Back on the trail

It was the most spring-like day this year and the urge to be out in it without delay overcame lengthy consideration of where to go. I considered the Phoenix trail to be unfinished business (see post before last) because I hadn’t walked its full length. Still haven’t, as a matter of fact. But there are more pictures to share and tales to tell.

As the springboard for mystical flights of fancy, it’s rather a failure, for it’s not solitary enough. Even when there is no one in sight, you are benignly assailed by the flights of fancy and dogoodery of others who have been before: the sculptors and installation artists, the philanthropic institutions. Royal Bank of Scotland is one. It may have ruined our country’s banking system, if not the world’s, but it has donated a thousand mileposts to ensure I don’t think entirely badly of it, like the one in cast-iron I display below, bottom.

I met dog walkers, an elderly photographer, ponyriders, whole families of cyclists (it is school half-term holiday so children were out in force). The best encounter was on a bridge:

It is an ancient Bicyclist
And he stoppeth one of three ...
‘By thy ruddy face and thy glittering eye
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?’

He had stopped for his ‘elevenses’ and offered to share a small packet of biscuits, which I declined, quoting the dying Sir Philip Sidney on the battlefield: “Thy necessity is yet greater than mine”. In an opening gambit he skilfully offered a smorgasbord of topics, out of which I chose prostate operations and his son who’s doing well working overseas for a pharmaceutical company. We could have talked about the cycling achievements of his youth or the sculptural embellishments on French motorways which may have inspired those on this cycling trail. But my heart was gladdened by the topic of prostate operations because, dear reader, I am of the age and sex where this could conceivably happen to me, as it has happened to my cousin of the same age.

I feel perfectly well, I hasten to add. But so does the ancient bicyclist, weller than me indeed, with his ruddy face and his fresh operation scar (which he described rather than displayed) and his 75 years of fitness. The routine annual blood test said otherwise, for he had requested a PSA (prostate-specific antigen) as part of it, and the result was high. So the mysterious gland was excised, or the tumour removed, I’m not sure which.

My own contribution was the sagacious observation that we all have to die of something, and that I am not going to submit to the interference of doctors trying to prolong my life by curing what they can cure, whilst increasing the risk of my dying from something which they can’t cure, namely dementia. My cycling friend agreed, for we both felt it must be a kind of living death, best avoided, and worse for the person who must watch and tend what must seem like the living shadow of her loved one.

I guess that in the United States, as in third-world countries, it is easy to die without the interference of doctors. Unless invigorated by the sight of a patient’s valid health insurance or credit card, their professional interest will rapidly wane. Here in the United Kingdom, it is different. They cannot force you to go to the surgery, but if you do, they will lecture you unceasingly: not you in your status as unique individual but you as a unit of epidemiological statistics. It’s no good saying you feel well. Who are you but the patient? What can you know of evidence-based medicine? It is for your doctors to tell you whether or not you are well, and to prescribe pre-emptively. You must take pills of various types for the rest of your life, together with secondary pills to relieve the side-effects of the main ones, and so on ad infinitum.

I prefer Basho’s outlook on life:

“Days and months are travellers of eternity. So are the years that pass by. Those who steer a boat across the sea, or drive a horse over the earth till they succumb to the weight of years, spend every minute of their lives travelling. There are a great number of ancients, too, who died on the road. I myself have been tempted by the cloud-moving wind---filled with a strong desire to wander.”

Our common pilgrimage

I’m on this path. I don’t know how far I’ve been, I don’t know where I am on the map. I hear planes criss-crossing distantly above the fog. I’m on the crest of a slope, looking out on rows of stubble, which bristle in parallel stripes over the curved surface of the fields. The landscape is wild, hardly a human habitation to be seen, yet deeply scored and shaped by human purpose: for example this footpath, which goes off in straight lines across the piece with a self-important certainty. It cuts across a road hidden in the fold of the valley, then continues true to its original purpose, which no living person may remember, for it ends up in a wilderness which I can’t identify. Sure, there are signposts, but most of them are worn and bleached by time, except those which say “Footpath” or “Bridleway”, which doesn’t help establish where on earth I am.

