End of the day

You'll be glad to hear that reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated; it was another young man who died on the by-pass that day. A step in a wrong direction started from school days. Not as lucky as even the deer I have been watching.

But all in all it is a reminder that the city is not the soft life I imagined. I had chosen its margins as my camp after my ill-health last year. To get whole.

But without friends to feed me up with a big dinner and some warmth and talk now and then it is no home to me.

Still I am here; I have looked close at deer, fox and hedgehogs in the park and garden edges; found the by-pass lupins and the buzzard; stretched out undisturbed in the big cemetery by the main road.

But now it is time to get back to my wood. What has been happening there?

A whole season of changes to explore.

Deer path

I have been camping in some industrial land overgrown with dock, sorrel, bracken and gorse; it’s been left empty so long that its cleared spaces - once home to big worksheds of I hope not too chemical a nature - have become nature reserve. Bullrushes in machinery extraction pit, owls on the remaining gantry sentinel and deer on the line of brown young growth.

Each morning and evening I remind myself that they are not always there. And then there they are again.

The by-pass runs close and headlights keep me company in the late evening when it finally gets dark. In the morning it is speckled with wild lupins and a big red buzzard does its round or sits in a carved out shape on a fence post.

Then rush hour changes everything.

The deer tried to cross at this time and with inches to spare jumped and scrambled through the lupins to the otherside farmland.

The buzzard doesn't care. It is always there. Looking. Like me.