Following the sun

Where the canal broadens out, a large flock of Canada Geese float on the water. A heron, hunched on a low-hanging alder branch, turns his back on them. Cock robins, pert and handsome, stake out their territories in the hawthorn hedge. They count me out along the towpath, and count me back in again – I might be up to no good. Stealing crab apples, perhaps, or gathering in holly for a Christmas wreath.

As I turn for home the geese take off, in groups of twenty or more, yapping and barking. They are following the last of the day’s sunlight, heading for the mill lodge hidden behind the hill.

Bracken

The rain has stopped, but the ground is still sodden. I walk through puddles to the canal, and by the time I reach the towpath my boots and the hems of my trousers are splattered with mud. The grasses beside the track across the field are flattened and yellow, the taller clumps dull ochre. And yet the hills are green, a green made even greener by the redness of dead bracken. The painter John Constable knew how to use red to strengthen the colour green; as a child I’d searched his pictures for the red - a scarlet cap or waistcoat, or an ornamental saddle to bring out the green of stream and meadow.

Today the redness of the bracken is astonishing; it defies analogy. Not amethyst, not chestnut, not madder, but all of these and all at once, a rich deep drowning of the hills in garnet. And the redness is doubled, each bracken frond reflected in the ebony surface of the canal. It is quite simply breath-taking.

Illness

For several weeks I've been ill, really seriously ill – I've had sepsis and pneumonia and there were hours when my life hung by a thread. It’s going to take me long time to get better. 

Since coming out of hospital at the end of September I’ve had a second bout of infection, a fifth course of antibiotics. 

My body is exhausted, but so too is my mind. Walking has been beyond me. Blogging has been beyond me.

I've been told it will take me a long time to recover, but no-one is saying how long. Suddenly, I'm old. 

Noise pollution

A mile along the towpath I encounter the noise that has been keeping me awake at night. One of the battleship grey industrial sheds that stand between my house and the canal has sprouted a trio of stainless steel silos which emit a low hum, as of an out-sized extractor fan. It's not a loud noise, but I'm sensitive to low frequency vibration and the hum has been disturbing me. Maybe it will bother me less now I know what it is. But if it does this to me, with my not-so-acute human hearing, what does it do to the wildlife?

Poem: January fog

January fog

There’s a tree on the other side of the road,

but I can’t see it.  I'm inside-out,

a coat whose sleeves have turned awkward.

I want to be the right way round.

I want to see the tree.

Snow

A slight dusting of snow on Blackstone Edge, visible only because I looked for it. 

New Year's Day

Today, New Year's day, the towpath is a social space. The world and its dog is out for a walk. I am embarrassed to be dogless, and compensate by politely greeting every pooch I encounter. The dogs are unimpressed. My doglessness is noted. 

Fox

As I walked past the small field beside Carriage Drive, I had the feeling I was being watched. It’s a feeling I’ve come to trust: If I think I’m being watched, I am. Who, or what, was watching me?

An animal was crouched in the middle of the field. A cat perhaps. No. It was a fox. Very pale in colour, as though it had been sprinkled with silver dust.  Its ears and tail were too big for its body, and yet, as foxes go, this was a large animal.  I gasped with pleasure, and the fox took off across the field – a fox can run at 30 miles an hour – and leapt over the perimeter ditch, its magnificent tail streaming behind it like a comet.

I stood at the field end.

Deeper in was a fox.

Suddenly I felt myself feared.

It was not a good feeling.

Echo

Echo

The air still, but elastic,

Throwing back

The quick dactyls

Of a dog-bark

Poem - Arthritis

Arthritis

My bones are without sap.

The pain strips me of all leaf.

I must make the pain beautiful,

like an old Caledonian pine,

twisted by years of wind and rain,

and now misshapen, but still tree.

Tree, I am tree.

I must remember that. 

A gap of three months

Three months without posting. That means I've been in pain for three months. It's been a bad year. It's not often I can't cope, but this year I haven't coped.  And meanwhile, the landscape has gone on without me. As it should. 

Willow Warbler

Sand martins hawking over the canal, swallows flying low over the sun-scorched fields. More of each than I’ve seen all summer.

The canal is half-empty, its underside exposed. A lone grey wagtail explores a patch of mud, female mallards sun themselves on a bank of shingle.

Pain makes me walk more slowly. Walking slowly makes me more attentive. I hear, for the first time on these towpath walks, the soft hhooeett hhooeett of a willow warbler. A plaintive, conspiratorial psst psst! I turn towards the sound and see, well-hidden in a hawthorn bush, a small green bird. Sunlit leaves. Sunlit bird. 

Like the swallows and the sand martins, the willow warbler is a migrant from Africa. It won’t be here for long. I feel privileged to have seen it.

The 589 bus route

Living in the bottom of a narrow valley I sometimes feel a need to expand my horizons, and so today I took a bus up to Burnley. I did so just for the pleasure of the ride, for the 589 bus route is one of the most beautiful in England. I've driven it too, but if it's views you're after, you can see higher and further from a bus. 

Cliviger Gorge, a sinister-looking glacial outcrop of millstone grit, is Todmorden's back wall. Even in high summer the blackness of the boulders is threatening, and I can well believe the old folk tale of a ghostly huntsman sending his hounds on ahead of him at Halloween;  when I come through in October, I will listen out for his horn. 

The gorge opens out through a series of narrow wooded cloughs into broad sweeps of moorland, with Pendle Hill away in the distance. This is livestock country - Todmorden Market sells lamb and beef from the farms around here - and the fields on the lower slopes are full of flocks of sheep and herds of cattle, the sheep recently sheared, the calves still young enough to graze close to their mothers. Higher up, and in the hanging valleys, heather is coming into bloom, but it's struggling against the drought, and is pale and straggly. 

The valley has many listed buildings and monuments, from old boundary stones, to lovely old inns and farmhouses, and even an ice-house - perhaps they had hot summers back in the 19th century too. I can remember as a child being taken to the Ram Inn for 'high tea', a feast of local ham and chicken and home grown tomatoes, followed by a pot of good strong tea and a slice of date and walnut loaf. Now it's scones and Prosecco, and somehow, that doesn't feel like progress!