From a height I see the landscape laid out like a map. I feel a connection with it, as to some unidentified, half-remembered fragment of my own past. All I can see is that everything has its agenda: these blue-green wild-plants spread flat, star-shaped in the meadow between the stubble-stalks, catching droplets of dew, or perhaps this continuing drizzle they call “Scotch mist”, so thin and steady that I’d forgotten about it till this moment. Surely, I too have my agenda, pursuing it diligently like every other force of nature.

Why else am I drawn to cross this landscape and record my thoughts, producing these “Records of a Weather-exposed Skeleton”*? For I’m out in the weather, wondering why I am here, I mean here on earth, not just this moor; exploring my provenance and destiny, not with any focused purpose, just making incidental discoveries. I’ve never plotted my path far ahead. It’s against everything I stand for, to do such violence to the delicate intake of sense and impulse, as to pursue an ambition and force myself to follow the course set by conscious intellect. People certainly do that: they crash through the undergrowth of indolence and self-indulgence by sheer force of will, and seize their due prize, Success. But a mysterious inner part of me, which gently rules, views such an approach with horror.

Amongst the more literary signposts I stumble upon — long may life reveal itself in such a fashion! — is this, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard:

I am sitting under a sycamore by Tinker Creek. I am really here, alive on the intricate earth under trees. But under me, directly under the weight of my body on the grass, are other creatures, just as real, for whom also this moment, this tree, is “it”.
. . .
Hasidism has a tradition that one of man’s purposes is to assist God in the work of redemption by “hallowing” the things of creation. By a tremendous heave of his spirit, the devout man frees the divine sparks trapped in the mute things of time; he uplifts the forms and moments of creation, bearing them aloft into that rare air and hallowing fire in which all clays must shatter and burst. Keeping the subsoil world under trees in mind, in intelligence, is the least I can do.

* There is this from the poet-monk Bashō, patron saint of this blog:

Determined to fall
a weather-exposed skeleton
I cannot help the sore wind
blowing through my heart.

After ten autumns
in Edo, my mind
points back to it
as my native place.

PS I think I’ve worked out where I went, and where the footpath led from there on: to a cemetery and disused pit. Apt enough. We are all on that pilgrimage. Still, something doesn’t seem quite right. Probably my map-reading. Real life never seems the same as what’s written down.

The Phoenix Trail (railway track reborn as cyclepath)

Seven stylish things

Bryan M. White, that onlie begetter of Nuclear Headache, has burdened me with an award nomination as a Stylish Blogger. Never fear: if you are already in my blog-list below, and have taken the trouble to read this far, you’re ipso facto stylish enough. There is, as always, a catch. You can’t win the lottery without buying a ticket. In this case you have to follow certain rules. I’ve included them lower down. First I’ll discharge one of my obligations herewith, by sharing seven things about myself. Nothing new about that but here goes.

1) In August 1959 I met Christine Keeler and asked her for a date. We were both seventeen. She’d been telling me about the social whirl she had recently been introduced to, in particular Lord Astor and Douglas Fairbanks Junior. Had she gone out with me (unfortunately she was washing her hair on that day) the course of British history might have been changed. She might not have subsequently dated both Yevgeni Ivanov the Russian spy and John Profumo the Secretary of State for War. This would have prevented the scandal which helped bring down the Government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1963. Reader, I did my best for my country.

2) In May 1962, I was a guest-writer at Shakespeare & Co (then Librairie Mistral) run by the eccentric George Whitman. Here I nearly met Henry Miller, Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg. Fortunately I didn’t, because if any of them had arrived in Paris, I would have been chucked out so that they could have been accommodated in the bed I was using. Guest-writer? Reader, I lied. (Not to you. I’d never do that. To the bookshop owner.) And when George asked what I was writing, I said “A book on Zen Buddhism”. (Whereas, I was actually reading one.)

3) In August 1962, I was instrumental in putting a fig-leaf on Michelangelo’s statue of David in Florence, as written up in this blog post. This brief but intimate encounter with the Chicago movie industry (Coronet Films), and the sensitivities of schoolmarms in the US Bible belt, failed to blossom into a career in Hollywood.

4) In December 1958, I played tea-chest bass in a skiffle group at a school concert. One of the numbers we played was Tom Dooley. John Lennon stole a march on me. He’d started his own skiffle group a couple of years earlier, The Quarrymen, at his school, Quarry Bank High. I’ve heard he went on to start some pop quartet, I think it began with a “B”.

