Blowing the cobwebs away

12 Dec Blowing the cobwebs away

Blogless November. Weeks since I reached for the notebook to scribble something that might transform itself into a blogpost.  It wasn’t that I planned a month of silence. It was just that there was so much to be silent about, silence being some kind of response or antidote to the desire to scream.

So, yes, it’s the angry variety of silence a lot of the time, of course. Hiding from the news yet drawn to it by some invisible force. I often wonder what that is, that wish to switch off from looking at the troubles in the world but finding it very difficult to turn away. Feeling somehow responsible for keeping up with things, for knowing what’s going on – though, clearly, we almost never do. 

I do my best to ration it – switch to another station, to some soothing or energising music. Or to another channel – indulge my fanciful side watching people cook or bake or dance. These things help to ground me. Probably sounds strange to admit to feeling grounded by whimsy. But amid all the serious ghastliness it feels human to let myself be fanciful again.

But the bad stuff is always there in the background, snatches from someone else’s radio, glimpses of headlines on the stand outside the newsagent, conversations overheard as you pass people in the street or sit in the park over a coffee at one of the outside tables dressed up against the weather. What did we talk about before we had the virus with its associated behaviours and misbehaviours, judgements and misjudgements that we talk about unavoidably and incessantly trying to work out what we think? 

I dress up against the weather every weekend and head to the park. This is my retreat, where I can press the reset button as I set out with a friend at 8 am to walk at pace. My mother would have called it ‘blowing the cobwebs away’ –  such a descriptive expression. I suppose it must belong to her generation for you hardly hear it nowadays.  But it comes to mind each time we meet to stride out our usual 5-mile route through Bushy Park and Home Park. 

Just over halfway round the circuit is Oak Pond where we always stop for coffee from our flasks and share a sweet snack, usually homemade by one of us. The swan’s nest that we watched week after week as the eggs were incubated last spring is still there. Five cygnets were hatched here and we counted them each week anxious that they’d all survive. We think they did though they are dispersed now – at least we hope that’s the reason we saw only one of them, closing in on adulthood, just a clutch of dark feathers left among the white. The nest looks in perfect condition built on the root system of a willow tree a yard or two from the pond’s edge and sheltered under its branches. We wondered: do swans reuse their nests or make new ones? 

As they grew, the parents would take them further afield to where they could learn to take flight and land on the Long Water a few hundred metres away. Commissioned by Charles II to bring fresh water to Hampton Court palace, this formal canal, a bit out of place in a park that is otherwise a little wild, is a playground and runway for the water-loving birds that live here. After coffee, our route takes us straight there. As we skirt its edge, we spot a long-necked dark bird with yellow in its beak. A cormorant, I think; I’ve seen them here before. It’s perched on a post in the water, drying its wings by holding them open as if in a wide embrace allowing the air to rustle through. Moorhens peck around the grass. A heron his neck folded down into his shoulders, watches us approach out of the corner of his eye. Before we get too close he unfurls his long body and flits slowly across to the other side of the water. He doesn’t seem to be anxious about us; he moves off nonchalantly, dismissively as if to say who did we think we were disturbing his peace? 

The early brightness is fading behind high grey cloud. But it’s dry and the temperature has lifted from almost freezing when we set out to about 8°. We take in the mistletoe high in trees bereft of leaves and search for the word to describe it – parasitic, yes. But there’s another word that eludes us. I get home and check – mistletoe is an ‘obligate parasitic’ species; it is ‘obliged’ to be a parasite as it cannot survive and grow without the host tree from which it draws its nourishment. A bit like us, come to think of it, obligate parasites for whom park walks are our host tree; they nourish us and help us survive.