A time of black and white in my Shropshire hills. The Shein brook which winds along to the Hafren/Severn covered itself in ice. Wandering its upper reaches, I found otter tracks. A really profound feeling, silently welcoming back this elusive creature of water and air. I followed its path over the frozen weir and through the thickets and eyots…wandering from open reach to reach across the snowy ice. One of the tracks on my last record – Carved in Bone – is about the hubris of us humans, talking so much of ‘saving the planet’. The planet will survive, it is ourselves who will join the many other creatures we’ve seen into oblivion. And it is the resilience of buzzard, fox, stickleback and shrew that will ultimately save the world I love, even if they cannot save it for me. Now I can add to the list of returners the lovely otter…
I saw the small feet and the swish of the otter’s tail first on a deeply overcast day, snow clouds overhead stuffed to overflowing, filtering the light until everything was a shade of white or deepest brown. The leafless trees scratched themselves into the snowy hillside, rising above the stream. Two fallow does, perhaps a mother and child, watched me suspiciously, tasting the air for any hint of what I might be, high stepping skittishly in the field’s corner until eventually retreating into the scrub.
Walking back through the thickets, a goldcrest kept company with a number of wrens and a small gang of long tailed tits. They all seemed embarrassed by this unaccustomed exposure, their lovely camouflage advertising them outrageously against the pervasive white.
In the grey dawn light white stuff falling from the sky and a skein of geese just flew over my house. Magical moments just when you least expect them.
Shropshire remains white over with hoar frost on my last day. Just fetched in the washing, cotton frozen stiff as a board. Chucking this and that into a suitcase and failing to prepare for a week in the heat of Siam. Dark sultry nights will see me sat on a stool in a dimly lit Bangkok bar, singing songs of the cold lands to the people of the heat. Stay warm my loves and see you soon.
Leaving now for Bangkok with the trusty guitar. Looking forward to the brilliant light, black kites against the water and colour. In my pocket will be a little piece of Shropshire, lest I become confused and forget the direction of home…
: ) Crazy airline… I was upgraded to first class – the Purser told me they hoped I would play for them.
Flying into Suvarnabhumi, light on the salt pans, through a mist stained tangerine by the late sun… Later a pencil grey sky was broken in places by teal green and an intense, dense powder violent. I find myself in a place of colour, as home is drained by winter to the purest of monochromes… and I say to myself…