5) For a period of 30 years, I meditated for an hour a day. It may have done some good. It might have done a lot of harm. Should I be proud or ashamed? As for my Guru, I recall the words of St Matthew’s Gospel (7:16): “Beware of false prophets... ye shall know them by their fruits.” Oh yeah? I still don’t know. St Matthew, you wasted a lot of my time. You should have explained in more detail.

6) Favourite film: if...., together with its theme tune, the Sanctus from Missa Luba; not to mention the deliciously watchable Malcolm McDowell & Christine Noonan, whose appeal to my inner adolescent has not dimmed with time. My picture above shows them as the rooftop revolutionaries they play in the film.

7) My favourite music includes the following tracks:

• I’m a dreamer – demo track by Sandy Denny, accompanying herself on piano at home, March 1976. From her album Rendezvous
• “Boya Ngai”, recorded by Franco Luambo & T.P.O.K. Jazz, on Voices of Africa, volume 6.
• Lux Aeterna (Morten Lauridsen), recorded by Polyphony (choir) with Britten Sinfonia & Stephen Layton
• On verra ça: The 1978 Paris Sessions, album reissued in 1992 by Orchestra Baobab. The title track is more easily obtainable on Specialist in all Styles, the astonishing comeback the band made in 2002; but not as good.

OK, here are the rules for giving yourself an award.

1. Link back to the person who nominated you.
2. Share seven things about yourself.
3. Pass the nomination on to ten blogs that you read regularly
4. Notify them of the award.

I shall follow the example of Bryan and consider this announcement as the only notification. As far as I’m aware, there is no adjudicator or blogging policeman to enforce the rules. If you have a full-time day job and are secure in your own stylishness, you need not bother.

A moment

One thing that language can do, and I think it only possible in written language, is to unwrap the content of a moment of consciousness, to examine and share it. Not every moment, of course. Rare moments.

Such a one occurred today as I crossed a car park to enter the supermarket. Perhaps I caught a glimpse of my own face in a car mirror, I’m not sure. It was a thought, rather than any of those complicated feelings which, for me, are inspired by walking out in town or country, feelings which could sometimes be described as ecstatic, but also have a minute particularity, like a scent. If I had walked to the supermarket, instead of taking the car, I might have arrived overflowing with such feelings, quite unable to put words on them. But this was a simple thought: that I am delighted to be me, and couldn’t ask anything more than that.

I don’t mean that I’m glad not to be another person. Nor that I admire my own looks, accomplishments, standing in society, potential and so on. I am (or implicitly was, in that moment) satisfied with them, even though none is likely to win any prizes. I wouldn’t mind being another person, either. Of course I wouldn’t want to be suddenly standing in someone else’s shoes, transposed into a different body or situation, as in so many stage comedies and movies. To be delighted to be a different person, I would have had to be that person since birth, and thus grown into myself as I have grown into this pair of shoes, which were so uncomfortable when I first got them, but are now my favourites.

So it is not an undesirable manifestation of egotism. Someone ought to be pleased to be me. I am the only possible one who can be appointed to that role, which has stood vacant so long.

I say it was a single moment of consciousness, and I don’t lie. I could imagine being distracted by something, and missing it. But having not missed it, having unwrapped it with language, I’ve been able to dwell in its glow for much more than a moment.

Not everyone might agree, but to me it seems very similar to an involuntary moment of thanksgiving: of thanking the Universe, or even some imagined unseen Spirit of the Universe, for my existence within it, as part of it. And it seems to me, in hindsight, that being delighted to be yourself is almost synonymous with being delighted with the Universe. Because, in those moments, or perhaps a fraction of those moments, you don’t see any clear dividing line between yourself and the world around you.

I know that not every mammal sings the glory of existence twenty-four hours a day, for I too am a mammal, and I know what it’s like to feel threatened, crushed, guilty, demoralized, depressed, terrified. I don’t suppose all mammals feel all those things. But in my imagination the humble snail, enjoying the great blessing of a comprehensive instinct, with few options at its disposal for self-defence or self-aggrandizement, might be feeling all the time what I was able to feel in one moment.

