Rockpool, Sutherland

Painted over a few hours. I mainly use palette knives to get the flat, broad strokes (though possibly just because they're much easier to clean!). The sky was busy and changeable, with one dark cloud threatening to break the peace.

The Perfect Wood

A dryad in Prince Caspian
(illustration by Pauline Baynes)

For a long time I had an idea of what the perfect wood should look like. It came from Narnia and Enid Blyton illustrations. Trees would be large and evenly spaced, and there would be plenty of light, and soft natural lawns full of moss and moonlight. There would probably be magical beings or deities hidden in cracks or roots. Dryads, hamadryads, brownies, and fairies. If only the right person would come along, someone with sensitivity and a deep appreciation for the natural world, they would show themselves. That person was me, of course.  

The fair folk awake in Prince Caspian (illustration by Pauline Baynes)

I didn't know whether or not the scraps that counted for woodland around the torn West Suffolk countryside could ever be home to anything so wonderful, but I did try to find them. But what were 'they'? As a child they were, of course, literal nature spirits. The trees would house dryads, and the rivers naiads. As I got older, they became metaphors for something a little more dry: good ecological habitat. These wondrous, ephemeral creatures could only exist in beautiful places. That meant lush green lawns, old gnarled veteran trees, orchards and meadows. These things don't exist much in West Suffolk - or if they do, they are isolated, like the tree on its own in my story. And so I wandered, hoping to discover something special, some secret green place, without much luck. I knew, vaguely, that things had been different. That, before the agricultural intensities of the 1940s and 50s, there had been huge, thick hedges, and many more meadows, and that perhaps these creatures were in hiding from the machinery and pesticides of the modern farm environment. That's not far from the truth, of course. The things that flit and fly in agricultural countryside have crashed since most monitoring began in the 1970s due to catastrophic habitat loss, pesticides, and increasing fragmentation of relic populations. 

Wheat, a copse, and the hard baked earth
(Image copyright Bob Jones, Geograph)

Most of the woodlands, like the one pictured left, are small game coverts a few hectares in size at most, only there to keep pheasants and partridges for shooting. Many of them used to be older but were grubbed up sometime in the early twentieth century and replanted with conifers and ash in straight, neat rows to provide a ready supply of timber. Their ground flora gives their away their older origins: carpets of dog's mercury, and ancient woodland indicator, appear in spring, and there are incongruous dips and ditches or relic pollards marking what used to be the boundaries. A lot of these fragmented scraps of woodland are all but empty, but stay long enough and you might be rewarded. 

Standing at the mouth of the copse, waiting and watching. A long August day. Suddenly, from the base of one of the larger ash trees there is a jerky wren-like movement, and something spirals around and up the tree. I only glimpse it; perhaps, though I'm still, it can sense me, for it climbs the far side of the tree, out of my sight. What is it? It looked almost humanoid, like some hairy sprite.  

Treecreeper Certhia brachydactyla.
(Image copyright Momo)

There are wonderful things out here after all. They just manage to hide themselves well. The treecreeper I saw at the bottom of an ash tree is one. Another time, sitting in a copse near a green runway, a drop of water caught on the leaf of a nettle sparkled. I watched it for half an hour or more, thinking of nothing, until the sun had moved far enough behind the trees and it blinked out. 

But these woods are not perfect. They have lost a great deal of biodiversity, and they are no longer being managed for anything other than game. I still spend a good deal of time exploring them, small as they are, and most could do with thinning out. They are choked with bramble and ivy. Little or no light reaches the woodland floor, so there aren't many insects. Aside from the ubiquitous great tits, blackbirds, wood pigeons, and rooks, there's almost no bird life. When you spend enough time in wildlife-rich places, you get a feel for what makes the habitat special, and for woodlands it's a decent age and habitat structure: an even mix of young- and old-growth; shrubs and scrub; dead wood left in-situ; a rich ground flora. In contrast, the copses of West Suffolk often contain nothing but similar-aged trees, with little or no natural regeneration. They are moribund. 

