Somewhere in between - a moment during lockdown.

The internet has brought me onto a hill.

It’s ironic.

Lockdown as we know it has meant everything we do to communicate with anyone other than our immediate others requires a decent internet connection. Before Lockdown (BL?) ours was OK. Not super fast, but we didn’t need it to be. Emails, a bit of twitter and some Netflix saw us all good and well. Now the need we have has increased tenfold and it won’t cope. The bent coat hanger someone at some time buried under the field to bring internet to our house must be rusty, so I’ve had to come up onto a hill a mile away and sit here, sending things from my phone’s 4G.

I’m lucky it’s not raining.

But I don’t mind. As I wait for a video I’ve recorded, for work, to upload, I’m looking out over the countryside around me. We’ve chosen to live out here in the Somerset countryside for the lifestyle it affords and that doesn’t come with bulletproof WiFi. What it does come with is everything I see, hear and smell around me right in this second. The sound of the birds is extraordinary. From every direction there’s song as they go about their business in their busiest time of the year. Funny really when many people are least busy. As I write this a Jackdaw is flying purposefully across the field in front of me. It’s a field of Wheat, silvery green. Healthy looking but feels like a desert when you look at the happily deep margin surrounding it and the thick hedge surrounding that. I can see the diversity and complexity of life around the farmed desert, must be where the Jackdaw is heading off to.

Skylark, Goldfinch, Dunnock, Woodpidgeon, House Sparrow, a female Blackbird and there’s a Buzzard circling overhead. All that just in this moment. All better than Wifi.

I’m glad I’m here.

I’ve been thinking about hedges a lot recently, I don’t think most of us think about them much at all, ever. But they are amazing things. When you really start to look. If there weren’t hedges here there wouldn’t be the Large White butterfly I see bowling around over there to my right. The Dunnock I mentioned wouldn’t be flitting around and the Oak, Ash, Blackthorn, Dogwood, Hazel, Sycamore, Alder trees wouldn’t be creating this beautiful splash of colour all around me. They wouldn’t be here filtering the air and feeding life. They wouldn’t be sheltering the countryside from the wind that howls up this valley before me and providing homes for the Rabbit, Badger, Fox, Deer in their plenty. The corridors for birds, mammals and insects between these farmed deserts. The ditches below the hedges are here for a purpose. For function. But they're filled to bursting with mosses, lichens, ferns, flowers, grasses and, just yesterday I found a newt.

I’m glad I’m here.

Suddenly I’m in a swarm of small black flying beetles. They’re coming in to land. Hundreds of them on me. It’s making me laugh. Looking closely I recognise them as the dung beetles I’ve peered at with my kids while on our hands and knees peering over a pile of horse crap along a track some while ago. They’ll be food for something, maybe the house martins that are nesting right now under the eaves of our house and importantly they’ll recycle for us. Hunting the manure, taking it down into the soil to lay their eggs in and feed their larvae. In turn our hedges will grow, the farm desert crops will thrive, the diversity will flourish and I’ll be able to sit here and enjoy these moments again and again. As quickly as the beetles came, they're gone. Must have just stopped for a rest. A few stragglers still to go, as am I. My video has uploaded, I’m back in the connected world. Is that where I want to be?

I think I’m better off somewhere in the middle.

I’m glad I’m here.

Note

The ‘deserts’ I refer to is a matter-of -fact term I’m using to describe the fields of crops. I don’t begrudge them being this way. I buy the food they produce. I’m friends with the man who farms this very field I’m sitting next to. They just simply don’t contain the diversity of life that the hedges, verges, field margins, woodlands and other wild places do. In my dreams everything is wild. In reality everything is not, and I probably don’t want it to be. It’s like technology. In my dreams it doesn’t exist, I live off the land, as simple as can be, but in reality I probably don’t want to.