The moment was remarkable for nothing else but the fact that it never happened to me before. And why do I share it? Firstly because that’s what this blog is for. Secondly because, as Montaigne said, “Every man has within himself the entire human condition”.

Preface Mark III

Pic from idunn_it

I still haven’t given up on “the book of the blog”. When I do, this place can become “the blog of the book”, but don’t worry, it will be the same blog, going off in the same haphazard directions. In December last, I dashed off a Preface followed by a Preface Mark II", both of which were enough to quell a reader’s interest stone dead from the first sentence on. Now I’ve had another go, but I’m not sure if it’s any better. You are invited to pass judgment, see below.

Over the last five years I’ve kept a journal, writing an entry roughly every four days. It hasn’t exactly been a private one, for it’s a blog, that strange word which some think ugly, formed from the syllables Web + log. There are on the Internet hundreds of millions of blogs, open to millions of readers. Some are like personal diaries. It is worth asking what drives the author to make the effort. I continue to ask myself this, and still get worthwhile answers. Gradually I’ve come to see blogging as a method of discovery. Without the discipline of written language, and of presenting something to my unseen audience, I wouldn’t know what I have to say. Precious experiences would hardly be noticed at the time, and soon forgotten afterwards; all for want of an album of literary snapshots.

This much—that it would be an adventure of discovery—I knew from the start, as my first ever post reveals. The second post, written a few days later, brought to consciousness something that seemed like an idle flight of fancy at the time. In asking “Do fish have souls?” I tried to record what it felt like to discover the astonishing beauty of a mackerel, even when dead. As I slit its belly to prepare it for grilling, I saw that its bone-structure and organs were not so different from my own; that in a sense we are one family.

I was—am—overwhelmed by the wonder of it all: its beauty, the mystery of existence, an inexpressible feeling within me, always yet never the same. I know that there are explanations: in the theory of evolution; in recent discoveries of DNA and how brains work; in the lore of various myths and religions. But it’s quite different to make a personal discovery. The sense of wonder is nothing like any explanation. Keeping a public journal, trying to find words to share this sense of wonder, perhaps sometimes succeeding, has helped uncover extraordinary dimensions within the commonplace round of daily life.

Words can’t really convey the richness of experience, but that doesn’t stop us trying. Sometimes the spirit behind the words can jump the gap of separateness and touch what’s common, however clumsy the communication.

I was going to call it The Soul of an Animal, with a photo of young bulls on the front. But now I wonder whether to call it Do Fish Have Souls?

The yet-to-be-invented eWriter

The 1980 Microwriter. Source: Wikipedia

There is more to inventing something than having the idea. I had the idea of the eWriter in 1978 but never did anything about it. Never mind my inability to build a prototype. I lacked the skills even to write about it coherently. Let’s see if I have improved at all since then.

But I was able to compose a mental specification then, and it hasn’t changed at all. I was convinced that someone would beat me to it, as soon as I did any work on it. Then I was obsessed with keeping it a secret till a patent application had been lodged. I can’t see any reason now, thirty-five years later, for staying quiet. Good luck, if you are the one who makes the money from it. You can call it the VincentWriter or Vwriter if you like. It functions as a Personal Universal Input Device. It belongs to you, understands you, translates your input into a digital form that fits every other machine that requires your input. Importantly, it doesn’t render my fountain pens obsolete. Their role is treasured as never before.

Everyone knows that the qwerty keyboard is an anachronism, invented to stop the rods on a typewriter from getting entangled with one another. Of course, it still holds its own in the office, especially for those trained in touch-typing, the required discipline for reaching the highest speed. But as you will know if you own a Blackberry or Kindle Reader (illustrated in my previous post), its tiny keyboard is not what you’d design if you were starting from scratch. My idea was that everyone would have his own personalised plug-in ‘keyboard’, but it wouldn’t consist of keys on a board.

The Vwriter is operated with one hand. When we learned to write in cursive, one hand was enough to guide the pencil. It was painfully slow but we speeded up to the point where now, as adults, we can hardly read our own scribbled notes—speaking for myself—and have to make efforts addressing an envelope clearly. The Vwriter unlike a keyboard or handwriting doesn’t require a flat surface, or to be held steady with the other hand. You grip it. The thing fits snugly in your hand like a pistol-grip, not that I am familiar with such things; not since I used to swing a toy Colt 45 around my finger, and load it with a paper reel of exploding caps.

