Woke up to a power cut this morning and couldn't do any work on the PC, so in an attempt to salvage some benefit from all the appliances in the house being inoperable I went for a wander. Ended up walking along the Trent, about a mile from here. The contrast is quite striking as you walk out of the housing estate into surroundings of trees and fields, buzzing with wildlife.
It's nice to step out of urban life every now and then, out of the confines of the house and the office to, as they say, 'commune with nature'. No, it's more than nice. It's necessary. Every so often, at the most irregular and unpredictable of intervals, I get a strong urge to go somewhere where I can't hear traffic, somewhere more than 50 metres from a takeaway restaurant. This itch builds until it's difficult to ignore, and I end up walking for a couple of hours around one of the handful of accessible places in Nottingham that are genuinely pleasant and open.
This is usually enough to appease the city-loathing part of me, at least for a short while, but sometimes I crave more... and I feel that I'm in this awkward state right now, knowing that I could get a lot of benefit from a weekend in Derbyshire or some other nice place, but in no position to practically do such a thing.
I'm sure it's just a transitory mood, though, or another attempt by my cunning and evil subconscious to procrastinate some more while my conscious brain is trying to write this accursed dissertation. It will pass.
Anyway... while I was walking today something reminded me of a memorable moment a few years ago, and I thought it might be worth writing about, although there likely won't be any point to the story.
For a couple of summer holidays I stayed with my family in a holiday cottage near Alnwick in Northumberland. The location was rugged and secluded but the house had all the amenities you would expect from any town house (including a really good shower). It also had several acres of land surrounding it, mostly pasture, but also including a stretch of stream, heavily wooded on both sides with a path cut high into the bank.
One morning I was walking down this path; the sun was piercing through the trees and creating interesting patterns on the ground, and there was a slight summery haze in the atmosphere. My movement made so much noise that I inadvertently disturbed a heron that had apparently been fishing on the rocks a little further down the stream. The canopy of leaves created by the trees on both sides of the stream was quite thick, so to fly away the heron had to fly along the stream and out past the edge of the woods.
Anyone who's ever seen a full grown grey heron close up in flight will know that they're magnificent creatures, with a wingspan almost as wide as a man is tall, and that they fly so gracefully that they really do look as if they're flying in slow-motion. This huge bird soared straight past me at eye level, just a few feet away, beating its wings very slowly and looking seriously prehistoric. The haze, the viewing angle, the morning light coming through the trees; everything came together by pure chance to create an image of astonishing beauty, as perfect as any photograph. I turned and watched the heron leave the woods, and then the moment was over.
Maybe you think I'm exaggerating this small incident in my life, and perhaps I am, albeit unintentionally. Memories do change over time -- become less precise and more idealised -- and I expect that the image I carry around in my head is a slightly more romanticised version than the one that was there a year ago, or two. And I'm sure that where I saw beauty on that day, other people might have seen only a bird acting instinctively to a perceived threat, but since when was aesthetics an objective science? I know for certain that for me it was an unforgettable moment, observed by mere chance.
Random moments of simple beauty like this must happen very frequently around the world, but in an overwhelming majority of cases there'll be no observer in the right place at the right time, and the moment goes by unappreciated. We can't arrange for these serendipitous moments to happen, we can merely be fortunate enough to experience them. Which is why it's nice to get out into the countryside occasionally, where the chances of seeing interesting and striking things are orders of magnitude greater than when you're in the office or in front of the PC.