozen to death,  still clinging to a branch of a tree. Its miserable mate, still alive and waiting in a nearby oak, flew down to warn us not to touch the helpless corpse. Starvation is the bedfellow of wild creatures in winter.But these same natural economics, also send the animals into spring-fever early. Winter doesn't seem so long, because generally, they are up to something before your bank balance has recovered from Christmas.

While we are still in woollies, the blackbird and sparrow begin their mad chatterings and daredevil dashes.in and out of hedgerows, with an urgency known only by creatures who have no central heating or supermarket. Food is available in abundance for such a short spell. They must be in full chick-rearing mode by Mid-April,and long before that territories will be established and marriages secured. They do not wait for the weather, but know by some internal barometer that there is an urgency to the ebbing frosts. In his poem, Spring, Gerard Manley Hopkins put it: 'have, get, before it cloud, before it cloy'. So I came away with a sense of a broken bond, a visceral dislike of the interruption of my observations of the earth moving through its rhythms.

 If I were forced to select my own living hell, it would be to be forever in the transit lounge of some anonymous airport, waiting to board or even worse perhaps, to be on the flight, eating plastic food out of a plastic tray hemmed in on all sides, unable to walk or run or shout or even laugh out loud. This time, however, I had run around so much in the week leading up to my voyage that sitting down for a whole day seemed quite welcome. My children, who have no telly at home, were angelically silent, consuming the colourful moving picture stories meted out to them. Still were grateful to arrive and our legs sang at the sheer joy of movement as we walked to collect our luggage.

I flew to the other side of the world and after twelve hours in Darling Harbour, Sydney, I was on a train to Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains, where a cockatoo, with scaly foot and clever beak climbed a pine tree in the car park with one eye on me, and that made it all worth it. So the next few blogs will tell of our antipodean adventures, including the antechinus who went bump in the night (or rather ratatatatatat), but that is another story, of which, more soon.

Love,

Sasha x