Your writing hand—right or left—could do much more, with less movement, than select keys to hit from a two-dimensional array. The movements we make in handwriting are tiny, normally made using two fingers and an opposed thumb. My handheld device can respond to contact with any part of the hand, and is sensitive enough to react to small twitches.

The Vwriter comes with a preprogrammed signal-language, one that is simple and easily understood. There’s a set of keys for one or more fingertips to press as chords (giving binary codes where pressed = 1 and not-pressed = 0). But since each one of us is different, and some of us have disabilities, my user is encouraged to reprogram the device with personal shortcuts, and take advantage of some of the other pressure-pads on the device, besides those designed for fingertips.

At this stage I’d like to refer you to portrayals of two actual devices, both of which use this concept in the pre-programmed manner suggested above First is the MicroWriter, which came out in 1980. I remember seeing one in a shop, but I was never tempted. It was cruder than the device I had in mind. Second is the keyer, which I only discovered whilst researching for this post. In physical design it is probably an improvement on my pistol-grip idea, but in other respects seems to resemble the Vwriter concept very closely. But on its own, when not plugged into another device, it’s not enough. When you are writing, whether shorthand, longhand or keying, you need visual feedback, to make sure that you have not miswritten. If your input is being captured on an electronic device, you need something like a screen to see what you have written, so that you can correct it as necessary. (At the start of my career in the Sixties, computer input employed punched cards and paper tape, with no visual confirmation. Accordingly, these media had to be punched, then verified—the same input re-entered by a different operator, with a warning given of discrepancies. Things have progressed since then!)

So the Vwriter can’t practically be a standalone device. If I am to walk down the Ledborough Road recording my thoughts on some kind of keyer, with my hand nonchalantly resting in a jacket pocket, I shall need a discreet head-up display. The combination of keyer and head-up display constitutes a wearable computer.

I’m sure there must be a way to project text characters on the lens of my glasses whilst I’m keying them, without impeding my view of the external scene.

Going back to my ideas in 1978, they were modest, though I’m not entirely sure how achievable they would have been with the technology available in that day. I visualised the Vwriter being sold as a standalone device. It would be your personal keyboard, that you’d plug into any computer you encountered. I’m not sure now what other devices were available then. By programming shortcuts to suit your own dexterity and frequently-used words and phrases, you’d constantly be improving its efficiency and personalisation. In ’76, memory was still very expensive. I visualized the Vwriter as incorporating what we then called a microprocessor, with no more than 256k bytes.

I’d still like one, if it were easily available, so that I could write anywhere, without being tied to this desk, this computer screen, this Microsoft ® Natural ® MultiMedia Keyboard 1.0A, which is so ergonomically designed that it has ruined me for any other computer keyboard on the planet.

But failing that, I can still carry my notebook and selection of fountain-pens, with inks in blue-black, green and red. Perhaps I should have faith that the Muse is best coaxed with age-old fetishistic (and time-consuming) rituals.

---------

PS: it was delightful to discover the work of Steve Mann, professor, performance artist and assistant mail-clerk in his own company, or as he puts it: “Empowerment through self-demotion. (© Steve Mann) In the same way that clerks facilitate empowerment of large organizations, I was able to facilitate personal empowerment by being a clerk. My self-demotion provided a deliberate self-inflicted dehumanization of the individual that forced clerks to become human. In summary, I found that humans being clerks can make clerks be human.”

To aid in understanding what he means, I recommend his website http://www.eyetap.org/” and this paper in particular: Existential Technology: Wearable Computing Is Not the Real Issue!

Reading, writing and publishing

Let me confess that I’m a conservative of the deepest dye. When some new-fangled thing—a gadget, for example—comes along threatening to oust its traditional equivalent whose pedigree goes back hundreds or even thousands of years, I form an immediate prejudice against it.

