Wild Life

Love and Death

2012-02-21T02:51:00.003-08:00

Love and Death

A greater spotted woodpecker flew into my window and killedhimself on Friday. I opened the door to find the vivid black, red and whitecorpse lying at my feet. There are windows floor to ceiling in my house whereverI could fit them. I want to feel like I am outside, even when the weatherdrives us in, which in these isles of rain is far too often. So I have slowlytaken out sections of wall and replaced them in glass. That way, I may seenature carrying on the process of creation and destruction and recreation ofcomplexity throughout the day.

Early on we had a few deaths, several chaffinches and somelovely long tailed tits, flew heavenward, convinced they had a new flight pathinto one and out of another window. I duly stuck falcon-shaped stickers on theglass, which prevented further loss of life. For a long time there have been nocasualties, but last week, this lovely, long-beaked creature, dashing and in-commandon the bird feeder, hammering out his heart on the wood of ages, died anunfitting death on the stone slabs of my courtyard.

That same day, in mid-February, after a hoarfrost whichlasted till elevenses, I cautiously peeped inside my hive to be attacked andstung in the thigh by one of a very busy group of bees. My friend, a gardenerwho was with me at the time, commented that I had killed twice that day.

I am not unfamiliar with death. All four of my grandparents havedied, and my father. I loved them all. The unremitting nature of death, the no-goingbackness of it is so unlike most of life. You can usually apologise for amisdeed after the event, fix something you've broken, make good on your errors.Death doesn't work like that. Living creatures have no reboot button. When wesay our phone has died, when the battery has run out, we are profoundly wrong.Our phone is very much alive. It just needs charging up. There is no chargingup a corpse.

Until you have experienced this finality, it can be hard toreally fathom and comprehend. This is one of the reasons younger adults tend tobe more reckless at the invisible edge between life and death, speeding in cars,taking poisonous substances for fun and even fighting each other. Older peoplefor whom death has been more present, are more cautious, not just because theirhormones have settled down.

An ex-officer in the army once described to me howoccasionally he sent men home, with a madness which had struck them followingthe death of their comrades. He said, they see it like a video game, and thensuddenly, its real. Death is bizarre especiallyin the face of love. For a mother, facing the death of her son in a war itsparticularly incongruous. To spend day after day, hour after hour, nurturingand nourishing a child, only to have them wiped away at the moment they reachtheir potential. In this way, death and love do truly belong on differentplanets. It is unfair of evolution to make creatures which care so deeply whendeath takes so decisively.

Donne said 'Death be not proud', but death I am afraid, ismighty. I will find a way to do almost anything I put my mind to, but I couldnot blow life back in among the feathers of that lovely bird no matter how muchI wanted to. I could not make his heart to beat again, his wings, to fly. Thechildren and I pulled the beautiful scarlet feathers from his belly and head,and the spotted pied feathers from his wings and laid them, reverentially in afan shaped display in our little family 'natural history museum'. Now we watch to see who takes his place eatingthe peanuts. For the moment there are only blue tits. But soon, I am sure, theflashing orange red, the tropical swagger of this species will reappear outthere in front of our window to delight and awe us again. For sure enough, thegap will fill and life will give where it has taken away.

Sasha x

Love and Mud

2012-02-07T10:11:00.000-08:00

Love and Mud

I didn't always live like this, in the mud, with trees as mymain companions. I grew up in aVictorian terrace on a back road somewhere between Tottenham and Muswell Hill.I was suspended between two worlds,at a private school but returning homein a beaten up fiat which seemed to break down at every junction. Some days Iwalked back down Highgate Hill, over the pavements mosaiced with sycamoreleaves to a latch key existence as my mum made ends meet, a teacher in anIslington school. There her kids, their shiny faces unaware of anything out ofthe ordinary, would write in their 'news', 'my dad came round and stabbed mymum last night, we went to the hospital in an ambulance, My aunty Doreen islooking after me. Dad is at the police station.'

I remember the filthy smatterings that would coat my lowerlegs on rainy days in Camden, helped by buses too close to the kerb. Now inHerefordshire I have a kind of pasty pink, iron rich mud which besmears itselfover me at this time of the year. From this soil come the best of Britain'sagricultural fruits, the apples, and potatoes and hops and beefsides, the honeyand the milk. It is almost a shame to steal it from nature by collecting it onmy clothes. Its job is so vital, and life-giving. London's version was a personification ofpollution, a congealed pate of a city's strange ecological processes, the fumeand fag butts and human urine, creating a substance with dark powers.

