ECHO 13/11/05

Name change, title change – bored with the old one.

Introduced to two new characters – perhaps they are from the village we don’t know – they ramble and call – Mike Pubin (naturalist) & Pam Pas (ex-choreographer). Very friendly, but we know there is a secret they are hiding – wonder if they are the organizers of the local swingers club? No doubt we will meet them again, the village being so small.

Photographs and newspaper cuttings, pressed in old leather bound albums and folders, collated, turning yellow with age, of people I never knew yet now feel close to by dint of geography and space; ancestral faces, whole lives and histories at my fingertips.

Late afternoon walk up to Whitsunn Brook – birds I have not seen since I was an adolescent: Redwing, Green Woodpecker, Corn Bunting – colours of late autumn in the pre-dusk sun – full corn reeds in the lower marshland pale against the purple-brown rosehips; stubble tips crunching in the grass underfoot – a long dead cadaver of a fox strung up in a wire fence at the edge of a now empty sheep field, its hind leg caught in the twisted wire and withered, though its claw is undamaged, still clean, like some macabre bloom of furry dark flowers, upright toward the sun. What remains of the rest of its body is now little more than desiccated pelt, gross and pitiful. There is something sinister too. How did it get there? By its positioning it looks as if human hands placed it there on purpose, rather than the beast having been caught in a trap. Maybe it was purposely poisoned or a warning to ward off other foxes? But the blatancy of death is disturbing; its clear details, its imagery revealed, the inescapable harsh reality amid the beauty surrounding it – the moon fresh risen and becoming perfect silver; fawn leaves and windfall crab apples golden in the grass verges and hegderows.