One good reason for loving books is the antiquity of their provenance. To replace them by gadgets is a foolish idea, I used to think. That was before I encountered the e-reader, face to face. Do you know about e-paper and e-ink? Its attributes are seductive, even to the most hidebound curmudgeon. My Kindle reader has a page size of 8x12 cm (3½ x5 inches) and the whole device in its leather case (with its own light, so that you can read in bed at night) is the size of a slim paperback. The page is off-white and the ink is black, but it does shades of grey very well too. Unlike a normal electronic screen, it doesn’t emit light. So it is not like the iPad’s full-colour liquid crystal display. The page stays put without being refreshed, as if it had been printed. You turn the page with buttons. You can flip from one book to another, as many books or documents as you like, and each will open at the page you last left off.

Obviously, if your objective is to possess a book as a physical object, then you must cherish your old hardbacks, whether leatherbound or wrapped in their original tattered dustjackets. My Kindle is now another fetish object in its own right. It’s handsome enough to take wherever I go, to fondle on my lap in any spare moment.

A text printed on e-paper with e-ink draws you into the magic of written language with no distraction, as soon as you have acclimatised yourself to this new medium. Then you discover you have choices, including eight font sizes.

It’s not my purpose here to write a review of the Kindle Reader, so I’ll cut short the description of features. When I took delivery of mine a couple of weeks ago, I instantly started to work out how to format text for it, and investigate its scope as a publication medium. It must be the world’s cheapest method to publish your own book, being completely free. You get royalties of 70% on the sale price, sent to you periodically by Amazon. Publishers and literary agents naturally look down on self-publishing, for it undermines their own business interests. But in the case of Kindle the stigma of self-publishing (“low-quality vanity press”) is hard to argue, as Amazon includes your book in its listings alongside the classics and latest bestsellers.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve offered for sale a Kindle version of The Soul of an Animal which could be described as “the book of the blog”, as its content is entirely drawn from A Wayfarer’s Notes. I withdrew the first edition (they call it “unpublishing”) and replaced it with a second edition. You may have noticed an advertisement for it here. But I unpublished the second version too. Various review copies were sent out several weeks ago. The lack of feedback in most instances bears silent testimony—eloquent all the same—to a fundamental flaw in the text. I’m convinced it’s a lack of consistent readability. The current Preface, for example, is enough to persuade most readers to close the book after the first sentence, promising themselves to come back at some indefinite time; from goodwill to the author rather than natural eagerness. So be it. The next steps are up to me.

Still, I do recommend the Kindle Reader. It may be the greatest encouragement to reading since the invention of printing.

The walk to Marlow

I’ve never taken this trail before, this walk to Marlow on the last day of January, on a cloudless frosty day. How often it happens, on my wayfaring, that something triggers a memory, perhaps of a single second in my life, usually in childhood, for it was then that I most frequently encountered something for the first time, and entered openheartedly into——that experience. That second expanded then and expands now, almost to infinity. Perhaps it was a colour, something sparkling, something translucent, something which glowed; the slightly blue-tinged green of a field, with its shoots of young wheat. Or a newly-ploughed field, where the plough had brought to the surface a large white flint, and I stared at it. You see, there’s a feeling, but I can’t say what it is.

And then I try to communicate in words, and find that more words won’t make it easier. Fewer words are better, when the task is to point towards something that can only be felt. It is not my description that will make things clearer to the reader. It can only be the reader’s own journey, which I must not hinder—to an untouched place, an archipelago of imagination.

I’m fully aware, John Myste, that I have not responded to your generous comment on the topic of poetry, appended to my last. I shall be lazy and not respond point by point, but merely dedicate this whole post to you, hoping you will forgive. Like you I am utterly beguiled by the magic and possibilities of poetry. Like you I am unimpressed by most poetry. It had an impact in my teens and I still like the same things now as then; my favourite of all time being one by Laurence Ferlinghetti: “Away above a harborful ...”. Poetry takes us to places we don’t know but its magic is to make them reachable and even shareable.

And this is how I would define my god, if I wanted to use the word, which I most certainly don’t: a Presence, an attentive Presence, there in times of need; the need to give thanks and the need to beg, and the need to surrender one’s life to something higher. To surrender in advance if you will, because death will come willy-nilly, death the force majeure. It forces us to let go of all that we know with our mortal mind. But perhaps there is an immortal mind, always hidden, or perhaps not so hidden. Perhaps the immortal mind takes wing after death, why not? Yet one can dwell contentedly not knowing.

