I HAD the unusual pleasure recently of actually enjoying and appreciating something modern. This came as a relief, as I had begun to feel that I was in danger of becoming something of a curmudgeon, something of a grumpy old man deprecating inane modern innovations, such as the tapless faucets in hotel lavatories where you have to wave your hand around helplessly in the hope of triggering some hidden beam, only to find that the flow stops as soon as you move your hand to make use of it, when you might have just turned on a tap.

Anyway, the modern thing that I found myself genuinely appreciating precisely for its style and innovation was not a faucet, but an entire building. It was the Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s Visitors’ Centre, in Cley, on the Norfolk coast. Were you to glance back from the freshwater marshes, with their old wooden bird-hides, at the little rise of land on which the modern building is set, you would scarcely know that it was there, so perfectly does its undulating “green” roof, set with turf and moss, follow and echo the natural curves of the land.

But, once you are in the building, looking the other way over the marshes to the sea, through the panoramic window, you find that you could sit and gaze for hours at the reedbeds, and the distant line where sea and marsh meet and intertwine.

When we were there, in the café, which also serves as a viewing room, there were many people doing just that: just sitting and staring. As I sat there, doing the same, I found some lines from Seamus Heaney’s poignant poem “Field of Vision” coming to my mind and clarifying the moment. Heaney’s poem starts with a woman, confined by arthritis to a wheelchair, who has been staring from her window for years at the same field. In the poem, Heaney enters into her “field of vision”: her frame of mind, her powers of observation:

She was steadfast as the big window itself.
Her brow was clear as the chrome bits of the chair. . .

He says that being “Face to face with her was an education.” You learned, he says, “to see Deeper into the country than you expected”.

I felt that I was learning a little of that, too, gazing through that wide window, not just at the flights of birds alighting and arising over the marsh, but deeper and deeper into the landscape itself.

When I came to, my eyes rested idly on the bottle of Norfolk Moongazer ale that I had in front of me and read the brewer’s motto: “Stop staring. . . / . . . Start gazing”.