It’s a beautiful day today, still and sunshiny: the perfect day to go outside. However, in England, if you waited for a day like this before you went for a walk, you’d spend a lot of your time indoors. Last week I went for a walk in the rain. While I like – and often repeat – the expression “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothing”, it’s not completely true: after all, go out in a gale and no amount of high-tech fabric will protect you from a falling oak tree! However, it is worth having clothes for (almost) all eventualities if you live in the British Isles.
I’d been at my desk all morning and was getting a bit frazzled about various things, so I decided to go out, despite the drizzle. It was the kind of rain that you could ignore, but shouldn’t: “Just enough to make you wet” as a fellow villager said when he spotted me putting my hood up and then putting it down again. There were a few bluebells in gardens so I thought they might be out in force in the woods.
They weren’t, but as is often the case when I go out looking for one thing, I find something else instead. I followed a path that goes parallel to the main road instead of crossing it via a footbridge. That way lies mud, and in the rain there’s probably more of it!
Close enough to the road to hear a faint hiss of white noise, the rain kept the air mossy-fresh and clear. Few of the trees are fully in leaf so far, so the danglebirds are still quite visible and pinging all over the place. I’m sure they all sing more loudly when it’s raining. A chiffchaff was calling loudly, then it stopped and another bird started to say “Toff-ee, toff-ee!” According to the BirdNet app – which I miraculously managed to activate before the bird stopped calling – that was also a chiffchaff. I never seem to hear the same words that books fit to bird song. A longer blog post about that is planned. Blue, great and coal tits were shouting each other down…robins were turning the place into a woody wonderland, and then the ear-bending song of a wren blasted out close by. I tried to spot it, and suddenly it flew across in front of me, almost brushing my shins, a tiny gingery missile.
There was only a light sprinkling of bluebells: the main crop will be in a couple of weeks, I think, but lots of other flowers dotted the forest floor. Wood anemones, stitchwort, celandine: whites and yellows with the indigo of bluebell buds. Their hyacinth scent already hangs high in the air. A bluebell wood is one of the great natural spectacles you can see in England. It’s one of those things I long to draw or paint accurately. As I sat down to listen, the rain got heavier and a song thrush began to warble and trill high in a tree. A great-spotted woodpecker drummed. I looked up for them, and saw a giant harp, creepers hanging straight down from a curved trunk. Everything was right.
A little bit of shinrin-yoku works wonders. I got home damp, but much calmer.
Don’t wait for perfect weather.
Words, words, words 