At this point I have just been overtaken by a fellow wayfarer, on this beautiful footpath. She’s walking faster. She said something as she approached from behind, so that I wouldn’t jump in surprise. What a gracious person! One of those angel-sent strangers who greets and passes on, the human manifestation of an invisible Presence, leaving me to resume this conversation with the world.

It’s a spot on the map called Burroughs Grove Hill. There’s nothing much here, apart from the landscape. I take a bridle path which wends its way, over hill and down dale, till it reaches Marlow Bottom. It’s undoubtedly ancient, probably prehistoric, but in this moment I feel it as mediaeval. I wouldn’t be surprised to encounter a travelling vendor carrying silks, ribbons and lace, to show to the high ladies in the castle; a juggler on his way to the Fair; a mountebank, or a jester in cap and bells, clad in motley. Or, I could see in my mind’s eye a boy here, driving his pig to market with a stick.

The well-known Ridgeway, a few miles west of here, is reputed to be the oldest road in Britain, dating back to prehistory, but give me this one, which has no name! It has been spared the indignity of motor vehicles. They run on parallel roads, ones which go round the hills, not up and down them. It’s too steep here for any but foot-traffic.

Birds are singing joyfully in the hedgerows, as if to herald Spring. I don’t know which path to take. I am near to a copse closely planted with young ash trees, I recognise them from the smooth grey bark and the black buds. There are paths through it, and paths beside it.

A website tells me (I check later) There is a buffering strip, Kimber's Copse (Compartment 3), to the eastern side of the wood to protect this ancient wood from further damage by agriculture practices or development pressure. This is naturally regenerating well with mostly ash and some oak seedlings.

The site has an extensive network of well-used public paths that are clearly appreciated by the local people who walk them. There is strong support from the Marlow Residents’ Association for the management regime in the wood.

Once again, my memory goes back to my time as a five-year-old, in Holland, in 1947, though I was never there in this season. Almost all my memories of that time are of wandering alone in the open air, absorbing new experiences. Certainly I went the mile or so to school on my own, and I don’t think I always took the most direct route. It was near Arnhem, not long after the war ended. I didn’t see wreckage of planes, they would have been quickly recycled I supposed, but there were little items scattered in a field: nuts and bolts, tiny fragments of mirror, glinting in the sun.

I was only five, but I can visit it again, with my adult brain looking through the child’s eyes, a kind of Remote Viewing, but in time, not space. This life is glorious.

Part of the surrounding nature reserve is dedicated in loving memory of Olga McDonald who loved nature and reading and hated ginger biscuits ... & inspired our interest in all living things ... educated us not just to look, but to have a... (There was a metal plaque against a tree, I tried to photograph it on my mobile phone. It wasn’t too legible but this was the gist.)

Later, coming near to a few houses, there’s a tree hung with catkins, sure sign of wintry regeneration. It’s also hung with several green net bags of peanuts, already pecked clean by the birds.

And I feel that whoever took the trouble to put up that plaque, remembering a grandmother, I guess, and whoever hung bird food on trees out in the countryside at some distance from their own house and garden, did so feeling a Presence.

Now I come to human habitations. The footpaths are sacrosanct. They go straight through between the houses, narrower now between the high fences of adjacent back-gardens. Over these walls I hear men’s voices, like the droning of bees, women’s like the chatter of birds in a tree. The sunshine is bringing out householders and their neighbours on any excuse to rejoice and look for premature signs of Spring.

I hear children’s voices in the distance, echoing in the woods. I descend a steep urban footpath with a handrail in the middle, to which someone has strapped a child’s wristwatch. I gaze closely at its dial. It’s working, telling perfect time, waiting for its carefree owner to come back looking for it. Who says time and tide wait for no man? I have just seen the disproof. This place has somewhat of the free-and-easiness of the place I was born in the Forties, in Bassendean, a suburb of Perth, Australia, in which I spent my first four years.

I may be wrong but I think that the moments which I go back to, the ones which expand almost into infinity, are those which weren’t used up the first time round. They happened but they weren’t fully lived and savoured. How fortunate to be able to live them again.

By the time I get to Marlow, I've walked eight miles. I take the bus back.