Not that I hatedLondon. In fact, I love it still, yearn for its diversity, its populationcaptive, but somehow free. They are 'repressed but remarkably dressed' to quoteMorrissey, whose flower touting Wildean antics I emulated, whose lyrics I knewby heart and would sing out loud in Highgate Cemetery or on the 134 fromLeicester Square. The squash and the squeeze of London, the desperate bids tobe seen among the millions, create the colourful blue quiffs, the platinumspikes and bewildering costume of Kensington Market and Carnaby Street. I loveLondon's colour engendered by its people. a kind of rebellion against the grey.The whirling leaves of London Plane trees, the wolves who used to howl for thesheer paradox of their home in Regent's Park. My mum fled the county of herbirth for a slice of this freedom, for Whirligig, free-form dance, and streettheatre, and something more important,for free thought, away from the provincial snobbery which is still palpable inthe Midlands. She fled the petty judgements of her childhood, the fake poshaccents, amateur dramatics and subtleracism of her youth.

I went back. Not for any of that of course, but for the mud,the hills, the air that doesn't drive asthma into children's lungs, thepsychological and the actual landscape. I lived for a time in the Homecounties, Oxfordshire and then Berkshire. The woody dells and byways there arebeautiful and I explored many in my jobas countryside reporter. Somehow, though, wherever I went, there was always thefaint sound of traffic and the sense that in front and behind you, to your leftand right, just around the next corner there would be an A road, a TileWarehouse, a B and Q or a Macdonald's. I came to Herefordshire, because herethe landscape opens itself out into the raw, green, unadulterated waterfallsand valleys and dragon country of the Black Hills and the Brecon Beacons. Thereis no motorway here, no restless, roaring, snaking monster tearing the land intwo, There is just a single lane road tothe seaside, where pipefish nest in rockpools and starlings roost under thepier. Beyond too are the rained-on peaks of Snowdonia, and further still, withbig-mouthed basking sharks in its belly, there is the wide Atlantic Ocean.

There was another reason I came. It was here that I saw lovemanifest itself along a timeline of sixty years, in the patience with which mygrandparents, cared for each other in old age. Here in a little detached housein suburban Hereford, I watched love play itself out in domestic conclusion.Ordinary everyday acts of love, tea at a certain o clock, offering of the largerslice chocolate cake, my grandfather, teaching my granny how to pay the billsjust in case he went first. Here Iexperienced an intact 'nuclear' family. The day, in day out, old-fashionedroles of a man and woman, dividing into their household duties, in harmony, noarguments. He had his tool shed, and his car, she had her kitchen and hersewing machine. I make no sociological assertions, how can I? Women's Lib gaveme my education, which gift I cherishabove all. The experience for me as a child, though, was that I felt utterlyrelaxed, safe to be a child knowing life was taken care of. So that is why i took myself out of the hub bub, theexcitement, the cultural richness of Oxford, London and the energy of the Southeast, heading west, for love, for wide open spaces, and for mud.

Sasha x

Midnight (the pony) on Loneliness

2012-01-26T13:48:00.000-08:00

Midnight on Loneliness

I have a pony with seperation anxiety. Generally speaking, Midnight is as comfortable a creature as ever walked the earth. Big round hooves, feathered with shiny black hair, a long tail almost touching the ground, and this time of year, a woolly coat to keep the wind and rain out. Midnight is interested mainly in grass, but when he's filled his belly, he likes nothing but to hang his big face over my shoulder and tease me about having two legs. He is playful and reliable, joining a game of football as my six-year-old runs around his legs. He has never in his six months of being part of our lives, lifted a hoof, or bitten or shown any signs of being anything other that deeply laid back. Except when Chalky, the donkey is out of sight.

Then he freaks. Don't get me wrong, Midnight isn't ever mean, he just panics to his very core when he thinks he's been seperated from his herd. Then he can turn on a pin, out-manouevre a swift on a thermal. The very first time I took him for a ride, he decided that the War memorial in our village was not to be trusted. His legs metamorphosed to jelly beneath me. He spun 180degrees and ran home, fast. When he could hear Chalky braying he calmed right down and slowed to a trot. When he could see him he decided it was time to graze the roadside verges. I caught up with him then and untangled the reins from his legs.

We sent him on loan to a girl who wanted to jump him, he churned the ground to mud twirling and whirling like a whisk in a mixing dish because we took his companion away in the trailer. He came home to be reunited with the mule. I have to admit that once or twice I seperated him from our donkey just to hear the thunder he made with his hooves as he galloped to the furthest point round our lake and back again. To see him run like Black Bess with Dick Turpin aboard; then he is simply magnificent.

The donkey is very nice. There is no malice in the donkey. The donkey really has no axe to grind, no disagreements with anything, not even a thistle. He is much happier than Eyore, but just as self-effacing. In fact, if I could make the donkey, man, I would marry him. But I don't think its just the greatness of the donkey that makes Midnight so attached.