Two hundred years ago, many of them wood have been like the nearby Bradfield Woods, which is a working ancient woodland to this day, and one of the best examples of sustainable woodland management in the country. Areas of the wood are regularly coppiced to bring light to the floor, where anemones and foxgloves abound. There are enormous ash stools which are thought to be the oldest living things in Suffolk. The Wildlife Trust, which runs the wood, sells poles, stakes, fencing, and firewood: a small selection, given that woods would have provided much more at one time: baskets, tools, medicinal herbs, a home for pigs, and most of the means for building a home.    

Ragged and poor as they are, however, these places formed my early ideas of what woods were, and I still find myself hopeful of finding some treasure - an oxlip, perhaps a houndstongue, maybe even another treecreeper - when I jump the ditch to explore one. 

Where to be

I couldn't be in a tower block sat on concrete. I couldn't be in a room whose windows faced only onto other houses. I couldn't be against a smooth, monochrome wall. 

I could be alone in a bothy or a sheiling, surrounded by conifers. I could be in a huge crumbling Victorian villa. I could live behind an overgrown garden. I could lie in thickets of bramble and blackthorn. I could be in a pillbox at night, listening to badgers. 

I could be in the smallest copse surrounded by nothing but wheat or barley. 

I couldn't be in the park surrounded by metroland homes.  

*

I feel guilty for being so self-centred in these first posts. Realising that I'm not special, that I probably won't amount to anything, no matter how much I try, hit hard. However, it was also liberating. I could be anyone and do anything and it wouldn't matter. A night cleaner, or a kitchen porter. Someone who does the washing up. What is important is not what I do, but where I do it. The where has several important criteria. It must be rural. I must be able to walk out of wherever it is, and be in the countryside right away. I must be able to get away from people - all people. Their noise, their infrastructure (insofar as this is possible). Saying that, there are acceptable cultural artefacts. 

I could be looking up at a telegraph pole dressed in ivy. I could sit inside the shell of an abandoned house watching leaves through glassless windows catch sunlight. 

The point is that they are relics. Things that eyes slide off. Things that go unnoticed. 

It seems to me that I can be around humans for only so long before I start to crave their absence. Once I would have said I was a misanthrope. While cynical, I don't think this is true. I'm an introvert, for sure. Social interactions exhaust me, and often make me bored; but there are people whose company I will always welcome. On the other hand, I never tire of nature. It doesn't ask, or require input. It can be observed. It doesn't exhaust. It gives freely to the eyes. 

What right do you have, asks my mind. You are nothing. You've not suffered, not truly. What right do you have to take up bandwidth, to waste people's time writing navel-gazing nothings. You are a nothing, and you are completely unimportant. 

Where to be is important. In my last post I examined how depression only become obvious when I was outside. It can still be a struggle, reconciling this heaviness with a love of nature. What I have noticed is that there are certain places that the depression seems immune to. Inner city parks and woods seem to help none. Perhaps it's because I can sense the city outside, and imagine the people and their activity going on around me. You would expect, therefore, that the flat bleakness of far-north-east Scotland would be exhilarating and redemptive. But something about that landscape didn't help either, and I think it is to do with openness. Hilly landscapes have a degree of closure. You can find valleys or streams with banks. The lees and scarps offer shelter and cover. On the flat moor, you can be seen and see. The landscape is just too open. 

These landscape types result in a very visceral response. Depression is not just mental. Physical manifestations include headaches, nausea, flu-like symptoms, and, of course, that general heaviness described in my last post. And so, perhaps the mind is not really like an estuary after all. If landscape can affect mind at its most vulnerable, there must be something open at all times. Perhaps the outside always has a way of getting in. 

Outside Shutdown

I was crossing a railway bridge when I realised that something was very wrong. 

