The return of the Ravens

Tuesday's project is beautiful. It sits high on a hill on one side a valley in the Cotswolds. It was a pub garden covered in brambles and buddleia, untouched for decades. With the volunteers and my direction it is being transformed into a terraced garden to communally grow fruit and vegetables. We are very proud of what we have achieved here but it is an ongoing project and will be more beautiful still as time goes by and the planting takes off. This is one of three projects I coordinate but by far the most joyful to spend time in.

The view is breathtaking, the major road at the bottom of the hill being obscured both visually and audibly by the trees that line either side. A vineyard is visible which wasn't there when I first lived near here as a boy. It seems oddly exotic to think of all the new vineyards on south-facing slopes around here. I know the monks of medieval times grew grapes for wine. Monks do seem to have a penchant for alcohol. Some of the world's most highly regarded alcoholic drinks were originally produced by monasteries. Their abandoned terraces are visible in some quite unexpected places nearby. Names such as "Vineyard lane" which I often walked along to school hint at a viticultural past. Of course names are just names and whilst saying the words "Vineyard lane", people only ever thought about the place. Nobody ever stopped to think of the meaning of the syllables and their implication that once there had actually been a vineyard there. Names are funny like that: Divorced from the meaning of their component words. I mean, who ever thinks about the origin of the word "cupboard" from an etymological perspective?

So, the vineyards are returning as the average yearly temperature increases. And increasing it is. An old gardener long past retirement age but still cutting grass told me that forty years ago when he started he would cease mowing in mid September and resume at the beginning of March. Now he mows almost to December and starts mid February. That's a personal observation on a changing climate which as a relative newcomer was not a perspective I would have gained personally. But there is it is from one who has experienced the change in seasons.

Today, as I looked over the rolling hills at Postman Pat's tiny red van, very far away, climbing the steep hill to the top of the common on the opposite hill, a commotion caught my attention in the sky overhead. Two crows were mobbing a raven in an attempt to drive it away. Though the shape is superficially similar, a raven is a much bigger bird and its call much lower in pitch. Also, its tail is a different shape, forming more of a rounded fan then the straighter edged tail of its corvid relatives.

The raven didn't seem unduly perturbed but was still forced to perform occasional avian shrugs as a crow flew at a wing or plummeted down at it from above. They obviously were not too happy to see their cousin. Eventually the three of them disappeared from view with the shrieking still echoing off the roofs of nearby cottages.

When I was a boy, I never saw ravens. I once glimpsed one on a mountain in wales and this was a cause to remove my binoculars from their case and watch awhile. It was picking at a carcass of some dead animal and seemed not the slightest bit concerned at my presence. But it was a moment deserving of that kind of hushed reverence one feels is deserved in the presence of a natural phenomenon. But I never saw one of them near home, though it was and remains rural.

And then one day, i was cycling down by the Severn and I heard a distinctive caw, perhaps an octave lower than a crow's call. And there, on a dungheap were two ravens, possibly Huginn and Muninn. Who knows? I was pretty thrilled to see them and suddenly my immediate vicinity seemed more exotic.

And now I see ravens quite often. Red Kites too, where once you had to venture to obscure valleys in Mid wales to view them at special feeding site. This must surely be some kind of progress? With all the changes to the natural world and the erosion of diversity, at least this seems a positive development. Dare I hope...? I'm not sure.

And the Machine Grinds into Motion again.

 And so I sit me down to write. Gosh! It's been ages, hasn't it! So much has happened! This is strange though: Where once a computer keyboard was the landscape of much of my life, now I am very rare visitor to it. When I think of the tens of hours per week I used to sit and tap away, it seems incongruous for it to now be such an unfamiliar activity. I spent this morning directing volunteers in planting a greengage tree and spreading compost on raised beds on the side of damp windswept hill: As far away, perhaps from the artificiality of the plastic office and online world as it is possible to be.

But I have been alarmed of late to note the decline in the availability of words to me. The regular beating-of-the-bounds of my vocabulary allowed a fluency which I have noticed is slipping away. The observational skills I used to spot noteworthy events and behaviours have waned. Life is merely pragmatic these days. Indeed, writing this is actually much harder than I expected because, well, I never write any more. 

And so, here, for my own benefit, is a small foray into the once-familiar but now foreign territory of attempting to be articulate. It's not for you, you understand,. It's for me. I compel nobody to read this and perhaps nobody will. And that is ok. The possibility that someone might helps aspire to clarity and discipline. But really, I just need the exercise if I am to be honest. What do I write about? I don't know. It doesn't matter really. As long as words are chosen, written down and are subsequently coherent, the purpose will have been served. It seems a shame to have the ability to compose a cogent sentence and not to at least try to do so. Previously, in my Old Life it was necessary to communicate clearly in order to earn a crust, but not now. Nobody needs my words now. 

I suppose, in order to regain some kind of verbal fitness, practice must be undertaken. Hence here I am, with nothing of substance to say, other than "I need to say something so here are some words". The house is a tip, the rain is coming through my roof and there are still some big pans which need washing up from yesterday's dinner. But this can all wait. Verbal composition is self-care (though so is cleaning the kitchen so as not to be unhygienic), just like exercise or eating your greens. There are things we must do for our own good. I seem to be discovering this is one of them.

Not only that, it is an enriching exercise to portray the seemingly mundane in  everyday life. One watches more closely and with a different frame of mind if something profound might be described. It makes you look at things in a different way. I envy those people who can look upon an ordinary scene with an artist's eye and capture it in a painting or photograph such that it makes you stop and look deeper at something. Words can do that too.

Therefore, with creaking reluctance, I shift my brain into a mode it had almost forgotten and I force words out of my mind, through these keys and on to a screen. Ye gods! But I am so out of shape! Time to try to put that right.