| In Cancer Ward, he wrote: “Nowadays we don’t think much of a man’s love for an animal: we laugh at people who are attached to cats. But if we stop loving animals, aren’t we bound to stop loving humans, too?” Last evening I watched two deer put down on a venison farm. I also saw my barking muntjac dancing around Jean’s horses.
Yesterday afternoon, I suddenly remembered some unplanted daffodil bulbs in the larder, and found a place for them by the stream. It wasn’t so much raining as damping, the trees dripping, the air filled with soft wet flurries. Some cucumber seeds followed. I was now warmly soaked. But how pleasant it was to be out.
I marked willow logs for sawing, and a forest of nettles for their comeuppance. The contract man in his combine who had been cutting the first rings of harvest gave up, and there was a sudden silence.
I had walked all round this huge field last week, and had heard it sizzle with dryness. Now all is moist. Bees rock in the tender boat-shaped Balsam flowers whose resurrection name is Impatiens noli-tangere — Touch-me-not. Because if you do, my seed will leap into the universe. This beautiful water-plant has shot all the way from a Shropshire riverbank to the Stour Valley since 1632. And everywhere else besides.
The post-lady brings me news of A Cropmark Landscape in Three Dimensions, i.e. a report on what lies beneath the onions and sugar-beet, unseen until aerial photography. Barrow cemeteries, concentric ring ditches, long mortuary enclosures, and cursus monuments, some of them in Wormingford. Indeed, a line of them wall off a loop of the river.
Intensive cultivation to its meandering banks — to their very edge these days, with the price of agricultural land going sky-high — has become the single biggest risk to our Neolithic and Bronze-Age farmers’ scene. I sometimes take my Christmas Day walk through these invisible sites that one must go heavenward to see, and sometimes carrying the thrilling photographs. The camera can look inside you, and, outside, can see humanity’s timeless scratchings on the significance of death.
Thus to evensong for six, the rain-smirched light looking for the altar through the lancet of the infant Saxon tower, and Barry holding the hymns together, and the prayer felt. Now and then I worry about this monthly service. Is it minimal? Is it “all”, as Julian would say?
Well, tonight it is everything. Forget numbers: think of validity. I read Isaiah. “And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.” We half-dozen, and the ring-makers down by the Stour, and the Reverend Mr Cox, and the saintly Solzhenitsyn, and George Herbert, and Gordon the churchwarden.
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