This is how it seems to me, anyway. In truth, I had suspected for some time. The outside, however, is where it begins; around five years ago I was on my way home from a walk with a friend somewhere in Berkshire. It wasn't tedious or long. It promised to be pleasant. It crossed parkland and woods, and ran beside the Thames. The first few miles were perfect. Amiable chat. Beech hangers like cathedrals. I thought about the ghost orchid, which is said to exist in these parts, and where I might find it. 

After a few hours I lagged behind. It is hard, at this point, not to resort to weather metaphors. So often we describe ourselves as under the weather, or imagine a cloud above our heads, or a foggy mind. Our thinking becomes muddy. As someone who attempts to write, I don't want to be use cliché. In school we were taught about the 'pathetic fallacy', wherein inanimate objects are personified so that skies can smile and storms can rage. Descriptions like these stick out. They're empty, over-used, and lazy. So, here I will try something different.

Outside

(in)

There is no way

(out)

Inside

Imagine the mind as an estuary. It is filled with channels and rivulets along which the seawater runs. Twice per day (or four, depending on where your estuary is), with the tides, it is inundated. This healthy waxing and waning can be seen as the mind interacting with its environment normally. On this particular walk, I finally understood that there was a blockage. Water was not flowing. That's not to say it was empty. In fact, it was full. Thoughts that had accumulated over weeks and months crowded for space. Nothing new was flowing. The thoughts were disabling. They were exhausting. They told me things that I had often wondered, but this time they convinced me. It's pointless, they said. You can't do it. Nothing is worth anything. Give it up. 

About five miles into the walk I wondered if I could go on. Stone-like thoughts were so heavy that they made my legs feel weak. It hurt to look up. There was too much light, too much green, everywhere. I wanted to stop, find somewhere dark, and cover myself with bracken. Eventually, perhaps, I might take root in some moist dell where moss could cover me, and there be still. My head lolled as if on a thin stalk. I was tired beyond imagining. I couldn't talk. I couldn't even pretend to be interested in the villages we passed. Another small anxiety sprung up: how could I explain it? But I couldn't, and didn't. I let my friend go on ahead. I made no attempt at catching up. Perhaps he was too polite to question my sudden lethargy and sullenness. When we got to the car I pretended to sleep. Back in London, I half walked, half stumbled across the railway bridge. A small thought saw its chance. Jump off, it said. It didn't explain itself further. 

I got myself to the smallish double room that I was renting at the time, and climbed into bed. I knew that the word for whatever was happening to me was, beyond doubt, depression. I suppose I also knew that I should concentrate on the things that were outside my mind: the sea of things that now meant nothing. I listened to the boards creak as the heating came on. I listened to my own measured breathing. I tapped the windowsill, and listened to that. 

I remember the jay. So sudden, so unexpected. It came to the window and perched on the sill for a second, perhaps less. Nothing in its beak. Magpie-sized bulk of metallic blue. Pupil framed in orange. It cocked its head and left for the sycamores at the end of the small, stony garden. Then the blue tit. Or was it coal? It came each morning, tapping at its shadow in the glass. Bird alarm. A charming patch of white on its nape. 

The outside had betrayed me. I felt something similar a few months before, while identifying sedges in Wicken Fen. Again, I was with a friend, and again I wanted more than anything to be alone. Every plant around me was mocking. I didn't know what they were, and there was not enough space in my mind to think about them, much less apply any kind of botanical knowledge. You'll never be good enough. You'll fail. Ever since, 'fail' has been the stone that weighs the most, that cracks into hundreds of fragments which accumulate in the estuary. It comes with something desperate, as if each failed opportunity deprives me of a chance to succeed. 

I won't call it the black dog. Dogs, in all their moods, are welcome company. Depression is not a beast, but nor is it a permanent weather system. It is not a thing in itself. It is an invisible force which acts on things. It sucks and saps. It brings stones together and fills you with them. It creates dams and blockages. It stops the outside getting in, and keeps the inside from getting out.