Notes from the Potting Shed

 I have, as is my unbroken tradition since nineteen fifty-three — or perhaps it was 'fifty-four, I can never quite be sure, what with the fog of years settling like soft moss upon the stones of memory — made my annual Easter Monday pilgrimage to the high moor. It is an act neither required nor expected by any but myself and the low murmuring soil, yet one I feel compelled to undertake as a means of gently straightening my inner ley lines, un-knotting my humours, and tipping my hat to the ancient forces that burble, unseen, beneath this Little Country.

I rose in the slow, grey hush of pre-dawn, the kind of hour when the whole village is given over to sleep, save for the milkman’s cart and a rogue owl with a vendetta. In the kitchen, by the flicker of my single unshaded bulb, I packed my old canvas rucsac — a dear, battered thing, faded and salt-dusted from my ill-advised adventures across Nepal during a summer when Everest was still an obscure lump and I believed myself to be in pursuit of wisdom, rather than waiting for it to come to me. Into it went my trusty flask, still faintly scented of last year’s nettle tea, and a thick, rustic slab of lemon sponge, baked the previous evening with a heavy hand and a light heart.

The streets of the village were hushed as a crypt, window boxes drooping with damp, curtains drawn against a sky still heavy with sleep. Only the mechanical click of my old walking stick upon the flagstones broke the stillness, and even that seemed to tread more softly than usual, as though afraid to rouse the spirits in the hedgerows.

I made my way up the narrow lane past old Mr. Draycott’s paddock — a lonely place where a single, indignant goose patrols the earth like a disapproving usher — and onward by Fielding’s Copse, where the rape flowers hung their yellow heads like drowsing choirboys. The lambs, strewn about like living punctuation marks, snuffled and sighed in their woolly dreaming.

At the old stile, weathered by decades of backside and boot, I paused, as is customary, and laid a hand upon its lichen-furred top rail. Beyond it, the bracken rolled away into a heathland bestrewn with wimberries and stone outcrops like the fossilised bones of forgotten gods. I made my way over the moor, the air thick with the scent of crushed thyme and the occasional sweet rot of last year’s leaves. The song of the curlew rose thin and mournful, stitching the far reaches of the landscape to the waking world.

As the eastern sky rippled with lavender and old-rose, I found my accustomed hollow in the heather and settled myself, knees creaking in a companionable chorus. The land around me seemed to hold its breath, waiting. I pondered, as I always do at this moment, the great invisible lattice that threads these hills to the stones and barrows, the standing oaks and secret pools. A kind of quiet understanding steals over you in such places — the sense of being a temporary note in a far older melody.

When at last the sun breached the crest of the distant hills, spilling golden light like molten honey across the mist-strewn vales, I rose, a little stiffly, and bowed low to greet it. Not with any grand flourish, but a simple, grateful nod to the eternal wheel, the slow turning of seasons that carries us all along whether we care to notice or not.

I lingered a while longer, sipping tepid tea and gnawing upon my lemon sponge, its crumb dense and defiantly wholesome. A skylark rose high, its song a liquid thread unspooling into the pale morning, and I felt, as I always do, both a small thing and an infinite part of the great woven pattern.

And then, by gentle stages, I made my way home. The village would be stirring now — smoke curling from chimneys, kettles boiling, HER at Number 23 no doubt already deploying her binoculars at the window. I shall record this morning, not in ink, but in memory’s deep, green chamber.

And as I made my way back through the dew-heavy lanes, I happened upon what I’m fairly sure was either a particularly determined ferret or a spectral Victorian child, vanishing into the hedgerow with a noise like a wet sock on parquet. Either way, I took it as a good omen.

By the time I reached my front gate, the neighbour’s ornamental gnome had moved a full two inches to the left of where it stood yesterday, and the crows on the telegraph wire were spelling out something suspiciously close to “TIDY YOUR SHED.” I shall ignore them, of course. It’s far too early in the season for shed-based divination.

There are places — and times — that belong to something older than clocks and calendars. And it’s good, now and then, to remember we live amongst them.

p.s. And if I'd known about it, this would have been exactly what I'd listen to on my walk back from the dawn

http://bit.ly/44vua4r