Generation of horses before him, whose genes echo in his, have survived by keeping their suede shoulders brushing their comrades. Being alone for a horse is a risky business. In common with wood ants and termites, bonobos and mackerel, horses have found sticking with their own kind the best way to stay alive. And we humans are as social a species as any other. No wonder then that Midnight wants to stay close to Chalky and no wonder that as more of us set up home on our own, pathologies set in.

In human culture, living alone is a risk factor for diseases of the heart, the mind and the body. From alcoholism to alzeimers, malnutrition to myocardial infarction, one of the worse things you can do for your health is live on your own. Put simply,

'lack of social relationships is a risk factor for death'

And we are currently experiencing a fragmentation of culture, an epidemic of loneliness like never before. Images and movies and websites and this blog and any amount of social networking can't substitute for someone holding your hand, or leaning on your shoulder. When my little boy wandered up to an old lady in a cafe and asked her 'Are you on your own, don't you have anyone to look after you?' he struck at one of the central issues of our culture. Horses need horses (ponies need donkeys) monkeys need monkeys, chickens need other chickens and people need other people.

I do not push it. Unlike better horsewomen, I find imposing my will so decisively over Midnight's difficult. I would rather respect his desire to be with his equid friends and find ways of riding him out in company than force the issue and have an unhappy animal underneath me. Riding a horse with its cacophany of metal bits and riding whips and saddle already feels too much like human dominion over animal for my liking. I don't want to add the feeling of fear to the equation. I want him to like being with me and to like being ridden.

So for now we potter about the lanes with the donkey in tow, or ride out with friends, which he greatly enjoys. I do decide the directions we go in and generally, the speed. But he decides who we travel with and that is alright with me.

Sasha x

Shitten Sheep and Cloths of Heaven

2012-01-22T02:53:00.000-08:00

Shitten Sheep and Cloths of Heaven

The lake is a light slate colour this morning, with ripples running west to east across the surface. I have been cutting sheep faeces from a Cotswold sheep fleece. This blog is an attempt to document my struggle against battery humanism. Against our imprisonment by modern culture. I love my laptop and my car which gives me freedom to climb up Snowdon on New Year's day and swim in White Sands beach the next. But they come with a price. One is the deep muscle ache cutting across my shoulders as I type. This blog will explore my attempts to challenge within my own life the pathologies of our culture. It will document my efforts to be happy without damaging the earth, to bring well-being and sustainability into the lives of my children and to reconnect with what it means truly, to be human.

Weaving is a part of my plan. So when my neighbour offered me a massive builder's sac full of damp, rancid, to quote Chaucer, 'shitten', sheep's wool, I accepted with delight.

As I type a long-tailed tit is tap tapping on the wooden panels above my window. Perhaps they are looking for insects sleeping beneath? The old dog is pacing around asking for some need to be met, a simple matter of a walk, or a meal or some water. I will attend to her soon. Outside an orange movement grabs my attention, Through the telescope trained permanently on my garden and the nature reserve beyond, I see a bullfinch, resplendent with colour, munching the seeds of a budlea flower. I looked at the scrappy plant all year, thinking I really should cut it back. Now I have been redeemed. This bird is like the brightest bauble on the saddest old Christmas tree. The tree feeds it, gives it life, makes fly its flash feathers. Life renews.

In my bath tub, lies the coat of a 3 year old ewe. She lives in my village in an apple orchard, with her children and mother eating grass and growing this coat. She is there still. I have the honour of owning her fleece, a gift from a neighbour with whom, in the past I have had some differences. I feel duty bound to create something of beauty for both human and sheep. My intention is to weave this wool on a peg loom into a thick, loose rug for the children's beds, or for by the fire. But for now, it is an ugly mat of filth. It will take some transforming.

First, I cut the ragged poo infested sections of wool off with a pair of scissors. Then I lug the unwieldy mass into the house. Luckily the bathroom is right by the back door. In it goes into a pool of warm spring water. My house is one of only two left in our village that is still fed by water from the Spring. This means I can never over run the bath. One of the twin dramas of my domestic life has been eliminated. The pressure is low, so the water slowly fills a tank. When the tank is empty, the water stops flowing, long before it fills the tub. I never over run the bath. I still, regularly, burn pans on the stove! Immediately I drop in the fleece, the water turns mud brown. Simple as that. Hereford mud, which has a pinky tone from the iron ore in its belly.

And that is where I left off to write this. I know, because I have done it once before to the fleece of her sister, that this wool will undergo a metamorphosis in the next hour. When I have finished I will be the owner of a warm, grey-blue, curly mass of the softest, sweetest wool man has ever woven. And when I have made it into a thing of beauty in my home, I will cherish it, like no shop-bought thing, however stunning or finely wrought. This rug will be the heaven's embriodered cloth, and I will lay it at the feet of loved ones, along with my dreams. But for now... back to the sh*t.

Sasha x